Things that you find yourself thinking about, expecting a child

This isn't, really, an update or anything on the Possibly Ted (as in, his name is, possibly, Ted.) This is, really, more about the sorts of things that I find myself thinking about, more and more, probably as a result of him. Specifically, I find myself thinking about stuff like Syria. I've come to a few conclusions:

1. Every military conflict ever fought should be regarded as a failure. You don't win a war, you just have the second worst outcome possible. What I mean is this: when a country ends up in a military conflict, it's the same as when two little kids get into a fight. War is not a continuation of politics by other means. It's the abject failure of politics.* They couldn't think of a better way to solve their contention, and so they resorted to the least intelligent, which is to say, least difficult to think about, solution they had available. That's not to say that there aren't times when a war is something that has to happen; no-win situations can exist. It's just that when we resort to military force, it's because we were too stupid to come up with a better solution. And I like my country too much to see it keep being so very stupid.
2. By extension, every weapon made by the military should be seen as having the goal of never being used, at all. Every cruise missile launched, every bullet shot, every grenade thrown should be seen as having failed at it's most basic purpose, which is to deter some other person from resorting to their least intelligent, stupidest option available.
3. Shouldn't we long to have a military that is so idle that we could put them to use doing things around our own country? I think that we should have the goal of having a military that is so bored out of their skulls that we're putting them to work, between training, doing stuff like laying roads, building (or rebuilding) bridges, and other vital infrastructure work that we need to have done.
4. When we manage to not go to war, by whatever means, shouldn't we think of that as a success, or at least, not a failure? To put it another way, if a flippant, sarcastic, rhetorical comment by our Secretary of State is enough to get some despot to voluntarily divest himself of chemical weapons, without us having to go to war, shouldn't we be rejoicing, even if it means that we were, maybe, wrong to think we had resort to force in the first place?

I think about this stuff, because I'm thinking about the quality of a world that I'm going to be handing off more and more, and, frankly, I'm more than a little bit pissed off by what is being left. Possibly Ted is going to have enough trouble in his life. I don't want him to have to worry about fixing problems that were made by some people too lazy to put forth the intellectual effort in the first place back in 1919 or 1945 or 1965 or 2003. I don't know of a way to make that happen, but I think, maybe, it starts when we all stop looking that things like wars and politics as something other than a game with our side, and their side.

*Politics comes from the Greek polis, meaning city-state. It's the proper functioning of a civilized (civil being a Romanization of the Greek polis) group of people. Is military conflict ever something civilized? I don't think so.