States must morally justify war to mobilize public support and troops

Evidence

Military counterterrorism involves two-sided moral disengagement with terrorists on one side and counterterrorists on the other side. We already have addressed the ways in which terrorists enlist the mechanisms of moral disengagement. However, targeted nations also must morally justify lethal means and disengage moral self-sanctions so that they can gain public support for intervention with force and mount military campaigns that will necessarily inflict death and destruction. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2302

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the vault’s existing claims about ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy; this shows the same mechanism operating at the state level in Cooper’s and authoritarianism claims. — connects to: Utilitarian framing justified the Iraq invasion despite prior US support.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2302