Refining War

I am not uncomfortable with the idea of warfare, as long as someone else is doing the fighting. When I am doing the fighting I want very sharp and clear aims of the conflict . And one other thing: It is mandatory that a culture going to war suffer the same risks as its fighting men and holds nothing back. If bombing the supply lines that wind along another country's borders will protect me and mine, my society has no right to deprive me of that protection; if it will not bomb the neighboring country's supply lines for fear of entangling the society in a greater conflict, do not send a soldier to fight there. War is not reserved for the soldier unlucky enough to be there. War is total, whether one side believes it or not. Believing war can be done with a velvet glove completely misunderstands its very nature and anyone who espouses that notion should be immediately disqualified from directing it. The battlefield stopped being a stage in the Theater of Honor with the invention of the repeating weapon. War is not "diplomacy by other means", it is a last, horrible resort.

That said, there has been a gradually increasing notion spreading in the United States that war can be sanitized, that combat can be refined and limited. America has been seduced by "limited action", "police action", "armed intervention" and, more recently, the comic "kinetic military action". It is as if the boundary between war and peace has a "semi-militarized zone" that separates them and allows for savage if half-hearted confrontations that one side or the other does not take quite as seriously. The West has allowed itself to live and kill in a grey zone between war and peace with U.N. supported "action" where one combatant is not really a national entity so that the death and destruction is qualified with an asterisk or a smiley face. Combat is entered to tip balances--Bosnia is bombed from 30,000 feet so the pilots don't get their hands dirty or Libya is bombed because at least one of the combatants is a tyrant.

Nowhere is this dangerous, scalable foolishness more apparent than the terrorist war. Estimates of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States has become commonplace in the popular press. This may all be commercial nonsense but, if it is not, no leader responsible for the nation's well-being should consider limits on the pursuit and destruction of such a threat.

If The Heroes of Beslan taught us anything, it is that hard, armed men will do anything in a conflict and at no time will they consider etiquette.