Is War Endless?

U.S. Marince Corps Lance Cpl. Theodore McCormick prepares to load an amphibious assault vehicle to begin Clear, Hold, Build Exercise 2 on Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif., Sept. 16, 2011. McCormick is a machince gunner assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, Kilo Company. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Reece Lodder

In Defense Of Endless War -- Christopher Hitchens, Slate

As 9/11 showed, civilization has enemies with which peace is neither possible nor desirable.

A continuous and repetitive thread in the commentary on the decade since 9/11—one might almost call it an endless and open-ended theme—was the plaintive observation that the struggle against al-Qaida and its surrogates is somehow a "war without end." (This is variously rendered as "perpetual war" or "endless war," just as anti-war articles about the commitment to Iraq used to relentlessly stress the idea that there was "no end in sight.")

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My Comment: As usual .... Christopher Hitchens states the obvious in his usual unique style of writing. My favorite passage in this post is his last paragraph .....

Human history seems to register many more years of conflict than of tranquillity. In one sense, then, it is fatuous to whine that war is endless. We do have certain permanent enemies—the totalitarian state; the nihilist/terrorist cell—with which "peace" is neither possible nor desirable. Acknowledging this, and preparing for it, might give us some advantages in a war that seems destined to last as long as civilization is willing to defend itself.

Indeed.