Example research essay topic: Persian Gulf War History Of The United States - 1,692 words

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War Making I would like to start the essay with the words of Chris Hedges, the author of "War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. " War is Zen. I mean, it's a pretty powerful moment. I mean, even colors are brighter, and you are just thrown in a way that, you know, would be hard to replicate completely into the present. I mean, maybe a great athlete feels that. But war has a way of focusing you, focusing your mind. (Hedges, 1992). Hedges is a past war reporter, and he approaches his theme with sorrow as one who has thrived on the thrill of war.

Hedges states that American self-scrutiny after Vietnam gave us a benefit in recognizing our own misdeeds. But he sees that vanishing. "The question is whether America now courts death. We no longer seem chastened. " But his own account about this period seems to demonstrate another confusing set of myths. He praises the Vietnam War Memorial as "part of America's battle back to truth" because it was not "funded or organized by the state but by those who survived and insisted we not forget. " (Hedges). After the Vietnam War or the defeat in Vietnam we became a better nation.

We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. We were forced to stand outside and see ourselves, and much of what we saw made us feel uncomfortable. That, if you go back to Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontent, " he talks about that constant battle in human society and with individuals between Eros, the force of love, and Thanatos, the death instinct. And I think that after the Vietnam War Eros was ascendant.

Freud would argue that always in human society one of these forces is ascendant. War always has to have a mythic element in order to be prosecuted, and once you lose that mythic element, as we did in the war in Vietnam, once it became a sensory war where it didn't mean anything - and he mentioned the futility of it -- once you realize that it's futile, then it's almost impossible for a nation to continue carrying out a war like that, and we saw that in Vietnam. That mythic element, that lie of war, is a fundamental part of wartime society and always of the nation. I mean, the state, of course, the pageantry within the military, and the press in the end. (Hedges, 1992).

I think that we " ve come to believe that war is a game, war is cost-free, and if we don't get caught in Iraq and we continue with this kind of attitude, we are going to get caught. As history shows, every nation that fails to understand that war is a poison does get caught. There are times when we need war. I'm not a pacifist.

I supported the intervention in Sarajevo or in Bosnia. I supported the intervention in Kosovo. I believe we failed as a nation by not intervening Rwanda when we had the power to do so. However, just as a cancer patient has to ingest poison in order to fight off the disease, that's what we do when we ingest war within us. And if we don't understand what war is and how deadly it is, it can destroy us. (Hedges, 1992). The book called People's History of the United States is another book that restates the true reasons for waging war.

Its author Howard Zinn looks very sincere about the whole chain the war events. We have to know that Howard Zinn said, "Patriotism is the highest form of dissent" in a July 2002 dialogue with Sharon Back, of the left-wing. And we have to know that when he offered this unsophisticated, self-serving declaration he made no mention of Thomas Jefferson. Zinn was a bomber in World War II, an passionate believer in the need to fight fascism by force of arms.

One essential event came when Zinn and his fellow pilots were ordered to bomb a few thousand German soldiers who were trapped in Royal, France, a few weeks before the war ended. Zinn, for the benefit of the unenlightened, is the leftist, America-bashing historian and author of A People's History of the United States. Zinn's vision of the world is through the Marxist prism of class struggle. He has nothing but disdain for wealth and "private profit. " He acknowledges that his book is a "biased account" and that "objectivity is impossible and undesirable" because, as he puts is, "I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be part of a social struggle. " (Zinn, 1997). If American history were a glass, Zinn obsesses only on the portion that's empty, diminishing or finessing the full body of American goodness and achievement. Patriotism, very merely, is love of country.

This doesn't mean blind love of country or mindless fealty to government. Of course you can love your country while also disagreeing with some of the things it does and is. The point is that patriots love it on balance. There's nothing inherently unpatriotic about dissent. And, yes, dissenters can, indeed, be patriots.

But it's just as true that some dissenters aren't patriots. Throughout most of the last century, many members of the Communist Party USA were dissenters but not patriots. Their principal loyalties were to their ideology and its home, the Soviet Union. Our own Founding Fathers were dissenters to British rule. They were surely the first American patriots, but they certainly weren't patriots to the crown. Benedict Arnold expressed his dissent to the American Revolution by treason ously betraying it.

That wasn't the "highest form of patriotism, " it was the lowest. Like many other lefties, Zinn hates America. Zinn won't declare that in so many words. The America he hypothetically loves doesn't exist and never has. His make-believe vision is of a socialist, just, peaceful, demilitarized, environmentally pure, utopian America, subservient to an equally enlightened, collectivist world government. What he despises is the real history, the heroes, institutions, economics, sovereignty, values and lifestyles of bourgeois America as it is.

Dissent isn't the highest form of patriotism. Brave and dedicated men and women in uniform are, right now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, serving their country and putting their lives on the line. That's the highest form of patriotism. (Zinn, 1997). There was a slow, steady reclaiming of war. We saw this in the Reagan administration with Grenada, Panama. By the Persian Gulf War, war became fun again.

War became a way to ennoble us as a people, as a society. We reveled in our own military prowess. You and I saw this, I think, Neal, when we came back to the United States. I mean, my react -- I was just appalled at this. I mean, war is always tragic and always should be seen as tragic.

And I think that since the Persian Gulf War, we have as a society, to steal this idea from Freud, been living in an age of Thanatos, in an age of death. And I liken it to the end of the 19 th century where war became sport for the aristocracy; everybody would go charging off to the Sudan and kill 10, 000 Mahdist troops, and seven soldiers, all of whom were Egyptian mercenaries, would die. War at its inception often begins and feels like love. It's not love, of course; it's a drug, it's a narcotic, it's death. And in the end, you know, it calls for the annihilation of the other, that's what war is about, but when prosecuted over the long term, even for those of us who don't carry guns, it ends in self-annihilation. The war in Iraq is certainly the war on terror - this kind of crowd mentality where all of us are sort of thrown together.

There's a kind of equality that comes that's expressed by this obsession with the same goal. And this is something that goes away once war ends, but that during war does create this sense of unity. It also disturbingly, because ostracism from the crowd in a wartime situation is so devastating, creates a kind of suspension of criticism, of self-criticism and criticism of our society. Even to raise those questions in wartime setting becomes treasonous. So I think we do see it.

We see it in the way that the state hands us a language in which to speak, which is also always part of war. The war on terrorism -- all the cliches, all the jingoism, and because we " re pounded with these cliches and this way of speaking, it becomes very, very difficult to speak or think outside the box. One saw it in the Balkans. Even when you feel this disquiet, you don't have the vocabulary to express it, and this is always the case in wartime and is what makes reconciliation in wartime societies so difficult because they must once again find a common vocabulary and a common way to speak. In the end, looking in the root of the views, we can conclude that the traditional concept of national security is based on the nation state. The role of the state, though, has, in its time, harshly declined with the end of the Cold War and the growing importance of trade.

The role of governments has also been reduced to being facilitators of personal transactions. With this, the US government should end asserting its pretense of worldwide military control, since it faces no more outside threats, and begin addressing issues that threaten the comfort of the people. The most bothersome notions are the ones we take for granted. This is not only because they are well-known but because they exist in our way of thinking.

They roll off our tongues without our ever ending to think what they really mean. We come to accept them as established truths, like Biblical commands. Words: 1, 632. Bibliography: Hedges, C. War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. New York: Viking Press, 1992.

Zinn, H. A People's History of the United States. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

Research essay sample on Persian Gulf War History Of The United States