The case for bombing Syria

Michael J. Totten (The Case for Bombing Assad):

...War is hell and always will be, but it’s less hellish now than it was. The mood almost everywhere on earth during the smoldering aftermath of the two world wars was let’s never do that again. Alas, the first wasn’t the war to end all wars as so many had hoped, and genocide didn’t go the way of the dodo after the second.

Even so—and hard as it is to believe for anyone who pays even the slightest attention to news coverage—war is on its way down if not out. 

In his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard Professor Steven Pinker makes a compelling case that homicidal violence of all kinds (including crime as well as war) have been steadily declining for centuries and that we are currently living in the least violent era of our species’ history.

Take a look, for instance, at his graph[above] for war-related deaths since the end of World War II...

Later: Totten's riff on Vladimir Putin later in the story is well worth reading.

Mother Jones

Kevin Drum:

Much of this is due to the Republican tax bill, of course, which has showered Wall Street with billions and billions of dollars...