America’s war with Iraq in the tender years of the 21st century comes as a shock to many of us. Like Europeans in 1914, we had come to believe that our country had to a large extent renounced war as an instrument of national policy.

This may be a short and efficient war. But already there has been death, in limited numbers among our own troops, doubtless in far greater numbers among those we call our enemies. Homes, buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed and will continue to be, however precisely aimed our bombs; there will be hunger and disease; there will be the misery of refugee camps and orphanages.

What one misses in most talk about the current war is any sense of its human cost. What is wholly lacking in current political discourse is any recognition of the obscenity of war. It’s as if we’d reverted smoothly to that primitivist thinking about death identified by Freud: We must be heroes, and the death of our enemies is greatly to be wished. I don’t doubt our leaders’ desire to minimize casualties and to control, to the extent possible, “collateral damage” — our nice euphemism for the inevitable killing of civilians by mistake. But it would be more honest if our death-dealing were discussed openly and fully.

War may be a failure of conflict resolution by peaceful means. It is also a kind of failure of civilization.

— Peter Brooks, Sterling professor of comparative literature and French at Yale University and author of several books, including Reading for the Plot and Troubling Confessions, LA Times [via CommonDreams]