PORPHYROGENITUS has a good post on war, anti-war, and the stereotypes that anti-war people have about pro-war people. Read it all, but here’s an excerpt:

One of the bits of conventional wisdom that vexes me is the widely-held assumption that people who are in favor of fighting this war (or any given war) just love war and/or have no conception of the consequences of war, of the suffering involved, the sacrifices that we are asking people to make, the loss people will experience as a result, and the fact that many of those we are sending to fight, and quite possibly innocents elsewhere, will never be the same even if they live.

Over the last several days I have been particularly melancholy. Yesterday was the hardest Remembrance Day of my life. I’m deliberately using the name for the holiday that is common in other countries, because its connotations are apt in this case. I couldn’t stop tearing up. I couldn’t stop weeping. Which is sort of a problem when one is at work, so I kept to myself and I left early.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the lads in their trench. I couldn’t stop thinking about the men and women who are not only fighting, but dying or suffering horrible wounds in a war I supported and continue to support. About people in hospital beds with their faces or limbs blown off. About people who, even if they are not injured in this fight, will see things – see things they do to others – that are difficult to live with. This is of course only appropriate.

My belief is that it is the pro-war people, not the anti-war people, who tend to have a deeper understanding of exactly these things. Frankly I hope this belief is correct because it must be correct, because it is a responsibility we bear and must accept when we favor such a course of action. In some moral sense, those who oppose the war do not have to have it to the same degree, because they aren’t asking people to face this. In other ways, I think it would be better if they did have a greater knowledge of both war and the alternatives to war than I think many of them do, because they bear a different moral responsibility, one that is no less grave, as a result of their opposition. And the consequences are really not as dissimilar as they seem to assume.

Yes.