The U.S. attitude to warfare is a puzzling thing. It has been so since the Second World War, which was a clear battle between armies with distinctive uniforms. Then the clarity ended.

It was the last time Americans fought a war that everyone, themselves included, fully understood. There’s something wretchedly appealing about that.

I am thinking of the fallout from the Omar Khadr settlement after a Supreme Court of Canada ruling on what happened off the battlefield when Canadian officials went along with the U.S. torture of a 15-year-old Canadian citizen.

I am thinking of the four Canadian soldiers killed and eight wounded in Afghanistan in 2002 — the same year Khadr was taken prisoner — when a U.S. fighter pilot bombed them in “friendly fire.”

The pilot, Maj. Harry Schmidt, was eventually reprimanded and fined $5,600 U.S.

As the CBC reported, Schmidt appealed, lost and later sued the U.S. military for allegedly violating his privacy. He accepted no blame. The Canadian families did not sue him. How could they?

War is complicated, something Americans have rarely been willing to concede. They tend to see war as if it were the Super Bowl, a staged event with simple rules, omnipresent umpires and cameras, and frequent, scheduled breaks. Everyone makes money.

But war is a blood soup with horrible lumps: burned baby hands, bits of bone and tendon, severed heads, desiccated corpses, scraps of fabric, dusty bones, the hoods of Abu Ghraib, families annihilated when angry male veterans return, eyeballs, bullet casings ...

In the Second World War, soldiers fought until they died or Hitler did, end of story. Modern war isn’t like that.

Without a draft to evade, it seems more like an ordinary job with “contractors” (once called “mercenaries”), tours of duty, retirements and pensions. Death is relatively rare. The horrible work is largely done by working class grunts, as the recent USS Fitzgerald collision at sea revealed.

The U.S. fought and failed in the Korean War. It shouldn’t have invaded Vietnam in the first place, but it did and lost, bringing the genocidal Khmer Rouge into Cambodia. It shouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan either, or Iraq, creating chaos that invited another horror, another style of violent death.

The U.S. failed to learn from its own history, repeatedly waging war with guerrillas who spoke languages Americans couldn’t be bothered to learn. The blowback has been fantastic.

The failure to understand modern war is summed up by “unlawful combatant.” It’s a phrase dreamed up by Americans who don’t grasp the informality of soldiering, of foreigners being deeply attached to their own soil and fighting for it until they died or the U.S. was driven out.

It is a useful term for torturers who, despite the International Criminal Court that the U.S. won’t join lest it be accused of war crimes, wanted permission to ply their trade.

Americans, fine people that they hope they are, persist in thinking that war is rational. It is not. The Supreme Court of Canada is by its nature rational, and it insists that the Canadian government not make use of the American willingness to torture our citizens.

The Second World War did not bring justice. Nothing could ever match Nazi Germany doing the worst things humans have ever done. It brought respite, which is a different thing entirely.

Ken Burns’s new documentary, The Vietnam War, will be shown on PBS in September. In preparation, I urge you to watch The Fog of War, the 2003 Errol Morris documentary in which the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara — incinerator, napalmer and bomber of millions from the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo to the Vietnam catastrophe — talked directly to the camera about what he had learned.

Said McNamara: “What ‘the fog of war’ means is war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

McNamara’s extraordinary conclusion — though it was not a confession of guilt — was that the U.S. never understood what it was doing in Vietnam. He placed his hope in the American people’s retrospective wisdom.

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To this end, he quoted T.S. Eliot. “We shall not cease from exploring/And at the end of our exploration/We will return to where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

He died in 2009, having lived to see two more pointless American wars. The fog of war had never cleared.

hmallick@thestar.ca

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