War is hell but fight we must

BLAST-OFF: A jet fighter takes off from the USS George H W Bush in the Persian Gulf yesterday to strike an Islamic State convoy in Iraq. PHOTOS/AP

Before his death at 90, Mac Hutton was for some years a neighbour of ours. He was a member of a distinguished family with deep ties to this land. His brother, John, designed the engraving of the glass doors within the Wellington Cathedral and the Great West Screen of the Coventry Cathedral in England.

Mac, himself, was a gentle, unassuming man who had been a Raetihi farmer. One evening after tea, in our kitchen Mac quietly began to talk of his wartime experiences. He was a survivor of the brutal campaign at Monte Cassino, when General Freyberg's troops relieved American forces as the Allies were fighting their way to Rome. The story Mac told was harrowing and terrible in its graphic description of the price paid by ordinary soldiers, New Zealanders and others, for the goal of defeating the Nazis in WWII.

Books such as The Greatest Generation (Tom Brokaw) quite rightly call attention to the heroism of the (mostly) men from Allied countries who saved the world from the threat to civilisation that the Nazis posed. But the truth of heroism leaves out the other half of the story: the truth of the brutality of war, and its lingering effect on participants, no matter how noble their cause.

A new movie, Fury by director David Ayer seeks to make just that point as it follows an American tank crew in their dangerously under-armoured M4 Sherman tanks pushing towards Berlin against a hardened enemy in a ferocious campaign which saw both sides exhibit ugliness that men might wish to forget, but can't - and shouldn't.

We've been seeing the images of civilians including children killed and injured in Gaza - images that shock in the stark reality of suffering. We've only read about (but not somehow seen) the similar killing of civilians in Eastern Ukraine. Saved from the visual imagery, we are able to be less incensed, more detached. Similarly in Syria with its death toll of 100,000 and now again in Iraq where Isis (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) proudly exhibits its executions of prisoners and threatens civilian Christians, Yazidis, and Shi'ites with the same fate. In Mosul, Isis ordered the genital mutilations of all women aged 14-69.

War is hell. There is no doubt about it and the truth is that there is no such thing as a "good" war, only a necessary one.

US President George W Bush led British and American forces into an unnecessary war into Iraq and Afghanistan, whose cost in lives and treasury will be paid for a long time in the families of the dead soldiers and the wounded who returned with the terrible scars of combat.

The far-reaching consequences of that greatest of American strategic blunders has been felt across the Middle East in the opportunistic toppling of dictatorships the US once supported - the so-called Arab Spring. The optimism of uprising for democracy has been replaced by the darkness of new dictatorships and by the rise of militant Islamists.

The wars in Iraq against secular Baathists or in Afghanistan against Islamic fundamentalist Taliban were seriously flawed in purpose, since these enemies posed no expansionist threat. Unending war has seemingly drained the West of resolve when a true existential threat has arisen.

The crying of "Wolf! Wolf!" over non-existent WMDs has deafened our collective ears and blinkered our common vision when a real threat appears.

Make no mistake. War is hell, still. But a determined army of jihadists, Isis, has demonstrated control over sophisticated weaponry and is poised to take over globally strategic assets.

And its declared intention of murdering everyone in its wake towards recreating an Islamic caliphate of the 14th century poses an existential threat that must be answered by a unified military response. This is a threat the US has yet to acknowledge.

It means forgoing a small battle with Russia and uniting with the Russians and Nato to do the hard job of saving Western civilisation, again.