Reasons for War

Human history is thick with wars. Some people say that humans beings are an inherently violent species - that this may in fact be why we survived and became predominant. The cycle of war, while constant throughout human history, has been one which many people wished to escape. Everyone has heard the famous maxim that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. However, as General William Tecumseh Sherman often spoke about after the Civil War, those that have not experienced the horrors of war cannot fully appreciate it as something to be avoided.

The entire prelude to the American Civil War seems to me to be a great suction into the conflict. It's as if war was out there as this irresistible force and men were drawn to it like moths to a flame.

I've often wondered if there is not something latent in men that does desire war. It would explain much, because when you look at history, the majority of wars were fought for entirely stupid reasons. I'm not saying that once some country becomes aggressive that the target nations should not defend themselves. I'm just pointing out that many conflicts, when viewed in retrospect, appear to be events that should have been avoided rather than embraced. Once the idea of war is openly discussed in a country, there seems to be no shortage of people stirring up fear or hatred to support that war. A fever seems to overtake men, subverting their higher reasoning, and making war inevitable.

There was an ancient Greek called Thucydides who wrote a famous history of the Greek Civil War between Sparta and Athens. This was 420BC, almost 2500 years ago. He describes the events leading to war and at one point touches on the motives that drive a state into War. He said they were fear, honor, and interests. Usually a combination of these interests will convince a group of people that they need to wag a war against another group. Fear of what the other group will do if they are not stopped is the first element of building up a war frenzy. If we don't stop them, they will surely hurt us. Honor is the form of pride that requires a group defend themselves or respond to a slight or offense. Interests are the greed that motivate men to think that there are gains to be had to going to war. Sometimes this interest is simply plunder, the other guys have a lot of nice things that we can simply take from them in a war. Many wars in history end with the victors enslaving the vanquished. Often, troops would simply take whatever they wanted after a victory. Often, the defeated land was absorbed or exploited for its resources or geographically advantageous position. In ancient times, going into battle for spoils was a more open motivation. The Romans would often seek out wars so that the soldiers could be properly compensated and would not be tempted to revolt against their leaders or the state. In modern conflicts, this may be a motive, but the aggressors usually deny it, and it is impossible to prove. Recently, many Iraq War opponents stated that the U.S. went to war for oil. Who can determine how much this played into the conscious or subconscious motivations for the war. Many people reject the premise offhand, because they tell themselves that it would be a dishonorable thing to do. On its face, it is an entirely stupid reason to fight, because war disrupts oil production and distribution.

However, history has often shown people to be overly optimistic about their chances in a conflict. History is thick with examples of people stating how quick and easy a war will be, partly as a preventative to those reluctant to start the war, and partly because people often believe the war will be quick and decisive. General Sherman was judged to be insane early in the Civil War when he said it would take 60,000 men to drive the rebels from Kentucky and 200,000 to win the war. These numbers ended up being very low, but were so far in excess of the estimates at the time that no one believed them. Consider the Iraq War again. This was a war we were supposed to be able to win very quickly, and it was supposed to pay for itself with oil revenue. Instead, it dragged on for 6 years and cost a fortune. The Iraq War is not unique in this respect, the only thing that would ever be unique about a war is if people were honest about it or came up with accurate estimates of the cost in time, money, and manpower at the onset of war.

No one ever expects what the eventual truth about a war will be when the war is just beginning. Before the Greek Civil War, the Spartans did not believe the war would be fought the way the Athenians said they would fight it. The Athenians were no match for the Spartans on an even battle field, foot soldiers against foot soldiers. They had an impressive navy, and had never developed large land forces that were strong and skilled. Their plan when they elected to go to war, put forth by Pericles, was to stay in their walled city, let the Spartans do what they wanted to the countryside, and outlast them with their wealth and huge navy. Neither the Spartans or the Athenians believed the war would be costly or long. Athens, goaded by honor and no longer persuaded by Pericles, abandoned their strategy later in the war, insuring that it would be a long drawn out affair which left both sides so weakened that they would eventually be ripe for takeover by other forces.

