War: The Good, the Bad And the Ugly

by Neil Bamforth

My favorite ‘war quote’ is from Apocalypse Now – “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” What, precisely, does war mean to us pampered souls in liberal democracies? On the whole, probably not a lot, at least in comparison to those unfortunates caught up in one.

Some wars are good in the opinion of some. Perhaps not good but, at least, just.

All war is bad according to those who think that way.

I would have thought, regardless of whether you are in one camp or the other, you would agree that wars are ugly affairs.

People, military or otherwise being killed is anything but pretty, that’s for sure.

The Falklands War was good. Well, not in the way that a pizza might be good but in a way that a dictatorship invaded a territory they had no right what so ever to invade and, in a warlike sense, got their asses kicked.

Was it good though, or, if you prefer, just?

I would say absolutely ‘yes’. I would though. I’m British and so are the Falkland Islands. It was a much smaller version of Germany invading Poland and the rest of Europe. The ‘bad guys’ were put to flight as they should be.

It’s quite hard to think of many wars that could be called ‘just’ since WWII really.

Vietnam? No way. Waging a war on the other side of the globe to try and halt the spread of communism. Bad idea.
Iraq? Libya? No. Definitely wrong. Evil dictatorships or not, removing them without even having a clue what to do next was plain stupid.

The Gulf War? Now that was a ‘just’ war. Saddam invaded Kuwait and we went along to save the Kuwaiti’s just like we went along to save the countries of Europe. Hang on. Kuwait has oil. Oh, yeah, forgot that. Perhaps it wasn’t waged for quite the just reasons I thought. Still right to do it though or Saddam would have successfully invaded a sovereign country.

Actually, if anyone still thinks we were ‘just’ in the Gulf War, what about Cyprus? Turkey invaded the sovereign country of Cyprus. We didn’t kick their asses and Turkey ended up with the northern half of a country that isn’t theirs.

Ah! Yes! Of course! They haven’t got any oil.

We do have other kinds of war. The war on terrorism. Britain knows all about that ever since the IRA started blowing up pubs and children back in the 1970’s. The IRA thought they were fighting a ‘just’ war. That must be Irish logic for you then. “Let’s blow up a few beer drinkers and kids, that’ll win it for us!”

Various terrorist organisations have blown up innocent civilians, the latest, of course, is the Islamic State. It isn’t a war in the conventional sense obviously. There aren’t any tanks and things bombing about – is that a pun of sorts? Sorry. Unintentional.

We can’t have a proper big war anymore of course. Well, we can but it won’t last long and neither will we so, logically, launching nukes isn’t on anyone’s agenda. Nobody can win. It has to be small wars or, warettes if you will.

We have to have them you know. It’s in our nature. We get along much better when we’re allied and fighting some nutters. If it wasn’t for the nutters I suspect we wouldn’t be quite so chummy. We would get bored. We need an enemy to keep our warlike nature entertained.

Preferably a good war. In other words, one we win with minimal casualties. A bad war will do providing it isn’t bad in the sense that we lose. That’s too bad to take. A few ‘collateral casualties’ when we accidentally bomb a church or a hospital. That’s bad but, as long as we win we’ve been entertained and the bad guys lost.

It is all ugly though. God, are we ugly.

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