The Moody Blues’ 1970 hit “Ques­tion” opened, appro­pri­ate­ly, with the lines: “Why do we nev­er get an answer/When we’re knock­ing at the door/With a thou­sand mil­lion questions/About hate and death and war?”…”
In a world where those three ills are at pan­dem­ic lev­el, the answer may well be because the ques­tion “why” isn’t asked often enough.
Grant­ed, that’s sim­plis­tic to the point of seem­ing naïve. The prob­lems are com­plex, their ori­gins often baf­fling and irra­tional. An abun­dance of experts and pun­dits make their liv­ing analysing every aspect of every con­flict and social trend, pars­ing every sen­tence uttered by the main play­ers, com­ing up with learned arti­cles and less-than-enlight­en­ing sound bites.
NATO-mem­ber gen­er­als (almost exclu­sive­ly retired ones) nev­er tire of pro­nounc­ing on how  well, or not, the Ukrain­ian “counter-offen­sive” is going. The only thing they all seem to agree on is that now isn’t the time to try for a peace­ful res­o­lu­tion to the conflict.
Why?
The short answer is because it will only suit coun­tries that could speed up the process to do so when their arms indus­tries can’t make suf­fi­cient mon­ey out of the war to keep it going.
The long answer is that it would require a lot more work, polit­i­cal risk and expen­di­ture of diplo­mat­ic cap­i­tal than any­one with the clout to try it is will­ing to apply at the moment, main­ly out of fear of fail­ure. The con­se­quence is no dis­cernible prospect of a sen­si­ble end to slaugh­ter and waste.
Equal­ly craven, or to be char­i­ta­ble, dis­con­cert­ing, is why envi­ron­men­tal groups are con­spic­u­ous­ly avoid­ing protest­ing war’s mas­sive con­tri­bu­tions to glob­al warm­ing. Appar­ent­ly they haven’t noticed that mil­i­tary armoured vehi­cles burn more than ten times as much fuel per kilo­me­ter as an aver­age fam­i­ly car does.

                    AND SPEAKING OF PEOPLE

Since even the most ardent advo­cates of wars accept that they only end at the nego­ti­at­ing table, why doesn’t the process begin before one or both sides sig­nal they want to make a deal – which is anoth­er way of say­ing when they can no longer sus­tain the cost in blood.
(For a mov­ing elu­ci­da­tion of that, I rec­om­mend “Sol­diers Don’t Go Mad”, by Charles Glass. FULL DISCLOSURE: a friend since Beirut in the 1980s)
The most illu­mi­nat­ing expla­na­tion of that lev­el of bloody-mind­ed (pun intend­ed) “log­ic” for the “no-end-in-sight” con­cept ‚was offered to me by a for­mer high-rank­ing Israeli intel­li­gence offi­cial in an off the record chat in Jerusalem some years ago.
In a tone that con­not­ed despair, he posit­ed that the antag­o­nists in the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict have reached what he called “an accept­able lev­el of slaugh­ter”. Ergo, nei­ther of them has any real incen­tive to con­sid­er, nev­er mind make, any sub­stan­tive con­ces­sions to achieve peace.
What he didn’t add, but clear­ly implied, was that nei­ther side has, or seems like­ly to find, lead­ers or the soci­etal men­tal­i­ty to ask them­selves why they car­ry on fight­ing, when it’s clear from their his­to­ries that nei­ther side will ever sur­ren­der on the battlefield.
Wash­ing­ton has pret­ty much giv­en up try­ing to apply the diplo­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of CPR to the unre­spon­sive  “peace process”. In light of the mind­set of the pro­tag­o­nists, that makes sense.
Instead, accord­ing to recent reports, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is con­tem­plat­ing “a major diplo­mat­ic push” to nor­malise rela­tions between Israel and Sau­di Ara­bia, two of its most feck­less “friends” in the Mid­dle East.
Con­sid­er­ing the Netanyahu government’s regard for Pales­tin­ian lives and a death sen­tence imposed by a Sau­di court on Mohammed bin Nass­er al-Gham­di, and  poten­tial long prison terms on sev­er­al oth­er men for dar­ing to crit­i­cize the regime on social media, a meet­ing of the minds is almost a sure bet.
It may also go some way to answer­ing why Wash­ing­ton con­sis­tent­ly gets a tepid at best response when it preach­es human rights. But that would, again, require some­one ask­ing the three let­ter question.
It seems to me the answer to all the afore­men­tioned ills lies in the way the late Bob­by Kennedy deft­ly turned the sim­ple ques­tion into a clar­i­on call for change: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that nev­er were, and ask why not.”
It’s also fair to ask why no one in a lead­er­ship role has the rhetor­i­cal abil­i­ty to match that.
But then, if the words were uttered in a pub­lic forum today, they’d be drowned out in an ensu­ing tsuna­mi of inchoate wran­gling and mud-sling­ing over the gen­der of the main noun.
Why?
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