Nations Are People. Do you deserve to die for your own bad government?
If you live in America, your government is run by Donald Trump. Ugh. You might despise that guy. You might have worked hard against him during campaign season. When you visit another country, and tell them that you are American, you might add, “But don’t judge me!” You would not want to be branded with the weight of the various stupid and despicable actions of your own government. You understand, first, that you do not agree with those things, and second, that you as a regular person have little power to affect those things. You are just living your life. You want to be respected as a human being.
“Unfortunately, this simple and intuitive understanding of the difference between the government and the people of your own country often evaporates–or gets erased–when the discussion turns to foreign countries. When someone says “Russia,” you probably think of Putin, not of the teenage girl dreaming of what she will do after graduation. When someone says “Iran,” you probably think of something that is often referred to as “the regime,” rather than of the laughing family gathering for a holiday meal. This mental mistake, this unwitting juxtaposition of one thing for a different thing, is like a steamroller that paves the way for you to accept unacceptable things. You would never nod sagely and agree that a bomb should be dropped on a child. But air strikes to “cripple” the “command and control” of a “hostile regime?” Well, of course, serious people understand that this may be necessary in the grand chessboard that is geopolitics.
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Are you willing to be killed for your own government’s sins? Are you willing to have your house destroyed and your child hit by shrapnel and your elderly parents lose access to medicine because of the policies of the latest president? If that seems unfair for you, it is unfair for anyone, anywhere. From this perspective, it is easy to see that the hurdle that a war must clear to be truly moral is so high that it stretches up into the clouds. Grounding ourselves in this perspective–always holding people, and their right to live, in the forefront of our minds–is the only way to make clear judgments about what our own government does with its killing machines.