Not A Virtue

From An Interview with Tom Farer, Author of ‘Confronting Global Terrorism’ by Scott Horton:

As I note in my book in the chapter on the use of force, for liberals war is always the lesser evil, not a virtue or a phenomenon that brings out the best in a nation. For about war only two things are certain: One is that it will destroy things and two is that there will be “collateral damage,” i.e. innocents will be maimed. Because liberals believe in the moral equality of human beings, the fact that the killed and maimed are predominantly on “the other side” does not provide moral solace. No liberal will ever sound or think like the turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century German conservative Heinrich von Treitschke who declared that “The greatness of war is just what at first sight seems to be its horror—that for the sake of their country men will overcome the natural feeling of humanity, that they will slaughter their fellow-men who have done them no injury.”