Ain't gonna study war no more?

The sniper war over American Sniper that began on Twitter and escalated to radio and the blogosphere has taken aim mostly at Michael Moore and Seth Rogen. But they are peripheral targets: Reviewers fired the opening shots, and the more left-leaning they were, the more dismissive or disturbed they were about the movie. The real target is war itself, and how the developed world feels about it.

Responses to this film—which remains No. 1 at the box office for the fourth consecutive week, grossing more than $200 million—are all over the map: tears, cheers, and jeers. Some detractors focus on the flaws of the title character; others claim the movie “glorifies” war. Karen Spears Zacharias—a Christian writer, veterans’ advocate, and Gold Star Daughter whose father was killed in Vietnam—offers a more personal reaction. In “Why I refuse to see American Sniper,” she writes movingly of three men: the father she barely knew, the doctor who tried to save him, and Sgt. Gordon Wofford, a Vietnam veteran she later befriended. Wofford’s jaw was shot away by an enemy sniper whose next shot killed the medic at his side. It’s in their memory she cannot see a film honoring a sniper, no matter how brave or honorable or patriotic he was.

“Hollywood has a way of fictionalizing war, of making it all about ‘us’ and ‘them,’” she writes. That’s not fiction, though; it’s the nature of the beast. Most wars are premised on manufactured rights and wrongs, when the real motivation is power and misplaced loyalty. World War I was like that. During the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 “us” and “them” became simply “us,” and it should have ended there. But it didn’t, and that’s the greatest tragedy of the modern era.

Still, sometimes the line between us and them must be clearly drawn, even though some of us may act like them, and vice versa. “Smart” warfare promised a more nuanced approach, aided by ongoing diplomacy, sci-fi technology, and public relations. But all it did was create a power vacuum in Iraq that ISIS swarmed in to fill. Warfare isn’t smart—it’s brutal, ham-fisted, indiscriminate, always tragic, and sometimes necessary. Once a nation determines to stop some greater evil, it had better be all in to win. Make it quick, make it definite, sign the surrender terms, and then begin the process of turning enemies into friends. It worked with Japan and Germany.

Sometime during the American struggle for independence, John Adams wrote, “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history … in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” He must have been in an optimistic mood. The need may skip a generation, but it does seem that sons and grandsons will have to study war. “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?” is a slogan of the wishful-thinking 1960s. Somebody always comes—we have that on good authority (Matthew 24:6). If the aggressor is the only game in town, nobody wins.