Another Armistice Day

South Korea?

(was a South Vietnam ever possible? Would it have been as stunning a success as the other high-performing Asian economies, or would it have trundled along as Thailand has?)

If you read, I think it was Foreign Affairs from the 1960s, you would see all sorts of Serious People suggesting that the United States should invade Malaya because clearly Harold Wilson could not be relied on to fight the communists, damn it, he’s even let some socialist take Singapore, obviously this Lee will lose it to the communists, what a disaster, it’ll cost us the Straits, etc. Hindsight is always hilarious.

On the other hand, at the time Indonesia already had actual communists in government.

Not sure what I think of the Bosnia or Kosovo interventions, I’m open to labeling them as worth it. Most wars clearly haven’t been though. Somalia, Grenada, Iraq I and II, Panama, Afghanistan, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam (and associated actions in SE Asia): All were either unsuccessful in their primary goals, or not nearly successful enough to justify the cost.

Poor Cambodia was collateral damage. It must have been especially bitter to have Vietnam rescue them from the Khmer Rouge, but that should count as a successful humanitarian armed intervention. I have to admit I was amused when Vietnam routed the Chinese in a border incursion, almost proud, since in a sense we’d trained them.

The Israeli destruction of the Osirak reactor was pretty clean, bloodless and effective. It’s a pity that our elites had forgotten the episode twenty years later, when they were frightened by the prospect of Iraq adding uranium ore to their already abundant stockpile.

Here and there a few supermen could have saved lives. More and better armed troops in Rwanda and Haiti, perhaps. Surely Bosnia could have gone otherwise, and if it had Kosovo might not have been necessary. Afghanistan might have been better off had we not opposed the Russians, or even supported them. What we did in Libya probably saved lives, even if what they wind up with is no more palatable to us than what they had before.

The question on my mind is whether gun and ammunition sales are surging after the election, as usual, or whether the market is saturated.

“But if we started any analysis of international relations with the assumption that war will end badly for all concerned, and that the threat of war will probably lead to war sooner or later, we would be right most of the time.”

From your lips to the ears of all the world’s leaders.

“And I can’t help but wonder, oh Willie McBride / Do all those who lie here know why they died / Did you really believe them when they told you the cause? / Did you really believe that this war would end wars? / Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame / The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain.”—Eric Bogle, http://youtu.be/bG99wB8moRA

Re: South Korea.

It’s a bit strange to argue that the Korean War was necessary to bring about South Korea’s prosperity. The war destroyed large chunks of the country and left it poorer than it had been. On top of that, it’s not as though “We” saved “them” from the the “Commies,” because historical record shows that the South Koreans were just as intent on invading North Korea.

We should separate the fact of successful state-led development in South Korea from the war that resulted from the creation of artificial boundaries by outside powers (US & USSR). There’s a reason why public opinion in South Korea is generally not very fond of the US nor of Russia

Contra Andrew, I think the first 4 months of the Korean war come close to a necessary war. South Korea was very poor at the time and had not been supplied with the means to conquer North Korea, nor would it have been able to during the Cold War, given North Korea’s proximity to China and the USSR. Most of the war still shows the truth of the OP though. By mid-October of 1950, after 4 months of fighting, the US and allies had achieved all worthwhile goals they could get out of the war, without dragging the Chinese or Soviets in. Then the usual logic of war (so many sacrifices demand a greater return etc) set in and they tried to go for more than the Chinese could stomach, leading to intervention, defeat, and 30 months of further war that got them nothing more than they had in that first October.

I think the outcome of those first four months would have been better than intervention, though. Given the extremely unpleasant nature of the DPRK regime throughout its history, the economic and other achievements of South Korea would not have been possible. Also, failure to intervene in such clear case of aggression so early in its history would likely have meant that the UN’s reputation would have reached that of the League of Nations, and such good as it did achieve would have been undone.

re: the Vietnam War, its often forgotten that Cambodia was a stable and moderately prosperous country in the 1960’s – it was considered a model for development by the Singaporeans! Laos was poor but fairly stable. The appalling damage caused to those two countries by the Vietnam War was to all intents and purposes, permanent. It is somewhat ironic though that it is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia which is (rightly) considered an example of a military intervention working.

Its also forgotten of course that the Korean War was staggeringly destructive. It may be seen as some as ‘worth it’ in the sense that South Korea is now a stable, strong country, but it took two decades for that country to emerge in a reasonable shape (while the North goes into reverse) and plenty of Koreans will tell you that the country still suffers deep psychological scars which have never adequately healed. The war did change the country so fundamentally its very difficult to come to any conclusion on what would have happened if there had been no outside intervention. Perhaps it would now be a moderately stable Chinese dependency.

