Weigh the costs, benefits of war

I found the July 22 guest column, “Civil War's lessons,” timely and hopeful. The historian, David Goldfield, writes that the 150th anniversary of the Civil War would be a good time to reflect on the costs of war and ask whether the Civil War was a necessary war. He goes on to suggest a good question to study is how other slaveholding nations, and even northern states within the United States, ended slavery without war.

Slavery is a serious injustice, but war has costs that are so high that its makes justice hard to achieve. Just-war reasoning is a weighing of relative evils, relative costs, and relative benefits, and asking whether the benefits are larger than the costs. A good use of just-war reasoning leads one to ask whether a slower, less coerced and less costly program for justice for slaves might have resulted in the achievement of more civil rights and better economic opportunities for blacks in the South quicker in the long run. The history of the “reconstruction” and segregation in the South is not a pretty picture regarding a program of justice.

Instead of only glorifying our memory of the Civil War, we can open our minds to the lessons of history by reviewing the costs vs. the benefits of that war. Too much glorifying of war can be devastating.

Clark Rieke

Cedar Rapids