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[We could just pound their missile facilities to a pulp from afar.]

With what intel? They don’t put up a big sign that says “missiles are located at this arrow” at each missile site. They’re not only dispersed, but dummies are created and emplaced. We definitely blasted a lot of dummy tanks and other heavy equipment in Serbia during the Bosnian crisis.

We make use of allied Arab intel as well as Special Forces operators in pinpointing enemy targets. How do you get either when the entire region is Iranian territory? How do you get landing rights to do repeated sorties, or do they all have to fly off aircraft carriers or Diego Garcia? And what about the missiles you miss? One miss = hundreds of thousands of American dead. All to prevent a few dozen GI’s from getting killed a year? Does the military exist to prevent harm to civilians, or are civilians just a milk cow for the military to have fun playing with new and interesting toys?

We could save the lives of a huge number of cops and firefighters if they were allowed to ignore incident reports, too. But that would kind of defeat the point of having salaried (vs unpaid volunteer) police and fire departments.

Off-topic, but an interesting take on the topic of war:

[For the classical age Greeks, in Homer’s Iliad, what is often missed is that for them the Trojans would have been the side of civilization, not the Greeks. They are the polis they’d recognize in their own time. Inside the city, the social ties of husbands and wives, parents and children, they fully function. There is mercy to the weak, understanding to the governed, a desire for normality to return, an understanding that war shouldn’t be the main purpose of human life. As Fagles commented, those were sentiments that had no place in the armed camp off shore.

But the Trojans had the defects of their virtues: they were not as at home in the ugly business of war as the Acheans. The main champion of the Trojans is a guy who might have been a great warrior, but was truly meant for peacetime: as a husband, as a father, as an heir to the throne. It was him saying goodbye to his wife and infant remains one of the classic scenes of Western literature, not him slaying somebody. But he was doomed to die in battle to the man who has no family, no ties, whose main purpose in life is simply to kill people, and has just let several of his comrades die over a petty quarrel over a slave girl: the man who was utterly, totally made for war, who finds his purpose in there.

This all made one of the biggest points (another one was the sheer futility of it all in the beginning of Book 12) of the Iliad much clearer: no matter how great your civilization is, it will be doomed to destruction if met by an outside force of superior might. Armed force can only be warded off by a superior armed force. So, if people over 2500 years ago clearly understood this, why do we not today? Why do we have people who do think that war can be anything other than the unambiguous, amoral-for better or worse-expression of the extremes in human nature? ]