War allows the politicians to goad us to hate foreign people and races -- whether Arabs or Japanese or Cubans -- so we become insensitive to cruelties inflicted on them. It is cheering at movies or news footage of "their" pilots killed in planes, of "their" young men blown to bits while trapped inside tanks, of "their" sailors drowned at sea.
Other tragedies inevitably trail in the wake of war. Politicians lie even more than usual. Secrecy and cover-ups become the rule rather than the exception. The press becomes even less reliable.
War is genocide, torture, cruelty, propaganda, dishonesty and slavery.
War is the worst obscenity government can inflict upon its subjects. It makes every other political crime -- corruption, bribery, favoritism, vote-buying, graft, dishonesty -- seem petty.
Government's role
If government has a role to play in foreign affairs, it isn't to win wars, to assure that the right people run foreign countries, to protect innocent foreigners from guilty aggressors, or to make the world safe for democracy -- or even a safer place at all.
If government has a role, it can be only to keep us out of wars -- to make sure no one will ever attack us, to make certain you can live your life in peace, to assure you the freedom to ignore who is right and who is wrong in foreign conflicts.
The only reason for military power is to discourage attackers, and -- if they come anyway -- to repel them at our borders. Such things as stationing troops in far-off lands, meddling in foreign disputes, and sending our children to foreign countries as "peacekeepers" only encourage war.
To make America safer and to assure that we stay at peace, we don't need to put more weapons in the hands of government employees, or to reform military purchasing methods, or to make more treaties with other governments, or to increase the military budget.
In fact, we need just the opposite of these things. We need to make it as hard as possible for politicians to involve us in war. And we need to discover a defense system that relies as little as possible on the normal workings of government.
Government is no more able to achieve military goals than it is to end poverty or stop drug use or run our health-care system. And it's time we started questioning why we allow politicians to continually drag us into unwinnable and fatal conflicts.
More important than asking whether Sen. Kerrey's actions in Vietnam were justified is the question: Why was he there in the first place?
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Harry Browne was the 2000 Libertarian presidential candidate. More of his articles can be read at HarryBrowne.org, and his books are available at HBBooks.com.