(identity 'myron)

Thu, 23 Oct 2003

Re: Chris [/personal]

Ok, I was typing out a response to Chris' comment to the previous post and it eventually grew to be a rather long rant, unwieldy for the little comment box format. So here is my reply:

Very true (this comic). Although I was going off mostly for the sake of morality--that no matter what, war is never "right". And that engaging in war, even if justified by circumstances, often unnecessarily involves killing of innocent and guilty alike. And if one could peer through the eyes of an innocent child, I would say that they would never understand what truly justifies such destruction and hatred. It is the mutual failure of all those involved.

For the record, I tentatively supported the war, but not on the grounds that it was eventually initiated. And from that view, it's rather arbitrary that we chose to depose Saddam and not some other rotten dictator. This is especially apparent now, when the USG is not so sure about WMD and is rather mum on the issue in stark contrast to its pre-war call of, "They have WMD; they are a threat to our security. Attack!"

Essentially the argument was, "Iraq is an evil country that has WMD or is producing WMD that can kill us or our allies. Disable them before they can act." They acted on the basis that they were sure, beyond a doubt, that these WMD existed. Now they are not so sure. Subtract the WMD from the argument and you get, "Iraq is an evil country. Disable them." This makes Iraq irrelevent to the argument and you can even drop it to make an adlib:

"__ is an evil country. Disable them."

Fill in __ with evil country of your choice.

If I can make such a mockery of the reasons for going to war, then it's quite likely that the reasons weren't particularly good....

But as you seem to be implying, despite all this, one can't pretend that screaming, "Peace not war!" will actually win us anything. The all-out anti-war argument does tend to be naive, but then, it also serves as a reminder that there's no true moral justification for war. And that if we act rashly and forget this, we could be plunging headfirst into an unnecessary war or worse, precipitating a third world war. Indeed, I don't think people were so worried of us attacking Saddam, the malevolant tyrant that he was, as much as the fact that we were rushing forth to war in a very sudden and arrogant (since the US ignored the UN) fashion based on very shakey claims of WMD.

Also, again, naive as it might've been, the anti-war opposition was the first time that the world saw so many people rise up and speak out against war. That people were so widely moved to do this gives us hope that maybe one day, war won't be needed at all.

But as a final note on the subject, as sad as it may be, our history seems to show that each period of peace is essentially only won through war. Remembrance day exists for that very reason. And that I'm sitting here at all typing this message, especially considering that I'm in Japan (no offense), is only because we settled WWII. It's thus entirely possible, in contrast to the above, that we will never be able to give up war until the day we simply blow each other to smithereens. And even then, I don't know.... Einstein's famous quote comes to mind: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

// posted at 04:43. permalink   comments