War is not inevitable. I was distressed that in your recent program on this subject both your guest and most callers made arguments for and against the inevitability of war based mainly on unexamined notions of “human nature.” Neither biological not theological essentialism is of any real use in addressing this question. Moreover, both evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, the fields to which much of your discussion appealed, amount I think to little more than cocktail party chatter between soft covers: fields in which real empirical data are replaced with speculation piled on speculation. The only discipline that can yield real insight into the inevitability of warfare is history. Serious study of history is all the more essential in the United States, because American public life is acted out against a background of historical ignorance so total that it amounts to willful collective amnesia. Before college, most Americans study only American history, and a version of American history so distorted by exceptionalism and triumphalism that it leaves them badly prepared not only for undergraduate study of history but for citizenship. If Americans had more real history in their heads, they would never have tolerated the Bush-Cheney administration’s starting two illegal wars based on nothing but lies. History shows that no war is categorically inevitable, even if there arrives a point on the road to every war at which it ceases to be preventable—for example, arguably, the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland. Thus war itself as a phenomenon is not absolutely inevitable. We must remember that resorting to war always represents failure: a political failure, always, and often too a diplomatic, economic, social, cultural, or military failure. John Lennon was right: war is over, if we want it.