War and our responsibility
I thank Mr. Sirajul Islam for his views on war expressed in the DS letter page on Sept. 27 titled "Is War Necessary?" This is a very pertinent question all over the world now. As a teacher, I feel every learner in today's world must be taught to ask questions on whether war is good or bad, justifiable or not. Since recorded history, from the shores of ancient Troy to Iraq Invasion (War?), mankind has been engaged in the act of causing suffering and slaughter in an orchestrated manner, often on a grand scale. The rationales behind waging war are many, and the underlying causes are various and complex. War as a theme for history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature has few equals. War is the combination of the horrible and the fascinating. It is man in the act of creating the ugliest of all horrors-- killing, and it is also man in the act of creating the hugely romantic notion of the heroic spirit.
It is mankind seen at the extremes. We notice these extremes in the campaign of Bush and Kerry. It was heroic spirit when Kerry took part in the Vietnam War, but horror when he saw the brutalities. On the other hand, war is neither horrible nor fascinating to Bush, because he had never been a combat soldier.
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