NON-LETHAL WARFARE
Published March 30, 2003

Within days of the beginning of the first Persian Gulf War, the club where I was performing was approached by a local TV station that wanted to interview a comedian about comedy in time of war. The interview took place in the club's lobby, between shows on Friday night. As the camera rolled, the cheerfully oblivious reporter finished his set up and turned to me: "Well, Chris - what's funny about this war?"

It was an Alice in Wonderland moment for me. We were at war, after all, and apparently it was going so well that my role was to provide the laugh track.

This war is stranger still. I don't know about Rumsfeld's recent contention that the United States is now leading the largest military coalition ever assembled (though it's undoubtedly the largest coalition look-alike), but it certainly promises to be the most money ever spent to kill the least people in the history of warfare. With a preliminary price tag of seventy-five billion dollars, anything less than 7,500 casualties come out to $10,000,000 each, and even a number ten times that works out to a million dollars per victim. Who says we don't value Iraqi lives?

Back in the Cold War heyday of mutually assured destruction (or M.A.D. - the most accurate policy acronym ever) the military worked very hard to develop the neutron bomb, a weapon designed to maintain the awful lethality of nuclear arms without the unpleasant ruination of massive amounts of real estate. Other than its potential to decimate the labor pool, thereby putting upward pressure on wages, it was the ultimate expression of capitalism in weaponry: Kill all the people, but leave property and infrastructure intact. The Pentagon didn't even use the term "bomb" for these weapons, preferring to call them "enhanced radiation devices".

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