Thank you, gentlemen, for your fine and thoughtful posts.
If there is one critical test for a conscious human to pass in modern life, it must be to be able to see some way into those subterranean ebbs and tectonics which bring out the cultural collisions of violent deployment. The easy intellectual (and apathetic) answer is to resign oneself to the lizard-brained dark side of human nature; no matter how throughly the lessons of war are learned--as they were in 1864, 1918, and 1945, for example -- sooner or later some dumbass will come along who believes the lessons somehow don't apply to him--witness 2000 and 2004, for example. A mind which willfully ignores history and willfully pursues power is a dangerous loose cannon in the halls of influence.
A far more strenuous response is to gird your loins and seek to tap into the higher angels of human nature, by finding means of communication and persuasion of a higher order, wherever possible. It is far saner to face up to that effort than to flee into the easy answer of violence because one refuses to exercise one's brains. < end rant>