I’ve never fully understood why everyone holds up Rwanda as an example where intervention should occur. It only needs a quick look at a map of Africa and a minimal knowledge of military logistics to know that a decisive military intervention with sufficient soldiers to provide ‘on the ground’ protection for civilians through the country would have been impossible in the timescale available. Maybe a small token force might have altered the politics, but its just as likely that it would have accelerated the process of genocide.

“But if we started any analysis of international relations with the assumption that war will end badly for all concerned,”

Indeed. Which rather brings us back to the value of having a great big f*** off Navy.

“and that the threat of war will probably lead to war sooner or later,”

That part depends. If every littoral state knows that a war will inevitably turn out very badly for any state that goes to war with the nation with the great big f*** off Navy, well, it depends really.

Depends on how you balance the rationality of those who might like to attempt such a war against the rationality of those with such a great big toy that they’re just itching to use. And no, I don’t know what the balance or the answer is. But I’m at least open to the idea that possession of a big stick reduces the need to ever deploy any kind of stick: no matter how softly or loudly one speaks.

Even though I know better intellectually, my intuitive response to lots of bad international situations (say, the current civil war in Syria) is that someone ought to do something (military) about it. Sometimes I’ve carried that intuition into initial support for wars of intervention on the assumption that, this time, they will get it right. Inevitably, I’ve realised in retrospect that I was wrong. Even when a military intervention goes as smoothly as possible, it sets a precedent for future disasters.

I think this needed saying. I was strongly in favour of the Kosovo intervention & regarded the consistent anti-imperialist stance taken by most of the Left with dismay and horror – had we learnt nothing from Bosnia? I’m now of the view that the good results achieved by the NATO military action were not only hugely outweighed by the bad but could have been achieved without it, by the kind of intelligent & sensitive diplomacy which NATO plainly had no interest in pursuing.

I don’t think the Left had learnt much from Bosnia, mind you; what we should have learnt is

1. “Non-intervention” is a fiction: everything governments do and don’t do helps one side or the other. (Our ‘non-intervention’ in Bosnia included an arms embargo against all the successor states to the former Yugoslavia – one of which had inherited the arms and armaments of the former Yugoslavia, and was using them to attack two of the others.) By extension, the idea that military intervention is the only alternative to doing nothing at all is also a fiction – They haven’t responded to our stiffly-worded note threatening to withdraw our ambassador? This means war! Trouble is, it’s a fiction that’s very convenient for governments that want to make war.

2. The UN: resource it or lose it. Srebrenica seemed like an unparallelled monstrosity at the time, but in retrospect you could see it as UNIFIL all over again. UN forces could be a real alternative to aggressive war, if governments wanted them to be. Which, sadly, they clearly don’t – witness Libya, where UN protection of civilians grotesquely became a pretext for aggressive war.

But if we started any analysis of international relations with the assumption that war will end badly for all concerned, and that the threat of war will probably lead to war sooner or later, we would be right most of the time.

No argument with the first, but the second? I can think of quite a few cases where there was a sustained threat of war that didn’t lead to war, and I am sincerely curious about whether anyone’s done any work on this. There wasn’t, for example, a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. There’s been a threat of war in Korea since 1953, but so far no war. No blood’s been spilled over the Spratly Islands or the Senkakus. There were a lot of French invasion scares in mid-19th century Britain, but no French invasion. The Russians never came over the passes through Afghanistan to threaten the Raj. And so on.

Side note:
The Israeli destruction of the Osirak reactor was pretty clean, bloodless and effective. It’s a pity that our elites had forgotten the episode twenty years later, when they were frightened by the prospect of Iraq adding uranium ore to their already abundant stockpile.

Fascinatingly, given that it’s seen as such a good thing today, you should remember that the Osirak raid was condemned at the time. This is from the Guardian, via Wiki:

“The world was outraged by Israel’s raid on 7 June 1981. “Armed attack in such circumstances cannot be justified. It represents a grave breach of international law,” Margaret Thatcher thundered. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the US ambassador to the UN and as stern a lecturer as Britain’s then prime minister, described it as “shocking” and compared it to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. American newspapers were as fulsome. “Israel’s sneak attack…was an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression,” said the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times called it “state-sponsored terrorism”.”

Just let that hang there. An American newspaper said that Israel was a state sponsor of terrorism, and the New York Times accused it of short-sighted aggression. 1981 was a long time ago.

