What Will It Take To End Our Destructive, Pointless Wars? ('Was It Worth It? Of Course Not')

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/story/150817/what_will_it_take_to_end_our_destructive%2C_pointless_wars?page=entire

Tomdispatch.com / By Adam Hochschild

What Will It Take to End Our Destructive, Pointless Wars?

Someday, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss as the millions who perished in World War One. What will bring us to that point?

May 3, 2011

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Later, half of all French men aged 20 to 32 in 1914 had been killed. There were similarly horrific casualties among the other combatant nations. The war also left 21 million wounded, many of them missing hands, arms, legs, eyes, genitals. Was it worth it? Of course not. Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more ruthless German occupation of France.

The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan. Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11 attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead than were killed in the United States on that day -- and more than 2,400 American, British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new generation of jihadists.

- snip -

As a result, once the conflict broke out, lofty ideals filled the air: a “holy war of civilization against barbarity,” as one leading French newspaper put it; a war to stop Russia from crushing “the culture of all of Western Europe,” claimed a German paper; a war to resist “the Germanic yoke,” insisted a manifesto by Russian writers, including leftists. Kaiser Wilhelm II avowed that he was fighting for “Right, Freedom, Honor, Morality” (and in those days, they were capitalized) and against a British victory which would enthrone “the worship of gold.” For English Prime Minster Herbert Asquith, Britain was fighting not for “the advancement of its own interests, but for principles whose maintenance is vital to the civilized world.” And so it went.

So it still goes. Today’s high-flown war rhetoric naturally cites only the most noble of goals: stopping terrorists for humanity’s sake, finding weapons of mass destruction (remember them?), spreading a “democracy agenda,” protecting women from the Taliban. But beneath the flowery words, national self-interest is as powerful as it was almost a hundred years ago.

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[LAGC]

1. And don't forget...

If World War I had never happened with its harsh sanctions against Germany in the aftermath, its unlikely that "last Great Honorable War" (WWII) would have ever been necessary, as Hitler would have never rode the wave of resentment to rise to power. Its questionable whether Japan would have been so aggressive in the Pacific without its axis ally in Europe to back it up.

War just begets more war. There's no better time than the present to break the cycle for good.

[Hissyspit]

2. kick nt

[crickets]

3. K&R

[FiveGoodMen]

4. It will take a very different crop of Americans than we've been growing lately.