Excellent again. Thank you.

"You can't hug a child with nuclear arms", "What if the military had to hold a bake sale?", ad nauseum. The sappy, sickening, pre-kindergarten-level mentality reflected in these pacifist slogans, and so many like them, has done more to turn me away from pacifism than has anything else.

I like far better the bumper-sticker that Dean Esmay referenced recently: "War has never solved anything -- except for emding slavery, fascism, Nazism, and Communism." Indeed. The choice is not between peace or war, but between freedom or slavery. Might may not always be right, but to fail to use one's might in defense of one's rights is always wrong.

I must add this:

"War is not the best means of settling differences. It is the only means of preventing them from being settled for you."
-G. K. Chesterton

War didn't end slavery. If reports are to be believed, slavery is alive and well in places like the Sudan. Sex slavery is also alive and well in Asia, where families sell their young girls to the sex trade. The American Civil War might be seen as having ended slavery in the US, but it was only part of a complex political process that led to the ratification of the 13th amendment.

Neither did war end fascism or communism. War, in a conventional sense, didn't even end the "communist" regime in the old USSR--it collapsed through a complex political and economic process. War did end the Fascist and Nazi regimes in Italy and Germany, but authoritarian regimes are alive and well in more than a few of the Asian republics of the former USSR and elsewhere.

Raj, you're playing word games here. It's fallacious to take ordinary discourse, which by its nature allows for spartan expression and generalization, and analyze it as you would a technical treatise.

(What would that do to the art of converation? "I object, sir. The weather is not always beautiful this time of year. In fact, the National Weather Service shows that just last year the weather was miserable, as it undoubtedly is now in Missouri, according to current reports.")

Slavery here is clearly not slavery, but slavery in America. Fascism is not fascism, but German and Italian institutional fascism.

Your attempt to dissect the case falls flat because the conditions of your critique are inapplicable to the type of discourse under discussion.

Your argument that "conventional war" didn't end communism in Soviet Russia is also fallacious because "conventional war" was never invoked, and the term "war", in ordinary discourse, covers the Cold War.

In your effort to invoke precision of language you should have seen the error in this last one.

"The sappy, sickening, pre-kindergarten-level mentality reflected in these pacifist slogans," is made all the more sickening by the self-righteous and superior attitudes of the sloganeers, who pretend that their slogans are some kind of simple, transcendent truth that trumps and nullifies all of the complex arguments of people more intelligent and experienced than themselves.

"You can't hug a child with nuclear arms."

Absolutely right - the kid has to put down the arms first.

"What if the military had to hold a bake sale" to fund the campaign against terrorism? Would the pacifists buy enough bread to protect their malls?

Here's a bumper-sticker for you:

"You can't hug a child with non-sequiturs."

Y'think it'll sell?

Raj,

Part of the complex political and economic situation was the fact that either a) there was a war going on or b) there was the threat of war. War is a part of the calculation used in these complex political and economic situations.

Is it the only answer? No, of course not. But it can be effective as a threat, and can be effective as a method for forcing a regime to change.

Now, the question of when, where, and how it's been effective is complex, and subject to debate. But it is a tool of policy, and it had better be used with care and deep fore-thought, because we pay the cost of it in blood.