War, What is it Good For

Through no fault of my own I've lived through 5 wars. I escaped all of them, I think. Now my baby brother (42) is going to Afganistan. He's an Army doctor and should be o.k. unless some Taliban dude with a wart on his dick explodes in his face.

Apparently, everyone born gets to live through wars. I was born in peacetime but toddled into wartime before kindergarten. Vietnam was really cooking when I turned 18, I thought of becoming Canadian and being a fishing guide. Probably should have done that. Vietnam was obviously a bad war but it went on and on. This is why the citizenry feels powerless. Almost every President feels the obligation to make war and sacrifice young men for questionable reasons. The people seem to have no input.

The worst war without question was WWII, this was the 'Good War' and it made all wars acceptable if the mongers, hawks and contractors could make a pitch for 'goodness'. WWII also demonstrated the money making power of death and destruction. Business types pricked up their ears. I suspect Iraq was more about Haliburton than democracy. George Bush and Dick Cheney both pray that there is no God because if there is they have a place in hell. I for one will just be happy to see them dead and gone.

What if we didn't get involved in all these conflagrations? America for long periods has been isolationist. It gives us a bad reputation but keeps us safe. Clinton waited way too long to intervene in Bosnia, we continue to let Africans hack each other to death and the French had to twist Obama's arm to get a minimal involvement against an acknowledged satan in the form of Gaddafi. Stand on the sidelines, see the monstrosities and say ho hum. Passivity is not a neutral position. Gahndi, King and Mandela were the big winners in the 20th century.

Our own Civil War was unnecessary. The southern experiment with succession would have failed of it's own weight. The north only needed to declare itself a a free state and welcome the blacks. Lincoln could have won the war with the emancipation proclamation, a lttle diplomacy and some economic sanctions. Lincoln was an idiot, he misread power and committed the youth of a nation to a long, brutal war of attrition. No wonder he had sleepless nights.

G.W. Bush sleeps well at night becaue he is an unconsionable idiot. He did it for Dad, he did it for Dick, he ruined a country for personal reasons and killed lots of humans.

Eisenhower was a much more progessive thinker than Kennedy. Eisenhower was plagued by bad advisors like Dulles but Kennedy freely embraced Cuba and Vietnam. He is thought to be a progressive but actually he was a 19th century hawk much like Teddy or Lincoln.

Vietnam should have been a lesson about deception but we let Bush play the same scenario some 30 years later. Are we so monkey dumb that we need to repeat deadly mistakes over and over or is war a necesarry part of our Constitution.