Given:

a) That politics is a violent business in a fallen world;
b) That it is conducted by a mixture of good and bad actors with good and bad motives and various mixtures of opportunism, bad faith, and genuine pursuit of the various and contradictory goals they think best;
c) That there are asymmetries of attention and information between ruling political elites and other persons, especially with regard to things happening in other parts of the world;
d) That no country or alliance of countries will ever be powerful enough to end all political violence and politically-created suffering in the world even if they were genuinely motivated to:

1) There will always be a abundance of political violence and politically-induced suffering in the world;
2) Political elites will never effectively follow a consistent rule of eliminating it all;
3) There will always be enough of it that political elites can choose among episodes of violence and suffering in order to rally support for acts of warfare at the times and in the places of their choosing.
3a) They will usually be able to do this by telling the truth about one episode at a time and just focusing on it to the exclusion of other episodes. When not, they will often be able to do so with partial truths about the episode. When not, they will often be able to do so with facially plausible falsehoods that non-elites have no way to effectively check or challenge.

e) A maxim of political judgment must be understood to be usable by real political actors of the sort described in (b).

4) The maxim “my country must fight a war to end this episode of political violence and politically-induced suffering” is approximately equivalent to the maxim “the political elites of my country may fight wars at the times and places of their choosing, for the reasons of their choosing, whether their motives are good, wicked, or opportunistic.”

Note that this is compatible with thinking that some particular episode really is unusually appalling.