Yesterday I finished reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration, a fictionalized account of Siegfried Sassoon’s pacifist declaration against the Great War and his negotiated treatment for neurasthenia in Craiglockhart hospital. The Great War earned its name partly because of the tremendous failure of diplomacy that led to its inception, the stunning failure of strategy that accompanied an unprecedented deployment of new technology, and the unimaginable level of slaughter accomplished by all parties. Barker uses Sassoon – a Military Cross recipient – to examine concepts of duty, courage, and camaraderie from the perspective of men who experienced the conflagration and were forever changed by it.

The beauty of a work like Regeneration is that it contains so many [timeless] Truths. In the present day we need to consider what our civilization learned from experiences like the Great War and the century of warfare that followed. Influential analysts on the ideological right like Max Boot are beating the war drum at the Council on Foreign Relations and in popular venues like the Los Angeles Times. Every leading GOP Presidential candidate in 2012 – with the exception of Ron Paul – has advocated military intervention against Iran. And in what looks like a case of “déjà vu all over again”, the media is gleefully acting as military enabler.

Consider this passage at the beginning of Part 3, when the Army psychologist Rivers is reflecting on the stained glass depictions in church:

Obvious choices for the east window: the two bloody bargains on which a civilization claims to be based. The bargain, Rivers thought, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies are founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns.

The son enters into the covenant and accepts a duty. What is the duty of the patriarch? Is he not obligated to make every effort to resolve the conflict before sacrificing his son? When Newt Gingrich calls for covert assassinations and regime destabilization as a first course of action, does he not betray his duty to provide a peaceful inheritance to his sons (and daughters in the modern world?) Does Mitt Romney see nothing in Iran but an imminent, existential threat? The Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone are projected to cost over $3 trillion total, and have destabilized an already tottering region of the world (and allowed Iran to assume the role of regional power.) With such an expenditure of lives and treasure, what is left to inherit?

Boom, boom, boom. Will you break the covenant, Mitt, Max and Newt?