Fox News Network, now with XTREME WAR COVERAGE!

I'm just waiting for the inevitable Operation Iraqi Freedom DVD, complete with "footage they couldn't show on TV" and "uncensored college girls showing everything."

Anyway.

I am seeing people's overwhelmingly negative reactions to pictures of this war, but those pictures obscure the big picture. This war has had the lowest civilian casualty rates of any war in history.

War is brutal. No amount of technology will eliminate the violence or the suffering of innocents.

War is one of the few things we humans do really well. We are getting better at it, and we are also getting better at not hurting those not involved in the process. But war will not cease to exist for a very long time.

As we speak, people are being killed in sub-Saharan Africa, in Central Asia, in Israel, in Latin America.

There is hardly a moment when some state or group is not waging war against another.

People may not want to believe this, but our country is no different. Democracies are not more peaceful than other states.

However, a democracy has never gone to war with another democracy. Perhaps, once people truly realize this, they will see what our troops believe they are fighting for, what our government has been trying to do for sixty years (though fear of communism subverted most of that effort into more 'practical' programs, some of which involved supporting repressive dictatorships).

Destroying Saddam's regime may not be the most immediately effective way of promoting democracy in Iraq, or anywhere else for that matter, but given time there will be democracy in the Middle East. Forcefully taking down authoritarian leaders is merely a small first step in a much larger and longer project.

If you truly believe in peace, then you have to acknowledge that war may be necessary now for the greater good later. It may be thirty, a hundred, or five hundred years from now, but eventually democracy will spread to most of the world.

Peace brought by war appears at first to be a contradiction in terms, but it is a matter of delayed gains. You cannot have peace in the present by opposing war. That is impatient and impractical. You can have peace later by fighting for it now.

~Halcyondream~

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