When You Shoot, You've Lost

Now this is kinda a sobering observation, recently made by Glenn Greenwald:

Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by the 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate.

Which again causes me to turn to Duncan Black, who blogs at Eschaton:

Wars Are Bad

And if for some reason the people who run the United States feel the need to start one, it means they've failed. It means they should all resign in shame and let someone else clean up their mess. This country has immense power - military, economic, political - and if you can't use the latter two, along with the implicit threat of the first one, to make war unnecessary then you've fucked up and it's time to go home.

I still cannot fathom the nearly headlong rush to make war on ISIS.  Congress rattles its sabers yet steadfastly refuses to even discuss a declaration of war as called for in our Constitution.  To hear the talking heads tell it, ISIS is the devil incarnate and Must.  Be.  Stopped.  Now.  At any and all costs.

Perhaps a better, saner approach might be this one, as I posted a couple years ago, where we'd take war dollars and use them for humanitarian purposes instead:

We're declaring a unilateral cease-fire.  And in lieu of fighting we are taking those combat dollars to dig wells, immunize children, and build roads and bridges.

Perhaps I am naive but I do speak from the knowledge base of decades of work for the DOD, and say as I hold a grandchild on my lap, by God, we can do better than this.  We have to do better than this.