[Rhodes22-list] reply to Dave Woten about subject of war

[john Belanger]

that was not a war. it was a police action.

Hank <hnw555 at gmail.com> wrote:  Dave,

Technically, the Korean war has never ended. A cease-fire was declared on
July 27, 1953 but there has never been a treaty, surrender or annihilation
as you put it.

Hank

On 8/8/07, DCLewis1 at aol.com wrote:
>
>
> Ed,
>
> You're right about the subject line, I apologize.
>
> As to wars being long - as I recall there was a 100 years war in medieval
> Europe, so wars can indeed go on a long time, but to my knowledge
> all wars have
> ended in treaties, surrender, or annihilation. I can't think of a single
> real war that's just gone on forever or one that has magically,
> mystically,
> just petered out without the other side surrendering, being annihilated,
> or
> accommodating the winning side via a treaty of some sort - for example
> Wikipedia
> tells me the 30 years war ended with the Treaty of Munster, there was a
> demarcated end. I'd welcome an example of a real war that has gone on
> forever, or
> that magically dissapated.
>
> As to the definitions of war you cited, again you are correct, but map the
> correct definitions you cited
> "War is a condition of belligerency to be maintained by
> physical force." "
> A contest
> between states, carried on by force, whether for defense, for revenging
> insults and redressing wrongs, or for any other purpose; declared and
> open
> hostilities."
> into "the war on cancer", "the war on poverty", "the war on drugs", it's
> a
> metaphorical stretch - and that's my point. What belligerency have we
> maintained by physical force in "the war on cancer" - none. Exactly
> what is the
> geo-political state we are contesting against with physical force in our
> war on
> poverty - none. We can take poetic license and say the "state" is
> poverty,a
> condition of society, but clearly that's a metaphoric extension of what
> your
> definitions were describing. Which geopolitical state have we asserted
> "a
> condition of belligerency maintained by physical force" against in our war
> on
> drugs - none (maybe Panama, but the war on drugs goes far beyond Panama).
> It's politically attractive to use the term "war" in dealing with cancer,
> poverty, drugs, or a lot of other things, but none of those "issues
> d'jour" are
> really wars, they're are areas of focused attention and resources, not
> wars.
>
> There's a good side and bad side to declaring topics d'jour to
> be wars. The
> good side is it gets people excited and focused - for a time. A
> politician
> can get a lot of good press by declaring war on some topic or behavior.
> The
> bad side is that most or many of the issues are not amenable to any sort
> of
> "victory", they are problems that have been with mankind forever, and
> will
> likely always be with us in one form or another. Because we can't
> declare
> victory, after decades with no or little progress, people get discouraged
> and give
> up the cause for lost - drugs are an example. My point is, we haven't
> lost
> and we can never win, these are long term problems of mankind that have
> been
> with us forever, not wars, and we just have to keep working on them -
> probably forever.
>
> Regarding drugs: If I understand correctly, the claim is that if we just
> legalized drugs the problem would go away. I'm asserting the
> problem(s) would
> just be different. I think that if we legalized "hard drugs" (i.e. drugs
> that
> are seriously addictive and seriously debilitating) the moral, social,
> and
> economic costs to society created by a class of literally tens of
> millions of
> addicts would dwarf our present problems by orders of magnitude. If
> drugs
> were legal, Brad's son would not be on the high seas trying to interdict,
> he
> would be riding an ambulance stuffing body bags. I think that
> criminalization
> of drug use actually works to disincentivize a lot of people that would
> otherwise try addicting drugs, and the moral, social and economic costs
> associated
> with tens of millions of addicts is so extraordinarily high that any
> disincentive is a good and useful thing.
>
> JMO
>
> Dave
>
>
>
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