Sierra Leone? I’d count that as a pretty successful intervention.

The trouble, though, is that you can’t really know what might have happened if you had or had not done something. It’s very easy to say “how terrible this intervention is, look what bad things have happened”. Less easy to assess whether things would have been worse if intervention hadn’t happened.

So honestly, I’d say there are circumstances where I’d support intervention. I can’t think of what they’d be right now. Opinion would definitely be shaped by the motives of the people pushing for intervention

Most sensible people have a natural aversion to violence, which is why only the permanently adolescent think war can be a any kind of a good thing in itself. But this aversion also muddles most thinking about war, which is immensely complicated (we have been thinking about war probably longer than we have been thinking about ethics, but to much less firm conclusions even after all this time). It’s not just violence, and the acts surrounding the violence, the context, the aims of all the participants (soldiers, civilians, all the different parties, policy-makers and more) all make a difference, as well, of course, as how much and what kind of violence is used, against whom. So yeah, JQ is right – war is very hard to predict or control, and you are much more likely to come out with a negative result than a positive. It has always to be dealt with careful case by case, never in generalities.

That said, there do seem to be occasions when the alternatives are worse. Bosnia for one, recently. People have mentioned Vietnam in Cambodia. Probably the American Civil War. Certainly World War II.

It’s worth adding that war is always changing. Those who feel that the US big stick – in Tim’s phrase – might be applied to them look not for a bigger stick but for ways to make the stick useless or irrelevant. Political control of the peasantry, for instance, or IEDs coupled with infiltration of the supposedly allied army. The policy challenge – rarely met – is not to think of how you can use what you have got, but to think of how the other side will use what it has: not just its guns, but all the other ways it might frustrate your aims. The US drift towards war with Iran is particularly dangerous because there appears to be almost no thinking of this sort going on in the US. If there were, they would not be waving sticks at all.

Lives lost to brutal dictators count too. People are just as dead if killed by their own government as they are when killed by outsiders. The horrific acts of the Khmer Rouge and the genocide in Rwanda strike me as cases where it would have been an unambiguous moral good to end the slaughter sooner rather than watching.

And there is the matter of needing to respond to military aggression by others. It seems pretty obvious to me that responding to Hitler was an absolute moral imperative, for example. Intervening against a regime that overthrew their colonial overlords, not so much (e.g. Vietnam).

So the basic principle is sound, but you do have to recognize that there can be situations where there will be many dead people regardless of what decision you make.

So yeah, JQ is right – war is very hard to predict or control, and you are much more likely to come out with a negative result than a positive. It has always to be dealt with careful case by case, never in generalities.

This is true as a generality (!), but has very limited applicability to places where the war has already begun in your absence and you are faced with choices about whether and how to interfere. Can you shorten the conflict or reduce its overall body count? Or merely shift the casualties from the existing belligerents to your own intervening forces?

Sierra Leone? I’d count that as a pretty successful intervention.

Except for JH’s closing point, “Even when a military intervention goes as smoothly as possible, it sets a precedent for future disasters.” Which would be a debating-society point, if Sierra Leone hadn’t set so clear a precedent for Kosovo & beyond.

Which would be a debating-society point, if Sierra Leone hadn’t set so clear a precedent for Kosovo & beyond.

But Kosovo wasn’t a disaster, though. Unless “& beyond” is supposed to be, what, Iraq? Which would be weird because the ostensible reason for invading Iraq was WMD, not RTP.

I really have a lot of sympathy for the stance JQ is expressing here (thanks for doing so). I do however think that it remains abstract. The questions that we confront historically aren’t “would peaceful struggle against the French colonizers in Algeria have been preferable” – but rather, given that any kind of struggle provoked an extremely violent and brutal reaction from the colonizing power, how should we stand with regards to the inevitable armed resistance? Similarly, the question isn’t whether I would prefer a peaceful revolution over a violent one (of course!) but rather if, given the reality of daily violence towards the oppressed, I would prefer an armed revolution to none. And so forth. It is in this sense that I unconditionally support armed struggle against the Empire abroad, or (eventually) against class rule at home. (To be clear this does not mean I support every form of armed struggle, or any given form at all times.)

At the same time, these considerations also mean I am strictly opposed to wars waged with whatever flimsy excuse by the imperialist powers themselves.

