It depends what you mean by "substitute." If by that you mean function symbolically than yes, I think sports can work as a substitute for war. Just consider some of the lingo in football. The long pass is the bomb and we talk of an offense as having a lot of weapons and of the qb as a general. I suppose that sports might also be considered as a way of sublimating aggressions and reinforcing communal bonds. For instance, when I lived in central Florida many people who seemed to share very little else in common, thought of themselves as "Gators" and could always relate to each other along those lines. And they got hyped up for certain games as though it were a kind of symbolic war. In thinking about the uses of sport, we should also consider that famous soccer game that took place between enemies during a cease fire. The men played together, embraced, shared food etc and the next day went back to bayoneting one another.

The short answer I think is, yes, one could imagine situations where all the participants in a war had strong reasons for participating. A more insightful answer to your question, however, will depend on exactly how one understands the ethics of war and peace.

For example, if it turns out that pacifism is correct (for more on this doctrine, see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pacifism), then the answer to your question may be--depending on the exact version of pacifism that is true--"no" because it turns out to be impossible for any act of warfare to be justified.

On the other hand, if just war theory is correct (for this, see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/#2), then one can imagine situations where multiple parties to a war were justified according to the rules of jus ad bellum. Since those rules are pretty strict, however, in practice I imagine that this rarely occurs, if it ever does. (It is possible, however, under this doctrine -- it is not the case that "every war is necessarily problematic" in the sense that you ask about.)

Another perspective that provides a clear answer to your question is that of realism within international relations. I don't view this as a philosophical theory or ethical doctrine, but rather a perspective on international relations that is extremely influential among scholars and practitioners within that field and that aims (among other things) to show that ethical argumentation of the sort pacifists and just war theorists wish to use is inappropriate for understanding and assessing international relations. (For more on this perspective, see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_in_International_relations). According to this view, war can be justified by states' national interests and needs for security and, alas, in our world of scarcity, unequal distribution of resources, and cultural and ethnic divisions, conflicts among those items occur frequently and so it would be fairly common for both parties in a war to act with justification.

I think Leaman is right that, in war and elsewhere, one must often choose between morally unpalatable alternatives. For example, the only way to protect innocent people from being massacred may be an intervention that risks killing other innocent people. And then your question (how would you feel if one of your loved ones were killed as collateral?) would be balanced by a similar question on the other side (how would you feel if one of your loved ones were massacred because we decided not to intervene?).

Having said this, I also feel I understand what upset you in Leaman's answer. There are two relevant passages. One says that "try[ing] to distinguish as far as possible between civilians and insurgents .. is a pretty empty policy once the bullets start flying. Right now the US and British military in Afghanistan have responded to pressure from the Afghan government to unleash less remote bombing operations to cut down on civilian deaths, and this has resulted predictably in increased military deaths among the allies." I suppose an empty policy is one that is unlikely to be implemented. Still, in this case the empty policy is also the morally right policy, and we citizens should not let the Afghan government be the only one calling for restraint. We should support as firmly as we can the call that such restraints be implemented (which, as Leaman's last sentence suggests, has now been done to some extent). Distinguishing between civilians and insurgents will increase harm to our soldiers, and this is a real, terrible cost. But what right do we have to pursue a policy that preserves the lives and health of allied soldiers at the cost of vastly larger numbers of Afghan civilians (as was the practice under Bush)? In fact, fighting there, what right do we have to assign any greater a value to our soldiers than to local civilians?

The other passage suggests we give up "trying to establish a UN policy of regulating weapons that no-one would adhere to anyway." Here I am rather more optimistic than Leaman: I think the ban on the use of biological weapons has worked quite well and has prevented a lot of harm. And the effort to ban landmines (spear-headed by Princess Diane) has also been impressive in the broad support it has achieved, even though the key offenders have so far not budged. I do not think it is hopeless to achieve widespread agreement that cluster bombs and napalm must not be used in urban areas where many civilians live. In fact, most people seem to agree with this prohibition, and very few states continue to offend against it. To be sure, an urban operation becomes more costly for one's own soldiers if one cannot just drop napalm all over the neighborhood. But then the commanders will have to consider whether the operation is really worth the cost (something they may pay much less attention to when the costs of the operation will be borne by foreign civilians) and, if it is, risk the lives of the soldiers they command.

