Lorem Ipsum

A friend (who also is not Vardibidian) made a comment last night to the effect that he was opposed to the war because Bush would be running it, but that it was quite clear to him that the inspections could not be effective. I admit that this question is a difficult one; I have no good data about whether the inspections can/will be effective. For that matter, one of the elephants in the living room on this topic is that the status quo for the past decade over in Iraq has not really been a situation I'm entirely comfortable with: as I understand it, the sanctions have not really done a very good job of addressing the problem, and I'm not thrilled about (what I hear of) the ongoing low-level US military action out there over the past decade. And yet, whenever I start to wonder about whether a war could actually be an appropriate response here, I start thinking about two other facts: first, as lots of people have said, I see no reason to believe that anything will improve substantially after such a war (we don't have such a good track record with the governments we install after we help overthrow an existing government); and second, as fewer people have noted, war results in a lot of dead people.

There was a pretty good Jon Carroll column on this subject a couple of weeks ago. Carroll's argument contains some flaws, but I think it's a good reminder, a good thing to keep in mind when thinking about war. It's easy to talk about war, about peacekeeping, about collateral damage; it's harder to talk about living humans being killed.

But of course, the hawks are quite aware that living humans (including some Americans) will die if we go to war. Their responses include the belief that a greater number of humans (including more Americans) will die if we don't go to war, and the belief that people who are in the American military are doing service to their country by risking their lives, service that should be honored but that renders it acceptable for military leaders to sacrifice the soldiers' lives in service of a cause. Both of those responses may be valid; I'm not saying that the resulting dead people automatically means that war cannot be justified. I'm just saying: it's easy to forget about the dead people when you're talking about enforcing a UN mandate, or stopping a madman from building weapons of mass destruction, or saving the plucky Iraqis from a despotic leader. (And it's particularly easy to forget about the civilian Iraqi dead people, who won't be brought to the US in body bags.)

. . . I had a paragraph here complaining about various forwarded emails that I've seen lately, on both sides, that start with comments like "Regardless of which side you're on, this sure does make you think, doesn't it?" (As opposed to, say, "I think this article makes a good point, and I'm inclined to agree with it, though I suspect that if you disagree with me about the war you'll probably disagree with the article too.") But then I realized I'm doing something vaguely similar above, so I have little room to complain here. So never mind.

But related to that, as I noted in email recently in response to a forwarded letter-to-the-editor from a European leader who was adamantly in favor of the US launching this war:

There've been wars that have had outcomes that were generally seen as desirable, and other wars that have had outcomes generally seen as undesirable. I suspect the choice of which previous war one compares the new one with depends largely on whether one starts out for or against the new one. If you're in favor of it, you compare it to WWII and taking down Milosevic; if you're against it, you compare it to Vietnam [as Carroll does in the aforementioned column].

I finished reading Bujold's Shards of Honor over the weekend, mere hours before being on a panel about Space Opera. There were a couple of bits I thought were relevant to the current situation. First, an exchange between Vorkalloner and Vorkosigan, which I'll present as plain dialogue to avoid having to show where I've cut less-relevant narration:

Vorkalloner: "It was a great victory, sir. With very little loss of life."

Vorkosigan: "On our side."

Vorkalloner: "That's the idea, isn't it?"

Vorkosigan: "It depends on whether you mean to stay or are just passing through. A very messy political legacy was left at Komarr. Not the sort of thing I care to leave in trust for the next generation."

(Shards of Honor, chapter 5)

And then this (I think the rhetoric may be a bit overblown, and plenty of people have made this point in real life, but I figured I'd throw it in while I'm quoting):

Cordelia: "He made me feel like I'd met the ultimate in evil. I don't think anything will really scare me, after him."

Vorkosigan: ". . . He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present—they are real."

(Shards of Honor, chapter 9)

Of course, later in the book Vorkosigan has a line that serves to make the exact opposite point about the current real-life situation:

"A Caligula . . . can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage."

(Shards of Honor, chapter 11)

One thing I liked about this book was the sense of just how hard it is to know what the right thing to do is, when faced with a set of unappealing choices.