War requires a declaration of such by Congress. No such declaration has occured since 1942. It isn't a war otherwise.

Every single time we have deployed troops into an active combat situation since 1945, they have had their hands tied under ROE's that don't allow them to wage war. When 3 members of the military are courtmartialed because a killer of 4 US civilians gets a bloody lip, the ROE's are not warfighting - they are nannyisms.

War is what war does? By that arguement alone no conflict since WW2 has been a war - since no conflict has been fought with the pure intent to wreak maximum destruction upon the enemy wherever we may find him.

Yeah right:doh:

Your country labelled itself as being at war. Your leaders did. Your troops did. the events equal those in war.

You may have fought with wrong ROE, you may have fought for wroing reasons and without needed determination, you may have fought the war wearing glace gloves, okay okay I haqve coimplained about all that myself many times in the past ten years..

But war is as war does. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands got killed. It may have been smaller wars compared to WWII. But wars it were nevertheless. And the US lost both.

And you counter with an unimportant bean-counting formality, like a bureaucrat? :DL Should I really take that serious? Maybe you want to avoid listing two more lost wars in the US history, by denying that there have been any wars at all? Some kind of a Dolchstoßlegende, maybe? :D

BTW, both Bush and Rumsfeld told the world and the nation that the US were at war. Both said also that the US got attacked (9/11), and that that equals an act of war. Do you plan to file a lawsuit against them? Obviously they lied to your country and to your people then and needlessly ordered military action although there was no war. That would be a conspiracy that borders high treason, eh? Don'T count beans again, i know there is no High Treason paragraph, at least it was claimed in past debates, but we all have a relatively congruent idea of what we associate with the term, right?

P.S. The wars that are not wars. The torture that is not torture. The defeat that is not a defeat. Well, I see patterns emerging there. Cognitive Dissonance Theory, anyone? :D

Well when the anti war crowd and the left wing press claim that americans simply came in a exploited the country, east indian company style, so I was kindof tempted to list the GDP.

But the big difference is, after the battle of plassey, the east indian company quickly recouped their war expenses, demanding at first 22,000,000 rupees in war reperations. The concessions and taxation from a state that size is fully sufficient to cover the occupation.

That is a real for profit war.

Unlike the war in Afghanistan

So the actual rule of law should mean nothing because some bureaucrat, from the president on down, says so? Well - if that is the way you want to look at it - then ok. But then that means all the griping about "torture" need to be dropped because - after all - the "legality" doesn't matter. Either the rule of law holds or it doesn't. You can't claim that it doesn't one moment, then that it does the next - just because the yes or no side promotes or supports your viewpoint.

The Law of the Land says Congress must DECLARE War. It also defines very clearly how that must occur. That has not happened yet. Various laws and treaties state that torture is illegal. The definition of torture is interpreted differently by various people in what it allows and does not allow. Because there is no clearly defined "this is, this isn't" standard, there is debate on the topic.

You accuse me of using a politicians answer - I simply stand on what the Constitution states. You bring up Bush and 9/11 - look at 1941. Roosevelt gave his speech in which he said that a State of War existed between the US and Japan. Then what happened? Congress VOTED to declare war on Japan. Roosevelt saying it didn't make it legal - Congress did. Bush said a lot of things, and not every one of them was accurate. No "high treason" conspiracy theory there.

Ultimately this is simply a question of are you willing to bypass what the law says to follow the rest of society in blind acceptance of what the politicians tell you? Or are you willing to stand up and say "Hey, that isn't what the Constitution says". Since your not in the US or a US citizen, I can't expect you to have the same dedication to the foundation of our Nation. But don't for a minute think that such dedication is simply "politics as usual" on my part.

I can admit we have had abject failures in the conflicts we have been involved in. It has nothing to do with avoiding admitting "defeat". It has to do with being accurate and holding to the actual principals of this nation and its laws. If our politicians did that, then we wouldn't be having this discussion, because the conflicts would have been drastically different.

The events and actions, the engagements and investments made, the victims and sacrifices made, the pulbic bleief and opinion, the claims, the ways the nation acted: it all said WAR.

And while the event of war, two wars, unfolded, you engage in a lawyers defintion on whether the war actually was a war or not.