I just don’t think the most convincing argument against Sierra Leone, for example, is the reality of Iraq 2003. Or that the most convincing argument for why Iraq 2003 happened was a continuation of the humanitarian interventions of the 90s. There are some similarities but Iraq 2003 was much more explicitly fought to increase US hegemony over the Middle East. There has to be, imho, a way to respond to actual humanitarian crises, (multilaterally would be my preference), and a separate examination of why US policy in the Middle East is so flawed.

Bloix, considering he didn’t become UK Prime Minister until two years after the Srebrenica massacre and four years after the Vance-Owen negotiations, presumably you mean John Major, not Tony Blair.

Neville Morley @24
I blame Thucydides – or at any rate crude misreadings of selected extracts from Thucydides, as are all too commonly found within International Relations, esp. in the US.

Actually there has been a fair amt of reconsideration of Thucydides in the IR lit. in recent yrs. Exs: R.N. Lebow, “Thucydides the Constructivist,” Am Pol Sci Rev; Jonathan Monten on Thucydides in Intl Studies Quarterly. Just two that come to
mind. (Sorry no time to put in links.) Might also see M. Doyle’s discussion of Thucydides in his Ways of War and Peace (’97).

It’s true of course that, despite these reconsiderations, a lot of IR academics in the US have prob not really read Thucydides in any depth. Realists (capital R) may make a ritual obeisance at the beginning of some of their articles or books and leave it at that. As an IR grad student in a program that was more geared to history/theory than many of them are, I had to read some snippets from Thucydides in the first year — in the Hobbes translation, iirc, which frankly is a pain — and that was it. There has been an elaborate, lovingly prepared new edition of Thucydides in recent years, I forget the editor’s name, complete w careful maps and all that, but it came out too late to be of any use to me.

In the case of Sierra Leone,… the interventon when it happened served only to distract from the role the interveners had played in brnging about the situation supposedly making it necessary in the first place.

Hell yes, you won’t get much disagreement from me there, although I would dispute the use of the word “only”. The intervention served to bring an end to hostilities and distract from the role the interveners had played etc etc

I think we’d all love a world in which motives were pure, and foreign policy was based on the idea of long term global peace and stability, rather than short term national interest (using a definition of national interest that many people wouldn’t recognise). Then eventually, any party that intervened could do so with clean hands.

However, the world is as it is – fucked up by history. Virtually no country can do anything without having at some point done something to contribute in the first place. If no one could do anything good unless they had never ever done anything bad, no one could ever do anything at all.

Accidentally, I seem to be making the non-interventionist point. It might be a good idea if everyone stuck to the same principle. Alas, everyone won’t.

@LFC #41: agreed re Lebow and Monten – but the obvious point is that both of them have read all of Thucydides, carefully and probably many times, and they develop a reading of the text that’s complex and multi-layered with attention to rhetoric rather than extracting a few supposedly universal principles (“the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”) and ascribing them to Thucydides. Since the vast majority of IR theorists are unlikely to devote lots of time to reading the whole text and the relevant classical scholarship, I’m more inclined to follow David Welch’s line (Review of International Studies 2003): ‘Why IR theorists should stop reading Thucydides’ – and I speak as someone who’s professionally interested in as many people reading Thucydides as possible…

I agree with much of this post and I’m no fan at all of intervention but I’ve long thought that a good deal of suffering in the former Yugoslavia could have been prevented by sailing elements of the US Sixth Fleet into the Adriatic in 1992 or 1993, or maybe even as early as 1991, after the shelling of Dubrovnik.

Can we maybe think of Korea as “the exception that proves the rule” here? The DPRK and PRC accomplished nothing by striking south of the 48th parallel, the defensive battle waged by the ROK/US/etc forces looks pretty good in retrospect, but the counter-effort to overrun DPRK territory proved costly and pointless.

Moral of the story: If someone attacks you, fight back. If someone attacks an ally, consider helping them fight back. But attacking other countries—even other countries that just attacked you—doesn’t work out.

“The Israeli destruction of the Osirak reactor was pretty clean, bloodless and effective. It’s a pity that our elites had forgotten the episode twenty years later, when they were frightened by the prospect of Iraq adding uranium ore to their already abundant stockpile.”

“Fascinatingly, given that it’s seen as such a good thing today, ”

You’re both assuming something–that it is universally accepted today that the Israeli raid on Osirak was a good thing. This isn’t true.

wikipedia article on Osirak

Barry Freed-
During those years I became convinced that the official policy of NATO and the United States was that the Bosnian Muslims should just die, already, and stop being such a pain in the ass about it.

