War and No War

[Mythsaje]

The wise men shake their heads
and the wise men bury the dead
and the wise have always said
the gods of war must be fed

-Saje


I'd be the last one to say that violence and war are NEVER necessary. I'm not a pacifist. It would be far too weird for someone who spent most of his life learning various martial arts to be totally opposed to violence.

That's the background that makes the fight scenes in my novels so believable.

But I digress. My point is that we sometimes forget that there IS a sharp distinction between violence that cannot be avoided and violence that is specifically chosen. Though there were people that protested our involvement in WWII, hindsight tells us all too well what might have happened had we not become involved.

Hitler was a monster. And what's more, he was a dangerous monster because he was viewed with an almost religous reverence by those who followed him. He didn't accept limitations, that there were points he could not, and should not, go beyond. And what's worse, he surrounded himself with people that were as insane and evil as he himself was.

He had to be stopped. And he WAS stopped. By a REAL "Coalition of the Willing."

But when you have people who cannot differentiate between necessity and choice. Between a fight with a dangerous monster and one with a tin-pot tyrant. They threw the comparison around a lot, between Saddam and Adolf...but Saddam, had he even wanted to be Adolf, was no more than the palest shadow of that lunatic genius. Saddam didn't have some sort of magnificent and evil plan. He was just living for his own pleasure...and, perhaps, just perhaps, just trying to hold onto his power in the face of the myriad of factions that was the modern Iraq.

Saddam became a convenient target after 9/11, because terrorists have no home country. They cannot be targeted, and, had this Administration chose to pursue justice in the most rational way--by using the intelligence and law enforcement communities, Bush wouldn't have been a "War President" and would never have earned the "political capital" he wanted.

This was a war that never had to be.

And that's not coming from a pacifist. It's coming from me.