Any reasonably sane person over the age of 15 knows that war is dangerous, expensive, and terrible. You know that it kills lots and lots of people, leaves many others damaged, and makes new enemies with new grudges. It is profoundly destabilizing and carries with it the threat of wider, more devastating unrest. So you don’t do it unless you absolutely have to.In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, no one provided a credible justification for the war. It was obvious that we did not have to invade Iraq. This is the overriding fact: Invading a nation without cause (you can call it “preemptive”, but that just means you don’t have cause) is breathtakingly immoral and equally stupid and you do not do it… A sane person starts from the position of not making war. The question of why not support starting a war should never even be raised—the reasons not to are always obvious…
Yes, we’d all like to be Superman, able to fly into countries and create freedom and justice for all. If I wake up tomorrow morning and discover I have become God, believe me, everyone will be hearing from me. But no number of weapons, and no army of whatever size, can compensate for the fact that human beings are not God and we can’t just make everyone behave the way we want them to.
Read it all. (c/o Jonathan Schwartz at This Modern World)
We will not win this “long war” so long as our enemies want victory more than we do, and are willing to sacrifice more to achieve victory than we are. We are asking for tremendous sacrifice from our all-volunteer military today. But though the burden of military service is heavy, it is not broad. I believe this is problematic in its own right, because such a division between those who serve and those who don’t has serious political and social consequences. However, there is an operational implication here as well. Our lack of national sacrifice telegraphs a very clear message to our enemies, not unlike the message which President Clinton sent to Slobodan Milosevic when he said “I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.” Wars are a contest of will, and they are won in the mind. We cannot afford to tell or show our enemies that we want victory less than they do. Unfortunately, that is precisely the message that our current attitude on national sacrifice is sending.
It is an important point. But, as I’ve said before, it is a war without definition, therefore a war without a defined end. How can we win?
Until an answer is found, I offer this and this.
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