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.

Let me begin by saying that I expect my answer to this one will be controversial, as I think there are deep feelings about this issue, and also a very broad range of considerations. So my own response does not rise above simply stating an opinion for others to consider.

For what it is worth, then: I think, as a matter of fact that within democracies military drafts should be mandatory. So, I suppose it is obvious that I think they are neither unethical nor immoral in democracies. I think in systems where the people's consent to government is not given, but simply coerced (the obvious example being dictatorships), then military conscription is almost always immoral, however.

But in democracies, I think that military drafts (universal and with only carefully conceived medical or extraordinary hardship exceptions) should be mandatory. The recent situation in which the United States finds itself gives a fairly clear ground for why I say this. It is simply far too easy for a government or regime to become involved in a war when that decision only puts at risk people who have volunteered for the military. If being in the military were instead a matter of civic duty, then the entire citizenry (including especially the families and friends of conscripts!) will be much less eager to have their countries go to war. As our fiasco in Iraq shows all too well, we should have been much more reluctant, as a nation, to get into this war--but when it was only volunteers whose lives were gone to be lost, well... It was just too easy for the rest of us (many of us with a deep sense of unease nothwithstanding) to sit idly by and just allow our government to make this decision for us. Well, the wrong decision was made, and I think such decisions would be much more difficult to make if more people in this country felt the real risks at stake.

A nation should be prepared to go to war only if and when the case for risking young lives--even those dear to us--is recognized by the majority of the citizens. I think that fewer people would have supported this foolish and reckless war if the stakes included risks to them or to their loved ones, and not just to those who, for whatever reasons--often economic, to be honest, which raises very serious equity questions--volunteered to risk their lives in the military.

The US withdrew from the Vietnam War because that war--another reckless adventure, I believe--put too many conscripts' lives at risk, and the American public finally would not put up with having their loved ones killed or maimed without adequate cause. After that War, our politicians' "wisdom" conceived the all-volunteer army--precisely because that gave them much increased capacity for military engagement without the resistance of the families and loved ones of conscripts. But this resistance is precisely what should be in place to hold in check a too-great readiness to engage in war.

Few thought the draft was immoral during either of the World Wars. That is because there were extremely good reasons to be involved in those wars. But after Vietnam and Iraq, the idea of being conscripted gives us all the creeps. It should give us the creeps! But that same reaction would impede hawkish lawmakers from expensive and deadly wars that do no credit to our country, and waste too many lives (at home and abroad) for poor or selfish reasons.

So it reduces to a simple question: Would we be so willing to vote for a candidate who wished to extend this war "as long as it takes" if it was our own son or daughter who might be the next to die or be terribly injured there? I think not, and if we went back to having the draft, we'd find our current follies ended with alacrity and conviction, and our capacity to make the same mistakes again sharply constrained.

Is it possible to oppose the War and yet support the troops? If I support the war, that means I believe the ends are justified and good, the means are appropriate, and so on. So I believe in the mission, as you might say. What does it mean to "support the troops"? It might mean that I write comforting "letters from home" to people in the services, that I have positive feelings towards the soldiers, that I applaud their representatives on the 4th of July, and so on and on. These two activities are very clearly different and perfectly distinct, as the support has two different objects, and there is plainly no fantasy here. The more serious question is whether it is morally permissible to engage in the second activity (supporting the troops) without the first (support for the war), or if we think the war is positively wrong. To put an extreme case: could (a moral "could" here) good Germans have supported the Wehrmacht, the regular army, even though they did not support Hitler and the War and its stated aims? And would it have been a good idea? (Or, even more extremely, should such Germans have written warm supportive letters to regular Wehrmacht units, but not say to SS army units?) It seems to me that the answer to this moral question hinges on just how bad the war is thought to be. Supporting the troops if the war is known to be a great moral evil is more than fantasy; it is itself wrong. But there is nothing wrong with supporting the troops in a war which we know or confidently believe is a justified and good one, such as (from the Allied side) the Second World War. So for Americans today the question of whether we can or should support the troops but not the war depends on just how bad we think the war is. My own view, for what it is worth, is that the war is very bad (even though it appears to be the result of incompetence and lack of intelligence rather than of malice), but not quite bad enough to justify withdrawing our support, if we wish to give it, to people in the services.

No, not unless he or she commits them or directs that they be committed. When one joins an organization one does not necessarily agree with everything that the organization does. Soldiers should not follow orders that are immoral, and if it is widely believed by them that the enterprise on which they are engaged is immoral or is full of immoral actions, then they should not be a part of it. But in my experience most of the military are not engaged in anything that could be described as immoral or as involving atrocities, and so there is no reason for their non-participation in the war.

It is a principle of living in a country where the military is independent of the government that a soldier sometimes is obliged to do things which he personally voted against, although he should never do anything he considers immoral, however many people voted for it or the party that supports it. That is why in America a sharp distinction is made between those who support the war and those who don't but still support the troops. There is a popular car sticker in my part of the country that says "Support the troops, bring them home".

I agree with the thought that being the subject of aggression does not necessarily license extremely violent responses like killing, and I would add that pacifists believe there can be--depending on the exact pacifist views being considered--principled and/or pragmatic reasons for refusing to respond to aggression with any form of violence directed toward the aggressor.

So, for example, Gandhi believed that a pointed refusal to respond to aggression with violence against the aggressor could serve to change the behavior and attitudes of the aggressor and of other witnesses to the aggression.

A useful summary of some assessments of pacifism by philosophers is here.

This much I'd agree with: There's a big difference between defending oneself against aggression and undertaking aggressive action oneself.

What's not so clear is that one can (let alond should) do absolutely anything in response to aggression. Take the mugging case. It isn't at all clear that, if you are being violently mugged, then you are justified in killing your assailant. If killing your assailant were the only way you could protect yourself, then it would presumably be justified---or better, excusable. And if that were not the only way, but if you were to defend yourself in other ways that were justified and were to kill your assailant more or less accidentally, then you would not be blameworthy. But you do not get to kill someone just because they are mugging you. (And how violent exactly does the mugging have to be?)

The same is true of war, even justified defensive war. Civilized nations have long recognized limits to the conduct of war. The use of chemical weapons, for example, is widely regarded as completely unjustifiable, even to repel an invader.

Where is it written that what is 'natural' is morally acceptable? Unless some argument is offered for this claim, there is a blatant non sequitur in these remarks.