War

I hear daily on the news that we are at war but the word war is a nebulous term whose meaning has changed over the years. Some say you are not at war until congress declares war but the last time that happened was WW 2. Some say Korea was a war and others say Viet Nam. Younger people talk about the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sometimes the phrase is trivialized like the war on poverty and the war on drugs. As I look back over the years and view all of the conflicts it seems that the last time we could declare victory was back to WW 2. Just how did that war differ from the battles that followed? The answer is complicated but one of the big differences was the willingness to deliberately kill civilians. One of the main strategies in getting complete surrender was to purposely target civilians. News stories about the big war all mention the use of atomic weapons but only a few describe the tactic of fire-bombing cities. While an estimated up to 200,000 were killed by the A-bomb, millions were killed in the fire-bombing of cities. In this war 60 million people were killed and most were civilians and this does not count the millions more who were injured. As war has become more civilized, excuse the oxymoron, it has become more difficult to totally defeat an enemy and so we are left with these endless conflicts and we best get used to it. The war on terrorism will likely go on for generations.