Like the conservatives here tried to avoid admitting that torture is being carried out when claiming that Waterboarding where no torture but robust interrogation or new interrogation.

Sorry, I don'T buy neither the one, nor the other.

And you also are wrong on the last sentence you said. Youi said that if your leaders followed the (formal) rules and principles of your nation, then the "conflicts" would be looking different today. I assume you m ean a formal declaration of a state of war. - No, they wouldn'T. They would have been approached the same way like they were. And mind you, everybody was considering it to be a war already.

It's just labels, where the content of something is what defines it'S essence. Another confusion about labels: war on terror. Not only is this label idiotic becasue terror is no enemy, but a tool of the enemy and you hardly would say that WWII was not a war against the Nazis, but a war against airplanes, or tanks. One needs to look at what makes the enemy the enemy, what motivates the enemy to use terror. You see Islam, and that the enemy beolives inw hat Islam teaches him. The war in terror is mislabeled, because in truth it is a war against Islam. Islam is the enemy here, and terror is only its weapon.

Well, anyhow, Iraq and Afghanistan are lost and come at a high longtermed strategic price. Iran comes out with stronger influence, Pakistan comes out with stronger influence. Now one has to live with the mess. Whether there was a formal declaration of war or not, is unimportant. You Americans tend to be offende dover Pearl Harbour, becasue the attack took place before you got a declaration of war. This I admit always makes me giggle. Not because you suffered losses there, hell, no. But becasue it is so absurd. The point is the Japanese made a decision for war - and you missed it, could not imagine it sufficiently, waited for a aper letter in your mail and were caught off your guard.

When it comes to the ammount of killing and destruction that war causes, formalities and diplomatic proceedings to give it a nice touch are meaningless. The Japanese made a decision (that America could and probbaly has expected), and stroke. That'S what you do in war. A leaf of paper - is meaningless then. Especially if for its delivery you would pay in additional blood of thy own.

It is no duel between noble gentlemen. No dresscode. No toppers and tailcoats. No polite phrases and witty smalltalk. No champagne bwefore and after. I have told you my favourite Musashi story before, haven't I? If not, I tell you again. That's how to fight, duel and war. Everything else is nonsense.

The State of war already existed without Roosevelt making a speech or Congress voting anything.

CAPS LOCK strikes, a declaration is irrelevant to the existance of a state of war.

Would that dedication be all encompasing as in seperation of church and state, or is it only dedication to the politics you like?

You fight to win a war - I think we agree there.
I also think we agree that the US has not fought to win - thus I take the position that it must not be a war.

You specifically avoided the whole "rule of law" point - either the law is followed or its not. You want to claim that its a war even though we didn't "follow the law" - then don't suddenly expect the US to "follow the law" in other aspects of this "war" - aka geneva convention, no torture, etc. Its a double standard.

Lawyers fiught - at the UN - over some massacring goping on somewhere, and even when a whole culture is pout at risk and people gets killed by the hundreds of thousands in masacres, sometimes nations deny this to be "genocide" although all criterions of the Anti-genocide convention when to call a genocide a genciodie are fulfilled. Becaseu there is a internationally binding obligation to intervene when genocide is stated to happen by the UN body. And some nations for some reasons do not wish to get drawn into another conflict, and so avoid it by denying it to be genocide. Which means the obligation to intervene becomes not valid.

But it still is genocide what happens.

You put formal criterions over reality when saying the wars were no "declared" wars. You could as well say a fouling, smelling, rotten body is not dead as long as a formal official stamp on some medical form does not bureaucratically confirms that the foul, smelling rotten body indeed is dead. But it is dead nevertheless. It was dead, it is dead, it will remain to stay dead, and it will not suddenly rise from the dead and live again just because that form does not get signed and stamped.

What was done in these non-wars, what has been caused by these non-wars, walks like war, looks like war, behaves like war and make noise like war.

So it seems reasonable to say that actually it has been war for sure.

Or to quote some American colonel from around 2004 or 2005, who was filmed walking the scene in some Iraqi town and said in that TV docu (that we even had linked in this forum at that time): "If this is not a war, then I have no clue of what war should be then."