Whose Side are we on?

I am on the side of the people who are being burned, cut to pieces, tortured, held as hostages, gassed, ruined, destroyed. They are the victims of both sides. To take sides with massive power is to take sides against the innocent. The side I take is then the side of the people who are sick of war and want peace in order to rebuild their country.

Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence

The Wisdom of Madmen

They teach young men to drop fire on people, but won't let them write the word 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's 'obscene'.

Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

More on War-fetishizing and "Manliness" on the Right

A good friend of mine told me a story once of calling in an airstrike on a bunch of NVA regulars in a treeline about 150 yards away.

He spent the next few minutes (minutes he wishes desperately he could forget) listening to the ... consequences when napalm incinerates human beings - men about his age, just as frightened as he was, who were loved by their mothers just as much - screaming their lungs out as they were incinerated. The ones who were caught in the main blasts died pretty quickly, as they inhaled burning napalm which destroyed their lungs and suffocated them. The ones who were on the edge took long, agonizing, screaming minutes to expire.

Killing people didn't make him feel manly or heroic or powerful. He says the way he felt that day gave him a glimpse of what being in hell might feel like.

Umberto Eco talked about one of the features of "Ur-fascism" was a cult of masculinity.

Manliness?

What is this bullshit on the right I come across regularly that equates war-making with manliness? Just ask a European over the age of about, oh, 70 or so how "manly" and heroic war is. And don't shut your ears when he tells you stories about how his family lived in a bombed-out cellar in some obliterated city for a year and a half, surviving on aid packages, bread and the occasional cat.

Try and describe how glorious and manly war is, and he is rightly going to look at you as if you are insane.

This

This is a towering, monumental song, filled with compassion and grace, mixed with a kind of bewilderment at the madness that makes men practice war.

From Matt Yglesias

I didn't see this AFP story last week:

The Iraqi officer leading a U.S.-financed anti-jihadist group is in no mood for small talk -- either the military gives him more money or he will pack his bags and rejoin the ranks of al-Qaeda.

"I'll go back to al-Qaeda if you stop backing the Sahwa (Awakening) groups," Col. Satar tells U.S. Lt. Matthew McKernon, as he tries to secure more funding for his men to help battle the anti-U.S. insurgents.

This, I think, does more than a little to underscore the limits of the "bribe our former enemies to be our friends" approach to Iraq. Of course, though the limits are real so are the possibilities. If keeping these guys on the payroll indefinitely were really crucial to American national security, I'm pretty sure we could find a way to work things out for quite a while. But it really isn't crucial to American national security. Having insurgents not shooting at US troops is much preferable to the previous situation, but insofar as the safety of our soldiers is the primary concern then getting the soldiers out of Iraq is a much more reasonable long-term strategy.

The "cash for allies" approach makes sense as a way to make a military presence more sustainable in a place where the presence is strategically important. But for some time now, the main strategic purpose of our presence in Iraq seems to be simply to sustain our presence in Iraq. That's not a good enough reason.

Lyrics from Ray LaMontagne

So now we see how it is
This fist begets the spear
Weapons of war
Symptoms of madness
Don't let your eyes refuse to see
Don't let your ears refuse to hear
Or you ain't never going to shake this sense of sadness