The Logic Of War - Peter FREUNDLICH (2003)

Oooo, this takes me back. All Things Considered, National Public Radio, March 13, 2003. An on-air commentary by TV news writer Peter FREUNDLICH (d. 2010).

Freundlich was known widely among industry insiders. Publicly he was known for his work on the CBS News Sunday Morning show and co-authoring two books with Charles Kuralt on Kuralt's American Moments experiences via the show. Sadly, most of his own commentaries are unavailable to read, as most links to transcripts are broken on the NPR website, but you can listen to the clips via their "All Things Considered" archives.

The rhetoric of going to war to oust Saddam Hussein had reached peak shrill insanity, with Gen. Colin Powell's "documented" claims (all bullshit) before the UN assembly of Iraqi WMDs (they never existed) and links to the al-Qaeda attacks on America, September 11, 2001 (another red herring, as Hussein hated Islamists and saw them as corrosive to his own machinations for absolute power).

I post this not as an example of my own writing, but as an aspiration to what I wanted my voice to be... frank, but smartly snarky, and pulling no punches at the Bush admin and all the right-wing, neo-con, war hawk, dumbshits. Such beasts hate smart retorts from people smarter than they are.

"All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN's word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?

Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it.

Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein's failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them.

Listen. Don't misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace,' but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that.

As a collector of laughable arguments, I'd be enjoying all this were it not for the fact that I know--we all know--that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident."

Sadly, he was right in his last sentence.

Tragically, history keeps repeating itself as humans continue to spit out political buffoons, generation after generation, as if we've been sleepwalking and forgotten all the previous dumb shit we previously enabled. <sigh>

Frankly, I think all war is bullshit. In the end, everyone loses, even the so called victor. People are killed or maimed, lives and social orders destroyed, resources expended and wasted, environments devastated... to what end?

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal. - John Steinbeck

War is failure of diplomacy. - John Dingell

Most of, but not all, past wars have been politically/economically/religiously imperialistic in nature (some, like WWI and the US Civil War due to other terribly convoluted and egregiously sad political/social/religious machinations). That is, a desire by the instigator to assert dominance and take over lands and peoples not within their contemporary geopolitical boundaries typically respected by the international community, via the U.N. Today, that is still true in looking at Russia's incursion into Ukraine (despite Putin's laughable original pretext of an anti-Nazi campaign) and Israel's continued genocidal campaign against the Palestinians (it's not just about Hamas, folks, as loathsome as Hamas also is). China intermittently rattles it sabres as it asserts claims over ever widening swaths of the South China Sea and its islands, as well as the ongoing drama of Taiwan. Remember, North and South Korea are officially still at a state of war, tenuously gripping an armistice (the Kim ruling family being the continually least stable and most provocative... and thanks again to Russia and China for enabling!). Russia further provokes EVERYONE around them today with their drones and military aircraft incursions up to or into national airspaces and random targeting of unsympathetic individuals, groups, or companies (and don't kid yourself, they're not REALLY friends with China, either). In addition, there are still other "frozen conflicts" that have yet to be resolved, regardless of what Cheeto Benito / Temu Hitler / TFG tries to tell everyone.

All of this to what end? We only have ourselves, humanity as a whole, to blame. We keep making more of the troglodytes who crave this shit, demand this shit, perpetrate this shit, and in many cases, get away with this shit. Seems like after tens of thousands of years, we still can't collectively shake the prejudiced, violent, and greedy tendencies (greed is greed regardless of whether it is money or power or food, etc.) that wreak widespread destruction upon so many peoples "guilty" or entirely innocent. We can't seem to give up on turning our pew-pews on each other, as well as the lust for gore, pain, and cruelty. We let this happen because we say stupid shit like "boys will be boys" or "it's a dog-eat-dog world" or "there's winners and there's losers" or "only the fittest survive" or "it's every man for himself" or "we're better than them" or "it doesn't concern me" or "what can I do about it" or... or... or...

And don't start with the "well, HE started it" whining. Hitler was wrong (completely, wholly, irredeemably, no debate, no "other side", so STFU) in the first place... but was also a product of soooooo many other human, political, social, and economic failures inside and outside of Germany and Europe that precipitated his dumbfuckery. "Just" war is still war... still killing and maiming and utter destruction. But then, what choice do we give ourselves when someone else does pull the trigger? We don't give ourselves a choice, collectively... we start shooting back. We don't create and fully support institutions from letting such tragedies happen in the first place, much less deescalate when they foment.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons. We seem to agree today that we can share modern technology, but we still refuse to acknowledge that our values — at their very core — are shared values. - Mohamed ElBaradei

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both. - Abraham Flexner

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? - Mahatma Gandhi

Sadly, I believe humanity will destroy itself before it grows the hell up and heals itself of these fundamental flaws to its nature. Even with all the truly good, loving, and peace-minded people out there, there are still enough of the irredeemable to poison the whole barrel. Whether or not its destruction, at the hands of a vicious minority, takes all other life forms with it will depend on the form of that final destruction... nuclear? biological? chemical? environmental? Does it really matter?

Wars had been fought for as far back as anyone could see. They accompanied the first tribes and settlements, and they persisted through the creation of cites, nations, empires, and modern states. They varied only in the means available with which to fight them: as technology advanced so too did lethality, and the unsurprising result that as wars became bigger costs became greater. The first war of which we know the details—the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta during the 5^th century BCE—probably brought about the deaths of 250,000 people. The two world wars of the 20^th century may well have killed 300 times that number. The propensity for violence that drove these conflicts and all those in between remained much the same, as Thucydides had predicted it would, “human nature being what it is.” What made the difference were the “improvements” in weaponry that inflated the body count. - John Lewis Gaddi

I believe the media can be the greatest force for peace on Earth. Instead, all too often, it is wielded as a weapon of war. That has to be challenged.

If you are opposed to war, you are not a fringe minority. You are not a silent majority. You are part of a silenced majority. Silenced by the mainstream media.

[I]magine if the U.S. media showed uncensored, hellish images of war-even for one week. What impact would that have? I think we would be able to abolish war. - Amy Goodman

We will be misguided in our intentions if we point at one single thing and say that it will prevent war, unless, of course, that thing happens to be the will, the determination, and the resolve of people everywhere that nations will never again clash on the battlefield. - Leslie Groves

And finally...

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. - Martin Luther King Jr.

Yes, this post is heavy. It's a downer. The end of things... lots of different things... weighs heavily on me now more than ever. I want to be hopeful. I have kids. I'll leave lots of loved ones behind. My profession is immersed in creating things which aspire to withstand the tests of time, nature, and man. Afterall, humanity has survived to this point so far... but it has also never had the capability to do the amount of harm to itself as it has today... or at least since the onset of the Atomic Age. I've hesitated to proverbially commit this to paper for some time... but I feel like if I'm gonna get things out of my head and off my chest, it's gonna be getting ALL of it out. Would you expect less?

I'll aim for something silly next time.