So, despite the lessons of history, people seem to forget that war often leaves them weakened and fails to achieve the goals they strive for at the beginning of the conflict. This does not mean that sanity should prevail and war will end any time soon, it just means that the voice of reason is often drowned out during the march to war.

Drawn to Carnage

What is it about human nature and violence?

You often hear people talk about war being inevitable or how humans are inherently violent. People that clamor or peace on some level seem ridiculous because they are advocating a position that would make them defenseless against anyone that disagrees.

People definitely like violent movies. The more gore, the better the box office appeal. Sitting safely in an air conditioned theater, it's fun to watch a bang-'em-up beat-'em-up flick while munching popcorn. When it's over, you go home or go get something to eat and pretty much forget about it. Real violence that inflicts real injuries is very different, and there's no "let's go get a burger" moment afterwards. Physical injuries take a long time to heal, and often include some kind of loss of ability or at least integrity of your body. Mental injuries are even more insidious because they are not obvious or readily apparent. The recent wars have a high percentage of post traumatic stress victims, which we are finding out is just a normal response to experiencing combat. It is possible to survive this affliction without treatment, as most combat veterans throughout history have, but you wonder how many walking wounded have woven their way through the aftermath of war with complete turmoil in their heads as they attempt to behave normally in serene social situations.

From a Darwinian perspective, we are violent because that's what helped us survive. But why are we so casually violent? Why are we fascinated and fixated by it? I would almost say that some people are in love with violence for violence's sake.

I know from my own experience that there is no denying that violence appeals to us, it calls to us somehow. I have been re-listening to the book The Civil War, A Narrative, by Shelby Foote, and there is something compelling about the battles and the scale of the carnage. I find myself very drawn to it. You hear about days where tens of thousands of people die, most in horrible ways, and in the back of your mind you're thinking, "I wonder what that was like to be there?". It's fine to be fascinated about this as long as it's in the abstract, if you actually had to experience it, it wouldn't be as good. However, each war or conflict has a strange romanticism about it, with no shortage or eager young men signing up and shipping out. The new soldier, the combat virgin is often full of zeal, ready for action, eager to experience "the elephant" as Shelby Foote calls it. Once experienced, they are not so eager. There is a scene in Band of Brothers where a replacement soldier shares guard duty with a grizzled veteran and is chewed out for his overzealousness. The man that has seen violence has had enough, the one that hasn't is itching for it.

Many cultures glorify violence, hold those that are good at it in high esteem, foster it in their young, and leap eagerly into the first situation that promises the chance to fight. Some of these cultures remain backward and stunted in their developement, but others produce violent young men from a cradle of privilege and comparative luxury. So there is no correlation between the degree of civilization and the willingness for violence. The violence is just inherent in the system.

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman wrote a science fiction classic back in the 70s.

It was originally published as installments in the Science Fiction magazine Analog. Later it was published as a book and went on to win many awards and become quite well known.

My father subscribed to Analog, and I still do. I don't know if I read it originally in the magazine or as a book, but I know I used to have a dogeared copy of the book that I read several times. My brothers read it too, and we used to talk about it.

Recently, the author released an "Author's Preferred Version" of the book, as I heard on NPR from Nancy Pearl, author of the "Book Lust" series. Nancy is a librarian and prolific reader and has nice clean concise summaries of books that seldom fail to make me want to read the book.

So I went out and got the new version. It took me a day to read it.

Granted, I was sick (therefore immobile and not distracted) and it was familiar ground, but it was still impressive how smoothly the material flows in. A truly laminar work.

I did not know or realize until hearing Nancy Pearl's review that Joe Haldeman was a Viet Nam vet. He wrote the novel because of his experiences, which taught him that war is stupid and senseless. The chapters he was asked to remove and rewrite from the original version were deemed too depressing. Haldeman had great difficulty getting a publisher because they all feared that the public did not want another war protest book. Good fiction can divorce itself from the original inspiration and outline basic truths in a way that make you see universal rules that underlie our existence. I believe Haldeman achieved that with this book. I found myself throwing his thought template over the current situation, the Iraq War to see if any truisms emerged from it. There are definitely lessons that apply to all three wars, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Haldeman's fictional Forever War.