A good deal of the suffering ın the former Yugoslavia (presumably) could by the same logic have been prevented by elements of the Russian navy sailing into the Caribbean in 1998.

The what now? What was happening in the Caribbean in 1998? And by that time, the war in Bosnia was over anyway… do you mean 1988?

The U.S. entered World War II because Japan had just attacked us, after all, rather than actually invading.

Not exactly. Japan attacked and invaded the Philippines, which was then part of the United States (as the Commonwealth of the Philippines), on 8 December 1941.

@Matt Yglesias

Can we maybe think of Korea as “the exception that proves the rule” here? The DPRK and PRC accomplished nothing by striking south of the 48th parallel, the defensive battle waged by the ROK/US/etc forces looks pretty good in retrospect, but the counter-effort to overrun DPRK territory proved costly and pointless.

I’m not so sure. The Chinese threat to intervene was if the UN forces came up to the Yalu River, not if they just went past the 38th Parallel. If MacArthur hadn’t been an over-reaching idiot, he might have been able to end the war on a more favorable territorial setting for South Korea than what actually happened.

In general, though, you’re likely right. It’s worth noting that the Korean War, like Gulf War I, was done with a much broader mandate than other US interventions – both had the support of the UN.

In response to some earlier points, I don’t think Korea was the starter for the US narrative of the spread of communism in East Asia. That was going to happen after China went communist regardless of what happened in Korea (I think Truman actually took some flack for “losing China”). Moreover, I question how much sooner the US could have improved relations with the Chinese, since it actually did take some time for them and the Soviets to alienate each other.

In general if you don’t understand what effects your actions will have, you’ll end up in the wrong place more often than not.

This is a generalization I can get behind. Of course sometimes not doing anything is the riskiest movie — but very often it isn’t! I think in starting wars, especially, the best decisions are made from a stance of humility — understanding that you might be wrong about things, and planning for that too. The biggest failures in war often arise from the most specific and confident plans, offensive and defensive. I think you can find an example in almost any war. The Maginot Line and Schlieffen Plan come to mind, though I can claim an only superficial knowledge of them.

“Insufficient elements of said navy were seaworthy enough to get there by 1998.”

Well that is a more valid point. Still one can dream, eh?

Neville Morley @45, 46
Yes I was thinking of the Landmark Thucydides. I had forgotten it used an old translation. The copy now on my shelf (b.c as an IR type I must have Thucydides on the shelf even if I never look at it) is the Penguin Classics ed., trans R. Warner, intro. and notes M.I. Finley. Do you like that one or not? (I don’t read Greek so the orig. is out.)

“Most of Europe becomes a German empire ruled by an autocratic anti-semitic dictator?”

Yes…. whatever you might say WW1 certainly prevented that. What was I thinkıng?

Yes…. whatever you might say WW1 certainly prevented that.

*looks out of window in the general direction of Europe*

… yes, seems to have done.

How do you smart fellows and ladies think the most disastrous invasions are started? Aside from the over-cited first half of the 20th Century, how often is it the same parties goad themselves into a risky and ultimately disastrous adventure twice in a row? Is that how we should view the Napoleonic wars as well? But they seem to have been more successful, at least for awhile.

“looks out of window”

Yes and it prevented rain as well. It’s not raining today. Proof if proof were needed.

“a German empire ruled by an autocratic anti-semitic dictator”

The Jews did very well in the German empire. Their rights were protected by the 1871 Constitution and they prospered economically and professionally after unification. In return, Jews were enthusiastic German patriots and served and died in higher percentages than other ethnic groups in the German army during World War I.

If we imagine a German empire from the Baltic to the Adriatic, balanced to the West by France and the British empire and to the East by the Russian and Ottoman empires, would that have been a situation less likely to advance human freedom and happiness than the result that Europe eventually got?

Josh G. @ 58 “We don’t teach nearly enough about WWI in history classes, mostly because it just isn’t a very edifying story: Wilson stumbles into a pointless European war, violates civil liberties like crazy, and botches the treaty negotiations so badly that WWII is almost inevitable. In contrast, with WWII, we get to be the good guys, and the post-war settlement actually worked, so it gets all the press.”

It seems to me that WWII worked out as well as it did, because the experience of WWI, and the happy accident of FDR, led to an historically unusual effort to think hard about ends and means, and liberals and principled conservatives (yes, Virginia, historically, there were such creatures walking the earth in the age of the dinosaur) took charge of policy. As Glen Tomkins @ 42 says, we don’t think hard enough about war, or the alternatives.

