A.R. Moxon: War or Nothing

https://www.the-reframe.com/war-or-nothingb

It's 2001—the year the movies promised us we'd make contact with aliens—and the United States has rather recently been attacked by terrorists who flew passenger planes into buildings. I have a distinct memory from the day of the attacks, of a news anchor announcing—before the buildings even fell—that we were now at war, which we technically weren't; thanks to my high school civics class I knew that news anchors aren't empowered to declare war, but I guess whoever it was understood something I did not yet know, which is that in the United States we are a war-oriented society, and felt they may as well get the old ball rolling.

As it turns out, we were going to learn many lessons about what it means to live a war-oriented society over the next quarter-century.

Flying planes into buildings is a sick and vile act. It is also a terrorist act. I don't think that's controversial to say no matter what else you think about what happened before or after. Terrorism is sort of an amorphous word, but I'd say it applies to acts of mass killing of civilian populations by a person or entity that doesn't have the requisite power to wage something called war. War used to be when armies met armies and kept civilians out of it, or that was the idea, but if that was ever the case it hasn't been the case for damn near a century now; now war is a matter that touches civilian populations most of all. When you're a person or entity powerful enough to make other people validate your reason for bringing death and terror to civilian populations, then you're powerful enough to call it war and make it stick, and then it is war, and it is more official and respectable for that. If you're not the aggressor, then war isn't as distinguishable from terrorism; like terrorism, it's something that you didn't choose that is happening to you for as long as you can survive it, and then after it is over, if you survived, then its a thing that was done to you, and if you don't survive it, nothing is happening to you anymore, and you probably don't care so much which one it was.

And sure enough, here in late 2001, old what's-his-name the news anchor has been proved right: we're heading to war in Afghanistan. I reckon this was the first lesson of a war-oriented society that we are all learning. Old what's-his-name knew, with the sage wisdom of somebody living in a war-oriented society; when you are attacked, war is not optional. Killing is not only an appropriate answer to killing, it is the only appropriate answer.

Afghanistan is not the country where most of the people who attacked us hail from, incidentally. It is a country where the perpetrators have frequently operated in the 80s and 90s, and they operated there in part because we were secretly funding them with cash and weapons to help install some very bad guys into power, because doing so served our national interests, or at least the interests of those leaders in the 80s and 90s who got to decide what our national interests were and in some cases broke the law to do so. So we've already been bringing death to the region for a while now, something millions of us notice it has made us less safe, not more safe.

*snip*