Beyond the depth of the work, there are also some very compelling and fun elements to it. I use the word fun even though it is somewhat inappropriate, but being a technophile, I love the gagets in this book.

While the stasis field, grenade launchers, missiles, gigawatt lasers, and immense ships with all their fighters and drones are interesting, the apex of his creation is the fighting suit. Part spacesuit and part exoskeleton, the suits tranform soldiers into their own tanks. They could be camoflagued with the flick of a wrist and enabled the soldier to see at any magnification or illumination he needed. They had unlimited food and recycling capabilities, emergency medical features, high tech communications, and finger lasers. Best of all, they had strength amplification circuits, so a person could leap incredibly high or crush things with their hands. Just this week, there was an item in the news about the military working to develop a soldier exoskeleton - possibly inspired by Haldeman's work? The other coolest thing about the story was that soldiers that lost a limb were taken to a hospital planet called Heaven and had their limbs regrown. Stem cell technology of the future.

Overpopulation, birth control, homosexuality, mind control, time dialation, future shock, and the inherent violence of the human species are all woven together in the story.

And it has possibly the most touching love letter I've read in the last chapter. So I would highly recommend this classic to anyone that enjoys a good action story, a good war story, or a good mirror to society and the human condition.

The Last Veteran's Days

On this Veterans Day, I was thinking this morning about how they have ceremonies for aging veterans each year. I wondered if there are any WWI vets still alive, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, there are 22 still alive, but of those, only a few actually saw combat. These guys are all 106 years old, more or less.

I read John Keegan's First World War this last year. It was a bear of a book that I had to force myself through. Not only is Keegan a fairly dry writer (don't get me wrong, he's an excellent researcher and the information is thorough, just numbingly so), but the subject of WWI is depressing as hell.

Short Summary: Europe spends 20 or 30 years expecting that there will be another war, and does nothing but plan for it. Some obscure and unimportant duke gets shot, and it turns out to be the trigger that sends a horrible cascade of events into motion. Enormous numbers of people smash into each other in great lines, and due to the efficiency of their modern weapons, are forced to dig in. They fight for almost 3 years in an almost static position, feeding millions of men into the action, to no effect. It reminds me of a great machine that is trying to keep a fire called war going, and human beings are the pieces of wood that it keeps feeding in to be wasted. And the war was a waste. Nothing was proved, nothing was gained. Even the victors were bled white and most of a whole generation of young men were destroyed. The war bled the countries' coffers dry and produced such an unhealthy environment that the worst pandemic to ever hit the world swept through in the months following the war and killed even more people that the war killed. Horrible things like chemical warfare were invented. As if the war wasn't bad enough, economic penalties for the losers were so harsh that a vicious hatred was stoked virtually guaranteeing the next war.

Even after all the evidence of the futility of attacking heavily entrenched positions, generals still ordered it and men still went forward into the teeth of the meat grinder. Can we even understand that thinking anymore?

It occurred to me today that those arrogant generals that kept ordering the fruitless attacks are all dead now and that maybe their way of thinking would die with them. Maybe when the last of them died, the urge to send men off to a fruitless, hopeless, meaningless death would find a final resting place in their cold lifeless corpses.

We already know it's not true. Each generation somehow forgets how horrible war is and starts a new series of wars. Maybe this is something that is hard wired into us, a genetic trait. Lord knows there's not much keeping our population in check. If humans were deer, there'd be an unlimited season on them. "Gotta thin the herd." Maybe war is the price we pay to avoid being hip deep in people. If so, it's damned inefficient.

