Maggie's Farm

Bird Dog:
I guess I am not sure what you are arguing with this piece. Should we have more war? Are all wars necessarily good? Is violence always the right choice in all interactions? That has a lot to say about family arguments.
I think this is specious. And it is this thinking that led Bush's team to undertake the Iraq disaster. Unfortuantely, none of them understood either history or human beings. Therefore we have an almost total disaster on our hands complicated by almost complete idiocy. The waste of money, lives and time is instructive: a wrong decision here is more than a mistake, it is a disaster. And Bush did not understand that reality either in Iraq or in Israel. This is a fundamental chicken who wants to preen on the school yard. Bullies, all of them.

What a dark view of humanity that it should treat war as a mere tool of public relationship. We have learned better between individuals and in smaller groups. In fact we view individual violence as far outside the norm and sanction it heavily. This was not always so of course but would have remained so if your general theory were to be the case.

Further, war has proved though intractable to human control to be a poor instrument of policy. I fear you are right on one point: there are times when war is the only choice, but we have not always taken it. Somalia, Sudan, Serbia, Cambodia, et al are too many examples of times when that might have been the best choice. If that is the case then there is little argument that war is either necessary or compelled by human nature. It is clearly a matter of choice, political choice, subject to all the weaknesses of that genre. And given the sorry state of politics particularly in the US today with a premium on lying and manipulation to preserve power for its own sake we have to doubt the actions of the government. I find no attraction for war and no justification or necessity. And your lack of willingness to undertake the necessary phenomenology suggests that you suffer from the exact disease Sherman worried of: that we should love war too much.