Broadly, we don’t like to think about domination in human affairs — it is the central problem of politics: who will guard the guardians? how do we found a peaceful order on justice? The core deficiency of American political discourse, since about 1980, has been the conspiracy of neoliberals and libertarian conservatives to pretend that the problem doesn’t even exist, and so doesn’t require any thinking, whatsoever. We don’t even have to go to war to bring about horrific consequences, for which we take no responsibility; we can impose “economic sanctions” with no more rationale or moral sense. War, then, is merely a continuation of teh Stupid by other means.

The entropy of mind, which takes hold, insists that great enterprises of state should be conducted in accordance with “principles”, which are nothing more than slogans, which derive their cardboard cutout meanings, from the context of fairy tale re-tellings of the past. The tragedy of Vietnam was the product of a determined re-telling of the story of Chamberlain appeasing Hitler at Munich, mixed in with reactionary fantasies about how “we” “lost” China. Underneath the story-telling was the purge of fags, pinkos and other sensible people from the Foreign Service and military establishment (thanks to Uncle Joe McCarthy and the cowardice of the liberal anti-commies), which, in turn, left the CIA, the Army and other key institutions, to successive generations of increasingly incompetent conservatives and reactionaries, serving corporate interests, but still mouthing the ideals of liberal internationalism as rationalizations — this continued right thru George W. Bush’s parody ultimatums to Saddam Hussein and the unbelievably corrupt and incompetent Reconstruction of Iraq. And, now we have soi disant liberals defending/ignoring Obama’s policy of mass-murder-by-drone.

This problem of failing to think thru the hard, hard problems of both using and constraining the use of power to organize and dominate won’t be solved by Matthew Ygelsias @49

Moral of the story: If someone attacks you, fight back. If someone attacks an ally, consider helping them fight back. But attacking other countries—even other countries that just attacked you—doesn’t work out.

As soon as he wrote “moral of the story”, it was pretty much certain that the rest would be idiocy. You cannot derive moral principles from Aesop’s fables, and then leave a reactionary semi-competent like MacArthur unsupervised, and hope for the best — it really will not work out well.

The lesson of WWI ought to have been that you cannot trust either foreign affairs or military organization to elites of hereditary, landed aristocrats and their authoritarian, reactionary sycophants. Ditto for hedge fund managers and corporate multinationals. There are no simple principles, pacifist or otherwise, which will do any good, whatsoever. What is needed is hard practical thinking and political organization to guard the guardians, to force public deliberation and accountability into politics, against the wishes of the politicians and those, who would hire the politicians to work against any genuine attempt to define or pursue a broad, public interest or good.

@74: And why would a successful Kaiser have left France around as an effective counterweight? Do people not actually remember the combatants in WW I?

As the former International Court of Justice´s judge Simma says:
as long as claims behind the disregards for the law are being met not with resigned silence but with firm counterclaims for a return to legality, international law will not give way to the short-sighted arbitrariness and apologetism aspired by a powerful few.
So, the only way for peace is to stay behind the UN-Charter and not the new Monroe-doctrines!

ajay @ 64: Please explain how a situation where the Allies “collapsed immediately” (as stipulated by Hidari’s hypothetical) would have resulted in Erich Ludendorff becoming dictator of Germany. It wasn’t until August 1916, two years into the war, that he succeeded Erich von Falkenhayn as chief of the general staff (a position he renamed to General Quartermaster) and thus became part of the Third Supreme Command with the Kaiser and von Hindenburg. Even then, this makes him one of the three most powerful people in Germany, not its unquestioned ruler – the Kaiser has the legitimacy, and Hindenburg was more popular (as shown by his long tenure as President during the Weimar Republic).
It’s possible to imagine hypotheticals where Ludendorff takes command, but it’s a low-probability event. Avoiding the war altogether is more likely. A quick German victory won’t put Ludendorff in charge. And a long war without U.S. involvement probably means a bloody stalemate that results in an exhausted peace on status quo ante bellum terms, and the discrediting of warmongers on all sides (and therefore no WWII).

Bloix @ 73: “If we imagine a German empire from the Baltic to the Adriatic, balanced to the West by France and the British empire and to the East by the Russian and Ottoman empires, would that have been a situation less likely to advance human freedom and happiness than the result that Europe eventually got?”

Counterfactuals are rarely evidence of anything, but the poverty of theory and interpretation.

A key word, here, is: “empire”.

World War I wasn’t a product simply of horizontal rivalries among imperial states; the hereditary aristocracies controlling those empires were in a vertical contest with the aspirations of various groups, organized as nationalities. World War I belongs in the long series, which began with the Dutch Revolt, and including the English Civil War and the French Revolution, and which brought about the overthrow of a “feudal” order.

