by Michael Patrick

Created on: August 29, 2008

If my child is old enough to go to war, it is neither my choice nor my right to "send" him or her. I might advise. I might encourage or try to restrain. I might weep. But in the end, it's a decision I must leave to my child.

War is a dirty business. Been there, done that. My father, too, and his father before him. On reflection, the righteousness of any war is in the eye of the winner. Most wars have been fought for all the wrong reasons: politics, religion, land, or wealth. None of these are a good reason for sending our sons and daughters into harm's way. A few wars have been fought in self-defense against some fool who started it for politics, religion, land, or wealth.

Name me a war that changed the conquered after a hundred years. Rome's conquest of Egypt didn't leave us with a Middle East speaking Latin. Even Alexander the Great's violent subjugation of Persia and Arabia in 380 was quietly reversed after his death. Persia's war against Greece a hundred years later for no other reason than revenge didn't change a thing. The Crusades of the Holy Roman Popes didn't convert Muslims to Christianity or leave them speaking Italian. What did Genghis Kahn achieve other than notoriety? What was mad King George III thinking during the American Revolution when he sent young Englishmen to subdue a continent separated from supply lines by three thousand miles of ocean? Who benefited from WW-I, politicians? Hitler, another madman, was defeated at horrendous cost to both sides in WW-II. What did Japanese Emperor Hirohito plan to do if he conquered America, the land of Wild Bill Hickock and Wyatt Earp . . . make us all eat sushi? Korea, officially a "police action", ended in a costly stalemate. Fifty thousand American sons and daughters died in Vietnam because our leaders felt "threatened" by Communism? For fifty years we fought the Cold War against the USSR and did nothing but spend the Soviets into economic ruin. At least five thousand young men and women will have died before we leave Iraq, George Bush's war and for what . . . to make sure Exxon-Mobil has another record-breaking quarterly profit?

The two advantages of war are:
1. The advance of technology through the desperate drive to outgun the opponent.

2. A huge transfer of wealth to all those who fund, develop and provide weapons that kill better than the enemy's.

Wars benefit no one but aggressive megalomaniacs and the opportunistic businessmen who serve them. In other words, all the great wars of history can be viewed as a waste of billions of lives for no substantive human gain or change other than historical (political) recognition or some monetary gain.

The fact that progenitors of violence and death achieve equal weight in history along side the heroes of social, scientific and moral advancement remains a mystery to me.

Ideas, not wars, have been the real bullets of human progress; Archimedes, Euclid, Galileo, Mendel, Newton, Einstein, Watson & Crick in science; Moses, Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Luther, Gandhi in religion; Socrates and Plato, Freud, Kant, Voltaire and Goethe in philosophy; the artistic brilliance of Michelangelo and DaVince and Raphael and Grandma Moses in art; Mozart and Beethoven and Liszt and the Beatles and Led Zeppelin in music. You choose.

Ambrose Pierce said:
History is an account, mostly false,
Of events, mostly unimportant,
Which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves,
And soldiers, mostly fools.

If I had a choice in the matter, I'd send my child to college before I'd send him to war.

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