The Forever War

Robert Edward Lee (1807 - 1870)
It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.

I can remember a mere three weeks ago yelling obscenities out my fifth floor window of Bruce Hall at anti-war protesters marching down Forbes Avenue. While the snow fell lazily upon their heads, I felt almost betrayed by people for some strange reason. I may not be the biggest Bush supporter out there, but I felt that people were disrespecting the position of authority at the time, and that they were ignorant of past crimes committed by Saddam Hussein. And in some way, I felt that what the course that the United States was taking was definitely the best.

In those three weeks since that anti-war march, I began to feel more and more jaded by the position that my country was taking. Yeah, I still felt as if I should be supporting my country, but it was not taking the course of action that I wanted. I may not know all the facts, and the public at large probably never will know all of the facts behind why the Bush Administration is taking such a hardline policy towards Iraq and Saddam Hussein, but I do know one thing: going to war requires tact.

Dictionary.com's definition of tact is "acute sensitivity to what is proper and appropriate in dealing with others, including the ability to speak or act without offending." Like the boyfriend who slaps his girlfriend because she says "No" to consenting to sex, the Bush Administration is going too far when dealing with something of this magnitude. The same thing happened during the Vietnam War; the public kept saying that they did not their country to be involved in a war that was not theirs. Back then, the United States was fighting against the spread of communism; today, the United States is fighting against "rogue" and terrorist states.

As sick as it sounds, but this situation feels like it would be the downfall of the United States. When members of NATO and the United Nations Security Council decide that the United States, one of their staunchest allies in the past, has gone too far and that we need to be stopped, they will not go to war. Going to war against an enemy is probably one of the worst things you could do, because that allows others to take pity upon you and that also allows you to rebuild whatever was destroyed to the point that it can be the most advanced of its kind in the world. The same thing happened after World War II; the United States steel industry went sour and died out because Chinese steel was far cheaper and easier to manufacture. Rather than go to war, the nations of the world will turn their backs on the Unites States, and even though we would never do the same to them, they would do just that to protest the rights and wrongs that we have done in the past and present. When other nations turn their backs on the United States, longtime friendships come apart at the seams and others are strengthened, but it is only together that we will be able to go forward in the best way. I do not know who will be the next king of the hill, but I have a strong feeling that if we pursue on the course that we are currently taking, we will fall from that "precious" position of "most powerful nation in the world."

I realize that Saddam Hussein has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the past, but that is exactly when it all happened: in the past. By no means am I saying that we should automatically forgive him for what he has done, but rather, we should take a look at ourselves and realize what we were once doing. The United States' sheets sure are not clean. From the start of the thirteen British colonies to today, the United States has not stopped committing crimes against its own citizens and perceived "foreigners." The demise of Native American culture from the 1600s through the 1800s by use of genocide and relocation; the enslavement and extermination of now African-Americans from the early days of the colonies until the post-American Civil War days; the "moral reducing" bombings of World War II against Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and many other cities; the use of concentration camps against Japanese-American citizens during World War II. The United States has to come to grips with the legacy of blood that it is built upon; we are also guilty of past acts that would be called crimes against humanity, but do not forget that many other nations also have committed their fair share of crimes against humanity: Japan, China, Cambodia, Russia, France, and Germany just to name a few.

There is always a Western double standard that is used in the world and even in the United States, where "we" are allowed to do this but "they" cannot also do this. Racial profiling is a great example in the United States, a classic example of where only "they" can do this and so they must be blamed for something. Nevermind the fact that they may not have done anything to anyone because "they" do those things. It makes little sense to me, just like sexism. Even not very long ago, it was enacted that all male Muslim (U.S. translation: Arabic) emigrants to the United States were to be specifically checked out, kept under close watch, and entered into a database for future reference. Forget the fact that being Muslim is not dependent upon skin color; there are plenty of Catholic Arabics in the Middle East, but they are Muslim in the eyes of the United States government. This racial profiling of male Arabics is just based upon stereotypes, and I would not be surprised if all male Arabics were rounded up (Similar to the Japanese-Americans of World War II) and thrown into concentration camps "for the good of the nation." I wonder, but where does the checks and balances of Congress go when Bush decides to go to war. In some sick fashion, this nation was running away from the King of England about 225 years ago, and we eventually create our own king even though that was not the intention of the founding fathers of this country.

In the ancient Chinese philosophical treatise Han Feizi, the emperor asked a painter, "What are the hardest and easiest things to depict?" The artist replied, "Dogs and horses are difficult, demons and goblins are easy." By that, he meant that simple, unobtrusive things in our immediate environment--like dogs and horses--are hard to get right, while anyone can draw an eye-catching monster. War is a demon, not in any horrific sense, but rather that it is a quick fix to a rather complicated problem that does not solve anything in the long-term. The world needs to come to grips with itself and decide on how to make a dog and then go about doing it, whether it will take one year or a hundred years. Dogs are much more difficult to get right than demons, but dogs are much better than demons.

Sometime in the future, I will probably write another entry in this online journal regarding the outcome of this crisis facing the world. If the United States and the United Nations succeed in creating a dog to fix the outcome of Iraq, I guess Bush will have a much higher chance of re-election, and the United States may not fall from its perch ever so high. If the demon of war comes though, I am afraid of what may happen, for things may never be able to go back to what they were afterwards.

Although Robert E. Lee did not have to deal with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction, he knew the costs that war brings with it.