What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Unless, of course, you win it in a walk.

I'm beginning to worship Gary Brecher, who writes the "War Nerd" column for The Exile. (Which, weirdly, is a web-based publication for English-speaking expats in Russia.)

He's a hard guy to worship.

As he'll happily tell you, he's an extremely unappealing man. From his picture, and his descriptions of himself, you'd expect him to have his fingers permanently discolored by Cheetos dust. He files his dispatches from the not-at-all-romantic and even-less-a-nexus-of-global-strategy town of Fresno, California. And his perspective on war and warfare, well, it isn't that fun.

His columns are entertaining and interesting, frequently shocking, and they often provoke revulsion. Oh, you think, that's a little beyond the pale.

Of course, what he's writing about is the organized and systematic annihilation of human beings through violence. What's beyond the pale is being interested in this. And his "oh, admit it, you're interested in it too" attitude reminds me of what William S. Burroughs said about capital punishment: let them see what's on the end of that long newspaper spoon.

It was a good career move for John Keegan to write about war with the civility and detachment he did. (No knock on Keegan, a clear-headed and open-minded man who sought out the answers to questions that very few people had thought to ask.) Brecher is, well, a little rough. He is interested in war the way that some people are interested in porn featuring obese women: he recognizes that it's shameful, but his interest is strong enough that he doesn't bother defending it. (Also, unlike porn featuring obese women, warfare intrudes on millions of lives around the world, and however you might feel about p.f.o.w., wouldn't it be nice if the positions were reversed?)

Here's an excerpt (thanks to Google's cache; the original is no more) from UPI's interview with Brecher:

Q. When journalists like Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times op-ed page describes various wars in Africa as "senseless," are they making sense?

A. That's the best question you asked. No, it's absolute BS but nobody calls them on it. If you guys were doing your job, they couldn't get away with it, but they do. When Kristof says "senseless," he means he doesn't WANT TO KNOW about it. He won't even try to think like the people doing the fighting. Try doing that and see if it still seems senseless.

Here you've got one kind of war, the "sensible" kind with uniforms, "rules of war," and big battles like Jena or Verdun. That kind means you stand up and walk into cannon fire, grapeshot or machine-gun fire and massed artillery, and all you get out of it is a few dollars a month, and if you decide to quit on your own, they hang you. How is that sensible?

Now take African war. You have these neighbors you hated since forever, and you decide to do something about it. You get together quiet with the rest of your tribe and jump the enemy village while they're sleeping and kill everybody except maybe the cute girls, then you take all their stuff and burn their houses and take the girls home to be slaves.

Maybe I'm crazy, but that sure makes more sense to me than getting your head blown off for the glory of king and country. Kristof makes a living not even trying to understand how there are people in the world who don't think like him. Nobody wants to see how other people think, it's disgusting.

His columns taken as a whole are bracing and occasionally seem a little unhinged. His hatred of Victor Davis Hanson, for instance:

In his last column for the Fresno Bee, he sneered at people who don't have Ph.D.'s for daring to have opinions about the war in Iraq: "What do a talented Richard Gere, Robert Redford and Madonna all have in common besides loudly blasting the current administration? They either dropped out of, or never started, college. Cher may think George Bush is 'stupid,' but she - not he - didn't finish high school."

Since I never even finished my AA degree, I took that kind of personally. I guess it's my fault for not getting into Yale on pure merit like Bush did. That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson's farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when one of their neighbors threatened them: "Your cicadas will chirp from the ground," meaning, "We'll burn your fucking olive orchards if you mouth off again."

There you have Gary Brecher in a nutshell: he's all pissed-off and demotic and man-on-the-street college-dropout, and then he drops that business about the Spartans in there to remind you that when it comes to warfare, he knows what he is talking about. (And boy, does he make Victor Davis Hanson look bad. Really, go take a look.)

He may be full of shit. But really, just about everything you read by everybody on the war in Iraq is full of shit. At least Brecher understands what shit is.