Hi again, In reply to my >>War is as bad as it gets. Including the ones you lot make - >>from Panama to Belgrade, civilians have represented far and away the >>majority of casualties. And at Dresden, Cologne, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Nagasaki >>and Hanoi they were the express target. Brad wrote: >Are these reasons to be depressed at the fall of Milosevic? I wasn't talking about Milosevic, or anyone else for that matter. I was talking about war, and geopolitical strategies based upon the likelihood or inevitability of it. 'We' knowingly aided and abetted a scenario ripe for war, and 'we' have fleetingly suspended the process 'we' helped start with war, and war will inevitably come of it (has been coming of it, if you're a Gypsy or a non-Muslem Kosovar, or a non-Kosovar Muslem, or a Kosovan Serb), and, as usual, 'we' have a wholly unpredictable new dynamic in the region, and 'we' will once again choose between the only two options 'we' know when the new boy flexes his muscles, as he must (the 'our sonofabitch' mode or the 'Hitler incarnate' mode), and 'we' will, directly or indirectly, belligerently intervene when the enduring fear and hatred 'we' helped produce flares up again. All 'we' can do abroad is make war, it seems. 'We' could realise what war is, and stop making it - that's all I was saying. And if 'we' do -which 'we' won't - we'd still have to sit back and watch stuff 'we've' already done take its long and miserable course (eg. in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, the whole Middle East, central Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Yugoslavia - oh, and the viciously desperate polarisation 'we've' carefully set up in the fSU). The more I learn about the world in which I live, the more I'm convinced a cycle of misery is in train which can only be reversed if America stops sticking its clumsy great bovver boots into places it doesn't understand for reasons it shouldn't have. >And I would agree with you that one *big* reason the U.S. should be >very cautious about intervening *anywhere* is its typical way of >fighting a war: Dropping a lot of bombs on an area from a great >height to pulverize it, all the while telling the attacked government >to behave. The underlying calculation seems to be that the death of >100 civilians is worthwhile if it avoids the death of one American >soldier. That's politics, mate! You can't keep incinerating foreigners if the cost is dead Yanks - on balance, the Yank electorate (and it's by no means alone in this) loves killing foreigners, but it's a fickle love - as soon as the body bags begin coming out of the C-planes, the love begins to die, and the president's all-important poll numbers with it. >I remember one of my high school history teachers, a man who had >been, IIRC, a tank platoon commander in the Third Army in France in >1944. He told us once about how he had, without warning, bombarded a >French village they came upon not because they were fired upon, not >because they were about to be fired upon, but just because if he were >a German commander he would have set up an ambush in that village. That's war, mate! He'd have risked a court martial if he'd let those poor villagers live and then watched his lads slaughtered. >The long twentieth century was very dark, especially in its middle >third. But the fall of Milosevic has not made prospects for the >twenty-first century any darker. Sadly, I doubt anything could do that ... anyone wanna run a book on the next Great Evil? I s'pose BinLaden is first off the blocks, but no-one has a clue what Kostunica's gonna make of his tenuous possie, or Chavez, or Putin, or the resurgent Netanyahu, or just about anyone who's not an Anglo Saxon suit ... Yours indescribably, Rob.
