Everyone's an expert on football and war
I haven't got time to correct all the misunderstandings on this thread - too busy working on War Studies Masters degree. All I will say is that no other field of human endeavour is as complex and emotive, with common sense meeting paradoxical logic, with such a perplexing matrix of interlocking factors, many of them invisible to the public. To even begin to understand the phenomenon of war one must have a comprehensive grasp of politics, history, philosophy and economics, and a little psychology helps, but isn't essential.
You wouldn't walk into a hospital and expect the doctor to ask everyone in the waiting room whether they should operate on you. You'd rather have the expert's opinion. The same is true of war. War Doc's like Sir Lawrence Freedman, or Dr Joe Spear, know what they are talking about - the former is for military counter-proliferation and against sanctions - the latter, I suspect, believes in the opposite. If you want to further your knowledge, I recommend checking them out - they're often on the TV, or in newspapers. If all you know about war is stuff scavenged from journalists or picked up from Vietnam war movies, then maybe you should ask yourself before you write, 'Do I really know what I'm talking about.' Perhaps you're not an expert on football or war after all.
