This morning I was talking about English nationalism and the World Cup with a friend, and the discussion shifted to an op-ed in this morning’s Washington Post by Andrew Bacevich on the corrosive effect of long wars on the military and on democracy. Here’s how his piece begins:

Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics. Events of the past week — notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s dismissal — hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military’s professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.

My friend sent along the poem The Cuirassiers Of The Frontier that really hits the theme of Bacevich’s piece. The poem, on the subject of soldiers in the Roman army, closes with the following two lines:

We, not the City, are the Empire’s soul:
A rotten tree lives only in its rind.

It’s not hard for me to imagine that’s how General McChrystal’s team in Afghanistan see themselves.

People are disconcertingly accepting of torture as a means of getting information from people we detain, and it seems to me that assassinations are even more popular than torture. You just don’t see many people protesting the United States blowing up suspected terrorists in countries like Yemen with missiles fired from Predator drones. It’s sad, because there are many principled objections to be made to the use of assassination as a tactic for fighting terror. A recent study makes it clear that there are practical objections as well — a 2009 study suggests that assassinations are counterproductive:

killing leaders of a religious terrorist group seems to increase the group’s chances of survival from 67 percent to 83 percent.

This week’s New Yorker also has an interesting article about the latest social science on the subject of terrorism. The article is chock full of interesting opinions on terrorists, the causes of terrorism, and the most effective approaches to combatting terrorism.

I was going to write a post about the Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” footage, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. As usual, someone else wrote exactly what I wanted to say. In this case, it’s James Fallows:

There will be lot of those “real questions” to consider, from rules of engagement to the apparent cover up of the footage. But the threshold point I meant to start with is this: The very high likelihood of such “tragedies” occurring is a very strong reason not to get into wars of this sort.

By “of this sort” I mean: twilight-zone urban warfare, not to mention “discretionary” or “preventive” wars, and situations in which a heavily armed-and-amored occupying force of foreigners tries uneasily to mix with a population overwhelmingly of a different race and religion and language. For their own survival, the occupiers need to be hyper-suspicious and ever alert — even though today’s prevalent Counter Insurgency doctrine (“COIN”) warns of the self-defeating consequences of behaving this way. (Indeed, a mounting debate about the COIN approach in Afghanistan is whether the effort not to seem distant from the local population is exposing US soldiers to too much risk.) It is a situation with enormous potential for miscalculation, misunderstanding, and tragedy. And therefore one to avoid if you have any choice at all.

War is an invitation to commit atrocities, by accident or with intent. This is apparent if you study any war. Historian Steve Rabson estimates that during the three month battle of Okinawa, US soldiers committed rape more than 10,000 times. Japanese soldiers raped the women of the island as well.

The time to prevent the sorts of horrible events (whether you consider them justified by the circumstances or not or not) depicted in the video is when politicians are working to convince us that war is necessary.