William Tecumseh Sherman told the graduating cadets at the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, “I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.” In a separate remark, he added, “War is hell” — a moment of unexpected bluntness from a decorated general, and a warning that would echo far beyond that day.
The man had earned the right to say it. And yet, more than a century later, we still divide ourselves neatly into camps:
The soldier who knows war is hell,
The politician who insists war is justified—so long as his party is steering the ship,
The armchair strategist who says war is sometimes “necessary” with a sigh,
And the historian who shrugs and says it was always inevitable.
That’s where we find ourselves this morning, chopping wood and carrying water, telling each other we “saw it coming.” Predicting the past is always easy. The rhetoric had been escalating. The weapons had been stockpiling. The alliances had been shifting like tectonic plates. But it wasn’t just that. It was the accumulation of contradictions—foreign and domestic—that made the air feel charged long before the first shot was fired.
We don’t pretend to see the big picture more clearly than those with better information. Like Bill Bonner says, we simply try to connect the dots and see what the image suggests. Lately, the image we have seen has been confusing, bizarre at times, like something from the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch.
Today’s canvas is full of smoke and rubble. At home, the political party that once campaigned on ending foreign entanglements now cheers every new plume of smoke overseas. Their opponents—who were perfectly content when their own leaders ordered drone strikes and bombing campaigns—have rediscovered pacifism. Expatriate Iranians celebrate in the streets while American progressives clutch pearls.
Through the fog of war, strange figures appear—some familiar, some jarring:
Democrats who are Jewish who despise a president widely admired in Israel.
Christians who joke about enemy casualties instead of praying for their enemies.
Western activists defending groups whose ideology would outlaw their very existence.
Feminists who, in the name of cultural relativism, offer tacit approval to regimes that deny women basic rights.
European leaders who seem resigned to or even welcome the erosion of their own civilizational inheritance.
Even Bosch might blink at this tableau. But the grotesque imagery conceals a simple historical truth: when chaos overwhelms comprehension, war slips into the equation. A forest left unmanaged burns catastrophically. An engine run too long without oil throws a rod. Civilizations are no different.
Speaking of oil: our disturbing artwork is not painted in watercolors. China’s long-term strategy is deeply tied to Iranian energy. Russia, though no friend to radical Islam, has repeatedly aligned with Iran when it suits its interests—the enemy of my enemy, and so on. And Western policy toward Iran has oscillated for decades, often producing precisely the “strange bedfellows” it sought to avoid.
As for irreconcilable differences: no, all cultures are not equal in their treatment of dissent, women, minorities, or basic human rights. A theocratic regime with modern weapons, responsible for orchestrating or supporting attacks that have killed thousands worldwide, and implicated in multiple assassination plots—including attempts on U.S. officials—was never going to be pacified by negotiation alone. To radical Islamists, negotiation is not compromise; it is contradiction.It is cognitive dissonance.
Was this the right move at the right time? We don’t know. History will judge, and history is written by those left standing, who write and sell the textbooks. What we can say with confidence is that the collision course was long set. And tomorrow? It is always too early to tell. If the war ended today, there would be thousands of refugees. Tomorrow? No one knows.
It is also possible, as my brother recently observed, that the flow of refugees could reverse—expatriates returning home. Before the British and American intervention in 1953 that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstated the Shah, Iran was a culturally vibrant, modernizing society. Many Iranians still remember that era with longing. I pray that such a renaissance is possible again.
Pray for the soldiers in harm’s way. Pray for our enemies. And for God’s sake, stop chortling like the fat pigs of Animal Farm when death is dealt out, cheering violence from a safe distance while claiming the moral high ground. This is not a video game, though it may seem like one from the safety and comfort of the recliner.
Outside The Box 