The problem is that its inconsistent. For every ethical action out there how many dozens of other wars are completely ignored by the same powers? That is what makes the ethical stance highly doubtful.
If the US was to get involved in a war every time they thought something unethical was happening would that be good? If the US made a policy to never intervene anywhere, even if trivial intervention could improve the lives of millions, would that be good?
I find that people have strong opinions about war and are happy to share them, but often don't seem to have thought them through at all. Why should either war everywhere or war nowhere make sense? Is there any room for good judgment, to weigh ethics, ability and consequences, and have a different approach in different situations?
There is an entire field of philosophy and ethics around this that has been developed in the Western world and continues to be researched and debated, called just warfare. It is actually used, at least in the US, to inform decisions about rules of engagement and legal or illegal tools and tactics. In fact it is required learning for future officers in the US military, at least in the Air Force.
This may all be true. But my personal impression is, that most wars are waged for geo-strategical reasons, and that ethical motives serve primarily in 'manufacturing consent'. I can be entirely wrong, of course.
Yes. War can be unethical but the most ethical response to an action. In practice, there are few ethical wars, which is why having any ethical conversation about war is incredibly draining and not worth it for most people: it is often sufficient to simply state war is carte blanche unethical.
Thankfully I don’t see any ethical wars on the immediate horizon.
It would also be ethical to remove the leadership of North Korea or even recently Venezuela since they actively harm their own constituents, yet it is very unlikely it would ever happen.
So in the end it is clearly calculated motives and returns on interventions. Ethical concerns are for the politicians to sell the package to Congress.
Really think about it. Is it ethical to start a war that is otherwise meritorious but that you cannot win? If you would be unable to create a good result, going to war would only add more misery to the process of getting to the inevitable bad result. This is not so 2 dimensional. You cannot say, these sets of values are parts of ethical decision making, and these other sets of values, that also impact people's lives, have no part in ethical considerations. The chances of success in a military action are a crucial component of whether it is ethical to even try it.
It is simpler to look at the results. Perhaps if the people in Iraq or Afghanistan are not better off than they would have been otherwise, and the rest of the people of the world are not safer and more prosperous than they would have been otherwise, then there was probably something unethical about the prosecution of the recent wars there.
We are just really bad at predicting the future, and even understanding the present or past. That is another ethical consideration. We should be very careful about using "ends to justify means", meaning that we do something that we know is bad for a good result of greater magnitude. The result will likely be something we did not predict, and therefore we have done a bad thing and gotten possibly a bad result as well.
The challenge would be to find a way to actually do things in the best way possible, while attaining good results. So we should avoid killing people. But if we must kill people, or even if we should kill certain very bad people (who makes those decisions?), you want to only kill the "bad" ones, therefore you should use the most discriminate weapons possible. Is it possible to do so? To achieve your aim can you use a sniper's bullet, a drone which can surveil it's target for days, or would you need to use nuclear weapons?
How would you approach North Korea, which is evil by almost any standard, when any war that lasts longer than 5 minutes results in the death of every inhabitant of Seoul?
I write all this because these are both very important and very difficult decisions. And it feels like we are not even trying. People cling to silly shallow principles and sling them around at each other, preventing the deeper discourse that should be taking place so that we can do better at dealing with horrible situations that remain in the world.