At some point, a US president may need to send soldiers into a situation in which they will very likely die, in order to win a war. It has happened before, and it may happen again. If the president allows visits to wounded veterans to weaken his resolve, the consequences could be very bad. That's what Eliot Cohen is alluding to. He is not suggesting that the president should not care -- he is suggesting that the president needs to do what is necessary to win a war if one happens.
> Be smart, war is a racket, and suggesting a president should not be worried about the lives of the people he harms is fucked up.
Nobody suggested that the president should not worry about the lives of soldiers. Your interpretation is unreasonably uncharitable and is in fact a straw man.
Not all wars can or should be won. For example, the war on drugs cannot be won, just like the war on alcohol was a mistake.
Sometimes, the greatest things a leader / president can do, is to acknowledge that he was (we were) wrong. However, pride prevents that. Once you decided to enter a war, you are entirely focused on winning it.
The war on terror is so-so.
There are a lot of decapitations and mass graves for something that isn't a war. If the people fighting aren't soldiers, what are they?
(By the way, soldiers generally don't decapitate enemies these days; doing so is a war crime.)
The police state doesn't carry out showy public executions like the cartels do, but they have ruined many people's lives for no good reason and they have put plenty of otherwise innocent people in a grave.
And guess what? The American people pay for both sides. They pay for the cartels and they pay for the police state.
If the war on drugs never existed there wouldn't be any cartels in the first place. It's pure idiocy compounded with greed and profiteering on other people's misery.
You can't have the one of the highest percentage of the population in prison and call yourself a free country. It's bold faced contradiction. The USA beats out Turkmenistan FFS.
If soldiers wage war and then decapitate people (like Daesh does) then that's a war crime.
Debatable. The police men / DEA involved probably feel like soldiers sometimes. The drug lords and governments in south america certainly have soldiers involved.
I'm talking about real wars, not metaphorical wars.
What war ? That's the war Butler is talking about. There's no winning or loosing endgame in that kind of war, because the most positive (for the initiators) is being done with prolonging it.
That a president should be a callous bastard and just do what's good for the military industrial complex sounds pretty insane.
> There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
If the president needs to win a war to defend our homes or for the Bill of Rights, then (according to this reasoning) they should not go to Walter Reed. War is usually a racket, yes, but it's hard to know exactly when the cure is worse than the disease. Probably is right now, sure, but the Revolutionary War? Civil War? Fought for economic reasons, yes, but also for some correct reasons.
Reading the comments below, I come to understand that many are missing the point of the essay, or speech as it was intended originally.
For modern readers, Butler's words are not to be taken directly but in context. Butler's point is that war is a racket. That is it. Funny right. If you are to ignore all the details about the casualties and who said what and who did what, you are still left with the essence of the speech. War is a racket. Repeat after me :) If you instill the mindset that war is a racket then all the pieces fall into place. It becomes very clear that war has no regard for human life. That it is detached from reality of life and death.
"Eliot A. Cohen, an official in the George W. Bush administration who is now a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, said that Mr. Obama’s trips to Walter Reed may have been the reason, and that future presidents should avoid such visits.
“A president has to be psychologically prepared to send people into harm’s way and to get a good night’s sleep,” Mr. Cohen said. “And anything they do that might cripple them that way means they’re not doing their job.”" -- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/us/politics/obama-walter-r...
"they’re not doing their job" --- their job being what?
Be smart, war is a racket, and suggesting a president should not be worried about the lives of the people he harms is fucked up. Additionally, presidents should visit hospitals in Syria maybe. Maybe then they will not make the same actions.