War will never make us whole

Editor:

Thanks to the fake news for another grim assessment of America's 20-year Afghan debacle. Still we are cluttered with think tanks where PhD experts, who might otherwise have found useful lives, declaim for us on the urgent need for war.

Actually, I believe Dante was wrong -- nine circles? Hell! -- hell has no bottom.

But America, if it harbors human life, must have learned in the last two decades, this: war is not, as its advocates and profiteers claim, a grim, surgical necessity wherein "we will prevail," nor is it a risky, complex gambit that might fail; It is not even a tragic venture, carrying some moral weight but doomed to fail.

War is failure. It springs from lies and lives in lies, from the first lie seducing us into its tenacious, labyrinthine embrace (WMD/Sadam!), to the last lie, limping backward from another shameful inconclusive iteration of Vietnam (MIA's will all come home!) or Afghanistan (girls learn to read, at least, and are rarely stoned to death for it).

No one wins, and even those nations who convincingly tell the lie of their success, must suffer, for decades after, their streets to be littered with the shattered homeless drunks, who were, briefly, the glorious victors in battle. Ceremony flickers, gratitude fades, life will heal or discard us all in its mystery. But war will never, ever make us whole.

Scott Hartley

Fairfield