War is hell, and peace can be bad too
by Don Feder · The Washington TimesOPINION:
War has dominated human history. The best we can do is to minimize its impact. In the past century, it’s possible that almost as many died from peace as from war.
Since the end of World War I – “the war to end war,” in case you’ve forgotten — there has been an interstate conflict, civil war or insurgency roughly every year-and-a-half.
When he was shown the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the end of World War I, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the last commander of the French Army in that conflict, declared: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”
His prediction came to pass 20 years later.
World War I was followed in quick succession by World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and now Iran.
Our attention is focused on our war with the Islamic republic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But there are also civil wars in Sudan, Myanmar, Syria, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not to mention Israel’s fight against Hamas and Hezbollah, which is part of an Arab-Israeli war that started in 1948 and never ended.
Our international efforts to avoid war have misfired badly. The League of Nations, launched at the end of World War I, was useless.
The United Nations, which was created in the optimistic afterglow of the end of World War II, has become a tool of totalitarians and tyrants. It’s now controlled by a combination of Muslim and Marxist regimes and old-fashioned dictatorships, whose primary purpose is to attack the United States and Israel and undermine real peacekeeping efforts.
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If Israel discovered a cure for cancer, the U.N. would condemn it as Zionist aggression.
NATO helped to check the Soviet advance in Europe for a time, but has long since outlived its purpose.
Humanity is an aggressive species. No one wants war — except those who are in the grips of a delusional ideology and the savages who want what you have and are willing to kill you to get it.
Peace only comes through strength and the determination to use it.
The conduct of a war should not be determined by the price of gas or the need to avoid civilian casualties. How many civilians did we kill in bombing Germany and Japan to force an Axis surrender in 1945?
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Pope Leo II says war never solved anything, thus betraying a tragic ignorance of history. The Revolutionary War gave America its independence. The Civil War ended the institution of slavery on this continent. World War II stopped the Holocaust and freed Western Europe.
War can be like a surgical instrument used to excise evil.
More than 3,500 have died in Iran since U.S. and Israeli airstrikes began. The Islamic Republic executed 10 times that number for peacefully protesting before the fighting even began. If Iran’s maniacal rulers ever get their hands on nuclear weapons, the carnage will be incalculable.
Pyrrhic peace can lead to more deaths than war.
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When the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War in 1922, bloodshed on the battlefield ended and a century of firing squads, torture cells, purge trials, planned famines and gulags began.
Deaths in the Chinese Civil War, which ended in 1949, were dwarfed by the body count from the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square and everything else that followed.
In 21 years of fighting (1954-1975), an estimated 2.4 million died on all sides in the Vietnam War, including 58,000 Americans. Then came the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, followed by the Cambodian Killing Fields and an estimated 1.5 million to 3 million deaths in the course of a few months.
Freedom isn’t free. It’s always paid for with blood.
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More than 1 million Americans died in all of our wars from 1775 to today. You can thank every one of them for the freest nation on Earth. Someone once asked conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. if there was anything worse than war. He replied yes, slavery.
Genocide is worse too.
Evil is held at bay only by those who are willing to walk the ramparts, gun in hand. When there are too few to keep that watch, a civilization dies.
On Memorial Day, thank the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep us free. As the saying goes: Land of the free because of the brave.
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• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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