Did the End Justify the Means?

As a liberal, I’m really struggling with the policies of our current administration.  Even though our most recent incursion into Libya has so-far proved far more successful than Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s one of the horrible realities of war: we can only measure success or lack thereof in retrospect.  And we can only assess the damage after it’s too late.

I can’t, in all honesty, call myself a pacifist.  But I can’t think of a circumstance in which we would know enough to go into a situation to be justified in waging war: having counted the cost, knowing the potential outcomes, and in due diligence, acting with some sort of “just war” moral certitude.  We tend to look at World War II as the example of a “just war,” and there’s nothing I can offer, because only perspective from the context of the day really illuminates the question – not objective moralizing about the nature of the war from decades and decades later.  But that’s the point… no matter how much evil we see in retrospect, it was not quite so apparent then.  Is that knowledge reason to jump into every incursion we see?  As potential Third Reichs?

No, there really has to be something to active, aggressive, intentional pacifism.  It is not neutrality.  It is taking a side, but it is a different kind of fighting, and a different way of dying.