The balance of power arrangements between states, which had kept wars in Europe, short and limited in scope from 1815 to 1914, broke down in World War and the incredibly bloody military stalemate of the Western Front. But, what provoked the war was not the inability of the Great Powers to get along with each other (which was altogether too well-practiced), but the unwillingness of reactionary regimes to adapt to the rise of nation-states and the ambitions of modernists in their midst.

Organizing politically along nationalist lines had its own, potentially ugly implications, but these competed with some pretty ugly implications of the imperial projects of the Romanovs, Ottomans, Hohenzollerns, and Hapsburgs. There was never an easy, pure ideal path, here, and the survival of the feudal empires, and their incompetent, irresponsible elites, was never a realistic option.

replying to Ajay at 74 – I was certainly not saying that Britain’s victory in the
Falklands could be predicted/guaranteed. I was saying that the implications of a British victory, if one was achieved, could be reasonably well predicted by the British government. My point is that (1) having a high level of confidence around the predicted long-term outcome of military attack assuming you win is something of a wise pre-condition to set before launching one and (2) unless you are specifically trying to turn back the clock to the recent past I do not think it possible to be very confident about the outcome of victory (and if you are confident that you know, you’re almost certainly wrong, based on the past century worth of history). And that’s just from a rational perspective.

“If every littoral state knows that a war will inevitably turn out very badly for any state that goes to war with the nation with the great big f*** off Navy, well, it depends really.”

Tim, the trouble with this is, the nation with the navy seems to go looking for wars.

LFC @ 63: Warner is my default translation of Thucydides; decent rendition of the Greek, doesn’t get too imaginative at the tricky bits, generally readable. However, I’m rubbing my hands at the prospect of at least one new translation (due from CUP in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series next year) and perhaps as many as three (Clifford Orwin and Ryan Balot at Toronto are certainly working on one, and there are rumours of some classicists at Cornell working on another). And I suspect that most people will still use Crawley, as he is so very readable, even if it’s not actually Thucydides half the time but his own imagination.

If we absolutely must theorize about how to construct a just, stable and above all international political and economic order, I’m with Bruce Wilder — it’s probably better to start with the United Nations than the Battle of Jutland. What’s needed that neither of those models offer is the willingness of those with power to put a substantial amount of that power at risk by lending it to those who haven’t any of their own, and doing so at a non-usurious interest rate.

Once upon a time, for few years after WWII, there were people around who actually thought about trying this. Unfortunately for us, they didn’t last very long. The non-nefarious aspects of the Marshall Plan, and later the Peace Corps — and there were some — weren’t such a bad blueprint, nor was/is the evolving design of the European Union.

So it’s not as though we had to begin at the absolute beginning when looking for a theoretical model, but we really do have to be clear about what we want. And no matter what the full spectrum dominance boys are currently wetting their pants about, what we want should definitely not be yet another reason to wave whatever flag it is that our friends and neighbors insist is ours.

In public dammit. Metaphor from cider-making.

Phil @92 ” Wait – there were Australians at Versailles?”
From Wikipedia, as good a source as any: ” In 1919, Hughes and former Prime Minister Joseph Cook travelled to Paris to attend the Versailles peace conference. He remained away for 16 months, and signed the Treaty of Versailles on behalf of Australia – the first time Australia had signed an international treaty. At Versailles, Hughes claimed; “I speak for 60 000 [Australian] dead”.[17] He went on to ask of Woodrow Wilson; “How many do you speak for?” when the United States President failed to acknowledge his demands. Hughes, unlike Wilson or South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, demanded heavy reparations from Germany suggesting a staggering sum of ₤24,000,000,000 of which Australia would claim many millions, to off-set its own war debt.[18] Hughes frequently clashed with President Wilson, who described him as a ‘pestiferous varmint’.”

By all accounts, he was a pestiferous varmint too. But annoying Wilson has to be a plus.

Also from wiki:

“The Australian delegation, led by Prime Minister Billy Hughes, wanted war reparations, annexation of German New Guinea and rejection of the Japanese racial equality proposal. Hughes obtained a class C mandate for New Guinea.

