People die in war

The mess in Afghanistan over the civilian victims of Robert Bale's shooting spree got me to thinking about some basic facts we seem to have forgotten about war.  People die in war.  War is horrible, unpredictable, and must be avoided if at all possible...but not at all costs.

2,551 civilians were killed in the 9/11 attacks.  That's when this war started.  Don't be fooled, we are at war with the people who launched those attacks.  The problem is that this is a modern asynchronous war with an enemy that doesn't hail from a sovereign nation or wear a uniform.  If the people, nay the government, of Afghanistan hadn't given harbor to our enemy we wouldn't be there.  But they did.  So we are.

So, this is a war and we are in it.  I'll go a step further.  We should be in it.  And we should finish it...or, as hawks like to say, win it.  And that means more people are going to die. But since our enemy won't wear a uniform or follow any international laws of war (a term that always brings a wry smile), we are going to kill civilians.

All we can do now is prosecute the offenders and keep fighting the war.  An NPR headline asked whether Robert Bale's shooting spree will alter White House policy in Afghanistan.  I hope not.  Bale is, at best, a troubled soul who should've been removed from the field of battle sooner.  But my suspicion is that hundreds of "Bales" went undetected in Vietnam.  Thousands probably went undetected in Hitler's army (and I'm not talking about the ones who were following orders when they murdered millions upon millions upon millions of Jews, Catholics, gays, Poles, and anyone else who was unlucky enough not to be born with the right stuff).  And in the history of peoples at war I'd guess hundreds of thousands of "Bales" have gotten away with murder.

The good news?  We're still a nation of laws, not men, so Bale will be punished.  We're also a nation that hates war so we're likely to end this one as soon as we restore some level of pre-9/11 security to America and our allies.