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Well, you could ask your friendly neighborhood assistant editor....
Err... I didn'tmean that Aeon was ignorant of history. I meant Michael Neumann.
Aeon Skoble addressed most of the reasons why. But he's also ignorant of history: 1618-1648 was the Thirty Years War, not the "wars of religion" in a general sense. These wars included the Thirty Years War, but also many earlier conflicts stretching back for nearly a century. The Thirty Years War was significant, if anything, because its diplomatic maneuvering began to decouple religion <em>from</em> war, introducing reason of state and therefore, at least potentially, the idea of limited war. While the Thirty Years War was awful, it ironically helped introduce the very ideas of limited warfare that this article (unsuccessfully) tries to attack.
Last line: I mean "stop" not top. Is there no way to edit comments?
Actually, this is wrong in many respects. Take this passage for instance:
"...collateral damage, which is murder. We approve of that."
9 words, 2 colossal errors.
1, collateral damage isn't murder, defintionally. Murder by definition is wrongful, and collateral damage by defition isn't. Is all killing wrongful? No. So, it's false killing=murder. Are all instances of non-combatant fatalities wrongful? No. If Country A's army destroys one of Country B's tank factories, that's an entirely legitimate operation. If there's a civilian janitor sweeping up at the time, he'll be killed - perhaps regrettably, but not criminally. So it's false that all instances of noncombatant fatality=murder.
The second error is in a way even worse: the collective-guilt premise implied by saying that "we" approve of everything the state does. That's what gives rise to the no-one-is-innocent presupposition that rationalizes car bombs at pizza parlors or flying airplanes into skyscrapers. It's a total non-sequitur to infer from X being a wrongful act of the state to all citizens of that state approving of X.
"And since the killing of innocent civilians is a war crime, we have no principled objection to war crimes, either."
Again, wrong in several ways.
3, the relevant moral distinction isn't civilians versus soldiers, it's combatants versus noncombatants. Several classes of soldier are per illegitmate targets, e.g. chaplains and medics. Also, some civilians are per se legitimate targets, e.g. spies, civilian employees of the military engaged in activities essential to a war effort, and of course guerrillas and terrorists.
4, 1+3 mean that it's false to say that killing innocent civilians=war crime. What is a war crime is to _deliberately_ target non-combatants, where this isn't part of an otherwise legitimate operation.
5, the last bit is another non-sequitur, or more precisely, a tu quoque which again implies a collective-guilt premise: "We" can't complain because someone else has done a wrong -- as if Calley's actions at My Lai somehow imply that I have no grounds for complaining about 9/11.
"We love to formulate the laws of war, but our morality--not just our view of what is expedient--condones their violation."
Again with the "we." _My_ morality _doesn't_ condone the violation of the laws of war.
There's lots else wrong, but this is a comment, so I'll stop.
Well said, Jonathan.
Neumann's argument is very powerful. I don't balk at the comparison in the conclusion, but in its disconnect with the rest of the article. He doesn't set up the concepts of necessity and effectiveness strongly enough to make the conclusion convincing; instead, it seems like a policy tag-on to a fantastic, but somewhat irrelevant, moral and psychological argument. There are a lot of ways in which his points could be extended into policy, most of them much more directly linked to his main points than what he does offer.