My war will be a connoisseur’s war. A war for the sake of war, free of any need for just cause and, ultimately, any need for real justification. It will be a war like my favorites, a war like World War I and the Crimean War. (World War II? The Civil War? Too obvious. Too easy.) It will be a war fought largely because we’ve run out of other things to do. It will be a war fought without regard for rules, without concern for its effects on civilian populations, without questions about morality and justice. (All the best wars turn solely on questions of patriotism, anyhow. Or variations on a single question: are you patriotic enough to support the war?) It will be a war led by men who can’t or won’t consider the greater consequences of their actions, for the present or for posterity, and fought largely by people whose circumstances (crafted by those selfsame leaders over the course of decades — with seemingly uncanny prescience) have left them with few alternatives.

My war will be a technophile’s war. Like the other Bush’s Iraqi war. It will be a war fought with gadgets, a war in which the key statistics won’t be casualty counts but degrees of accuracy. It will be a war in which no one ever asks why the missile hit the hospital, but only by how many centimeters it missed the reputed weapons factory. It will be a war related back to the people funding it (financially and morally) by animatronic journalist robots. The warriors’ agents will feed whatever information, whatever half-truths, whatever jingoistic slogans they’re peddling at a given moment to the androids in front of the TV cameras and the robots in the control rooms. And the mechanical information-laundering process will pass the "news," free from the stink of the propagandists who created it, on to the people.

My war will be a cynic’s war, a war like every other war. It will be a war that drags on not for the weeks or months that have been promised, but for years. It will be a war that sends planeloads and shiploads of young Americans home in boxes. It will be a war that calls those corpses heroes and ensures they are received as such in the churches and the funeral parlors of their hometowns. It will be a war that denies treating its dead as little more than means for justifying its own continuance. It will be a war that pretends, without so much as a telling wink, that those heroes’ bodies are viewed as something more than steppingstones by a leader who was morally bankrupt long before he ever cheated his way into office. It will be a war that eats the very population and subverts the very ideals it purports to protect. It will be a war that is said to be nearly over when it’s only beginning, over when it isn’t halfway there.

My war will be the last war ever fought. And the war that comes after that.

Back to the Thoughts on going to war index.