War-It's just preventative medicine

Arizona Daily Wildcat

History provides many examples of systematic political oppression. There are typically two reactions to blatant abuses of power. People either, as the saying goes, "put up or shut up."

The participants of the French Revolution were living incarnations of "Network's" famous, "I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." Their rebellion was total, bloody and dare we say, successful.

At the other end of the enabling spectrum, we find examples like the serfs of the English feudal system, who for years worked for next to nothing under horrible conditions.

This is not to make value judgments about the two examples listed above. They merely illustrate how all humans are partially responsible for the environment they inhabit.

The "innocent" people of Iraq are likewise accountable for their condition. They provide the taxes. They provide the soldiers. They provide the support base for Saddam's megalomaniacal activities.

Saddam Hussein is one person. He may be able to "push the button" by himself, but are we expected to believe he designed, built, transported, and armed his biological, chemical and atomic weapons alone?

Political theorist Carl Von Clausewitz wrote that making war on the populace was not only the most expedient way to fight, but the most compassionate. While this seems oxymoronic, his idea was that "polite" fighting does nothing but prolong martial conflicts, thus hurting the country over a longer period to a more severe degree.

General William T. Sherman agreed with Von Clausewitz and closed the Civil War by destroying the morale of the Confederacy with his famous March to the Sea. Would the Union have prevailed eventually anyway? The dominant opinion is yes, but the war would have lasted longer and caused more Union casualties. And as Dr. Meade so eloquently puts it in "Gone With the Wind," "God, woman, this is war, not a garden party!"

The United Nations' present approach to the Iraqi situation is reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in the 1930's, and the backlash to the proposed bombings leads one to question whether the opposition objects to war on civilians, or war in general. I say the two are inseparable.

How is one supposed to fight a war without threatening civilians? Imagine the Russians marching into Berlin with their thousands of soldiers and saying: "We're not going to hurt any of you, but tell us where we can get your leader." Where is the incentive for German cooperation?

War is atrocious. This may seem evident, but judging by people's current behaviors both on our campus and throughout the nation (listening Ohio State?) someone must have forgotten.

Saddam Hussein does not present an immediate threat to the United States.

As any doctor can tell you, however, preventative medicine is almost always cheaper than paying after you're sick. War is the same. Yes, people will be killed. Yes, some are relatively innocent. Yes, war is atrocious. These are all truths.

But there is another truth. The truth that allowing madmen to blackmail the civilized world leads to damages far beyond the unfortunate Iraqis who will die in air strikes. I don't want, in 25 years, to watch my son or daughter go off to fight in a new World War because we were too liberal to stop the conflict in its infancy.

Diplomacy works in a civilized world, but unfortunately, the barbarians will always force us to violence; and the irony is, to preserve civility we sometimes need to be uncivilized.