War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges
A powerful and unsettling book about the reality of war
(Review posted 26 Jul 2004 01:23:38)

This is a hard book to summarize, or at any rate a hard book to summarize well. It's about war, about how awful (in the "very bad" sense) war is, about what war is really like, the effect it has on societies, the uses to which bad people put it. The author knows about war, because he's seen it multiple times and close at hand. He tells us things about people who fight wars, people who are victims of wars, people who (like him) report on wars and risk becoming addicted to them, people who use wars for their own ends, and the effects war has on the societies it touches.

While unequivocal about the evil of war, Hedges isn't claiming that it's never a necessary evil; he just doesn't want us to forget that even when necessary it's still evil. He strips away a few things I've been comforting myself with; he says that the whole Bosnian thing, for instance, was not a case of a centuries-old feud just following its ancient course:

There was no reason for the war in Bosnia. The warring sides invented national myths and histories to mask the fact that Croats, Muslims, and Serbs are nearly indistinguishable... Ethnic warfare is a business, and the Mercedes and mansions of the warlords in Belgrade prove it.

His prose feels mostly free of party and faction, reporting from the heart of what he's actually seen and lived in various war zones. He does veer now and then into anti-Americanism that doesn't feel entirely even-handed to me, but perhaps that also comes from his experience; I don't feel qualified to say.

A good book, an important book, and worth reading regardless of where you stand on any particular issue.