MARK AND WAR | 2005-12-21
I will get off my self-flagelaton for time to address the point Mark made me think of.
What ever happened to DECLARING war?
As Mark pointed out, we have repeatedly killed off tens of thousands of our young men, time after time, since 1941 and not even THOUGHT of declaring it a WAR.
This phenomenon is not at all limited to the United States. I vividly remember the one time I totally took Israel's side against the Arabs.
Ignoring the complications, which are fascinating to someone interested in international and a bore to anybody else, all of hte Arab states except Lebanon declared war against Isreal in 1948.
When I went into Israel, just as when I went into Rhodesia, I would get my visa stamped on a separate peice of cardboard, not in my passport. The reason for this was that if yo had a Rhodesian visa in your passport you could not get into black-ruled countries.
By the same token, a passport with an Israeli visa meant you could not get into the Arab countries who were officially at war with Israel.
Then around 1980 Israel conducted a sneak attack and bombed out Iraq's nuclear power plant because it might make them capable of obtaining nuclear weapons.
I was in a peculiar position. I was certainly no friend of Israel, and I had no interest in whether they were right or not in attacking the plant.
No, my problem was entirely different.
I DESPISE the guy in the bar who acts like he is about to fight someone but waits until there are people to grab his arms and shouts, "Lemme at him! Lemme at him!"
He is a coward posing as a real fighter.
Iraq had an official state of war declared between itself and Israel. So when Israel bombed Iraq, Iraq went whining and crying to the United Nations.
When you have a state of war declared against another country, you have given that country the right to bomb the hell out of you. That's what a state of war IS.
I have championed the Arabs a long time, and it was EMBARRASSING to me to see a coutry that had been beating its chest and yelling how rough and tough it was and how it would fight to the death against Zionism go squealing to the UN when Israel took them up on it.
Which reminds me. Did Iran and Iraq DECLARE war on eaxh other? There were over a million deaths in that conflict, but i honestly don't know whether war was ever formally declared.
In the Falkland Islands War (sic) there was an actual naval conflict going on and neither side ever even considered declaring war and nobody expected them to.
What has happened to declarations of war and why?