In the 1980's, Soviet troops and American-backed Islamic guerrillas fought a brutish war there that helped speed the Soviet Union's demise.
In Robert Sullivan's 2014 book Rats, he described humanity's relationship with the species as an "unending and brutish war", a battle we seem always, always to lose.
India, chastened by its disastrous intervention more than a decade ago in the brutish war that has long plagued Sri Lanka, its island neighbor to the south, is nonetheless gingerly stepping back into a conflict that has once again reached a crisis stage.
And yet a part of Mr. Bush seemed to cling to the place and the life he was leaving behind, to his rugged and remote hideaway here, so far from the nation's capital, which he often portrayed during his campaign as a brutish political war zone.
But the real blood and guts of the battle, the part Alexander would have so enjoyed, is in the chatrooms, where fanatical foot- soldiers taunt each other with blood-curdling threats heavy with echoes of the short but brutish Balkan wars that carved up ancient land between Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria almost a century ago.
He believes the deaths in 1994 - over one million of them -- were collateral damage in a typically brutish African civil war.
The cold war was brutish indeed, rupturing the city and many of its families, but it is long gone now: Berlin, if it does still struggle with memories today, struggles still to erase the Nazis.
In the state of nature, humans are selfish, and their lives are 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', a war of all against all (Leviathan, Ch. 13).
Aside from nasty and brutish, but typically short, wars over the past decade (Lebanon 2006, Gaza 2009 and 2014), the Jewish state essentially ignores its surroundings: weather maps in Hebrew newspapers show London, Miami, Moscow and New York but not Cairo or Baghdad.Since it joined the OECD in 2010, Israel has outperformed the rest of the rich-country club on many measures.
But after the Iraqi troop columns melted into the landscape, the war turned nasty, brutish and long.
It's a stupid, pointless death — one of many in the book — and in her fragility we suddenly appreciate the desire to somehow ennoble life's nasty, brutish shortness, even, irrationally, through war.
