War Stories

I'm dead set against the US invading Iraq, but here is an audio/visual piece from the NY Times which tells the stories of three women who soldiered in Iraq. It makes it real.

The tragedy of war is that it really should be the last option, the very last option. But leaders who don't have to actually do the fighting find it far too easy to order others into the horrors of war. This makes it far too easy.

This piece doesn't address this, but if a people have to go to war, then it should be total war, everybody mobilized, nothing held back, and it should be short violent and ugly so you can get it over as soon as possible. Using war as a "diplomatic tool" is immoral and disgusting. War is only justified when it is all-or-nothing because it literally is the last option and it really is a them-or-us situation.

Maybe it would be a help if after every war, all the war leaders are executed, sort of the sacrificial goats for the society. A way to cleanse the moral harm by the acts of war. A payment for the crimes necessitated by the conduct of the war. I bet that would sure help make wars far more infrequent. I'm sure Bush wouldn't have been so keen on his "war of choice" if he knew that the day he celebrated under his "Mission Accomplished" banner would be the day that he would be taken out and shot. Only if leaders know that it is really, really necessary, would they "lead" their country into war knowing they would have to pay the ultimate price for their heroism.

Final point: what this pictures & voices make very graphic is that war is fought by the lower classes. The rich (like in the American Civil War) buy their way out by having a job in the real economy. The poor have no place so they sell their bodies to get buy. For this they are promised several things, like an education, which most can never cash in because they won't "fit in" to higher education. They are sold a lie. They are puffed up with noble words about duty, service, country which the makers of those words are cynically using them to get what they want, and at a cheap price too. Sad.

Each Sunday I watch the roll of names scrolled at the end of the ABC show This Week with George Stepanapoulis. It lists names of soldiers killed, their age, and their hometown. The little towns of the US are way, way over-represented. This drives home that it is the poor in rural areas that are recruited to die in the wars. Rome did much the same, offering the proletarians from the slums of Rome a retirement gift of a small farm if they could survive their 20 year military stint. The founders of the US didn't envision a standing army and didn't envision a system where grinding poverty was the enlistment "aid" that ensured you filled your quotas.