Feb. 22, 2015

The American people have spoken.  Fifty-seven percent of them say they support boots on the ground in Syria to defeat ISIS.

Can 57 percent of Americans even find Syria on a map?

There are related statistics.  I'll begin with the statistics in the following syllogism:

The human brain is 90 percent emotions, instincts, intuitions, and motor functions; and 10 percent reason, rationality, and logic.

I'm human.

Therefore, I'm 90 percent emotions, instincts, intuitions, and motor functions; and 10 percent reason, rationality, and logic.

This means that my first reaction to the barbarity of ISIS was the same as the first reaction of most Americans—namely, we should kill every one of the barbarians, either by sending in troops or turning the land they occupy into molten sand.

Of course, politicians and commentators engaged in demagoguery to feed the emotions.

Then I took a two-hour walk to calm down and let reason take control of my thinking

Reason took me back to the history of the First World War, when American doughboys marched onto troop ships with patriot fervor, to the cheers of civilians, in order to teach the Huns a lesson about killing 27 Americans when German U-boats torpedoed the Lusitania.

Nearly 117,000 of the doughboys went on to die in the war.  Some lesson.  To avenge the deaths of 27 civilians, 117,000 soldiers died.  That was a ratio of 4,333 soldiers killed to avenge each civilian death.

The ratio doesn't count the tens of millions of deaths caused by the Bolshevik Revolution, which was triggered by the Great War.  Nor does it count the tens of millions of deaths stemming from the rise of Hitler, which in turn stemmed from Germans wanting to restore their honor and mete out vengeance for the draconian terms of the Versailles treaty after the "war to end all wars."

Fast forward:  About 4,500 American soldiers have died in Iraq to avenge the 2,996 civilians killed in 9/11 and to restore the Bush family honor.  That's a ratio of 1.5 to 1.  I guess that's progress over the ratio in World War I.  However, if we include approximately 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths from the war, the ratio becomes 35 deaths for each 9/11 death.  And if we include all of the future deaths stemming from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein—which resulted in the rise of ISIS—we might eventually get up to World War I ratios.

Honor and vengeance are very dangerous when under the control of the 90 percent of the brain instead of the 10 percent.

Reason also took me back to the Vietnam War, which has special significance to me, because I was an artillery officer on the way to Indochina in 1971, when Nixon cancelled my orders.  I was prepared to kill people who were no threat to America, by burning them with phosphorous rounds, turning them into Swiss cheese with rounds full of tiny darts, or shredding them into hamburgers in their holes or in the open with high-explosive rounds that exploded overhead or on the ground.  My artillery skills were so good that my kill-count would have certainly exceeded that of American sniper Chris Kyle.

Ah, that was long before my reason overcame my youthful testosterone.  I'm still not a pacifist, but I'm hopefully more thoughtful about military interventions.

During my two-hour walk, I also reflected on the savagery of the European religious wars centuries ago, the unspeakable brutality of the first sixteen centuries of Christianity, and the sadism and cruelties of the first 200,000 years of human existence after homo sapiens stood on two feet and entered the African savannah.  Europeans only came to their senses—to reason—after they finally became exhausted from bludgeoning each other, immolating each other, beheading each other, disemboweling each other and forcing the victims to eat their own entrails, boiling each other in oil, and killing each other in scores of other creative ways.

If you can stomach the gruesomeness, visit the torture museum in Paris to see what Europeans did to each other.

The barbarity of ISIS is not new.  It's just late in human history.  The reasons don't matter.  What matters is whether the United States should do anything about it other than defending the homeland.

History shows that virtually all terrorist movements burn out from overreach and lack of popular support.  And surveys show that only a small minority of Muslims support Islamic terrorism.

If the United States were to once again send troops to the Middle East, will fewer or more Muslims support anti-American terrorism out of honor and vengeance?  That's a rhetorical question.

And if we don't send troops, what will heavily-armed Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia do about ISIS?  Will they let ISIS become a terrorist caliphate and destabilize their own regimes, or will they annihilate them when they realize that the U.S. isn't going to help?

Either way, there is going to be a lot more bloodshed in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.  This means that the 90 percent of our brains will be very active if we don't let reason take charge.

And last, whatever happens to ISIS, the centuries-old sectarian hatred between Shiites and Sunni is going to have to run its course until both sides become exhausted and sign for peace, or until one side annihilates the other, whichever comes first.  The United States can do little about this, just as no country outside of Europe could do much about Europe's religious wars.

Is that the 10 percent or 90 percent of my brain talking?  Is it reason or emotions?

Hell, I can't be objective about that, but I'm at least asking the question, which is more than most of the 57 percent are doing.