My View

OK, I guess I will mention my stance on the war etc, specifically and in general.

And then try and get Munin to stop reading about it for a little while at least.
Maybe a movie to watch... of course then she'll start going on about those darned Dunedan rangers... grumbleTolkienrangersgrumble ;)

So if you are tired about reading about this stuff... I can understand.
And instead you should take a look at this Civ type game in space. It looks like a lot of fun and the developers put a lot of time into its creation, support and continued expansion. Just look at the forum to see some of the hours that Frogboy answers questions... I admire that.

So, the war and war.

I heard some people talking about the war and how it isn't a solution. I agree. War is never a solution to a situation, it is a means to try and bring about a situation in which there can be a solution. It is as has been said before, an extension of diplomacy. Unfortunate but true.

War in and of itself is horrible, tragic, ugly and worse. It is the by-product(s) that count, either politically, technologically, socially, etc.

Thinking historically, war was waged to take such and such piece of land, or gain such and such tribute, or to drive off invaders from your land. Why was war needed to do this? Because other measures didn't work; they wouldn't give the land, they wouldn't give tribute, they wouldn't go away. War becomes the means to convince them to do so, either by convincing those in power and by removing those in power and replacing them with those who will do what you want. It isn't the war that is the solution, it provides the possibility for solution.

In the current situation not everything is known perfectly. I don't want to say what the reasons for this or that are, because I would speak from a standpoint of ignorance; there are many reasons for everything, and many reasons from different sides.

Points are that Iraq had weapons they shouldn't have had according to the UN agreement. The UN wasn't going to do anything about it; saying that they could ignores the fact that the weapons were built despite the UN. The Iraqi people are not in a good situation socially, I only heard this from people who left the country. And their leader has been compared to other historical autocrats who have been responsible for mass killings, and other crimes. On those things alone, I feel the war is justified. Ignoring the situation or responding in a limited way that allows this to continue is tantamount to turning a blind eye.

And as a quote from a movie we watched last night said, "We must all fear evil men, but there is another kind of evil that we should fear most, and that is the indifference of good men!"

Do I like war? No.
Do I think war should always be the answer? No.

But there have been times when it came too late. The US in joining WWII, if it had happened earlier, many lives might have been saved. That delay was caused by public opinion in the US which wasn't radically changed until December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbour.
Continued peace efforts by the US would have made things much worse. And might have allowed Germany to mass produce their Messerscmitt jet fighter, improve their rockets and theoretically even complete atomic weapons research.

Again, war isn't a thing to be desired. It is to be avoided, but not at any cost.

If the world were perfect, if the people in it were perfect, we wouldn't need war, it wouldn't exist. Or maybe that isn't true either.

Does nature have examples of `war' in it?
Do animals that exist in a pack/tribe/unit wage war on others of that species? Not in the same way we do that's for sure.
Skirmishes over territory perhaps, but not war.

Anyways, that's my view on this.
It isn't set in stone I don't think. But I don't think it is blind either.

Posted by hugin at Marzo 27, 2003 09:53 AM