At surface its not a very deep philosophical question but once you get past the answers such as fighting over land, defending, disagreements and petty fights and others.
Why have war… we know so much bad that comes from it yet we still do it, why?
Is it our nature or instinct or is it something more?
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Surely a lot of ‘powerful men’ i.e. politicains and the military, still believe in such a notion as a ‘just’ war or a ‘lawful’ war. Might makes right! being the general policy.
I have always found the notion of the ‘legality’ of war to be Oxymoronic…
We have war because every opinion has a counter-opinion (otherwise it would not be a opinion, it would be an observation 
) A situation always has it’s circumstances but the circumstances are in the eyes of the beholder and vary with the viewers. One person’s war is another persons self-defence. Or maybe some people are just violent and stupid, and maybe it’s just greed. Maybe good christians percieve a threat and suddenly all that ‘Do unto others as thou shall have done unto you’ stuff just pops out the window because they never really believed it in the first place.
Is it nature or instinct? Instict would be punching a mugger in the face, not plotting year long stratagies. Probably nature. Our nature incompasses all possible reactions we can have to a situation, and different people have different reactions to the same situation. Some people see a need to defend where others see a need to attack. But then again that might count as instinct too.
In conclusion, people who start wars are uncreative, stupid, violent jackasses. 
(Not as deep as it could of been but utterly true 
)
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War exists because it’s the topmost option, and always will be. The idea that me and my friends can come beat you up or kill you if things don’t go my way is an ever present option. Even in the most enlightened societies, where things are handled by debate, sanction, and so on, it will always be known that “Well, I could just ignore the sanction and go take what I want,” is something to consider, even if everybody says it’s unthinkable.
Imagine a situation where conflicts are resolved through computer simulation, and nobody ever gets hurt. Why not hack the program? It’s not like this is a game with rules, and teacher will take the kick-ball away if we cheat. If one side hacks, and one side doesn’t, who will win? So what do we do with enemy hackers when we find them? If we could send in a team to blow up an enemy server, wouldn’t we do it? If a couple of their technitians get killed in the process, oh well. Sooner or later the “do you really want to win or not?” question will escalate things right back up to full scale invasions, bombings, and so on.
In short, we have war, and we always will, because it’s an expression of the highest level of action.
I think that the philosopher Xunzi outlined it pretty well:
Human nature is bad. Good is a human product. Human nature is such that people are born with a love of profit If they follow these inclinations, they will struggle and snatch from each other, and inclinations to defer or yield will die. They are born with fears and hatreds. If they follow them, they will become violent and tendencies toward good faith will dies. They are born with sensory desires for pleasing sounds and sights. If they indulge them, the disorder of sexual license will result and ritual and moral principles will be lost. In other words, if people accord with human nature and follow their desires, they inevitably end up struggling, snatching, violating norms, and acting with violent abandon. Consequently, only after men are transformed by teachers and by ritual and moral principles do they defer, conform to culture, and abide in good order. Viewed this way, it is obvious that human nature is bad and good is a human product.
We go to war because we can.
The thing is we are raised believing in the state - the holders of the monopoly over the legitimate use of power. (Max Weber - Politics as a Vocation) I tend to agree with this view - that whatever the state does can always be justified by it, so even though the Bush administration claims to want to wipe out terrorism, those who support the war and believe their rhetoric find it perfectly ok that we respond by dropping bombs on the bad guys.
Because the people in power cannot convince their opponets to give them what they are asking for. So they must rely on force and threats to get what they want. Like a used car salesman putting a gun to your head to get your money from you. 
testament to their ignorance, and lust for power they cannot control in reality.
easy. A means of population control resulting in specific environmental conditions.
You’re all looking at the social reasons for war, which is not what vincent was looking for. IF we did not have war, the population would expand exponentially and reach phenomenal heights (hundreds of times the present 7 billion) in less than 1000 years. All the resources would be used up and the human race would be wiped out pretty instantaneously. We all have to die at some point, but in order for a specific future to be achieved the resources we use have to be used in speciic amounts at specific times in order to have a specific effect on the planet at a specefied time.
The real reason for war is to control the condition of the planet/solor system/galaxy/universe, same as all the other natural “disasters” nad events in the universe.
I never really considered the population part of the equation. Makes since too. Could it be a combination of both?
Bad at doing what?
Lenin claimed that the First World War was a capitalist plot to keep down the population of the working class.
Of course Lenin was also mad, you must realise this…
matmilne- thats my opinion of it too. too expand on that war is not only part of our nature but its part of all nature. Its basically boils down to balance. The earth is a biosphere that only has a certain capacity of life it can hold, all disasters are natrual disasters. Whenver a population grows too much or even worse grow too much too suddenly something happens to try and control it. There is an actual theory and proof to this developed by this guy I couldn’t remember the name of if my life depended on it.
He basically did this by making a chart, he showed population vs. time every time the population increased too much something happend to bring it down eaither by “nature” or man-made [although i think its all natrual].
Therefore I disagree that war is a perversion of nature because its just another mechanism of nature to try and bring balance between its capacity of sustainability and our population.
