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Jewish World Review
May 31, 2005
/ 22 Iyar , 5765
Is war on the wane?
By
Bill Steigerwald
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
We're waging a major war in Iraq. China and Taiwan are getting testy. So are the Koreas. There is bloody fighting in Sudan and Congo.
Thanks to 24/7 news channels and June Atlantic Monthly cover pieces explaining why our next Cold War will have to be with China, the horror of warfare seems more common than ever.
Yet Gregg Easterbrook, one of magazinedom's sharpest journalists, makes a persuasive case in The New Republic that war on Earth has entered a significant "cycle of decline."
This 15-year global trend has gone unnoticed by the major media, Easterbrook says. Yet it has been argued in two "brilliantly original and urgent books" by Ohio State University professor John Mueller.
Mueller argues in his 2004 "The Remnants of War" that war is not an inevitable result of humanity's dark side, but a bad, stupid idea, like dueling or slavery, that is going away.
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Easterbrook reinforces that argument and shows that "it is possible that a person's chance of dying because of war has, in the last decade or more, become the lowest in human history."
He also shows that the unremitting warfare that Europeans and others practiced for eons — and which killed 200 million last century alone — is on the wane.
The number of wars, their importance and their bloodiness, is significantly lower now: four times as many earthlings — 1.2 million — died in car wrecks in 2000 than in wars.
Why the decline? Easterbrook says global military spending is down. U.N. peacekeepers have stopped fighting in many places. Nuclear deterrence worked. The Soviet Union no longer foments wars.
Democracy has spread. So have "capable governments" that can preserve order. So has global free trade, which reduces war. And philosophers such as Immanuel Kant no longer say stupid things like war is "sublime."
In other war news, you'll be happy to know that Wyoming is a little safer from terrorism today, thanks to the bloated, wasteful and politically manipulated Department of Homeland Security.
U.S. News & World Report says the DHS, which pretends to spend $50 billion a year fighting terrorism, has become the "biggest porkfest" in Washington. In "Security at Any Price?" U.S. News says every state and medium-size city gets its share of the pork.
Wyoming, for example, has used its DHS handouts to buy every police officer in the state a hazmat suit and to purchase Miss Daisy, a robot that disposes of bombs. You never know, an al-Qaida sleeper cell might try to blow up the Memorial Day "Cruzin' With the Oldies Car Show & Parade" in Casper.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Comment by clicking here.
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