Philip Slater On War

The third characteristic of agrarian societies is that they are warlike.

War as we know it, with standing armies, pitched battles, the taking of land by force, etc. was an invention of the agrarian era. Hunter-gatherers had occasional skirmishes, but land ownership was a meaningless concept to them, and without herds and crops there was no need for armies.

As Robert O'Connell observes in his definitive book on war, we were free of war for most of our existence on this planet, and "its onset and continuation were dependent on levels of ecological adaptation that were inherently transitory".

Today, when corporations are global, the economy is global, environmental issues are global, and all major problems faced by humans are global, when the nation-state is rapidly becoming obsolete, warfare between armies is increasingly meaningless.

Terrorists are not national. They are not armies. They are utterly decentralized international networks of murderers. Europeans, who have lived with terrorism a long time, actually capture and arrest terrorists, through efficient intelligence and police work, while our clueless president--still living in the past--makes war on Iraq, creating a bloody catastrophe in the Middle East while destroying democracy at home.