Are We Really at War?

I have been increasingly struck by the virulent chant that I hear every day from the politicos that "We are at War!" I confess to a certain level of ignorance about things, but, you know, War is a pretty basic staple of humanity. In fact, it probably preceded the development of language (at least for us lepers who believe in evolution.) Some feel that the capacity for violence is in our genes. I guess it does have a certain survival advantage.

But War since time immemorial has meant the clash of armies. Or, at least, it has meant the clash of organized groups. It is very difficult to see how 19 men on three hijacked planes can be construed as an Army. Furthermore, until we royally screwed it up, these men represented only a handful of others in the mountains of Afghanistan. There is ample evidence that Al Qaida was not associated with groups in Iraq (Saddam Hussein was secular and the majority of Iraqi are Shiites; Bin Laden is a Saudi and closer to being a Sunni). Even now there are probably not more than several thousand Al Qaida in the world. Now, of course, there are a lot more in sympathy with them, due to our idiocy. Still, not by any means an army.

Those of us that came of age in the 40's and 50's remember war as something entirely different. Even after WWII ended in 1945, we played the battles out for many years. On the playground and in the theater, with bats for rifles and John Wayne to lead the charge (yes, we were little jingoists.) We lived through Korea and Vietnam. Some of us even fought.

So what is this "War on Terrrrror?" There has been only one battle and that was by a platoon of men who didn't fight anybody. The 3,000 casualties, as tragic as the event was, were simply collateral damage. Not one shot was fired from our side. And, to be honest, we have fired very few shots in the five years since. There hasn't been another clash of significance. Yes, you can say Madrid and London. But, the death toll on a single day in Baghdad and Lebanon and Gaza dwarfs those two events. We call Iraq a War but no one is sure who we are fighting.

This incessant use of "War" and statements like Gringrich's "Third (or was it Fourth) World War" are just asinine. This is not "War," it is "Politics by other means" (to borrow from Clausewitz).

What has been done is to debase our language. And when that happens, no one can communicate. What if we really did have a War? What would we say then? What if our experience is more like the IDF's in Lebanon than the "cakewalk" that wasn't Iraq?

A lot of us are basing our hopes on a Democratic victory in November. But what if the political landscape has been so debased that even a Democratic majority in the House, and possibly the Senate, can't function because the very basis of discourse has been so corrupted by the Rovians that it makes government impossible?

We should really worry.