Books like Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer

Three months after Army lieutenant William Calley was charged with the infamous massacre of civilians at My Lai, the Marine Corps had to deal with a savage war crime of its own. Although the incident received little of the media attention focused on Calley's crimes, the murder of sixteen women and children by five Marines at Son Thang-4 raised serious questions for the Corps and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Gary Solis, a Marine combat officer in Vietnam and later a judge advocate, draws on his considerable experience to describe the horrifying crime, its problematic investigation, and the complex courts-martial. It is an engrossing true courtroom drama, complete with unpredictable outcomes and the involvement of both Oliver North and James Webb. Were the five Marines of the self-styled killer team sent to Son Thang-4 on 19 February 1970 carrying out orders to punish the hamlet or reacting to snipers when they opened fire on noncombatant civilians at point-blank range? Were their actions simply a consequence of weeks of unrelenting combat in which fellow Marines were killed by the invisible Viet Cong and their boobytraps? Using trial records and extensive interviews, Solis brings to life the host of military and civilian attorneys, judges, and juries who wrestled with these and other thorny questions in the midst of a combat zone. His riveting courtroom narrative is every bit as fast-paced and readable as the best legal fiction, and his authoritative assessments of the principals' performances, explanations of the peculiarities of military justice, and analysis of issues that rocked the very foundation of the military code of justice assure the book's long-lasting value. Here for the first time is the full story of what happened at Son Thang-4, including the controversial deliberations and verdicts - a study as pertinent today as it was in 1 Corps, Vietnam, more than twenty-five years ago.

Elaine Scarry examines the inexpressible nature of physical pain, exploring how it erodes language and identity, and how states weaponize suffering through torturous warfare. Her analysis draws on literature, law, art, and military theory.

Humorous look at the costliest blunders in military history, from the Fourth Crusade to the Bay of Pigs, revealing how even great powers have launched disastrous wars.

[book-club][1] [1]: http://book-club.tk

With Obama's election to the presidency in 2008, many believed the United States had entered a new era: Obama came into office with high expectations that he would end the war in Iraq and initiate a new foreign policy that would reestablish American values and the United States' leadership role in the world. In this new assessment, historian Lloyd C. Gardner argues that, despite cosmetic changes, Obama has simply built on the expanding power base of presidential power that reaches back across decades and through multiple administrations. The new president ended the "enhanced interrogation" policy of the Bush administration but did not abandon the concept of preemption. Obama withdrew from Iraq but has institutionalized drone warfare -- including the White House's central role in selecting targets. What has come into view, Gardner argues, is the new face of American presidential power: high-tech, secretive, global, and lethal. Killing Machine narrates the drawdown in Iraq, the counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan, the rise of the use of drones, and targeted assassinations from al-Awlaki to Bin Laden -- drawing from the words of key players in these actions as well as their major public critics.

Examines the biblical story of the Exdous and shows its part in shaping Western political thought and action.

A definitive, single‑volume analysis of why U.S. policy led America into and ultimately lost the Vietnam War, featuring portraits of key decision makers and a foreword by Senator John McCain.

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the seminal figures in twentieth-century literature. His influence on the art of narrative and on the very way people think about writing has been incalculable. All postwar fiction, from Garcia Marquez to Fuentes, Updike to Barth, Calvino to Eco, bears Borges's imprint - in spite of the fact that Borges did not write a single novel. Borges: A Life is the first biography to be written in English since Borges died, and from it emerges a picture of a complex man who neither courted fame nor acknowledged the literary revolution he set in motion. Based on firsthand research in Buenos Aires, James Woodall's portrait depicts the Borges the world never saw: the young pamphleteering poet obsessed by Walt Whitman and Argentine slang; the sexually timid intellectual falling disastrously in love just as he was writing his finest prose; the guru of Latin American letters whose sole aim in old age was domestic happiness. Casting new light on the background to the stories and the poetry, James Woodall also looks at Buenos Aires itself, a city in one of the most dramatic periods of its history. At the center of Woodall's depiction are the two grand obsessions of Borges's life: his celibate love of women and his loathing of Argentina's most charismatic dictator, Juan Peron.

What causes war? How can military conflicts best be prevented? A prominent political scientist here addresses these questions, offering ideas that will be widely debated. Van Evera's book demonstrates that ideas from the Realist paradigm can offer strong explanations for international conflict and valuable prescriptions for its control.

Jean Bethke Elshtain explores how gendered myths of the "just warrior" and the "beautiful soul" shape the treatment of women and men in war, analyzing their impact on identities, participation, and the moral frameworks of conflict.

"This book is a comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among the beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, neonates, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe, congenital, cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose.". "In an attempt to understand the moral status of these beings, Jeff McMahan develops and defends distinctive accounts of the nature of personal identity, the evaluation of death, and the wrongness of killing. He contends that the morality of killing is not unitary; rather, the principles that determine the morality of killing in marginal cases are different from those that govern the killing of persons who are self-conscious and rational."--BOOK JACKET.

Walzer entró en 1977 en la historia de la teoría y filosofía política con *Guerras justas e injustas*, que se convirtio, y sigue siendo, un clásico o mejor, el clásico contemporáneo del tratamiento de la relación entre guerra y moral, insustituible incluso cuando las guerras actuales no suelen ser ya guerras entre estados soberanos. Walzer partió de un ataque frontal al realismo, al negarse a mantener dos tesis interrelacionadas: que «cuando las armas hablan, callan las leyes», y por tanto calla también la reflexión moral y política sobre estas y sobre la conducta práctica de los seres humanos en los conflictos armados; en segundo lugar, que el silencio de las leyes y de la moral es únicamente el correlato de una verdad, descubierta por el realismo político, al despojarnos la guerra de nuestros civilizados aderezos y poner de manifiesto nuestra desnudez, resulta evidente que lo que convencionalmente se ha denominado inhumanidad o conducta inhumana es únicamente la humanidad sometida a presion extrema. El carácter fragmentario y discursivo del razonamiento de Walzer ha dificultado la percepción de la fuerte interconexión de toda su obra, a no ser que se entrelacen textos de, al menos, la primera y última etapa, como se hace en la presente selección. De ahí que pueda afirmarse que *Guerra, politica y moral* que incluye una entrevista en que habla de la totalidad de su obra, textos de la primera época de Walzer "Contra el realismo", capítulo inicial de *Guerras justas e injustas*, entre otros y una selección de sus reflexiones recientes mas importantes constituye una introducción general a la visión minimalista de la moral universal que siempre ha defendido Walzer. Los textos que aquí se presentan permiten la continuidad en el razonamiento de Walzer a lo largo de las tres décadas, su peculiar combinación de minimalismo y universalismo, así como su posición singular en el debate entre liberalismo y comunitarismo.