This pretty much sums it up for me:

"Bin Laden was a self-mythologized figure of no historic standing until George W. Bush designated him America's equal by defining 9/11 as an act of war to be met with war, instead of a crime to be met with criminal justice. But this over-reaction, so satisfying at the time to the wounded American psyche, turned into the war for which the other party simply did not show up. Which is, of course, why we are blasting a substitute Iraq to smithereens."

James Carroll - The Boston Globe - January 30, 2006: Is America actually in a state of war?

War Without Death

Tried the Google search for this term: "war without death"

War without death / The Pentagon promotes a vision of combat as

Non-lethal Weapons: War Without Death

Amazon.com: Nonlethal Weapons : War without Death: Books

I also tried "no-kill war" but that found a bunch of pet shelters.

When I was a kid I used to say, "Why not have each country build a robot and whoever's robot wins, wins the war?"

The show Robot Wars appeared on the TV around 1999: A bunch of nerds in a warehouse somewhere with remote controls whacking at each other's robots with hydraulic whackers and circular saws. They added flashy graphics and a pneumatic blonde emcee, plus a gravel voiced WWF announcer, attempting to make it watchable. At first I was thrilled, "This is the future of war!" I thought, "This is the first step!" But eventually the show format became common and eventually interest died out.

I'm sure those nerds are still whacking away at each other somewhere even as we speak.

Now we've been doing this Iraq War thing for a few years now. At first it had all the flashy graphics and the promise of a bloodless war. Even I was convinced, and thought, "They have all this hi-tech stuff now. So it'll be, like, a surgical strike team slips in wearing ninja masks and shoots a poison dart into the bad guy. No-one really gets hurt."

And then we saw enormous explosions over Bagdhad, over a city as typical as Boston in many ways, and we realized that people were dying. "But they have those laser-guided rockets like we used in the Gulf, and they'll only blow up the terrorists' underground secret lab. No-one innocent gets hurt, right? Well, except maybe a few of those computer technicians and henchmen in matching caps, who maybe didn't realize what their boss was really up to. "

And so it went until we've now killed 30,000 Iraquis, and a couple thousand of our own guys. Our Allies have also lost people. Not to mention the millions displaced and without basics like food and water. And then Katrina came and made us realize that our own country's infrastructure couldn't recover gracefully from such an attack. Oh, shit! Now they're allowed to hit back! Ain't that the rules?

The reason a real Robot War between nations won't work is that the whole point of a war is that people die, property is destroyed, territory is gained. This isn't about settling differences.