For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one "wins" in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children? Full Story »
Posted by Derek Hawkins
Some wars make sense, others do not, so a blanket approach that all war is wrong is going to be wide of the mark. A failure to fight a smaller war may make necessary a much larger war. The Gulf War in 1991 was mandatory, in my view; the mistake was to keep permanent US military bases in Saudi Arabia, which led directly to the attacks on the World Trade Center, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, it must be said that a quick reprisal against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a quick rooting out of al-Qaeda, did not mean that an endless war of occupation need ensue. The Iraq war was totally elective, and a continuing fiasco in the manner of Vietnam (another totally elective war, and a mistake of the first dimension).
