Wars, a Necessity

There’s that famous line from Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s song, War, that goes: “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!”. A lot of such opposition to all wars comes right in the middle of a war (The lines above were written during the Vietnam War) or right after a major one ends.

But does anybody subscribe to that view entirely? Does India’s war that created Bangaladesh qualify as a useless war? Or the first Gulf War that freed Kuwait? Or how about the dharma yudh of the Mahabharata? So what’s common to those 3 wars? They all had a purpose that was defined before the war started, not some noble cause associated after the event by the victors.

Which is why I totally disagree with Ambrose Bierce’s stance (as described below by Benjamin Schwarz):

“Emerging from the charnel house, (Ambrose) Bierce shunned any effort to invest the butchery with meaning. . . . For him the war was nothing more—could be nothing more—than a meaningless and murderous slaughter, devoid of virtue or purpose.”

I do agree with Edmund Wilson’s comments that countries often try to thrust artificial and noble goals after the war is won:

“I am trying to disregard the pretensions of moral superiority with which we have tempted to clothe it. . . . I want to suggest that . . . we ought to stop talking in terms of defending and liberating the victims of “oppressors” and “criminals,” our old patter of “right” and “wrong” and punishing the guilty party.”

But like I said earlier, not all wars fall under this category.

And like it or not, sometimes wars have to be fought. Thomas Bruscino explained it very well in his article, “The New Old Lie”:

“War, after all, is about competing purposes, competing causes, competing ideals—produced by polities, defined by policymakers, put into action by military professionals, and fought for by average soldiers. War itself does not care about the relative merits of those ideals, but the outcome of war, and therefore the outcome of combat, determines which ideal wins. The outcome of war determines which cause gets to survive, thrive, and guide the lives of people in peace, and just as importantly, which cause does not get to shape the peace.”

It may be some kind of twisted irony but yes, the outcome of a war does decide the kind of peace we get afterwards.