Give War a Chance

The brilliant Anne Applebaum's analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian issue has me thinking of an interesting article I read nearly ten years ago that contained a thesis that rather shocked the diplomatic and foreign policy community. In the pages of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Edward Luttwak actually had the temerity to write that while bloody and horrible and really, really, bad for those involved, war had the redeeming quality of actually settling things--and that peace keeping, peace making, peace imposing operations all had the downside of actually extending the life of political issues that once were solved at the point of a gun. Luttwak pointed to the seemingly endless employment of UN Peacekeepers around the world, to the rise of city states in Palestine erroneously referred to as "refugee camps" as evidence of the fecklessness of many measures short of war in actually solving problems.

All of us have seen the bumper stickers...."War is Not the Answer". Pardon me, but if the question is "slavery, communism, totalitarianism, fascism or terrorism", war seems a very logical conclusion to me.