War is like pandora’s box. There is good that comes out of war.
Other than being a tool of nature to bring down the population to a sustainable level it also is a way of renewing. In peace countries become stale, and corrupted, and war can either make them grow if they win, if they win in the end but lose a lot in the war they are slightly renewed, if they lose they get to rebuild from scratch start anew. I can tell you that this defenition was a lot more universal in the past but those lines have blured now. Actualy if you watch at what I just wrote you cann tell I had one idea when I started and saw thats its not so right when I ended. [the renewing idea]
All actions are aimed at the maximization of gain, or the minimization of loss. Warfare is merely an option among many options, each of which belongs to the same rank of any other. Historically speaking, war as an option to realise the will to power, has been often commited on the basis of blunders. It has been a lack of patience, a shortage of information in assessment of the situation and a blackout of reason due to macho maglomaniac immaturity of existentiality.
Society is experiencing less and less warfare. The reason behind the fact is multiple and inter relational, each with a highly plausible possibility that can be assessed from material data. Cultural advancement might explain the tolorance. Economic growth might sustain the tolorance. Political aliance might support the tolorance. Commercial almagation might encourage the - tolorance - o rather: patience, wisdom and emotional maturity. From here I seek Karl once again, who believed in the proportionality between materiality and spirituality. We are being less babaric and warlike is a result of being more plentiful and secure. The reasoning that war is no longer a necessity, no longer gain maximising, is dyed with moral gold, overglowing in the name of God, spirit, culture and civity. Here, I have just proceeded from Karl to Fritz, the latter of which once said that morality is the herd instinct in the individual, so, there is such as fixation as morality, for it changes according to circumstance, because its root is reason, a tool of the will. Whatever happens, it is either the result of a realised will to power, or that of a failed will which failed in the first place because it mistook morality as its tool, in other words, it mistook the reasonable tool of higher men such as Christ as its own - an action of doomed consequence becasue of the self voluntary servitude in slave morality.
War is never the first option, for the human body is so very fragile, and its value is so very dear in comparison with the blade of a sword. To judge what is the highest action advocating the will, is to make value assessments using gain and loss as the yardstick. That is all that there is to it, war and peace take over each other in this cyclic transcendental unity. Physical war will theoretically end someday. War as an expression of the conflict between individual will to power, or within the individual, will never cease, becasue the will will never ever cease until the extinction of the race.
Yes, and he was super smart with a real grievance against the czar as the czar had his brother hanged.
Wars are usually a competition for resources or the result of an attack or fear of an attack. Hence, the general erradication of the Native Americans, by the Spanish, French, and English, then U.S., Canadian’s etc. This will probably be again born out with either the Israelis or the Arabs erradicating each other over the worthless bit of desert with no oil, just religious significance. Or, perhaps the Indians and the Pakistanis erradicating each other over the worthless bit of land named Kashmir. Then there is Tibet and China basically erradicating its populace. Then the South Americans erradicating many indiginous Native American tribes.
Hell, the list is endless, and I am beginning to believe war will never cease, as it has never really ceased in human history.
I just read the Mexican troops are periodically making incursions on U.S. soil, all hell will break out as this becomes more well known regardless of the Iraqi situation. That is, if Bush doesn’t do anything the people will scream and trust me, you do not want a bunch of the “good ole boys” pissed off.
Oxymoron?? If an individual attacks you, will you not defend yourself?
Augustine, I believe is was Augustine made the case for a just war. The problem stems from moral relativism. What is a just war? Do we have the right to fight against what we call evil, when the enemy sees us as evil. Hence, there is a problem.
Is it right for the militarily advanced to drop smart bombs? Is it right for the enemy to saw off the heads of civilians?
Both are very nasty, both kill, but which is just?
Chuckle, are you discussing this very new century or the last when millions died in WWI, WWII, Korea, Nam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran, etc.?
I mean, more died in wars in the last century than in the previous centuries.
True, and I have forgotten his name too. SIATD you may know as you are currently in university, and me, well, I have been out for many years.
Why do disagree that it is a perversion??? I mean an academic is not God, and I am an academic and they make huge errors.
True, most scientific advances have stemmed from military/war efforts. Heck, our microwaves stem from WWII.
Not all become stale and corrupted. Peace brings far more greatness than do wars. Peace allows for the exchange of intellectual thought, technological advances and much more. War erradicates whole cultures. Look at what happened in Russia, France after Napoleon, England after WWII, the list is endless.
The U.S.A. has seen very little war except the Revolutionary War and Civil War, and basically has a very low unemployment rate and many technological advances.
addendum, not all societies evolve with peace (i.e. communist).
aspacia, ma’m, lallow me firstly to refresh your memory that back into the middle ages, war was a way of life. If we go down history further, war was, the, way of life. What happened in the first half of last century, as Nietzschean predicted as “global scale politics”, was statistically merely a peak on the sine wave of alternating war and peace. It must be realised that the underlying trend rate growth of this wave is negative. The amplitude between the two antinodes is proportionally decreasing with the trend rate. Eventually, what we will get is a straight line crushing down onto the x axis.