After WWI came a series of little wars around the globe as people sought to push boundaries around and plant their flag in a piece of turf, or assert their domination over another group of people. Then the big countries went at it again. Hell, they didn't even wait a full generation between WWI and WWII. Some of the guys that fought in I were still there to fight in II. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a veteran of both, as well as Douglas McCarthy. Truman fought in the trenches in the first war and later gave the orders that finished off the next war.

Then there was Korea and Viet Nam as well as Gulf War I and the Iraq War. So we didn't learn anything about the costs and results of war. At any given time, there are dozens of wars going on in the world. The print and the network news don't even report most conflicts unless they get completely out of control. Would you like to venture how many ongoing conflicts there are right now? Wikipedia (see "Ongoing Conflicts") says there are 29. The death toll for these wars is mostly unknown, but it appears to be about three quarters of a million. The average conflict goes about 15 years back. Try typing "War Death Toll" into Wikipedia's search bar and gaze in amazement at the carnage from history. The Rwanda Burundi war didn't even make the list and I remember hearing that 1.5 million people were hacked to death with machetes in that war.

They called WWI the Great War and The War to end all Wars. I wonder if maybe the end of war, which would be great, is something of an oxymoron. They always say that those that fail to pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it. I don't think that's right. It's not that people aren't aware of what happened before, they just don't think it's the same thing when it's happening to them. Look at the Iraq War. Many of the people that worked the hardest to make the war happen came of age in the Viet Nam era. I remember when the Iraq War was going to start, there was this really small fringe of people that said that it was going to be another Viet Nam. I remember the reaction those statements got - mostly scorn. The average citizen thought that this was totally absurd. We would be in and out in no time. The problem with this war is that not many Americans think they are affected by it. I don't know anyone that died over there and only a very few that served. I don't know anyone that has lost a loved one over there. But I know that the world seems like a much more dangerous place because of all the resentment over our actions.

The problem with resentment is that it doesn't die with the people that harbor it. They pass it down to their children, and it gets nurtured and preserved. One of the premises in the Serbian Bosnian Croatian Kosovar conflicts was some massacre that happened hundreds of years ago. I'd never even heard of it. No one alive today was there, much less effected by it. Our continuous chain of wars and atrocities stretching back to antiquity is like some kind of twisted perversion we keep feeding and never try to break free of. It's the serial drug addiction of the human race.

All that gloomy sentiment said, I have to say that overall, life is pretty sweet. You get to see interesting things, have good friends, love your family, and cherish sweet days with beautiful weather and glorious scenes. You get to struggle against disease and hardship, grow and learn, strive and achieve, and see the world change and history take place around you. People are basically decent, if you get to know them. There are few people on Earth that no one loves, that someone can't understand or appreciate. Maybe some of them only have animals for friends, but most people have someone that wants to have them around. And sometimes we send people off to war to stop things from getting worse, to preserve our way of life. Not many soldiers that march off to war think that they are doing something worthless. But in the cauldron of war, watching all the suffering and loss around them, I'm sure they have one thought in their minds - "If I get through this, I'm gonna do something to make life worthwhile."

We need to find a way to teach that lesson without war.

Justifications

Originally written 8/25/05:

Jon Stewart’s guest last night, Christopher Hitchens(promoting his latest book, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America - ISBN 0-06-059896-4) made some good arguments in favor of going to Iraq. In fact, he came closer than anyone ever has to convincing me that what we are doing is the right thing.

Hitchens laid out 4 reasons why we should invade a country. He said it’s justified when a leader (or country) 1) invades its neighbors 2) uses weapons of mass destruction 3) commits genocide or 4) harbors terrorists. He concluded that Saddam Hussein had done all of these at one time or another. The counter-argument that the time to respond and take him out was after the Kuwait invasion, he conceded.

Jon Stewart’s counter-argument was that he just doesn’t like the way Bush talks to us. He doesn’t like the way that Bush belittles and sneers at his opponents.

I found myself both agreeing with him and terribly disappointed in his answer. You don’t want to hear the champion of your cause (or maybe just your views) expose the utter weakness of one of your core beliefs.

