So now Bush is thinking about attacking Iran.  You would think that the failures in Iraq would demonstrate to him the complexity and difficulty of using military force, but you would be wrong.  Apparently, he is incapable of learning, unable to understand that bombing Iran might gain a short-term victory against the Iranian military but could very well create a longer-term political dynamic that will harden that regime’s resolve to build a nuclear weapon.  An attack could facilitate precisely the thing that it is meant to stop – which is generally what has happened in Iraq in terms of generating a greater number of guerrillas to fight against American interests world wide.

    The obvious futility of Bush’s hawkishness makes me think of Mencius, a very anti-war thinker.  Here’s one passage that came to mind with this new Iran adventure:

Mencius said: "There were no just wars in The Spring and Autumn Annals.  Some were better than others, but that’s all.  A sovereign may discipline his august lords by attacking them.  But one country should never discipline another in such a way.
(257).

     He is writing in a feudalistic political world; hence the reference to "august lords" and the possibility of attacking them, since they owe the Ruler a certain loyalty and service.  But toward other "countries," places that are beyond a Ruler’s sovereign reach, "discipline" should never be exercised with warfare.  That invocation of "discipline" strikes me as a very Bushian idea: he believes that whatever he does is righteous and that the "evil doers" are wholly incapable of worthy action, so he will "discipline" the bad in order to spread his notion of the good.  All very moralistic, all very deadly, and, for Mencius, all very immoral.

    Another Mencius passage came to mind regarding Iraq, where we should have learned that we must be very careful who we kill.  When we kill a person’s family, we can turn that person into a fervent and hard-fighting enemy, just as Mencius suggests:

Mencius said: "Only now have I realized the true gravity of killing a man’s family members.  If you kill his father, he’ll kill your father.  If you kill his brother, he’ll kill your brother.  There’s precious little difference between that and killing your father and brother with you own hands.  (259)

    Let’s add that to the US counterinsurgency manual.