War: What It's Good For

Hanson remarks on crackpot commentary on the war from Left and Right, and interesting Pew research on Middle East public opinion highlighted by Jonah Goldberg.

I've personally heard enough stupidity about the war to last me a good while. Everything from (responding to Cindy Sheehan) "Waaul, the Bible saays you gotta let the dead lie" to (essentially), "Does it make me un-American that I like sugar and spice and everything nice?" I know people who, in all seriousness, can't fathom why we haven't nuked the whole of southwest Asia. I also know people who's biggest concern about the world--as militant Islamists disembody and disembowel, as clitorides are lopped by Muslim whackos, as rape is swept under the rug everywhere from Africa to the Vatican to the U.S. prison system, as humans slave and starve in North Korean concentration camps, etc--is the fact that we have a petrochemical-based global economy. I'm sick of people who have absolutely no sense of scale, whether it's of the 'lets annihilate billions to deal with totalitarian regimes and holy warriors,' or the 'let's buy a fucking Prius while the inhumanity and oppression continue' variety.

If you hold, as I do, individual freedom as good, then that which prevents or opposes freedom is evil. Death is not a pretty thing; the blood and brains and bits of a human should be disturbing to us as self-aware beings, but there is (goddammit) a moral difference between killing someone who lives, whether from simple power lust or the projected power lust if a god, to deprive others of their freedom, and someone who is simply trying to muddle their way through life.