I know I missed the fifth Anniversary of the Iraq war, but I thought we might like to talk about war and violence anyway.
Using our current tactics we will indeed get John McCains 100 years of war. I can’t imagine anyone thinking that is a good thing. Except the spawn of Satan, someone like McCain or Bush. The reason that our war will last that long is because we have lost sight of a political fact handed down from generation to generation for the last few millenia. But it was Niccolo Machievelli that wrote it down so eloquently in his book The Prince.
In a conflict situation there are realistically two options; diplomacy and destruction. We can talk or I can push your face out the back of your head. Your call.
When you take over a country your best bet is to keep everything more or less the same, just with a new name on the letterhead. Or, to be more honest the only thing that changes is that your tax collector is now named Frank instead of Omar. People like takeovers like this. The way the average Joe sees it the only folks that are hurt are the people in charge, and, really, no one liked them anyway.
Of course, sometimes people rebel. They liked paying Omar. They think Frank is a gimp. Then you have to go to plan B; destruction.
According to Machievelli if you start changing the rules and your new citizens become restless history says you should kill them. Lots and lots of them. We’re talking streets running with blood kind of killing. Sherman’s march was this kind of tactic, also refered to as “Scorched Earth.” Now, Scorched Earth policies make most modern folks uncomfortable. But, that may well be why we haven’t had a crisis actually end in the last 60 years or so. Lately, we just get bored and go home. And then we’re back at them a decade or so later.
Our problem is that we want to give someone a gentle smack and get them thinking like us. I agree that’s a worthy goal, because bloodshed is not a good thing. But if they don’t want to think like us we have to let them do their own thing, or kill them. Really, that’s about it.
If we are going to win any conflict our violence must exceed that of our opponents. We haven’t done that yet. We show restraint and take the moral high ground. We torture a few people instead of killing a lot of them. We hold onto territory that is under constant conflict with a skeleton crew instead of decimating our enemy as an example; Play nice or you’re ash.
Now, Jeff might look at this and think, “When the Hell did Pyro become a Republican?” But I would have never read The Prince if not for him. And history shows that any period of extended peace has been handled in exactly the way Machievelli describes.
If we persist on our pretend middle path and try not to look like the bad guy, we’ll be shooting folks for the next century. You want the war over? Shock and awe, decimate one of the major cities. Kill everything standing. In the Bible when the Hebrews took a town they would even kill the livestock and salt the earth behind them. I don’t think they had to do that too often before people got the message.
End rant. Tune in tomorrow when I try to be funny again.
