There seems to be an inevitability to the war that is coming. It is coming, you know.  Our “leaders” want it and thus we want it and there is no nay saying even from the most adamantly anti-war types. I do not want war and I certainly believe you do not want war.  So, why is that we will soon be going to war?

The reason seems not to be a desire from a jingoistic American populace.  Present on this day are the veterans who forcefully state that they are representative of all those who died in previous wars. Our martyrs cannot march in the parades that express the militarism that is at the base of our revolution and our struggles in wars on our continent and on territories of other parts of the world. Those who died in battle and in service to their country cannot really be represented in all the preparations we make for yet another war.

In our land and in others there have been the traditional preparations for war by mobs of the discontented who scream for war and who are further manipulated by the press and in so many other ways by those who profit from war, to WANT war. Every so often it is the popular notion that a people will really want to go to war. Our Civil War was one of these times.  Yet there were riots in the northern cities AGAINST going to war. Conditions had to be just right in both the pre World Wars for our people at those times to be FOR the war.

Our country traditionally had listened to the caution of our first president who warned against going abroad to fight foreign foes.  We have had a tradition that was advanced by our fifth President who placed our hemisphere off limits to the old European colonial empires.  This was pretty successful although we have usually contravened the proscription in every era. Our record has been that every generation of young men have wanted and probably needed to go to war to prove something.  It is in the genes of human males to fight – maybe.  But it is definitely in the history of mankind that wars have marked off the periods of peace that sometime come in between the carnage.  Today female participation has become an institutional part of conflict.  Things may change but war remains the same even if there is a remoteness in the way it is conducted by technologically futuristic societies.

There is an inevitability to the war with Iraq that is on the horizon.  Our leaders have pronounced it and even as this is being written there is no debate and the preparations are being made. War is coming.  It is not wanted but we can smell it in the wind.