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"All war is stupid." -- John F. Kennedy Although support for the Iraq war diminishes daily, even among Republican senators, the neocons continue to write articles about why "we" must stand firm. That's what neocons do: They write articles and memos. "We" have an obligation to the Iraqi people, they tell us. "We" must stand by them in their struggle for "democracy." "We" have a moral obligation to continue the war. A war that may have been unjust at the beginning, it would seem, becomes a just war because we are "responsible" for the current civil war in Iraq -- even if it seems obvious that the Iraqis will continue to kill one another no matter how many troops "we" send or how long they stay. |
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Another article
lamented that America is losing its "warrior culture." I didn't know we had
one such. If we did, I would have thought that getting rid of it was a good
thing. Americans are not Spartans, they are not Gurka, they are not
Prussians. Upon reflection I realized that the country had fought a lot of
wars, most of them against push-over enemies: Indians, Mexico, Spain,
Panama, Grenada. But when the country stumbled into a war that it could not
end quickly, the public lost interest and then rejected the war: Korea,
Vietnam, Japan in 1945 before the bomb. Even the Revolution until the French
came along. The warrior culture, which can make a lot of pseudo-patriotic noise, tends to be male, Southern, and never to have seen combat. In 1963 they were the ones who were denouncing President John F. Kennedy because he did not nuke them and "get it over with." He also had to fend off his own military leaders who almost started a war without his consent. |
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.Last
week's Time magazine praised Kennedy's restraint in those terrible days, for
which conservatives and Republicans have always condemned him. Without
perhaps knowing it explicitly, he was following the Catholic teaching on war
-- only when there is absolutely no other choice. It was this long tradition
of restraint, of which the missile crisis was the high point, that
eventually won the Cold War, and not President Ronald Reagan's grandstanding
at the Brandenburg Gate. It was a great good fortune for this country that a man of restraint who thought war was stupid was in the Oval Office in those anxious days. It would turn out later that the Russian commanders in Cuba had been ordered to return fire if they were attacked. One shudders at the image of what the current incumbent of the Oval Office would have done if he were the "decider" then. Many Americans would have died, and many more would never have been born. The establishment media never liked Kennedy, an Irish Catholic from Boston. The Time article, which also acknowledged that he would never have escalated the Vietnam War, is revisionism with a vengeance, though it's not clear that the skimpy current version of Time is establishment anymore. Perhaps it is the beginning of a long overdue reappraisal of President Kennedy. John Kennedy was not a perfect human being, nor was his presidency a flawless presidency. Yet his behavior on those critical days in May 1963 entitles him to the title of a great president. Time did well to remind us that Americans should always keep in mind when voting for a president whether the candidate has the valor to stand up to screaming "warriors," bellicose senators and men in fancy uniforms with stars on their shoulders. Would that we had a similar ironic, cautious, restrained chief executive in 2002. .
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