In Iraq we are playing evolution's fool

By not recognizing that our involvement in Iraq is an occupation and not a war of good versus evil, we are in an unwinnable struggle ... to echo—once again—Robert Ardrey's prescient comments regarding the Vietnam War. I wrote the following post in December, 2004.

(See December, 2004 archive)

Thursday, December 23, 2004
Letter to the New York Times Editor

Dear Editor:

Decades ago in the midst of the Vietnam War, Robert Ardrey wrote this in his bestseller, THE SOCIAL CONTRACT (my Fontana Library paperback edition was first issued in 1972):

"I was writing early in 1966, when escalation of American power in Vietnam was less than a year old and American optimism was still a native resource. Applying the territorial principle, I published my conclusion that the war was unwinnable. A powerful intruder, uninhibited by world censure, may with a single blow annihilate a territorial defender. But an effort to escape moral obloquy through gradual escalation of force gives the weakest defender opportunity to escalate his own quite incalculable biological resources. Incapable of playing the Hitler, we played instead evolution's fool."

We haven't learned a thing, have we? Once again we are fighting human nature with the fervor kindled by a religious belief. We are attacking our own mirror image!

Think for a moment of how we would rally to the barricades if we were attacked! Is it so strange that the Sunni's are doing the same thing?

Ten, twenty years from now even children will wonder how supposedly smart leaders could have been so dumb.

Regards,

N.C. Swede

Other books of interest on the subject of the biological basis of human society are:

African Genesis

The Territorial Imperative

The Social Contract