Retired Army Lt. Gen William Odom, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., calls a society without war a Holy Grail. On the one hand, we'd like to seek salvation through disarmament and arms control, but when it does not work we go out and kill with a vengeance. Political philosophies and ideas based on the perfectibility of man lead to tyranny and war, Odom said. It may be an unhappy matter, but politics is about who gets what, when and how. Periodically it has to be done by violence.
War seems to be an organic aspect of social behavior.
Unless somebody can foresee a transformation in the nature of human beings, it seems folly to predict the end of war. Nina Wasserman is a freelance writer.