Part of the challenge is that we're so far away from our wars in the United States, that the sense is that a 'lawful' war is our experience of it: functionally zero civilian casualties.

And that's not how even a 'lawful' war is experienced where it happens.

April 07, 2026 - 03:31 UTC

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How does this sit with the understanding that waging a war of aggression is a war crime? Or is this war colorably not a war of aggression? I barely know anything about the law of war.
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That's 'jus ad bello' which is a crime only for those with the political authority to decide whether or not to start the war.

Separately, there is 'jus in bello' which is about crimes in the conduct of a war, which can be committed by regular soldiers, even if they are obeying orders.
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Anyway, war is bad, we should do less of it.
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I can see the point you are making. Wars kill civilians. Always have and not always directly but through pestilence o famine. In the period I study war crimes in the modern sense were rampant, some accepted then but other recognised as crimes. Sometimes it depended on the general.
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The other big thing, as I note frequently, is that we're accustomed to "wars" against opponents with basically no ability to strike back, so we assume that we can always control the scope of the battle and the rate of escalation, which is rarely true in most wars.
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this is also, i think, part of where the “lethality” obsession comes from on the right. we’re used to deliberately waging limited wars, we also don’t exactly have a great record of winning those wars, so a simple argument goes that we can just “stop pulling punches” and we’d win
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As a person who lives within shouting distance of the Port of Houston, one of the largest ports and oil refineries in the US, and not so far from a number of nations we regularly bully, I've been thinking about that.
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