What reality?

Report of conflict in Syria
I watched the above news report by an Independent Television News reporter that was aired on NBC in the US with incredulity.
I was not shocked by the bombing. I was not shocked by the artillery shells going off. I was not shocked by the flames in the buildings. I was not shocked by the riflemen and grenadiers firing their weapons. I was not shocked by a six-year-old boy lying wounded in a hospital. None of that was any surprise to me. You know why? Because that is what war is all about.
It seems that Amnesty International didn’t get the meme from the International Committee of the Red Cross: What is going on in Syria is a war, a civil (well a very uncivil really) war.
The Amnesty complains that the bombs and artillery are “battlefield” weapons, as if the “battlefield” was some sort of prizefighting ring or jousting field for medieval knights. What alternate reality are these people living in? War is not a prizefight or a joust.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like seeing non-combatants get caught in middle of a battle, but that is going to happen, especially when the combatants decide to duke it out in cities.
War is not a place where you send in unarmed observers to keep a running tally on who does what to whom. That is a recipe for getting the observers killed. It amazes me how much the news gatherers of today seem to treat war as some kind of video game. Believe me, it isn’t and it never was. Still, we see these reports decrying the fact that the battles have any impact on “innocent” civilians.
Well, as we have seen around the world, unless you are under about the age of five, there are no “innocents” per se in a combat zone. You usually are for one side or the other. You just try to stay neutral in a combat zone and I will make a wager that neither side will trust or respect you. Both will think you are working for the other side, unless you are working for them.
Still, we have people in this world who put on the blinders and think that war is anything but the cruel, ugly, deadly, terrible thing that it is.
I am sorry people but war kills people, indiscriminately. It destroys things, indiscriminately. It maims things, indiscriminately. That is what bombs, and rockets, and artillery and mortar shells, and grenades, and mines, and bullets do. They are not discriminate. They don’t just hit the bad guys, or the bad places. Just ask the nine people wounded in New York City Aug. 24, 2012. The police did not intend for their bullets or the shrapnel from their ricochets to hit anybody but the killer that they were trying to put down.
I will pretty much guarantee that the pilots of the planes in that video or the gunners on the artillery or mortars that landed in the video or the guns being fired by the people in the video were not deliberately being aimed at non-combatants. Not on your life. Those gunners, bombers and shooters where just hoping that the rounds that they were sending down range were going to hit “the bad guys” and, you have to remember in war, the bad guys includes those who support and back the fighters.
Now, I suppose, in some alternate universe, the prizefight paradigm or the joust model exists and the spectators can line up in the stands and watch the battle without expecting any harm to come their way. However, that is not how it is in the real world; and in Syria, as well as many other places around the globe, we are living in a real world.
Whether it is diplomatic personnel in Mexico (even if it was two US Marines assigned to the embassy) or a bunch of people meeting with a terrorist leader in Pakistan, or a clash between tribal forces in Africa, that is the real world. Bullets fly, bombs drop and people are wounded or die. That is the reality of war.
It helps to remember that war is not glorious. War is not gallant flags waving.
War sometimes is necessary, unfortunately, and the only thing to do in a war is to apply enough force quickly and efficiently enough to get one side or the other to quit fighting because it is no longer cost effective, whether in human lives or wealth expended. To do anything else is, indeed, a war crime.
The human tragedy is that we cannot agree on what is good or bad, or who should be in power or who should not. All too often, because we are basically sore losers or the winners are not magnanimous, we end up with people taking up arms to make their cases. That really is all that wars are, political and economic discussions extended to a different sphere that uses violence, death and destruction to resolve the differences.
There apparently is no antiseptic alternative to war, unfortunately, although democratic societies where the people agree to compromise and abide by the majority rule, if it respects minority rights, come closest to it.
Regrettably, it seems that that willingness to compromise and share, to be magnanimous, is a quality that is sorely lacking in the modern world, despite what the people at Amnesty International and other people and organizations of like mindset want to believe.