[Peace-discuss] Civil War

[Bill Strutz]

        The two sides of a war may have quite different reasons for having a war.  For instance, to the US, Iraq may have been about oil (and probably was).  To the Iraqis, it wasn't about oil.  It wasn't, "Let's defend our oil."  It was about the fact that they had been invaded.
        Perhaps neither side would have fought the Civil War, except that they all expected to win in six months or less.  To some extent, the war was fought because they didn't think it was going to be that big a deal.

        The Southern elite seceded because they thought that the
Abolitionists were eventually going to prevail in Congress.  The South was either mistaken, or
premature. It was not entirely a decision to fight; some of them expected that they could secede without a war.
       The North did not care enough about slavery to fight (at
least, not in 1861), but when confronted with the fact that states had
seceded, they were willing to call up some 90-day volunteers to bring those states back in.  Then things got out of hand.

        Wars don't always happen for dramatic, momentous, and meaningful reasons.  Sometimes people just screw up.
        Maybe we didn't have a reason to invade Iraq at all.  Maybe it was expected to be so easy that the question wasn't "Why?" but "Why not?"

        However, we are shooting ourselves in the foot if we argue about stuff that happened seven score and six years ago.  Do we really care what the Civil War was about?  Or is it that one person has to prove himself right, and another person has to prove him wrong?  Let's stay in the present.

      -- Bill

---------------------------
William J Strutz 
"Beware the Ides of March" -- Soothsayer to Julius Caesar
PO Box 11464,Champaign IL 61826       (217) 359-0598




 
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