From the department of “no, shit, you don’t say, Sherlock” comes this little nugget for the annals of history from Ehud Barak, defense minister of Israel:
War is not a picnic.
Well blow me up and call me a love doll! That’s just profound. So, Ehud, if it’s not a picnic, then what, exactly, is war? It looks to me like you fancy it some sort of buffet with dead children, general carnage and wholesale destruction. Whole families destroyed… mmmm. Tasty, huh? The only time I’ve ever had artillery shells fired at me was in South Lebanon in 1994 when I was covering the work of UNIFIL in the buffer zone between Lebanon and Israel. The shells were coming from the IDF positions, and were being fired quite deliberately at the UN as some kind of territorial marking exercise. Like an ugly dog pissing off his neck of the woods. Not long after, of course, the IDF decided to screw the kabuki of warning shots and simply shelled a UN shelter directly, killing more than a hundred refugees.
No, Ehud, war is not a picnic. Not the way you conduct it. That’s why you should perhaps be a little pickier before you start one. Because the last time you and the frat boys that run things in your end of the world decided they wanted to throw a war, it kinda blew up in your face, didn’t it? No, pun intended.
