War: compared to what?

David Aaronovitch, in the Guardian, asks just how awful war is, compared to the alternatives.

Last week saw the re-release of the anti-war classic, All Quiet on the Western Front . The film critic for my local paper expressed a widespread sentiment when he argued that the message of the film was that ‘the only real weapon of mass destruction is human nature itself’, and recommended, rather selectively, that it be ‘mandatory viewing for all politicians, especially the United States and the present Government’.
This theme was developed by novelist Philip Kerr in the New Statesman. Also writing about Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Oscar-winning film, Kerr told readers that he was just three years younger than Tony Blair. So, he went on: ‘I find it almost incomprehensible that someone from a generation who came of age during the Vietnam war, who read the war poets, [who]… listened to Joan Baez and John Lennon, and who must surely once have seen this marvellous film, could march this country into so many military conflicts.’

It is Kerr’s incomprehension that I find odd. Just seven years after Erich Remarque’s novel, on which the film was based, was published in German, Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland. Kerr knows better than most the sequence that followed: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland. In Spain, General Franco, it turned out, had not seen the movie.

The military conflicts we have been ‘marched into’ by Mr Blair are Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. That isn’t because the PM never understood the words of ‘Imagine’, but because it transpired that the Taliban, the hard men of the Baath, the amputating militias of West Africa, the Hutu Interahamwe and the Serb army of Radko Mladic had been brought up on something other than Joan Baez.