More Sydney J. Harris

With recent events in Iraq – particularly the murder of an injured, unarmed Iraqi by a U.S. Marine – the following essay is appropriate.

I suppose, as Harris states, that any killing that takes place is – by the sheer nature of war – atrocious, but watching a Marine coldly raise his rifle and fire a bullet through a man's head seems far beyond the pale; far beyond what is deemed "necessary" the warmongering miserable failure's hideous war.

As if the above act wasn't hideous enough, Kevin Sites – the imbedded freelance journalist who recorded the video (and whose blog I've linked to above) – is being castigated by the right wing nutjobs, some of whom have gone so far as to implicate Sites in the murder; others suggest Marines take reprisal in the form of violence against him. Another loony even insinuates that Sites could have been in cahoots with the insurgents amongst other things.

These are the so-called believers in "moral values" that have been touted as having elected the miserable failure a few weeks ago.

The Atrocity of War

I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE to understand the indignation aroused in so many people by "atrocities" of war. In fact, I have never been able to grasp what an "atrocity" is in wartime. For what could be more atrocious than two bands of people resolving a conflict by killing one another?

Once you decide you are going to kill, why should there be any "rules," and why should such rules be observed? The object is to win; any means will do, if winning is the prime objective. War is not a game, where lives are restored when the victor has been decided. All armies are more alike than they are different, just as all flags and all uniforms and all weapons are more alike than different. Once you have resolved that there is no way to change your opponents' views except by slaughtering them, what difference does it make how or why or where you do it?

It seems to me that the greatest hypocrisy of nations is exhibited at their resentment of "atrocities" committed by the other side. Although I think of the Allies as "good guys" and the Axis as "bad guys" in World War II, both sides bombed cities with equal destructiveness when they felt it was to their advantage.

And it was the good guys who detonated the atomic bomb, not once but twice, despite the later verdict of many competent historians that it was a cruelly unnecessary act, prompted by political rather than by military motives. It was not the bad guys who loosed that evil upon the world – an evil that is going to come back to haunt us a thousandfold.

There is no such thing as an atrocity in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself, just as no part can be larger than the whole. Killing is the ultimate act of impiety; all other acts are merely subordinate to it.

It is possible, barely possible, to have a just war, a war waged in self-defense only, as a final desperate expedient. But this is a rare exception in history: Almost all have been avoidable, and were seen to have been so after they ended. They have been wars not of survival, but of pride, power, possession, stupidity, and vengeance.

In man's thousands of years on Earth, virtually everything has changed but this. The world is a totally different place in nearly every aspect of life, so much so that an early Greek or Roman would not recognize it as the same place.

Only one important thing has remained: the way in which sovereign states settle their disputes, by force, by violence, by death. And what is most shocking of all is the fact that we now can kill a million times as many people a thousand times as fast as ever before. The more "progress" we make in warfare, the more barbarous we become. This, beyond anything else, is our terrible legacy to the future.