A Swiftian harvest.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - War dead

The philosophically minded--from St. Augustine to Michael Walzer have struggled manfully through the ages to define a "just war," but without convincing results. Is it a war that's primarily defensive in nature? Maybe, but almost every aggressor claims to be acting in self-defense, even in the absence of a discernible threat. Does it lead to a minimum of casualties, especially of the civilian kind? Sure, but the bombers of Dresden and Hiroshima believed they were saving lives in the long run. So it would be far simpler to apply the same moral criterion to war that we customarily apply to that other form of legal killing--hunting--and declare that war is "just" when and if the parties agree to eat what they kill.

Think about it: The chief and immediate product of war is corpses, which are currently regarded as a kind of waste matter. What would be our judgment of a mountain lion that ran around ripping fawns to bits and leaving them. lying around to rot untasted? We would think it was one sick kitty cat. There's no reason the same judgment should not apply to any fighting unit that generates an impressive harvest of corpses and then furtively buries them in the sand.

There will be objections, of course, from vegetarians, advocates of a high-carb diet, and the hardcore anti-cannibalists amongst us. Some soldiers, no matter how repulsed by their MREs, will still balk at a Baghdad Burger or Saddam Stew, and more elegant recipes for human meat are vexingly hard to find. But our species has a proud and ancient tradition of consuming the enemy dead. The Aztecs, for example, ripped the hearts out of their POWs with great ceremony, then rolled the bodies down the temple steps, where they were chopped up and distributed to the protein-starved crowd.

Luckily for the squeamish, modern medical technology offers a dazzling array of alternative uses for what we might call "pre-owned" human flesh. Organs and tissues can be consumed, in a manner of speaking, as transplants to the needy. The New York Times Magazine, with stunningly good timing, has just run a brief article on the many uses of used skin, tendons, and bones. It disclosed that these ingredients of a single individual can be sold to hospitals for $36,700. Throw in the eyes, kidneys, liver, and heart--and subtract for burnt, crushed, or otherwise damaged areas--and you might get at least $100,000 per body. At this rate it would take only one million Iraqi casualties to finance the entire...