Thought on the Wars

President Johnson, in moral agony over Vietnam, once told his staff: "If I go, people die, and if I stay, people die."

The wars are a fact of history - and as much as I opposed the invasion of Iraq, there are no actions to be taken which free us of failed moral choices. We may now be able to leave Iraq in an orderly way, having killed a 100,000 people, without wasting all their lives.

In Afghanistan, we're invaders with a hot personal grudge, and a slower moral conscience. But it's there. The people who had to grab the reins on these runaway wars are not fools, and I'm not yet convinced just leaving will kill less people.  If there is a better alternative, one that prevents more deaths, I don't know what it is.

Like this oil catastrophe, the key point of best moral action was in the distant past- not drilling irresponsibly, not bringing us to oil dependency, which is driving force of these wars. Once it happens, you have to play your best cards, and when it ends, try a different game entirely.

That being said, whenever you finding yourself talking lightly about war, stub your toe, hard. That pain is the punctuation on this:

War is a mass effort to insert metal at high velocity into soft human flesh. Everything else is the stench of the battle for power.