War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

[substitute]

The latest technical foul caught by cameras in Iraq is all over the news. Nasty business; a Marine appears to have shot a wounded enemy. And there are pictures of dismembered toddlers, accounts of starvation and disease, descriptions of the use of dreadful weapons. If you’re a person of any empathy these things make you choke. Here’s the odd part. The news media covers these as shocking aberrations. My politically liberal anti-war friends cite all of these as evidence of the brutal inhumanity of the current administration and the wickedness of the current war.

What did any of you think a war was like? Have you ever even read a good book about one? The strangest ones are the people who back the war but say “we have to do this by the book” or “these abuses can’t go on”. Well of course they can go on. That’s what a war is. The “rules” are a polite Victorian fiction.

Real wars consist of the following: pants-filling terror, rage, uncontrollable killing rampages, rape, the slaughter of prisoners, the deliberate burning to death of other humans, torture, dead babies, useless mass death, the destruction of every useful thing within reach, theft, and insanity. When you agree to send soldiers into battle you sign off on all of the above and more.

Every time this foolishness comes up I’m reminded of the first Gulf War and the attempt by that sad madman Ramsey Clark to prove that the U.S. forces were war criminals for using combat bulldozers against earthworks, thereby burying enemy soldiers alive. One general’s response was basically: “It is indeed horrible. Most of what happens here is horrible. You might think from watching war movies that dying from a gunshot or a grenade blast is a relatively quick and clean death; I can assure you otherwise.”

The “boys” over there shooting dying prisoners or mortaring infants are doing exactly what you asked them to. Just admit it already.

Comments

[gcrumb.livejournal.com]

Indeed, some of us knew this was going to happen, and that is exactly why we object to the gung-ho militarism that's so common in the US. And that is also why we made it clear to *our* government that it should not become involved in Iraq.

I remember sitting in a small-town legion hall one time with a half dozen or so veterans, one of whom had only half a jaw (Korea). We chatted and argued and, when the conversation inevitably turned to war and peace, I trotted out some Age of Aquarius aphorism. The jawless man looked at me for a long time and said, "Kid, I wish you knew what you're talking about."

It came out after several other conversations that what he hated most about war was what it made him. A cripple, a killer, unloved and loveless.

I hate that too, and it's why I cry out when I see it.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

My Uncle Dick has not yet recovered from the 1943 invasion of Sicily but he's doing a lot better in his eighties. Unlike movies, lives go on long after the climax of the action.