One of the most successful 19th Century wagers of war, General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) said "You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out."
His words highlight the saddest aspect of the whole Iraq debacle: The American people and Bush and his neocon minion in particular are still caught up in the myth of the nobility and glory of war. Americans still believe that war is an appropriate tool to accomplish strategic aims.
All war is evil, disastrous, a corruption and debasement of all that is good in humanity. The horrors of Haditha, Falluja, My Lai, torture, rape, murder, destruction and death, these are not horrific outliers in a genial enterprise, they are part and parcel of warfare, in perfect harmony with the nature of war. We tend to think of war as some kind of business activity with unfortunate externalities. Wrong!
There is no such thing as good war, and there are so many alternative paths to waging war. War is the fantasy of impatient child-men who want to wipe their antagonists off the face of earth, rather than figure out how to get along or work around them.
This war on terror is pure foolishness. War is terror.
The most effective response to terrorism is to quietly defend our vulnerabilities while ignoring their efforts to make us afraid. America needs to be courageous, not by sending soldiers and bombs to foreign lands, but by staying focused on what is truly important. In the United States there are many more urgent concerns facing us than terrorism. Terrorism is a distraction that keeps us from facing the truly difficult questions.
Making war on a small band of terrorists may make for good press and give the President special powers (he's still trying to figure out how to use his secret decoder ring), but it is also precisely what Osama bin Laden had hoped for, and a strategic blunder of the highest order.
War is the problem, not the answer.
Ted Bucklin