The destructiveness of war—short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide—is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong—wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, “The

Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.

And thus a majority of Serbs living in Serbia or abroad maintained right to the end of the Serb siege of Sarajevo, and even after, that the Bosnians themselves perpetrated the horrific “breadline massacre” in May 1992 and “market massacre” in February 1994, lobbing large-caliber shells into the center of their capital or planting mines in order to

No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.