POST 13: The justness of the US wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan,

According to the council on foreign relations( cfr.org) , the Bush administration argued that, in the 12 years since the end of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein defied the will of the United Nations by failing to fully disclose his suspected arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and cooperate with U.N. weapons inspections. The administration also said Saddam had formed alliances with terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that could use Iraqi weapons against U.S. targets. Yet to date no such weapons or ties have been revealed.

 Based on the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita’s teachings and moral of the story. The war in Iraq was justifiable because based on the Bhagavad Gita " to whom comes joy of battle, comes as now glorious and fair, unsought; opening for him and a gateway unto heav'n,but, if thou shunn'st this honourable field-a kshattriya- if knowing thy duty and thy task, thou bidd'st duty and task go by-that shall be sin!"(479)The Bhagavad Gita teaches that a warrior who fights for a just cause is acting religiously, and he or she will benefit spiritually by such fighting. It suggests that there must be rules of war, especially with regard to innocent civilians.

Nevertheless,one of the teachings in The Art of war states that" therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemies troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field."(358) Instead we turned Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan into a broken nations. A million of its citizens, mostly the educated middle classes, have fled the country; government ministries are chaotic; its electoral system is dysfunctional (put in by us); its ethnic sectors are almost at war; terrorism and kidnapping is still rampant.The American way of war has little capacity for postwar planning. Think of abandoning Afghanistan in chaos and misery after the Soviet collapse. Think of the First Iraq War. The U.S. left the nation "bombed back to the Stone Age," and then put on a brutal economic blockade to prevent reconstruction for nearly 10 years, which left a million Iraqis, mainly children, dead of starvation and disease.