Jun 13, 2015 4 min read

A few weeks ago, a family of several young children, their mother and grandparents were settling into their table at a restaurant along Route 19 in Peters Township when the kids broke into song.

“Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” they chanted to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann,” until their mother finally hushed them.

We can blame U.S. Sen. John McCain for this. He’s the one who popularized this little ditty, chuckling as he repeated it before the news cameras way back in 2007. We can blame the adults in this family, too, for allowing these kids to think dropping bombs is a form of amusement.

As the field of candidates for the U.S. presidency grows larger, so does the competition to determine who is militarily toughest. Several on the right claim to be proponents of a stronger national defense, but they’re actually talking about offense – in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine.

It’s as if they completely forgot the many billions of dollars spent and thousands of American lives damaged and destroyed in our failed efforts to bring stability to the Middle East.

Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, is all for sending planes, missiles and ground troops to just about anywhere. He’s not alone. The Atlantic magazine reported last September: “Like McCain and Graham, (Ted) Cruz also wants to kill first and ask questions later. He’s suggested that America ‘bomb (ISIS) back to the Stone Age.’ (The quote echoes General Curtis LeMay’s advice during Vietnam; that turned out well.) At this week’s hearing, Cruz demanded not merely that the U.S. ‘destroy ISIS – not degrade them.’ He also demanded that it do so ‘within 90 days.’ When Dempsey said that wasn’t possible, Cruz issued a press release saying the general was wrong.”

The war mongering of these politicians is ironic in its timing. We just recently commemorated the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War, this country’s bloodiest. One hundred years ago, World War I was raging in Europe. Seventy-five years ago this month, Germans occupied Paris in a war the United States would not enter for another 18 months. And 50 years ago, combat operations went into full swing in Vietnam. We think too much about the glory in these wars and too little of their horror.

Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” is a timeless indictment of war. It’s protagonist is a German infantryman plunged into the brutal carnage of the trenches of World War I. “We see men living with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shellhole … The sun goes down, night comes, the shells whine, life is at an end.”

Paul, the narrator, and the close friends in his company can discern no purpose for the fighting and wonder if enemy soldiers they slaughter and are slaughtered by are any different from themselves. They do know, as today’s soldiers do, that if they survive at all, there lives are forever changed, and not really for the better.

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how people are set against one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. …”

We should remember our wars and elect those who would rather avoid them than wage them.