In the wake of the Wesley Clark comments regarding the military experience of John McCain, I was reading a poll that indicated that many Americans believe that military experience is less important today in evaluating a presidential candidate than it used to be. I find that "unfortunate".

Personally I feel that if Bush's top advisors had had combat experience, it would have been less likely that they would have invaded Iraq so "casually". Only Colin Powell advised against such action, based upon his own extensive military background.

Ron

I know the conventional wisdom says that first-hand knowledge of the horrors of war will make a man less likely to start a war. However, I don't think history bears that out. If anything, living through those horrors seems to desensitize people to them, or even to give them a sense of having paid their dues enough to entitle them to send other men off to die. Many of the biggest warmongers in history were men whose younger years were spent fighting on the front lines. Napoleon went from being a young military officer to conquering much of Europe as France's leader. Adolf Hitler was more aware of the horrors of war than most people -- he was almost gassed to death as a corporal in the First World War, and yet is personally responsible for the biggest war in history. The three men most responsible for getting the US involved in Vietnam were Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, all three of whom had personal combat experience. The bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War, was between two political factions each led by a man who had combat experience in an earlier war. A combat veteran of that war went on to lead America into the colonial war against the Phillipines.

When I step back and look at history, I find it astonishing that this weird conventional wisdom can survive. From Alexander the Great in the ancient world up through the strongmen in Africa today, a huge number of those responsible for bloody wars of aggression have been people who spent their younger years on the front lines themselves. So, what leads us to believe such combat experience makes people less likely to casually invade other countries?