A Historical
Perspective on The Benefit of War
I think it’s a great idea to
attack Syria. It’ll be quick. And painless (for us anyway) and it will
undoubtedly accomplish our goals, although truth be told, I’m not entirely sure
what those goals might be. But that’s
why we have leaders, to do the things we don’t have the time or patience to do
ourselves. If they say it’s in our ‘best interests’ to launch a million dollar
tomahawk missile into a foreign country then it has to be the right thing to do
because our government exists for one reason and one reason only and that’s to
protect us.
Besides, anytime a war is started
things usually go exactly according to design and events quickly develop along
a well planned, coordinated timeline where loss is limited and missions are
accomplished. Well, except for the
American Civil War I suppose. They
thought that was going to be a short affair and if you wanted to catch it you
needed to pack a picnic basket and head out to Manassas to view the show
because once our Union Army taught those southern bastards a lesson they’d
realize how futile their efforts were.
Too bad nobody bothered to tell them about the script because once that
first battle failed it took, what was it, four years for those guys to finally
do what we wanted them to do? And what,
600,000 dead guys? (You can call them
‘dead guys’ because it happened over 150 years ago and they and their loved
ones won’t be offended).
But that’s one war that didn’t go the way it was supposed to…oh, well okay, there
was that thing they call World War One too.
But I always liked the first name to it, The Great War, now that sounds
better. They could have even called it
The Awesome War because in all reality that’s what it was. Things blowing up, flying around and going
crazy. Mud, machine guns, guys running
into barbed wire…poison gas. That war
was supposed to a quick one and they told the kids “You’d better sign up now
and get in while you can because it’ll be over before the leaves fall off the
trees!”
Four years later they were still
going at it and that war didn’t even really end until a generation after when
we got to do it all over again by fighting the really big war they call World
War Two. I think Russia won that one
because they had like 20,000,000 of their people killed by the end of it.
Oh, and I guess you could say Vietnam was a war that didn’t go exactly like
they thought it was going to go but even so it was still conducted in a
brilliant manner with incredible public support, beautiful cohesion between
political and military leaders, well thought out in every way and in the end it
turned out to be a pretty awesome benefit to America. And in that one we only lost 58,937 of our
own people. It was worth it though
because those guys on the other side shot at one of our boats in 1965 (did
they?) and we can’t stand for that sort of stuff.
Look, so we made a couple
misjudgments along the way. Is that all
that bad? Not when we learned from our
lessons. Take a look at Gulf War One in
1991. Back then we really wanted to kick
Saddam Husain’s ass and get him out of power so we sent 530,000 or so of our
guys (and girls! They got invited to
this one too) over there and it played out like magic. We were able to do everything we wanted
to. Except remove Saddam from
power. Oh I know, that wasn’t one of our
‘goals’ but c’mon, wouldn’t it have been nice if we could’ve wiped out those
Republican Guard units so they wouldn’t have been able to kill all those Kurds when
they started rebelling after we stopped shooting? If anything the only reason we weren’t able
to remove Saddam was because we fought that war too perfectly and had to stop
because the rest of the world thought we being too cruel by the end of it. Imagine that?
Thinking we were being too cruel…in a war!
Anyway, we finally finished him
off with the 2003 Iraq War. And that one was probably our best idea
ever. To begin, we got to actually start it which was something kind of new
for us but we’re catching on. And with
that one we had such a simple, easy to understand plan that there was no way we could fail. Sure, maybe it would have been a good idea to
ask a couple questions like; “What would happen if we all of a sudden decided
to force the entire Iraqi Army to go on unemployment?” And; “Is that true that
Sunnis and Shiites don’t really like each other?” But c’mon man! We had that thing wrapped up in like a
month. Mission Accomplished!
Okay, okay. I see what you’re saying. How could we have possibly known those kind
of things before we ran a bunch tanks
down the streets of Bagdad? I suppose
maybe we can’t figure everything out beforehand but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
act anyway. I mean look, just because we
couldn’t find a clear definition of what Victory in Afghanistan is back in 2001
it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have gone over there. So what if it’s going to be twelve years next
month, sometimes these things take a while.
So when I hear all this nonsense
about people asking questions about should we or shouldn’t we attack Syria I’m
like; how do know if we should or
shouldn’t until we actually do?
