Iraq War repeats history as told in ancient letter “War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.” – Erasmus “Same as it ever was.” – The Talking Heads

Here we go again, yet another year of the Iraq occupation, and I find it hard to expand on anything I said almost exactly five years ago in a guest column for The Spokesman-Review.

It was excellent timing (not) for an anti-war editorial – the picture of Saddam’s falling statue dominated the front page – and I took a good deal of heat for my “lack of patriotism.” Same as it ever is.

Here’s what I concluded, alluding to the so-called military strategy of the campaign:

“This is an unwarranted, unjustified, immoral attack on a sovereign nation that has not attacked us, has not threatened us, has never been anything but ‘bad.’ And our leaders wanted it all along. The rest of the world trembles in shock and awe at the demise of true American ideals.”

Enough said. I find studying humanity’s debacles through history a source of both solace and horror, with an abased resignation that it is, indeed, the same as it ever was.

Let’s go back 500 years, to the days of that Christian monk-scholar-humanist Desiderius Erasmus. His “The Complaint of Peace,” published in 1521, remains the most scathing indictment of war that I’ve ever read, and I’d like to let the good monk have his say.

The language has aged five centuries, but not his tongue, a lashing that could have scoured us yesterday. Or five years ago.

Let me set the stage, as the 15th century gives way and the 16th passes through its adolescence:

It is, as usual, a time of chaos. Mad Savonarola lights his bonfire of the vanities. The Medici, Leo X, follows the “Warrior Pope,” Julius II.

Leonardo and Michelangelo vie for supremacy. Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, beginning the Reformation.

And Erasmus watches it all, hoping for a new, peaceful Christian century. However it is not to be, as Luther tells him (and tells him) in “The Bondage of the Will,” reminding Erasmus: “Christ openly declares, ‘I come not to send peace but a sword …’ But I am sorry that I find it necessary to teach so great a theologian as yourself these things like a schoolboy, when you ought to be a teacher of others.”

Ouch.

To which Erasmus might have responded from his Complaint, speaking as the Goddess of Peace: “As Peace, am I not praised by both me and gods as the very source and defender of all good things? What is there of prosperity, of security, or of happiness that cannot be ascribed to me? On the other hand, is not war the destroyer of all things and the very seed of evil?”

Touché.

A couple of snippets from the Complaint, this one on the causes of war:

“After all the pretences thrown out, and the artifices used, to irritate the vulgar, there often lurks (as the true cause of wars) in the bosom of kings, some private, mean, and selfish motive, which is to force their subjects to take up weapons to kill one another, at the word of command, as they wish to evince their loyalty.

“But when kings can find no cause … as indeed they seldom can, then they set their wits to work to invent some fictitious but plausible occasion for a rupture. They will make use of the names of foreign countries, artfully rendered odious to the people, in order to feed the popular odium, till it becomes ripe for war, and thirsts for the blood of the outlandish nation, whose very name is rendered a cause of hostility.”

Sound familiar? Saddam, Iraq, Sept. 11, evildoers. Same as it ever was.

And this, on the actions of a poor leader:

“Now, will a king of such a disposition … be easily prevailed upon to extort money from his own people to put it into the pockets of foreign mercenaries and alien subsidiaries? Will he reduce his own people to distress, perhaps even for bread, in order to fill the coffers of military despots and commanders? Will he be lavish of blood, as well as treasure (neither of them his own), and expose the lives, as well as expend the property, of his people?”

Halliburton, Blackwater, New Orleans, no child’s behind left, dirty skies, clear-cut forests … oh, enough. Same as it will ever be?

Do let’s change the tune.