So We're At War Again

"He's just a peacenik and she's just a warhawk
If I said you were crazy, would you have to fight me?"
--Moxy Früvous, "The Gulf War Song"

So we're at war again.
Yippee.
Over a century of intermittent conflict in that part of the world, not to mention a decade of usually-on-again airstrikes...we've finally made it to the point where more airstrikes are necessary.

I have both peacenik and warhawk friends. My proposed courses of action will offend both sets. Let's just say that this middle way we've embarked (yet again) on is beyond pointless. One look at modern history should spell that out quite clearly.

You know why it doesn't? Because we've lost our taste for war.

The U.S. pretends it still has one--it seems as if the media in that country are never truly happy unless the American military is off bombing people, preferably brown people. But the fact is airstrikes aren't war.  Airstrikes look like war, sure: stuff blows up real good, body parts fly everywhere, and if your aim is good you can massacre the enemy without too much chance of getting massacred back. That's become the point of "wars" nowadays--go out there, inflict maximum damage, but get everyone home safe...as if war is actually a school picnic.
"The enemy" sees this hesitation to actually commit Western lives to the conflict...and laughs at it. We're seen as weak. Never mind our overwhelming technological superiority, we're seen as weak because we won't back up our airstrikes with anything meaningful.
Let's go back to the Second World War. That was widely viewed as an existential conflict, a battle to the death between the forces of tyranny and freedom. In that war, airstrikes had two purposes. One was what we would today call terrorism. Both sides engaged in it--the Germans bombed London repeatedly, the Allies basically incinerated Dresden...and of course there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the grandpapa and grandmama of air strikes. (Did you know Hiroshima was purposely left completely unscathed until the Enola Gay, because our side was curious to see just how much damage one nuclear bomb would cause?)
The other purpose of an airstrike used to be support. You might send some planes to drop ordnance and "soften up the target", or you might call in airstrikes to support your actions on the ground.

That's right--on the ground. Because if you truly believe--as many claim to--that the fight with ISIS is a civilizational conflict worth dying for...you put your mouth where your money is, not to mention the rest of you. Airstrikes alone won't win a war, not unless you're willing to recreate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and nobody should be willing to do that. The West hasn't fought a real ground war since Viet Nam--the ghosts of which are still circling uneasily today. The United States managed to win every major battle in that war militarily, while losing the war politically and strategically (Viet Nam went communist after the Paris Peace Accords, as did Laos and Cambodia). Why did the U.S. lose a war in which it won every significant military battle? Several reasons, but the biggest one was public opinion. From the outset, there were many opposed to foreign involvement half a planet away, and the opposition steadily grew as more and more of the 58,000 American casualties came home in body bags. America was relearning a painful truth: war, real war, kills people. What was seen as regrettable but necessary in World War II had become simply unacceptable as the Viet Nam war drew on.

Jump forward to today. Once again the U.S, and now Canada, is involved in a war half a world away. This is properly seen as a battle in a wider war against Islamic extremism that has taken center stage in the aftermath of 9/11.  Because the ensuing conflict has been horribly mismanaged--America has a unique talent for picking the wrong proxies in any conflict, it seems--all we've done is create more and more people to take up arms against us.

If you don't believe ISIS poses an existential threat to your way of life, simply dropping a few bombs and smart missiles on them is the simplest way I can think of to make sure they will, eventually. It's funny how this works, but when you hit people, for some weird reason they want to hit you back. I'm not sure why it is that our leaders seem so blind to this simple fact of human nature.

Look, I'm not denying for one second that ISIS is evil. They also have delusions of world domination (though at present they can't even maintain their supply lines and operate two countries over from their base). They are undoubtedly guilty of horrible atrocities.
 But if you're going to base your decisions on who and what to go to war with on atrocities, ask yourself why the West has stayed almost completely out of central Africa where millions have been slaughtered. Ask yourself why there seems to be no will to combat the Mexican drug cartels, whose methods of control and intimidation could teach ISIS a thing or two. And then ask yourself, seriously, what threat ISIS poses to Canada or the United States. The great fear I've heard is that they will export terrorism to our shores. Maybe they will and maybe they won't, but surely there are better ways to combat terrorists than to make more of them?

I'm willing to listen to reasons why we should fight ISIS.  If we are going to fight, though--let's FIGHT. None of this half-assed drop-a-bomb-on-'em-and-run-away-with-our-contrails-between-our-legs bullshit. I'm all for peace, but if war is necessary, let's show 'em what war is.

Who's with me? Nobody? Didn't think so. Truth is, I don't see ISIS as anything close to a Nazi-level of threat at the moment. They might get that way, though, if we keep poking them. I'll let Moxy Früvous close this out:

"And history seems to agree
That I would fight you, for me
That us would fight them, for we
Is that how it always will be?