It’s not easy to look in the mirror and see someone that is behaving exactly as the very people you spent 8 years in the Clinton years despising. The Clinton haters rarely could come up with a better argument than “I don’t like the way he looks and I don’t like the way he talks.”

OK, now the shoe is one the other foot. But let’s review some of the reasons for disliking the way the country has been run the last 5 years and some of the contrasts to the previous 8.

The economy is in stark contrast. The past 5 years have certainly been the most dismal economic time in my life. I wasn’t alive during the Great Depression, so I can’t compare, but I’m sure some of the benchmarks surpass those times. The only good thing you can say is that there wasn’t a total collapse, and we seem to be pulling out of it shakily.

We have no plan for cutting our dependence on foreign oil, and I discount more drilling in ANWAR, as it will have little impact (in supply) and will take too long to develop to help – it does not address the root cause or move us boldly into the future.

We are suppressing scientific development. Rather than using government to prod or encourage science and continue to keep our lead in technology, we have the glaring example of opposition to stem cell research. I’ll even concede that the development of new technologies needs ethical guidelines and moral oversight, but just slamming the door shut is not good enough. First, it totally removes government from the game, actually inviting abuses. Second, it ignores reality. The promise of the technology is too strong to expect that it will wait or go away. If we don’t do it, someone else will, and if the government doesn’t take a hand in it, we will lose control of the direction the technology goes and where it will take us. I could go into the question of genetically engineered humans or the whole way that patenting and tightly held intellectual property drives the cost of those innovations up and beyond the means of the average person or how pharmaceutical solutions tend to create “addictions” to medical technology rather than curing root causes, but those are other issues.

What’s more important, getting back to Iraq, is what we were told about why we were going into Iraq. I’ve often thought that if Bush had just said, “He’s a bad man, it’s time to take him out,” he’d be better off right now. As it stands, he justified the war saying there were weapons of mass destruction, which there were not. Then he said they had the ability to make them, which they did not. Then he said that they were planning to make them, which is ridiculous. Then he tried to make it seem that Saddam was involved in 9/11, which is easy for many people to accept, regardless of the fact that there is no proof or evidence of any connection. Then he started to say that the world and Iraq is better off without Hussein. Unfortunately, that’s not really clear. You could argue that the heavy hand of an oppressive dictator kept the lid on the current pre-civil war explosive situation. Saddam could keep the oil flowing to the world and kept the electricity flowing to his people. This argument doesn’t excuse Saddam to the outside world, but it gives the insurgents something to rally around and it prevents the average citizen over there from having confidence in our presence. Don’t even get me started on “We will be greeted as liberators”.

The other major problem is the planning and execution of the war. We certainly had Halliburton ready and primed in order to keep the oil flowing, which it turned out wasn’t necessary. What we didn’t have was enough troops, enough armor, enough local authorities, any appreciation of the growing insurgency or any semblance of a coherent plan.

The major thing that fills me with dismay when I look at the current administration is the feeling that things are getting much worse. We are supposed to relinquish personal freedoms because of a threat of terrorism. We are not supposed to question how people connected with the administration or those of already comfortable means are in a position to profit wildly at a time when the rest of the country watches their standard of living slipping away. We are not trying to solve any long term problems, medical care, the environment, or the future of our energy supply.

And the thing I fear the most is the death of truth and the total annihilation of civility. It started during the campaigns, when winning an election was so important that it justified trying to trash the reputation of a respected war veteran (twice! once with McCain before Kerry). It’s nothing new for people seeking power to play with the truth in order to get support. But those are the people that ended up on the trash heap of history (Joe McCarthy was quite popular for a while, but you don’t ever hear people singing his praises now).

I think the thing that angers me is that any student of history would measure Bush as one of the worst presidents this country has ever had. The problem is that people that live in the current day often can’t see how things are likely to end up. I see the Bush era as a time that future people will look back on as a dark time with an incompetent leader. But the guy in the parking lot with the W sticker on his SUV thinks people that think like me are anti-American. In their eyes, those of us that can really see how it is, we are the problem.