Why is there war?
A thought occurs to me (it happens on occassion).
Humans have been fighting wars for what, 10,000 years? Why?
The big wars have always been fought for territory (pretty much every war during the expansion of the US was like that), or wealth (what the Spaniards did to pretty much every place they went), or religion (The Muslim conquests of the 10th and 11th centuries, the Crusades after that). Or so I always believed.
There’s another type of war, the confounding sort. It is the kind of warfare that free nations grudgingly engage themselves in. And that is war for the purpose of being left the hell alone. Where free nations are concerned, most are content to have a somewhat isolationist policy in affairs martial. Then some schumck comes along and messes everything up. Napoleon, Tojo, Hitler, King George. And we go and kick butt and get back to the business of minding our own business.
It occurs to me that this is the war we are fighting now. In Afghanistan. In Iraq. All around the world, right now. We are taking out people who want to pester us. And why do they want to pester us? That is at once unknown, unknowable, and wholy irrelevant. We just want them to leave us the hell alone. We tried the “peace at any price” bit, and wound up with a nuclear tipped Korean peninsula. We tried the containment bit, and wound up with Buy-out at the U.N. Corral. So that leaves us with “kick ass” or “run home to momma”. Run home to momma got us 9/11.
And so we kick ass. We try to kick only the asses that want to kill us. Sometimes we miss. Sorry about that. But if you guys that these cretins live among would be nice and kill them for us, maybe we wouldn’t have to do it by raining flaming death from the heavens upon your villiages. And, being the decent, generous people that we are, we rebuild. And we put our best and brightest in harms way for this. We could just say “the hell with you”, but we don’t. And good men and women die because we are basically decent people.
If we ever reach the goal of all the nations of the Earth being free, will it mean the end of war? Probably not. Some country with guns and money will eventually put another Hitler or Napoleon in charge. And it will be up to the U.S. to go and kick his ass too.