War and Peace is the title of a book, but it is also the script of television news. We like peace and want to forget the war, confined to strange and distant places. Or sometimes to places closer, bathed by our sea, or the place of origin of our housekeeper. Then we can't say we know nothing, so we look down, change the channel, or focus on the dish we are having for dinner, believing that this way there will be no wounded, mutilated, orphaned children, disemboweled men.
In Paris, there is an annual military weapons fair, this year dedicated to (hold the laughter) “Logics of defense and artificial intelligence.” Computer scientists, economists, engineers, various analysts, researchers, or healthcare experts gather with political leaders, contractors, and military personnel, and discuss the relative efficiency of each new discovery. They are very uneducated: they ignore, for example, that after two years of war in Ukraine, the positions of the two armies are exactly the same as before. So they could have stayed still, limiting themselves to singing national anthems and showing off uniforms, and the situation would be the same, saving the (approximately) 350,000 casualties recorded. (However, it is true that without two years of war, the sector's business figure would be much lower).
This can be generalized: a war is essentially inefficient. It destroys lives, breaks things, devastates a country, with costs much higher than the hypothetical benefits that may come from it. And if we talk about the moral costs (what they now call “reputational”), the impact is terrible: how many years will it take Israel to make the Arab-Islamic world forget Gaza? And these costs are enormous for everyone, without exception: in the span of a generation, we have seen both the Russian and American armies flee Afghanistan.
So, although it may seem obvious, peace is always preferable to war. And only those who profit from it will say that this is naivety. It is better, ultimately, to be friends than to be enemies. And that's why we call ourselves Friends of the UAB, right?
Joan Botella, Emeritus Professor of the UAB
