It seems like someone wants this war in the Middle East. It is someones political ploy. Somewhere someone is thinking that the ends justify the means.
But I for one am tired of death and destruction. Enough killing. War is diplomacy, but man, where did all of the other solutions go? Have we come to the point where the best way to acheive our goals is to inflict unbearable agony on the people we oppose? Meanwhile hoping that the pain and suffering of our own people never reaches the breaking point?
There is enough blame to go around. Enough injustice has been done by all that no one can claim clean hands. The debate of blame can go on and on…and all we get is more dead civilians…
Are there no more ideas? Are there no better ideas? If this is the best our leaders can give us, then I say it is time for new leaders.
There is no security but shared security. One side oppressing the other is a recipe for future fires. Until each person in the middle east can safely go to a job where they can earn enough to support a family, and they can send their children off to school without the fear of explosions killing them, we will not have peace.
Peace and security is not free. It is costly. Too long we have paid that cost with the blood of our own and of our enemy. Is that such a bargain? Why can’t the concessions be made at the bargaining table, instead of at the end of a gun, or in the shrieking of shrapnel? Are we really saying we are willing to offer our children and our young people? Our women and men? The elderly and the infirm? as a sacrafice so that the survivors can live as they feel they are entitled? So that others, who feel just as justified in their cause, cannot?
My slide from Gulf War Supporting Conservative to Pacifist Liberal accelerates…
Well another way to do it is to get up and leave. That’s right, cram the good ol’ US of A into a starship, either after teraforming mars, or after that whole speed of light thing is conqured.
Almost anything would be as effective as war, because war doesn’t generally work; it only appears to work because it usually results in some kind of finality. The trick is not escalating into war when your war-replacement method fails to resolve the conflict (as it inevitably will).
War is an intristic part of humanity. To eliminate it, you would have to first eliminate greed and xenophobia along with the notion of religious superiority. Hell, even apes and ants go to war.
Remember that famous quote about how no one knows how WWIII will go down, but it’s a sure thing that WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones? Well, it’s true on several levels-- even if civilzation as we know it was smashed into smithereens by nuclear warheads, we would still war with one another using whatever weapons were at hand.
We will always find excuses to fight the other guy and take his stuff, because we like war. Humans enjoy killing and stealing.
War is not caused just by xenophobia and greed. War is the last appeal of those who are (or think they are) unfairly mistreated. We can stop the fighting once everyone no longer thing he must fight.
John Moore, of the righty blog Useful Fools, has some unusually personal instructions to us non-warfighters should deal with war: shut up and get in line.
Interestingly, he didn’t see fit to post this on his own blog, only in the comments column to another blog. The occasion was Seymour Hersh’s New Republic report on Abu Ghraib in May 2004.
Moore, a Navy veteran, says the real problem is not the breach of discipline at AG, but the fact that people cared at all. Here he offers what military training people would call “wall-to-wall counseling” to civilians for the post-9/11 “reality.”
The logical conclusion is that if war is inevitable, especially a homefront terror war, then we had better drastically simplify our moral compass as a civilization. Survival first; everything else threatens that survival.
I’m for the starship/Mars thing, provided Seymour Hersh is on it! There’s a reason I never contemplated joining the military, and that there rant is pretty close to it!