Looking at the history of warfare, it is clear that some armies have, even at considerable cost, conducted themselves well vis-a-vis civilians even at times when bullets were flying (or the fighting was intense) and other armies have bahaved horribly. In Vietnam and also in Iraq and Afghanistan, allied military policy has been informed by great indifference to the suffering of the civilian populations. Such indifference to civilians is especially appalling because of the crushing military superiority we enjoyed in these conflicts: the survival and territorial integrity of our (allied) contries were in not the slightest danger, and the free fire zones and the napalming of villages in Vietnam victimized deeply impoverished families who lacked both the will and the ability to do the slightest harm to the US or anyone. Instead of feeling compassion for such people and a commitment to keep them out of harm's way, our military responded to their poverty and defenselessness with racist and cultural chauvinism (which was also in evidence in the widespread recreational torture practiced by our troops in Iraq). This is not the way all armies behave, and it is not the way ours is destined to behave. And even if this were the way our army is, or all armies are, destined to behave, we should explain why this is wrong and why it would be wrong to join, or to allow oneself to be conscripted into, such an army

There are various potentially relevant differences. First, interventions abroad are often more likely to be counterproductive. The foreign government committing or condoning the human rights violations may be so powerful that the attempt to stop it will cause much more death and destruction than is now occurring. By contrast, we can bring overwhelming force to bear domestically and thereby crush even well-armed crime gangs.Second, internationally we do not have unique authority to judge and to act. We are just one of many similarly placed agents possibly able to do something. These agents (the governments of powerful states) are likely to see things differently -- e.g. may support different factions in a country that's facing a violent power struggle. For example, some potential interveners may believe that the Sri Lankan all-out assault upon the Tamil Tigers was a crime that had to be stopped (because so many civilians were also hurt and killed). Other potential interveners may believe that the assault was the only way to end the civil war once and for all. If one intervenes to enforce its view of the situation, another may go in to prevent that. This illustrates that a general permission to intervene is likely to make matters worse by leading to altercations among interveners. Third, governments are often disingenuous. If we endorse the kind of principle you are entertaining (let governments use military force when doing so can stop the attempted murders of civilians in other countries who peacefully advocate for human rights), then governments are bound to appeal to this principle -- even in bad faith -- to justify interventions that are really motivated by rather more self-interested motives. You may recall those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were mendaciously appealed to to justify the invasion of Iraq. It's just as easy mendaciously to appeal to attempted murders supposedly taking place in a country one would like to invade.You will note that these arguments are predicated on the world as it is. They do not deny that the world you suggest is desirable: a world in which people abused by their government can hope for protection from abroad. But building such a more desirable world requires changes that go deeper than the adoption of a principle of parity. In particular, it requires a single effective decision mechanism that judges in the manner of a court -- that is, in a rule-based and transparent manner -- whether some particular country is so badly governed that military intervention is justified. In addition, it requires a powerful alliance of states committed to giving effect to those judgments. These two conditions seem far off.

A traditional component of the 'just warfare doctrine' emphasizes the importance of 'discrimination' between soldiers and civilians in carrying out a 'just war.' While often ignored, this requirement was easier to fulfill before technology changed the nature of warfare over the past couple centuries. After all, it was relatively easy to know whom you were attacking with a spear or sword. Compared to the indiscriminant carpet bombing and fire bombing tactics used during the conflicts of the mid-twentieth century I think things have improved considerably in recent years due to the creation of higher precision ammunitions. However, even high precision ammunitions require accurate intelligence and careful rules of engagement to avoid substantial civilian casualties. In the conflicts you mention, discrimination has also become more difficult because the use of 'irregulars' (non-uniformed combatants), the use of civillian areas for military cover, and the awareness that civilian casualties can be used to generate sympathy through the media have all increased.

All military weapons have the potential for misuse, but I am uncertain whether any of the weapons you mention are genuine examples of weapons that are inherently indiscriminate. If there is an ethical problem, it is in the nature of how they have been used not in the nature of the weapon itself.

Lack of precison in warfare is inevitable once civilians and military are mixed up with each other, which is increasingly the case in modern war. So one could say then that war becomes entirely immoral, but this makes it even more likely that ruthless people will use civilians in their military operations. Or one could say that one will try to distinguish as far as possible between civilians and insurgents, which is a pretty empty policy once the bullets start flying. Right now the US and British military in Afghanistan have responded to pressure from the Afghan government to unleash less remote bombing operations to cut down on civilian deaths, and this has resulted predictably in increased military deaths among the allies.

