Perhaps the primary value of war – from the point of view of national leaders and their loyal followers – is that it places 100 percent of the blame for whatever’s wrong on the other guy: the enemy. And thus there’s no alternative but to kill “him,” which nowadays amounts to slaughtering and dismembering anybody and everybody who lives in his sector of the planet, including children . . . though that part isn’t said out loud.

It’s not even “winning” that matters, because in truth there is no winning when it comes to war, just ongoing preparation for the next one. Good ol’ George W. Bush described the phenomenon with such clarity in his 2002 State of the Union address, when he said that North Korea, Iran and Iraq – three countries the United States once controlled – constituted, in their defiance, “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

We all know what happened next. We invaded and shattered Iraq. A million or so people died. Nothing changed. Certainly nothing was learned.

For instance, these are the words of George W. . . . excuse me, Benjamin . . . Netanyahu, speaking two-plus decades later before the Israeli Knesset, in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel:

“Hamas is part of the axis of evil of Iran, Hezbollah and their minions. They seek to destroy the State of Israel and murder us all. They want to return the Middle East to the abyss of the barbaric fanaticism of the Middle Ages. . . .”

From Netanyahu’s point of view, the Hamas attack was completely unprovoked. It had nothing to do with Israel’s occupation of Palestine, turning Gaza into a concentration camp for 2 million people, continually “mowing the lawn” there, etc. After all, the enemy always bears 100 percent of the blame.

And how national leaders love their enemies – just not in that “love thy enemy as thyself” way. A good enemy – and a war against that enemy – create national unity: “Our goal is victory,” Netanyahu declared, “a crushing victory over Hamas, toppling its regime and removing its threat to the State of Israel once and for all.”

He added: “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”

Law of the jungle?

These words made me pause, oh so briefly. Netanyahu – murderer of children – actually uttered a sliver of truth, unintentionally, of course. His genocidal war on Palestine is, indeed, a struggle between humanity and the law of the jungle. It’s a struggle between brutal force – this is the “humanity” part, simplistic and domination-obsessed – and transcendent sanity: the law of the jungle, i.e., the laws of survival that have evolved into our global........

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