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

Thank you for your reply. Before I respond to your argument I want to emphasize, so you don't infer otherwise, that I'm not stridently pro-war"; that is, I don't have any respect for the ideals of nationalism, expansionism, colonialism, imperialism, or manifest destiny. I believe war is necessary only as a last resort in cases of self defense and exceptional charges of international social justice. In the case of your first example, you identify several reasons why India should not wage war on Pakistan. By your argument, to wage such a war would entail anger, escalation, violence, and revenge, so India instead should prefer a non-violent compromise--and I agree. But in distinguishing a specific example to buttress your argument that war is not justified you necessarily imply that there are cases in which war *is* justified--otherwise, what is the point of making note of political conditions applicable to a single conflict? Of course countries should always prefer non-violent compromise to war. However--and this is my point--it is not always possible to do so and therefore war is sometimes necessary. You subsequently argue that the "merits [of war] are less in number compared to the demerits" and that countries "should not wage war at any cost." But these two ideas are contradictory. For if the merits of war should exceed the demerits, then by your logic war would be justified--a contingency you reject. Thus your argument contains two claims: (1) that war is not justified for the reason that its merits never outweigh its demerits, and (2) war is necessarily immoral. Both cannot be true. I believe that some wars are just. The Allied Forces' action in World War II, in my opinion--and contrary to the opinion you have ascribed to me--was justified. But whether or not the Allies started the war or even whether or not their actions were justified, does not, as far as this debate goes, validate or invalidate my argument. It is enough, by your logic, that some war--past or future--be justified. Now I'm not sure which war-time commodity you mean to calculate in 'merits' and 'demerits', but I'm going to assume that any reasonable definition of these terms would include the loss of lives. But there have been, and there will be, cases in which going to war results in the loss of fewer lives than not going to war. This is true not only of the lives of one country's combatants, but of the soldiers and citizens of every country in the conflict. It is commonly argued that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, was justified because the counterfactual inevitability was the loss of far more lives in a ground war. This may or may not be true; I am not arguing that it is. However, if it were true it would disconfirm your claim that the demerits of war always outweigh its merits. (The utilitarian consideration of life in this example applies as well to other conceivable commodities, especially inasmuch as most war-time conceptions of merit are derivative therefrom.) Such was the explicit justification for war in 28 percent of the 289 wars surveyed in a study by Erich H. Witte & Susanne Halverscheid. Of course, I can't prove that 28 percent of wars are justified. I can't prove that 2.8 percent of wars are justified. But yours is a logical, not a historical argument. Therefore, unless you can prove that every war is not justified--you have the burden of proof here--then your argument from merit is not justified. However, if your opposition to war is just a manifestation of your ideological opposition to something more fundamental--as you imply--then your argument, to the extent that you adduce consequential conditions for the moral character of war, is self-refuting. War cannot be wrong for the reason that it increases anger, per your example, if it is wrong "at any cost." However, If you truly believe that war is wrong because violence is necessarily wrong, then I invite you (in another debate, alas) to explain to me how it is that allowing a genocide to occur could be preferable to preventing it.