Adult Thinking About War
People who think like children will have the same fate war deals to children.
A very smart friend of mine has a Facebook post about war, a post reflecting the maturity and sobriety we all need just now. I repeat it below.
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I was just thinking back to the Iraq War, and how some of its biggest boosters among liberals turned against the war early. Not because the war wasn't going well (it seemed to be at the time), not because they thought the US was the aggressor, and not because of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties. Rather, it was because of the news of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
Of course, that was appalling. But what struck me at the time, and still strikes me, is how naive these people were about war. War is said to be hell for reason. It inherently runs the risk of dehumanizing people, because if you think too much about your enemy's humanity, it makes you less likely to be eager to kill them. And not thinking about enemy soldiers' humanity desensitizes you to suffering and death more generally. So no matter how well-trained and well-briefed etc soldiers are, if you have a large enough military campaign, a few of them are very likely to do bad things.
I'm old enough to have personally heard second-hand stories about US soldiers in WWII doing very bad things, much worse than Abu Ghraib. Yet the armchair warriors were so *shocked* by this that they didn't just call for the soldiers to be punished, new procedures put in place, and so on, they decided the whole war was a mistake.
And of course the reason I'm thinking about this is the current war in Gaza. There are lots of people with very bad moral sensibilities who are just on the wrong side for very stupid reasons. But there are some who just have a fantasy that there is some way of beating a determined, immoral enemy entrenched in an urban environment without a lot of people suffering.
I looked up a few statistics. Battle of Normandy--about 20K French civilians killed. Battle of Berlin--about 120K German civilians killed. Battle of Manila (1945)--about 100K civilians killed. This was not terror bombing, as in Tokyo or Dresden. This was just the result of errant bombs, civilians in the crossfire, plus in Manila the Japanese adding to the mayhem with random atrocities.
War is brutal, ugly, every bad thing you can name. It should be avoided to the extent possible. But when war is necessary, the alternative isn't magical thinking, as if there is some magic, for example, in the word "cease-fire." The alternative is either to freeze in place a status quo that will result in more war in the future, or surrender. ###
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Israel does not have the luxury of childish thinking or of being pushed around by childish thinking. Neither do we. Not about Hamas and, more importantly, not about Iran. Of course not all of it is childish thinking. A good deal of it is simply enemy propaganda or versions of enemy propaganda being peddled as “news” by America’s increasingly and increasingly brazen anti-Semitic mainstream media (as Paul has done a fine job of pointing out). But some of it is childish thinking. It needs to be called out as such and replaced by reality.
Such a replacement does not by any means assure that civilization will win its current battle with barbarism. But without that replacement, it’s depressingly likely to lose.
great observations
I have often had the same exact thoughts. And I have thought recently, 'what percentage of the American Public today have the mindset of a naive child?' It appears to be a very high percentage but is it over fifty percent? I don't know, but sadly I believe we will be finding out sooner than later.