Before we throw up our hands and say that moral decision making is impossible, we should reflect on the fact that in much of morality agents are put in difficult situations and have to choose the better of unpleasant alternatives. So rather than trying to establish a UN policy of regulating weapons that no-one would adhere to anyway it would be preferable to think seriously about what in a particular situation is the less bad action. For example, there are occasions when the police have to take risks with innocent hostages' lives to catch criminals and a balance has to be struck here between the competing rights and interests of all the parties. Blanket rules on the use of particular weapons is unlikely to be helpful.

The claim to which you refer, I suspect, is a shortened version of one or both of two basic inferences. Either, that killing other people/ risking one's own life is an enormous and 'grown-up' responsibility; anyone deemed to be capable of such responsibility should surely be capable of lesser responsibilities; drinking et al are lesser responsibilities; therefore etc. Or, second, that a nation is asking a great deal of a person in putting them forward for combat; if someone is asked for so much, and gives honourably, something should be owed in return, especially some degree of rights or privileges; drinking et al are just such rights or privileges; therefore etc.

As they stand, the above mini-arguments are not terribly convincing. The responsibility argument assumes that the condition of being responsible is simple and one-dimensionally quantitative. But imagine a Mr. X, who holds down a good job in management, raises a family, sits conscientiously on the city council, and so forth – but occasionally drives under the influence. Such an example shows that being responsible is not quite so straight-forward a concept, capable of an unequivocal 'less' or 'more'.

The rights or privileges argument, on the other hand, seems to assume that a privilege such as drinking is owed. But, if anything is owed it is either contracted explicitly (the soldier's wage packet, pension, due care by commanding officers – something owed by law) or something conventionally suitable (like a parade, say, or a bit of respect – something owed by existing cultural convention). I don't see how renting a car, for example, fits into either category.

There are, of course, differences between the two cases. The Soviets did at least have some opportunity to defend themselves, for instance. On the other hand, vastly more of them died. So let's just put all such differences to one side, and suppose that the two cases are indeed equivalent. Okay then, if Hitler had the right to invade the USSR, then he had the right to slaughter the German Jews. But so what? The antecedent of the conditional is plainly false. Why on earth would anyone think he had the right to invade the USSR?

From an ethical standpoint, the research and development of weapons of mass destruction is justifiable only by appeal to the deterrent effect possession of such weapons has. When a country has weapons of mass destruction, others are deterred from using force against that county. There is a significant catch, though: in order to attain the desired deterrent effect, other countries have to believe that the country who possesses the weapons will, in fact, use them if provoked. And this is where the logic of deterrence gets sketchy: ethical considerations of the efficacy of deterrence support the having of weapons, yet in order to serve as deterrents, a country has to be prepared to use them. Those very same ethical considerations, however, may not support the actual use of weapons of mass destruction.

These considerations do not directly respond to one of your central concerns, which is whether or not the use of weapons of mass destruction is justifiable. Yet I do hope to have raised some doubts about inferring the fact that a country is willing to use weapons from the fact that they are researching and developing them. It could be ethical to research and develop them, and yet, at the same time, not be ethical to use them.

I believe that the meaning of the expression "war on terror" contains a metaphor and a judgment, neither of which is explicitly presented as such. This double equivocation has grave political consequences. Let me address each fold of the equivocation separately.

The Metaphor of "War."

I do not see how, in the "war against terror," "war" is used as anything else than a metaphor, as in the "war against cancer" or the "war against drug-trafficking." In principle, there would be nothing wrong in making use of the metaphor of war to describe the fight against terrorism, and the terror that it produces. Now, given that acts of terrorism are so destabilizing precisely because of their intrinsic production of terror (an individual and collective state of mind), I am not sure that the metaphor of war would be my pick, since it is obvious that it increases, rather than decreases, the production of terror.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, however, by formally "declaring" war on terror, the Bush administration equivocated on the status of the term "war." All of a sudden, the United States was at war , engaged in an actual armed conflict against the terrorists. This has allowed the Bush administration several very problematic moves:

1. to ask countries around the world to either align themselves with or against the US;
   
2. to suggest that whoever was "with us" was good and whoever was "against us" was evil;
   
3. to infuse secular democratic discourse with theological sentiments;
   
4. to accuse critical voices within the US of betrayal and anti-patriotism -- a vicious accusation that has silenced any form of dissent, including most of the liberal media until the war in Iraq began to lose steam. A recent example of this slippery slope is Sarah Palin's statement about the pro-American versus anti-American, states of the Uniion.

