War, what is it good for?

In the inbox today is found another missive pleaing the case for the pro-peace cause. The subject centers around the efforts of the American Friends Service Committee, or the Quakers. Their exhibit, "Eyes Wide Open", has been touring the country displaying the shoes of lost servicemen as a sort of play on the shoe exhibit in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

I'm moved to write on this subject for several reasons. First, two lines of my ancestral tree were Quakers, one of which, Anne Skipwith, was hanged in York for upsetting local religious leaders in the 17th century. Her great grandson, Preston Goforth, died at the battle of Kings Mountain, fighting against the people who had driven him from England.

Secondly, I have a little peeve with people who refer to themselves as pro-Peace. Peace, Life and the Environment are ineffable states of being, unlike the death penalty or abortion, which are clearly defined actions. Similar to the pro-Environment or pro-Life crowd, they seek to conclude a complex argument before it starts. Really, people. If your position on any topic can be summed up in two words, either your position or the argument isn't worth discussing. I mean just who is anti-Peace? What we are concerned with is whether the whole of one's proposed actions will lead to more or less peace. Forgive me, Quakers, but sitting in a circle and singing kumbayah will probably lead to more bloodshed, especially from the campers in the next site over. To me, a peace-loving Quaker decendent, I know from my own view of history that people like the AFSC exist because others fight.

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.....The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." John Stuart Mill

Imagine we could rewind the clock. A dictator moves into a neighboring country. The dictator is ousted by outside forces but not defeated. Under sanctions, the dictator's people suffer. He turns on the weakest members of that society, committing mass murder in some cases. The international community hesitates but finally enough is enough and the dictator is given an ultimatum. Under protest from the pro-peace group, troops move onto the sovereign soil of said dictator. His army is routed and he and his henchmen are soon captured but not without the cost of over 2,000 allied soldiers and many more injured. The ASFC protests the horrible waste. Afterall, Germany is for Germans and Hitler had very few weapons and war is no solution.

War is a terrible thing but often times the peace-at-any-price policy leads to exactly that, an incredible price. Of course, the 80 million dead from WWII can't protest in the street and the millions that may have died from the seemingly interminable wars in the middle east will never know the price they might have paid.