Letter of the Day: No good wars

EDITOR: About 20 years ago I was visiting a friend in the Washington Post building. The elevator door opened and standing there big as life was Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Post. He and a friend were chatting about pain. Cohen, trying to be funny, said it hurts when he gets a haircut or a manicure. Let alone a pedicure.

Now, Cohen has written a column about some wars being just (“The necessity of United States finally taking action in Syria,” Tuesday). He refers to World War II as a just war that we had to fight and had to win. And we did. Yet the toll was immense (even with conventional weapons) — 70 million killed, 200 million wounded and equal amounts of orphans and broken families. After the war, much of German and other European countries were rubble.

To end and to wit, maybe there is no such thing as a good war. And we still have millions upon millions of people who know how to talk, and how to calm things down, and contain the temptation to use force to settle a dispute. There is no need for big bombs to go off.

MICHAEL BOBIER

Santa Rosa