Peace Doesn't Sell... So Who's Fighting?

War is like Prince Charles: Hideously ugly, yet necessary only for reminding the majority of the population how lucky we are. In much the same way that I haven’t got enormous, flapping, poorly designed wings masquerading as ears, I can also count myself fortuitous not to be entrenched in a sandblasted Middle Eastern hell hole desperately dodging the latest shrapnel cumshot spewn forth from viciously oversexed landmines. I don’t have to witness my best friend being brutally raped by machine gun fire, nor do I have to endure sucking the cock of a 10lb tank shell and gallantly swallowing hard.

But that’s the very scenario faced by thousands of our troops each and every day, forced to whore themselves by jumped up pimps safe in their political citadels. Like generals sipping Sancerre from the shelter of their hilltop tents, they don’t see the horrors of war. They see entire divisions as markers on a map to disregard as if the next batch of chips to throw at the croupier in a whimsical game of blackjack. We lose a few? Plenty more where that came from, m’laddo. Want to try a different game? There’s always a new avenue of entertainment to be pillaged. The similarity to gambling doesn’t end there: gamblers more often than not lose. For every overcooked yarn of fleecing the bookmaker, there are a multitude of failures waiting on the flanks to scupper the party in a devastating pincer movement.

For every World War I – the underdog triumphing at odds of 3-1 – there is the unshakable stalemate of a Vietnam (nailed on for the score draw at evens before it even began). For every (once more) against-all-odds, Hun-repelling World War II there is the almighty shitburger of Iraq from which we all have to take a huge bite at odds of 33-1 against. For every woefully inadequate Boer war (no odds available due to the compiler getting a close up view of a spear during the battle of Spion Kop) there is the marvellously vitriolic 100 Years War. Fair enough, historians of the time wildly over-egged the length of this particularly titanic struggle, but can you imagine killing Frenchmen in a variety of barbaric ways over a sustained timeframe of decades? What glee! Quite clearly this no score draw was fixed by the English deliberately holding back and lumping on the draw at odds of 6-4. Well, what do you think funded the expansion of the Empire?

It’s all a game hinging on likelihoods to the bigwigs in Downing Street and Capitol Hill. It’s all about studying the odds and coming up with the best strategy that will maximise the return on initial outlay. Sometimes the return warrants an outlay no matter what the odds: laying £1 to win £5,000,000 at odds of 10,000,000-1 for instance, even though 50p would be a more realistic wager that reflects the odds, is always going to be taken because of the dwarfing payoff. But this is a simple state of affairs with just one variable by which to measure success. War consists of multiple variables that can each define victory or, more importantly, whether a return has been earned on the initial gambit.

Consider the recent Western business trip to Iraq: A huge initial outlay that doesn’t reasonably represent our chances of success, yet George Bush – ever the Mountie who always gets his man – has reeled in the winning ticket amid world-wide acknowledgement of a continuing debacle. It beggars belief how the award of obscene reconstruction contracts to US corporations and the capture of the Iraq’s oil trade can be seen as victory when our troops are dying every day in a land where chaos reigns supreme in a supposedly liberated land. Bush will never admit it, but he’s done his friends in the board rooms of some of America’s biggest corporations a huge favour that will eventually need fellating. He almost seems smug in knowing that his legacy will be forever regarded as the President who went after a wrongly accused nation believing it at least partly culpable for blasting the most effervescent symbol of American capitalist prosperity into a smouldering mound of rubble… and made them pay for it not only with their lives but with their money.

This is not a new phenomenon by any means. Humanity has been knocking seven shades of the brown stuff out of each other in order to gain power and wealth – or at least retain the power and wealth already amassed – for millennia now. Every once in a while there comes along a hysterical crackpot with motives other than these that conform to a personal ideal of how society should be – think Hitler – but generally we start wars out of avarice and/or a megalomaniacal need for power over others. The two are inextricably entwined: one can never have enough money and the more power one can exert, the more money one can demand, steal, extort and defraud from the enfeebled. It’s human nature. It’s why we all want to be promoted at work. It’s why one day I want to make tax partner and earn huge sacks of the green stuff. The difference is that I’m not prepared to kill in order to gain these things (unless the fools get in my way, of course) and certainly not prepared to go to war.

Yet in the midst of the violence, the cold-blooded murder, the 17 year olds returned to their mothers in closed caskets, there exists good in war. History is littered with colossal feats of defiance in the face of sickening depravity, the shear will to survive through courage, pride and an unwillingness to be subverted by malevolent foes. It’s heartening to know that some people can actually sit through an entire Justin Timberlake record in order to warn others of the horrors within, but there are people in war who exhibit the above qualities. The ferocious hand-to-hand defence of Russia by a frontline armed with nothing more than basic rifles and agricultural implements, the men who would rather be slaughtered on Spion Kop than surrender their post and loyalty to the crown, the heroic goliaths of the rag-tag band of British, American and Canadian brothers that stormed the beaches of northern France amid nothing short of barbarous opposition from Gerry. And then come the scientific breakthroughs such as atomic energy and radar and the medical innovations such as a non-whisky based anaesthetic (which no doubt comes in handy when listening to a Justin Timberlake record) although why any sane man would refuse whisky and opt for ether is beyond me.

So after all this, war actually isn’t like Prince Charles – it isn’t simply an amorphous mass of irredeemable hideousness. It’s more like the morbidly obese girl at the end of the bar – with tits that don’t protrude further than her immense waistline – making eyes at you while puckering her plush, luscious, perfectly rouged lips: one part can’t help but think how pleasurably advantageous it would be to have her latch on to your pink oboe and compose sweet music with those made-for-blowing lips; the other backs away in revulsion at the horror stood before you, in a state of incredulity that the thought was ever entertained.