It’s difficult to imagine that it was once honorable to wage war; that the English and the French would stop fighting at sunset and sort out their dead and wounded peaceably. Of course, that’s nostalgic hooey. They were probably just limited by their technology. If they’d had night-vision goggles during the Hundred Years’ War, I’m sure they would have kept fighting through the night. Now, thanks to that same technology, war has become a video game. There isn’t much honor in winning a video game. Most of us just hit reset until we win.

And when aren’t we playing that video game? Are we at war with Afghanistan? In Afghanistan? Reset. With Colombia? In Colombia? Reset. Did we win the war against Bosnia? Against Iraq the first time? I’m not sure, but the game’s over. I know we won World War II because I’ve played Medal of Honor. And they don’t make video games about the wars we’ve lost. There’s no game about Somalia, right?

In the video games, we become the people — soldiers and civilians (are we all soldiers in the war against terrorism?) — who are fighting for their lives. That makes sense. If somebody’s about to kill you, you try to stop them. You kill them. Isn’t that Bush’s central argument for Gulf War II? Saddam is trying to kill us, so we’re trying to stop him? Or is it that Saddam is trying to kill someone else (his own people, the Kurds, those poor Kuwaitis), so we’re trying to stop him? Or maybe we know (or think) that Saddam has the power to kill lots of people (maybe us, maybe not, maybe Israel), so we’re trying to stop him from doing that (assuming he can do it and wants to do it, which he obviously does because he’s evil, obviously).

North Korea is much the same — you know, it’s evil, it has bad weapons, it wants to kill people — but we don’t want to play that game.

Even a bad video game gives you a set of clear objectives. Mission: go into Iraq. Mission: assassinate Saddam Hussein. Mission: install your own puppet regime. They may be blunt, but they’re easy to follow. Bush would win points with me if he were at least clear about what he wanted.

No self-respecting video game would ever come up with something like: go tell your citizens and the world that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction even though you, yourself, are not actually sure; then, without confirmation one way or the other, start amassing troops on its border until you just get impatient for an actual excuse and make one up about Al Qaeda or some other secret intelligence source so that you can start dropping bombs and controlling its oil. Warning: if Saddam really does have chemical and biological weapons, like you say he does, then you’re totally fucked because he’ll use them against your troops — your own CIA says so — and the casualties will be criminal.

No one would play that game. I don’t want to play that game.

Back to the Thoughts on going to war index.