Bob Herbert writes great columns about many things, almost always centered on the suffering of others, whether black men in prison, the homeless on the streets or the soldiers in U.S. wars.

Today he wants us to get acquainted with a powerful new book of war photography by Peter van Agtmael: “2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die.”

As he says, It’s chilling.

Herbert then goes on to remind us how distant the sacrifice and suffering of the soldiers is from everyday life in America; that only 1% of Americans are wearing the uniform. Both true.

What is not true — and it’s distressing to hear it repeated so often — is that if the U.S. reinstituted military conscription again –The Draft– somehow, magically, Americans would become engaged and the wars would end, or equally improbably, that they would not have begun!

Bob Herbert

Bob, there was military conscription in 1963. It did not prevent the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Far from it. It gave the presidents the idea that they had an army do to what they wanted with.

Eventually the young men being drafted helped end the war, some of those men. Many of course went to fight. Many died. Draft resisters helped end the war, along with their sisters — not then allowed in fighting units of the military– along with their mothers and fathers, some of them. Many mothers and fathers disowned their children who were against the fighting. Many many others grew to oppose the war and it didn’t have to do with children being drafted. It had to do with finally understanding the enormous moral cost of killing people who had not threatened them; it had to do with actually understanding the financial cost, and the theft of monies for schools to be spent on bombs and bullets.

It was a long, long difficult battle. Families broke apart. Some didn’t speak for years. Some died without wounds being healed.

A military draft never has, and will never prevent a war.

What will help to prevent, at least the stupid and useless wars, those of aggression and raw-resource pillage, is that societies demilitarize themselves — every day and in every way. Celebrations of war, past and future, occur less often and with less fervor. Manliness is understood and lived in ways other than in bullying and reckless courage. Movies of blood spattered enemies are looked on with distaste and fail to pay for themselves at the box office. Guns become seen as dangerous tools to be used only after training and are to be kept locked away, instead of being flaunted like intimidating toys at Presidential meetings.

It’s a long long road but it can be done. We can demilitarize ourselves. We can come to regard with deep and hostile suspicion any leader who says he has secret information which he cannot share with us that will cost every family a child, and that years of suffering and heartbreak should be understood as a patriotic love of country.

Demilitarize our imaginations. Be afraid of hate and loathing of others like are are afraid of HIV and sine flu. Wars will diminish if we no longer imagine them with such pride, if we stop the fantasies of our invulnerability and their bestiality.