War has more benefit than harm

Thanks to my opponent, and let's get started. 1) Loss of life. "...in this case, the 'personality' of a person is irrelevant. In war, as cruel as it may sound, a person is a resource, and all people are equal before the "eyes" of war." Voters, this is the concession of the debate. This is literally all I need to win it. Pro is conceding that war erases personality, turns people into resources, and dehumanizes on a vast scale. And all of his points throughout this debate just supercharge my argument. He says that more lives have been born into the world and sustained as a result of war, again focusing on numbers and effectively making the problem worse. He said in the last round that even recovery from war is essentially this same numbers game writ large, where new people "replace" dead people. Let me make this clearer. Pro cannot simply sit here and say that increased lives equals better outcomes (even if he can prove that). He has to prove that war is net beneficial. When he agrees that war effectively turns humans into resources, he's granting that the mass dehumanization occurs, and therefore that lives as a whole are only worth their value to society at large. He is effectively removing the importance of these lives and degrading them to nothing. And each life that is produced by resources created through war, or is born to "replace" lives lost, is actually functioning as more dehumanization. The population may be increasing, but its overall value as a result of being a collection of individuals perceived as the same, without personality or individuality, diminishes dramatically. 2) General costs Pro ignores the fact that those resources garnered from Iraq were lost by Iraq, and the resource drain that occurred is damaging to them. Pro doesn't explain where the oil extraction benefited Iraq. His own source shows that they've been harmed by the lack of oil to meet basic energy needs. In fact, the only point Pro makes here is that the U.S. benefited economically as a result, which is also contended by his own link. Yes, oil companies have benefited, but not the U.S. itself, which experiences in fact lower levels of total employment due to reliance on foreign companies. More importantly, Pro never explains how these oil benefits outweigh the costs of lost life. That continued dehumanization isn't going to be overcome by increased profits. 3) Cycle of violence Pro is mishandling this. No, it doesn't support his claims that war relieves social tensions. The whole purpose of this point is to say that war only increases tensions between nations, breeding more war, more tension, and as such, more dehumanization. Pro's sole response to my point here is an assertion with some very odd logic. He's essentially trying to assert that war calms the aggressor down, so everyone's more calm afterward. People want revenge for war committed against them. They resolve it by war. That war creates more tensions, with create more war. One side resolves its tensions by creating tensions in the other side, which causes more war. It's an endless cycle. His response to diplomacy is that it doesn't work. First off, it does, especially in recent history (look to the Israel-Jordan Treaty, the North Atlantic Treaty, and the Treaty of San Francisco)[1]. He drops my responses about changing trade relations and international cooperation, both of which can and do affect behavior. This is seen most notably and recently with Russia.[2] He also ignores the fact that tensions exist regardless of the action taken, and since war only redistributes and exacerbates those tensions, it's worse than any of the alternatives. Lastly, he drops my point that inevitability doesn't make it beneficial. Even if he's right that war is the only possible outcome, it's still net harmful. Before I go on, I'd like to return to burdens, something Pro has left untouched. Remember, it's not enough for Pro to prove that some wars are beneficial, and, in proving that a war is beneficial, it's not enough to say that that war is beneficial to one side. Pro has to show that the costs of a large majority of wars to both sides are outweighed by the benefits of those wars to both sides. Not only that, but he has to show that it is causative in its benefits, not just correlative. He also has to show that these benefits are unique to, or are at least significantly better as a result of, war. This will play into my further responses. Onto examples. Pro talks about how Native Americans were benefited. I'd say this links back to my point about dehumanization pretty strongly, but beyond that, he never explains why war was necessary to spread resources and knowledge. The entire purpose of the Age of Discovery was to establish trade routes, not initiate war.[3] He never states why that trade route was impossible just because they ran into America instead. Pro comes back to the Crusades. He essentially says that, despite millions of lives lost, the Muslims won the Holy Land. They already had it. You don't benefit from winning what you already have. Pro then states that it was a huge win because of all those great technologies. Again, I'd say that he's hard pressed to show that the millions of lives lost in the Crusades justifies the acquisition of this technology, but he also drops my response that they could have acquired these technologies through trade. Pro asserts that migration and emigration would be less without war. This is nonsense. The presence of war is what creates an impetus to never go to the country you're fighting. Pro will have to prove that isolationist policies are common in the absence of war, and that war causes these to disappear. Pro looks at the Mongols and Muslims. At best, these are two examples of conquerors allowing religious diversity that didn't last beyond their reigns. It's not a benefit of war, and Pro is not responsive to my point that war actually homogenizes views by giving strong reason to spurn them. Pro then asserts his main point, which is that war is a catalyst for technological advance. I don't think he does enough here to prove this. He's saying that it's only a result of a need for military vehicles that engine technology was accelerated and better planes were made. This isn't enough to prove the point. He doesn't explain why the money and research spent on creating these wouldn't have been likely to exist in the absence of war (the percent of budget spent on it is actually pretty independent of warfare[4]), nor does he say why the time, energy and funds required to go through war don't negatively affect their advancement. Extend my points about how war drains resources for this research. Even if he's right, voters can go ahead and extend my points about environmental damage, depleted resources and killing tens of millions as harms that push back any benefit of catalysis. Better to have waited a few more years (though we have no idea from Pro's arguments just how much it sped up the process, if at all). On influenza, Pro asserts that we made progress during WWI on a vaccine, but never shows that that's true. The U.S. developed the first vaccine in the 1940's, which seems to disprove his claim. Again, Pro asserts that blood transfusions and sterilizing techniques would only have occurred as a result of war, but neither his first source nor this one support it. It says "advances in some medical techniques kept pace with the mass destruction of war," but there's no assumption that war brought about those advances, or even made them happen faster. This is just another unwarranted assertion. Back to Pro. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org... 2. http://politicsandpolicy.org... 3. http://www.the-map-as-history.com... 4. http://www.thetransportpolitic.com... 5. http://en.wikipedia.org...