War on an enemy by a country is necessary or not.

First, let me thank you the opportunity to debate you. My argument is simple. Since your claim that a country should never start a war is normative--that is, it specifies what one *ought* to do--it must necessarily abide one of the following two ethical forms: (1a) It is wrong to start a war because doing so is intrinsically bad. (1b) It is wrong to start a war because doing so will result in something bad. The first possibility (a) evinces a deontological ethical character. Any violation thereof is bad for no reason ancillary to the act of starting a war--it is bad simply because starting wars is bad. Therefore no conceivable circumstances could ever suffice to justify its violation. Now, the ultimate basis for one's holding such an ethical position might be contractarian, or religious, or perhaps based on some kind of Kantian modal calculus--it doesn't matter. But on (b), a teleological ethical notion, one evaluates the ethical propriety of an action based not on a simple principle of an action, but on its outcome or its intended outcome. Inasmuch as you condemned war--in the abbreviated argument you posted earlier--on the basis of its making "the situation worse," it's clear that your opposition to war is not motivated by a principled pacifist stand but rather by a supposition contingent on variable real-world facts. (However, until you more completely argue your position, I will remain agnostic to its specific morals.) But no matter how you argue you will have to contend with the following problems: If you argue that war is always wrong, *no matter what,* then your argument could not be disconfirmed even in theory. Because nothing I could say would ever change your mind, such an argument would not be an argument at all; it would instead be an impotent tautological cliche'. But if, on the other hand, you argue that starting a war is wrong by virtue of what you personally foresee occurring thereafter, you run into two different problems: (2a) First, the only guarantee you have that starting a war will result badly (we might say that it would "make things worse than they were before") is your own fallible intuition. On what credible basis can one make such a bold assertion? None! You might, on the basis of some statistical data, say, argue that it is probable, or even that it is nearly certain, that the outcome should be worse. But you cannot--and in fact nobody could--predict how a war will turn out. Moreover, there is the related problem of your determining whether or not things actually *are* better thereafter. But this is a promise of futility, because at whichever point in the future you make such a judgment, the ethical basis upon which it was made may thereafter change, and in so doing, perjure your assessment. (2b) Second, you are committed to the idea that every war is bad, when in fact there is, spread throughout the annals of history, clear evidence to the contrary; wars have proven necessary, wars have resulted in the greater good, and there have been wars, that, were they not waged, would have entailed outcomes much, much worse. But you have to regard all of these wars--World War II and the Childrens' Crusade--as being immoral categorical equals. You can of course do so, but what you cannot do is simultaneously make your argument with any kind of coherence. Furthermore, if it can be shown that you oppose a war that, if waged, would bring about a state of affairs better than that which would obtain otherwise, then you are *not* opposed to war on a teleological basis at all. Your opposition--in this putative scenario--would be of the inadequate deontological variety instead. So, in order to coherently make your case, you *must* be willing to acknowledge at least the possibility that starting a war could make things better than they would be if no war were to occur. This might seem like I'm asking you to argue on my behalf, but the alternative would be that your argument is necessarily, rather than contingently, true, and that's no argument at all.