In my view, the equivocation on the status of the term "war" in the expression "war on terror" is not a simple rhetorical twist but a deliberate attempt to change the substance of political discourse, whose effects are still present today. Look at the responses given uniformly by the media as well as by the Obama campaign against the "accusation" that Senator Obama is a Muslim, or that he is deliberately concealing his Muslim background. In unison, these responses simply disputed the "allegation" on factual grounds. Senator Obama is a Christian and not a Muslim, and he is not concealing his Muslim background. How did the American public not take the accusation as offensive in terms of the demonization of Islam? How is it that in the oldest liberal democracy in the world religious discrimination still reigns sovreign? The truth is taht no candidate or media can afford this line of response yet. And this limitation of freedom of expression is, I believe, a consequence of the last 8 years of equivocation on our being really at war against an elusive enemy.

"Terrorism" as a Judgment

Declaring war against terror implies that the fight against it can be won or lost. In my opinion, the promise to eradicate terror rests on the wrong assumption that "terrorism" is a referring expression, which is to say, the fitting description for a specific type of violent act, carried out by a new military enemy, an enemy that can and should be beaten on the battlefield. By contrast, in my scholarly work I have claimed that terrorism is not a description but a judgment. In this case, it is important to underline that judgments may be offered not only by individuals, but also by institutions, government agencies, the media apparatus as well as the political elite in charge of major policy decisions.

You might argue that I am conflating terrorism and terror here, and that the war that the United States has declared is against terror rather than terrorism. My answer to your remark would be that in the past 8 years these two terms have indeed been used interchangeably. In my view, this interchangeability is another deliberate and dangerous equivocation that has allowed the Bush administration to obscure that terrorism is in fact a judgment, which, as all judgments, need justification pronouncing them. My point is that the Bush administration’s decision to declare “war on terror” is essential in establishing terrorism as a referring expression. The specificity of a terrorist act is to deliver terror, which is conceived as the essence to which the multiple and varied forms of terrorism can be reduced. In Platonic language: terror is the absolute essence and terrorism is the particular embodiment of terror. This way of thinking about terror and terrorism obscures the fact that terrorism has had a long history and assumed, throughout it, very different forms: think about the difference between the targeted killings of the Red Brigades in Italy, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the mass murder of 9/11, which closely resembles, although not in scale, the fascist attacks against railway stations and banks that accompanied the history of Italian terrorism during those same years.

Declaring war against "Terror" (which was more often that not capitalized in the earlier years of the millennium) erases the need to distinguish between the specificity of the context in which terrorist act is committed and the ideological brands that each one of them has embraced. It is a legitmate to debate whether, in very specific circumstances, a terrorist act may be acceptable in the liberation from liberation from an unjust oppressor.

In contrast with the reduction of terror to an essence (I call it the essentialization of terror), I see terrorism as a judgment for which, whoever pronounces it, has to provide a justification. Today’s mainstream conception of terrorism is the very specific product of a very specific political culture that bears the responsibility of having formulated it and constructed it as a "fact" of sorts, independent from language and circumstances. This is why I call this political culture the culture of terrorism.

All my points seem to me a way of articulating more fully what remains implicit in your question when you ask: "We don't try to preemptively stop violent offenders in the developed nations, so why are 'terrorists' people that can be so easily branded and fought against?"

The declaration of "war on terror" implies that the fight against terror should be conducted by traditional military means, without which the Bush Doctrine of preemption would not make any sense. This doctrine applies only if terrorism is seen as a single recognizable agent (the particular embodiment of a supposed essence, called Terror) whose harmful intentions can be preemptively anticipated and staved off. By following this line of argument, the Bush Doctrine avoids asking the question of who, in fact, is a terrorist. In my opinion, a terrorist is first and foremost a violent offender who claims political motives for her criminal activity. So that the real question becomes: who is in the position of determining whether that claim is justified, and thus to judge whether the violent offense is in fact an act of terrorism? And this is an open question at the intersection between the national and international judicial systems.