Syria spreading chemicals? Iran building nukes? No matter; we are weary of war. It costs too much money, too much sanity, too many limbs, too many lives. While different Americans have different goals when we go to war, it takes its toll on all of us: conservatives and liberals, whites and minorities, young and old, the devout and the atheist.
We are weary because in the wars we’ve waged in the last half-century, we weren’t always stronger when we finally left; we were weaker. Sometimes, so was the nation in which we fought.
There are still wars we can win, or at least strengthen our security. But we’re too weary anymore to take the chance even if eventually, in places like Syria or Iran, we ought to; it’s the price of our power.
What’s somewhat odd about this is, most of us only deal secondhand with the dreadful deaths and devastating disabilities of soldiers who have fought so hard and seen so much. The blood they spilled was far from home. We weren’t shaken by the explosions. Or deafened by the gunfire. Or sickened by the carnage.
In battlefields like Iraq, the picture’s different. With double-digit death tolls almost daily, many are numb to warfare in their own neighborhoods. Citizens in Afghanistan are accustomed to combat in their own cities. Now, in Syria, people are plummeting down the same sad path. These are the ones who should be weary of war, even more than us.
But when death and destruction become the norm, human nature kicks in. I’ll never forget a day during the Iranian revolution when a camera crew and I ran for our lives into an alley after a tank started shooting at us, and when we sprang, gasping, onto the next street, we landed in a thriving open marketplace, only a block from the tank’s deadly cannon-fire. As if these people’s world wasn’t turning upside down.
But life goes on.
During the troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland, another crew and I literally dived into an alleyway to escape Molotov cocktails and rubber bullets flying in every direction and almost tripped over little kids playing their version of cowboys and Indians: the cowboys were the Catholics, the Indians the Protestants. As if deadly warfare between two sects of Christianity was only a game.
But victims adapt.
Maybe my most vivid encounter with people inured to bloodshed saturating their societies occurred in Beirut. A crew and I wanted a safe viewpoint to videotape the battle for a gorge overlooking the airport. During the civil war there, anti-government militias loved to lob shells at the airport, forcing it to close and compelling travelers to rely on ferries from Cyprus to get in and out of Lebanon.
We liked the back deck of a house overlooking the gorge. But with a battle also raging on our route to the house, we had to zigzag through the line of fire, then sank to our bellies at the base of the front door, and knocked hard.
A woman answered — her face heavy with makeup, her hair in curlers, and feet in high heels. There we were, machine-gun fire off the front of her house and rocket fire off the back, and she’s all done up like she’s heading for a fancy-dress ball.
She let us use her deck, and after the crew crawled out back to record the battle, I started talking with this woman, saying something like, “Pretty bad out there today, isn’t it?,” to which she replied almost blandly, “No, we’re used to it. Some days it’s a lot worse.”
She wasn’t weary of war. She was anesthetized. Detached. Deadened.
Sometimes the world’s most powerful nation still ought to fight for a better world. What it costs us doesn’t come close to what it costs the people we’re helping.
We could be worse off than just weary.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
