Have we learned the lessons of war?

On hindsight, this should have been titled "Haven't we learned the lessons of war?"

How long did it take the US to get out of Vietnam? Did the US have the moral right to invade Vietnam? Now the US is in Iraq. Did the US have the moral right to invade Iraq? And they are surprised that unspeakable violence is spawned by wars?

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Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 28 April 1995

For practically the whole of April, and maybe even well into May, morning newspapers, as well as The Evening Paper, ran reminiscences, eyewitness accounts, analyses, and investigations of the personalities, events, and situations that led to the culmination of two of this century's most gut-wrenching conflicts: World War II and the Vietnam War.

The first observes this month the 50th anniversary of its end, the second the 20th. Both wars seared the affected generations as never before, and set into motion global reactions of unparalleled proportions.

World War II carved up the European continent according to ideological, rather than racial or geographic, lines. It also propelled the world into a new economic structure, with the United States on top of the totem pole, followed by the very powers that lost militarily but triumphed economically: Germany and Japan.

The Vietnam War caused the United States to undergo a spiritual catharsis as painful as the emotional one, and endangered the very stability and sanity of the American people. Today, US assumption of the leading role in another war not its own has put in question its moral authority over the rest of the world.

At the risk of being repetitive, we hope everybody will take these twin anniversaries as occasion to remember a wise man's warning: that those who do not know their history are bound to repeat it.

These days, all over the world, wars continue. People die, combatants as well as civilians. Governments order whole-scale decimation of rival communities, rival societies. Armaments of war are sold, transported, used. New and more potent weapons are invented, developed, stored. If guns and bombs cannot guarantee the death of the enemy, then the human body itself is employed, the ultimate death weapon.

At no other time in the history of the world have so many people been so committed to the ends of war, bloodshed, violence.

Such commitment will not necessarily lead to a war of such magnitude as World War II or of such anguish as the Vietnam War. But commitment of such intensity is bound to divide the human race according to even more complex lines.

Where nation-states no longer command loyalty; where ideology, race, and religion get pitted against each other; where the common weal no longer reigns supreme, the lines blur and the conflicts multiply.

The hopes for peace that flowered with the end of the Cold War are already wilting under regimes controlled by intense and unmitigated hatred. And where no power--superpower or superorganization--is able to wield moral authority, the future routes and forms that war can take become truly frightening.

Is this the world mankind went through three major wars in this century to shape? Is this the kind of world we want to leave to the generations of the 21st century?

-- NBT