Aggression, War, Killing: Are We Killer Apes?

Our situation looks crazier every day.

We're currently fighting a Bush-Cheney-Halliburton war in Iraq that most people in America don't want.

The younger Bush first got us into the war maybe to knock off Saddam Hussein for trying to kill Bush Elder -- not for having "weapons of mass destruction," which did not exist. What moved the American people, most of whom knew little about Iraq or its history, were repeated television images of Saddam firing a rifle into the air from the balcony of his palace. Saddam looked crazy and dangerous, so we went to war.

Then, when it became obvious there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush told us we needed to bring "democracy" to the tribal confusion running amok in Babylonia, a nice idea that even Anthony Quinn and Peter O'Toole in the movie Lawrence of Arabia couldn't pull off. With or without Iraqi democracy, the "reconstruction" of Iraq meant fat contracts for American corporations, and the White House-Halliburton propaganda machine continued on a roll.

And now, as the democracy-in-Iraq fantasy vaporizes on TV every day in front of our faces, Bush tells us the purpose of the war is to fight the few thousand al Queda jihadists able to enter Iraq only because we first turned the country into scrambled eggs.

It's a circus, folks. Our generals tell us there's no military solution in Iraq, and any possible "political" solution seems more and more a mirage. The only continuing "purpose" of the Iraq war, if it has any purpose, is to redistribute taxpayer money to military contractors and their shareholders. If you don't believe that, follow the money and see where it leads you.

As the redistribution of money continues, every day the lottery of war chooses more young American soldiers and marines for the meat grinder. A war without reason reduces to a monstrous machine to create amputees and corpses. The machine grinds on, sucking in the kids and turning out body parts.

But there's a fundamental question: Why did we go to war so easily? Why was it so easy to get ordinary Americans to jump up and down like trained dogs in the circus of such a war? It's fascinating that Americans allowed themselves to be led by their noses into a stupid war by a crowd of "cut-and-run" draft-dodgers, money-grubbers, and self-servers, none of whom have ever been at personal risk in combat, and all of whom seem to think war is a board game played in an air-conditioned "situation" room. They ought to see what it's like when someone's head is blown through the air to land at your feet. "I had other priorities," Cheney said. Of course he did.

They tell us to fight an unreasonable war and we do it. Do we like war that much? And if so, why? Where do aggression, violence, war, and killing come from? What are the roots?

In war, young men are told to kill other young men. Young men are trained to kill others. In the military, they don't teach you to shoot clay pigeons, they teach you to shoot people. Men who would not kill women and children can be taught to kill other men as easily as they can be taught to turn a screw with a screwdriver.

But that doesn't mean men so taught enjoy what they do or actually do it on command in combat. Most of them don't, as much research has indicated. The firing rate (the percentage of soldiers who actually shoot at the enemy when the enemy is in front of them) on the front lines is not what many civilians think it is. In World War II, the firing rates were 15 to 20 percent. The firing rates in later wars were higher due only to special training of recruits. Most soldiers need to be conditioned to overcome their resistance to killing, and this has apparently been so for centuries.

Some people define aggression as a fighting instinct in animals and humans directed against members of the same species. Instinct means innate behavior, and innate behavior means inherited behavior, and inherited behavior means genetically determined behavior. To call aggression an instinct is to close the question by calling the question answered.

But there's really no hard evidence forcing such a call.

There are questions: Why are some people, children and adults, more aggressive than others? Why does one decade differ in national and group and individual aggression and violence from another decade, one century from another century, one age from another age? These are the important political questions about aggression and war.

To close our understanding of aggression by a resort to the idea of "aggressive instinct" is gene-mongering -- an attitude of no use in explaining human differences in time and place.

So are war and aggression inevitable human activities? The answer is no. The next time someone says it's all in the genes, look to see if they're cherry-picking their evidence.

Meanwhile, we seem to be stepping into quicksand in a time of chaos, American bravado confronting jihadist bravado. Yes, they want to kill us and we need to stop them. But we certainly haven't done ourselves much good by jumping up and down like trained dogs at the crack of the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton propaganda whip, the whip of ringmasters who smirk at the camera with phony stories and phony promises. Bush tells us he's credible because he reads intelligence reports.

Sure.