[Peace-discuss] Civil War

[John W.]

At 03:02 PM 3/15/2007, Bill Strutz wrote:

>         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.


"He who fails to learn from the past is condemned to repeat it."  You may 
quote me.  :-P



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