Wars are never good.

You begin by saying that WWII had a reason, which is that Hitler wanted to take over the world. I agree that Hitler was an expansionist dictator who had to be stopped from gobbling up Europe, but as I assert in my original post Are there Any Good Wars? (in the Politics section), the ruling elite of the Allied nations were themselves guilty of denying self-determination, freedom, and human rights to millions of human beings, not exactly the noble champions of democracy and decency were they. They stood up to Hitler because their own interests and hegemony over much of the world was at stake. They ordered not one bombing raid to destroy the train tracks to Auschwitz, not one op of any sort to slow down the implementation of the Nazi's program of genocide. Because the real goal of the war was not altruistic and humanitarian, it was pragmatic and self-concerned, realpolitik and realeconomik. You also say that if the Nazis had won we'd all be Catholics. Say what?! The Nazis were hardly all devout Catholics, I think if Hitler had won we'd all be Hitlerians rather than Catholics! But I won't rehash my thoughts about WWII here any further, the next war that you choose to use as an example to make your case that there have been some "good wars" in history is the American Revolution, so I'll move on to that example and focus on it in depth. As for your contention that the American Revolution was totally necessary, and that if they hadn't fought for their independence Americans would have no say in how they're governed, well, this isn't at all historically accurate. Although they had their legitimate grievances the citizens of the North American British colonies were arguably the freest people in the so-called "civilized world". It was hardly imperative that they launch a war of independence to realize the dream of liberty. What about "taxation without representation" though? Yes, they were eventually heavily taxed but that was largely to help finance an enormous British debt that had been wracked up largely as a result of defending the colonies. Going to war with the "mother country" for national self-sovereignty was not at all such a cut and dried proposition in the Thirteen Colonies. Estimates vary, according to some historians 20-40% of colonists were "loyalists" and opposed independence, according to other historians a good half of the residents of the colonies remained neutral, in any case those who felt the need to wage war for independence only made up about 40-45% of the population. Clearly it was not an objective fact weighing on everyone's mind that they absolutely needed to make war against the Crown! Those who led the charge to turn the colonies into politically autonomous entities certainly had their ideals, I'm not going to paint an overly simplistic, black and white picture of them as totally cynical practitioners of realpolitik, however, neither were they the saintly true believers in democracy that they're often portrayed to be in high school American history classes! And neither was the Revolutionary war a noble fight for populist representative government. Rather, the "Founding Fathers" were worldly men of business and the upper echelons of colonial society who felt that the best of all socio-political systems would be one with a certain degree of democracy to safeguard against tyranny, but in which successful gentlemen such as themselves would really pull the strings. No, the competence of the common people to actually govern themselves was not all that highly regarded by the aristocratic land owners, merchants, and lawyers who were the movers and shakers of the American independence movement (this fact was vocalized quite a bit at the Constitutional Convention). Their war and their commitment to democracy was largely motivated by their desire to enhance their own political status and power. Democracy was a part of the zeitgeist of the Age of Enlightenment, it was in the air and to the colonial elite it was a path of progress, progress to their own freedom to be the stewards of American political and economic life rather than middlemen for the British elite. The OGs of American democracy essentially piggybacked their own political ambitions onto the democratic spirit of the age and rode it all the way to independence, starting a war in the process and sending 12,000 British soldiers back home in boxes. When the leaders of the American "patriots" finally came to power did they radically break from British legal and political traditions? No, because they liked the kind of society they had, they just wanted to be at the top of the power structure and to do that they had to boot the British out, and to do that they waged a bloody war. Their war was just as self-interested as most, and no more holy and just than any other. Well, I'll give it to you the delicate way that conventional historians put it, one of the main factors that led to war was that the Founding Fathers and the Crown differed when it came to their "views of the relation between the central sovereign and subordinate political units" (John C. Bennett). Translation: the "subordinate political units", i.e., the homegrown business and political Establishment of the colonies didn't like being "subordinate" and resorted to lethal force to separate from the Empire and make themselves big fish in their own fishbowl. I'm sorry but I have to say that the idea that the American Revolution is another example of a "good war" is downright historically uninformed, to put it mildly and gently. Have you ever noted how in television commercials for pharmaceutical companies the spokesperson will often say that the drug he's pitching was developed to make your life better, as if turning a profit for the company wasn't the real motive. But people usually just let this "nice" idea that megacorps market their products to improve our lives slide, we don't all shout in unison "BS!" This is how were trained under capitalism. Well, we've been taught to take the same tactful tack when it comes to American history, to refrain from standing up and shouting "BS!" when someone parrots the positive view of the Revolutionary War that he learned in school, consequently this view is taken to be the gospel truth when it's really just the conventional spin. I have an 8 year old cousin who's already been taught to believe the conventional spin of American history, he idolizes the early presidents as if they were genuine heroes of freedom, like the rest of us he overlooks the factoid that some of them owned slaves and that they were hardly radical egalitarians. Although we get a little wiser as we get older, like my young cousin many of us apparently still buy the official, history textbook version of why we go to war as a society, to be skeptical is considered unpatriotic after all. Yes, when we tell our kids and ourselves that Washington never told a lie, that Tom Jefferson believed that all men are created equal, and that they took it upon themselves to fight a war of independence to secure the blessings of liberty for us all, we're all like the official FBI historian I recently saw on a documentary about J. Edgar Hoover who clings to willful naivetï¿½ and denial about Hoover's crossdressing. Let's step out of denial and intellectual dishonesty and own the truth that the Revolutionary War was just another war fought by the Establishment mainly for its own benefit. No exception to the rule there. (Here's one interesting source, http://www.religion-online.org...). I've shot my wad of allowed characters on the American Revolution and haven't many left for the Greco-Persian wars. Suffice it to say that the Greek city-states had an imperialistic ruling class that dearly wanted to retain its power and privilege. In the light of your examples I still stand by my thesis that wars between states are normally fought for selfish gain.