War: What is it good for?

WEEKEND
June
14
2008



San Mateo Daily Journal

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War: What is it good for?
Editor,


“A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda,” said Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane.


War is rarely necessary and never glorious. That’s one thing Americans should have learned from their experiences in Vietnam, and from seeing the daily horror and carnage of that war televised in their living rooms every night.


The U.S. government sure learned from it. They learned not to allow TV cameras to show so many dead or wounded GIs, or even enemy soldiers. They learned it’s safer to restrict photographers and TV crews to shots of awesome artillery barrages, powerful tanks, aircraft carriers and modern bombers taking off with their lethal payloads-the weapons of war, not their effects.


They don’t show the death and devastation in the little rural villages once full of farmers, the crippled children who happened to pick up cluster bombs, the charred corpses that are now called “collateral damage.” After all, showing such things would detract from the glory of war.


Ted Rudow III,MA

Menlo Park