ABSTRACT
We are all prisoners of war. Most of us do not spend months or years behind barbed wire, staring up at guard posts situated at the four corners of a filthy enclosure. Nonetheless, we are all prisoners of war. We partake in that long and persistent legacy, that pernicious bustle of activity, that recurrent menace. Human history so far argues that war lies deep in human nature. Periods of peace have sometimes fostered the illusion that the human race had matured to the point where war would forever be left behind. In its own time, World War I was called the Great War, and some said that such a thing could never happen again. But it did. Armed conflicts of modest scope pepper the world today in the first years of the new millennium.
