On War

Only recently Israel sent a missile and by a blunder of sorts killed 18 Palestinians including two children. It is in the list of several mistakes we have been hearing lately: friendly fire is another kind of mistake.
War is an enterprise of men that however does not create anything worthwhile as much as any person may work towards some purpose or common good. If any good comes out of war it is because of man and woman despite of its destructive power manage to create nevertheless conditions for life to go on.
So in terms of life and what noble purposes it can achieve, rest with humans and not in war per se.
Has glory or fame made war any less destructive or life nurturing? No. So all this talk about heroism is hogwash and a distraction.
In any war as it unfolds whoesoever be an interested party, if sane and endowed with an iota of fine sensibility should expect the unexpected. An enlightened nation therefore would never embark lightly on such a course, probably detrimental to their long-term goals because of loss of their manpower (that cannot be easily replaced), resources and goodwill among other nations.
Soldiers die if not by a hail of bullets by the very poison the clamor of war sweeps across the friend and foe alike. The ‘gulf-war syndrome’ is much more visible than the outbreak of Spanish flu that ravaged Europe after the soldiers had returned home after the WWI. Virus that spread all across the civilized parts of the world were spawned by the war. (Can anyone disprove otherwise?) On the first year the outbreak took only some hundreds and the year after the mortality numbers were in millions. In such a twilight world of death and desperation man’s thinking could not be said to be at its peak or clarity. So naturally another war more brutal and sustained would be played out within the space of a decade.
2.
All nations, having gone into a military adventure conduct in a manner that cuts across warring parties. They bury all their misconceived attempts to shore up their glory in a catch-all word called war.
Into it every mistake will fit. Incompetence of the generals and commanders alike; overweening ambition of politicians are equally at home.
The last mentioned species scrupulously woo the electorate but when it comes to war, any one they can either trick into by promise, or by some rule of law is a soldier and is a fair game.
"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own": Aldous Huxley - English novelist and critic, 1894-1963
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