Originally Posted by
Stavros
I ought to be insulted by your claim that I am 'naive and idealistic', but it suggests a stunning ignorance on your part of a long, and documented history of the politics and the laws of war -you seem to either think that the history of armed conflict is equivalent to a John Wayne or a Sylvester Stallone movie; or wish that it was. If your reasoning were to hold, the Japanese should have killed captured servicement instead of putting them in camps, just as the Allied Powers should never have bothered to imprison captured soldiers -but why stop there? The Japanese attacked the USA at Pearl Harbour -why bother to intern Japanese Americans when you could kill them all? After all, as you say there's nothing civilized or decent about war. There is little human decency. You kill, maim , or be killed. It's as primal as that... and as you make no distinction between combatants and non-combatants those Japanese Americans should all have been toast.
The reality -not the ideal condition- the factual and informed -not the naive- history of armed conflict does concern the observance of rules, as well as the transgressions. You have opted for one side rather than another, in favour of violent, nihilist anarchy against international law and the values of a democratic society.
But lets look at this statement: Yours is essentially the same argument we hear about water boarding, and is precisely why the US will never again achieve total victory over any present or future enemy. Victory? What Victory? The only military victory the USA can claim since Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the successful invasion of Grenada in 1983, which is equivalent to the 82nd Airborne achieving a successful lock-down of Carnegie Hall (empty except for the Janitor). Waterboarding achieved nothing, something like 90% of the people interned in Guantanamo had never engaged the USA in any kind of military action, most were shopped by people in Afghanistan and Pakistan to get the money that was offered.
What depresses me is that you start from the position that you are under attack and must respond, without ever asking why? What is the purpose of armed conflict, and what does it achieve? I deplore war as an instrument of politics, because it fails to achieve the objectives which can be, and which eventually are reached by diplomacy. I am not soft on terror, I am not an armchair liberal, but a realist, someone who believes every conflict in the world can be solved with debate and diplomacy, and not through violence which creates more problems than it solves, which costs astronomical sums of money, and which ruins the lives of young people and their families.
My mother drove an ambulance during the Blitz in London; she used to fetch bodies, too often pieces of a human body from the wreckage of people's homes-she became a pacifist as a result, and I am honoured to follow in her slipstream, because Pacifism is the only courageous position that a human can take today, war has become the refuge of cowards, specifically those politicians and self-appointed 'leaders' like Osama bin Laden who neither want nor are capable of discussing their grievances, but who believe that if they want something they should just kill anyone who gets in their way to get it. In a world of so many options, why choose the one that doesn't work, that has been demonstrated time after time not to work?