President Wilson was especially offended by Australian demands and asked Hughes if Australia really wanted to flout world opinion by profiting from Germany’s defeat and extending its sovereignty as far north as the equator; Hughes famously replied: “That’s about the size of it, Mr. President”

World War I is a good example of my point about the need to think through the actual case – not operate in generalities. World War I arose because the coalitions of landlords, industrialists and aristocratic politicians that ran Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia all preferred war to a peace that they saw as leading inevitably to their political and social extinction at the hands of liberals and social democrats. The point of the war to them was that, if they won, it would weaken the liberal powers and free them to take drastic measures against their domestic opposition (Wilhelm, Bethmann-Hollweg, Turpitz, Hotzendorf, Sazonov and others are documentedly explicit on this) . So what you would have got from a German victory was not the old Wilhelmine Germany, but new tough anti-liberal, anti-social democrat Wilhelmine Germany. And, yes, liebensraum in the east was a major part of the agenda too, so goodbye Poles and Ukrainians. World War II arose in large part because the same coalition in Germany refused to accept that they had lost. It was so much more horrible because they got behind someone who took all their worst fantasies as a definite program, and had the ability to hold them to the job to the bitter end. Those who died in both wars opposing this vision of how Europe should be run did not die in vain.

BTW, a lot of the discourse assumes that, if we don’t pay the price, no-one will, or at any rate no-one who counts. The high policy attitude to the Bosnians was that if they were going to be raped anyway, could they just keep the screaming down because it was really hurting the ears of the bystanders. The comparable attitude to World War I is that, hey, Belgians, Poles, Serbs and a few others may suffer a bit under the German new order, but they’ll get used to it.

I don’t want to come off like a conspiracy theorist here suggesting that the military industrial complex is pulling all the strings but asking generally speaking “Was more lost than gained? Were the national aims achieved?” might be an interesting question philosphically and historically but in terms of practical politics all that matters is what particular parties gained and lost. The Iraq War was not a disaster for everybody. The shareholders of defense contractors did pretty good. If you ask them, the Iraq war as spectacular success (although they probably wouldn’t let you quote them on that). The W’s and Rumsfeld’s of the world didn’t lose anything personally other than having a black smudge on their name in the history books but they’ll live out the rest of their days wealthy men eating steak and playing golf. Obviously, the people who fought the war and live in the war zone paid a high price but let’s not get kid ourselves that any of those people really matter much to anybody in Washington or Wall Street.

Or to put it another way, the reason why we never learn anything is because is there is no we.

Or to put it another way, the reason why we never learn anything is because is there is no we.

Amen to that.

It is a growing obsession of mine to call attention to how often *we* use the word “we” without any definition whatsoever of who/what *we* mean by it.

“The point of the war to them was that, if they won, it would weaken the liberal powers and free them to take drastic measures against their domestic opposition (Wilhelm, Bethmann-Hollweg, Turpitz, Hotzendorf, Sazonov and others are documentedly explicit on this) . So what you would have got from a German victory was not the old Wilhelmine Germany, but new tough anti-liberal, anti-social democrat Wilhelmine Germany. And, yes, liebensraum in the east was a major part of the agenda too, so goodbye Poles and Ukrainians.”

This seems to be a more accurate interpretation of the events than those posted earlier.

I think it’s the occasional success stories that leave liberals open to entering conflicts despite all evidence to the contrary. I think John’s point is not that there have never been interventions that were, in retrospect, justifiable. Rather, our first instinct should be to run away screaming from whichever pundit or politician is recommending war, then only to return if the prospects of inaction are so horrific that even a military intervention gone horribly wrong wouldn’t be much worse. Dictatorships that aren’t actively killing off thousands of citizens probably don’t qualify.

Interesting fact not generally known: the Britısh Empire reached its greatest extent in the 1920s, after WW1.

As a historian, I’m dreading the centenary of Gallipoli in 2015

As a folksinger, m3 t00. The second time I heard “And the band played Waltzing Matilda” I was already sick of it – and the second time I heard it was a long time ago.

our first instinct should be to run away screaming from whichever pundit or politician is recommending war, then only to return if the prospects of inaction are so horrific that even a military intervention gone horribly wrong wouldn’t be much worse

I think this is exactly right. The question should always be “What’s the worst that could happen?”, not “Is there a chance of a good result?” The trouble is, who’s having these discussions? For we-the-CT-commenters to get things straight in our own minds is one thing, but it doesn’t necessarily have any purchase on what goes on in the credentialled punditsphere, let alone in government.

And governments think about war differently from us(-the-CT-commenters). Firstly there’s the hammer/nail problem, exacerbated by personal vanity and groupthink: waging war may not be the only thing a government can do, but it’s one of the more immediately visible options and particularly easy to associate with an individual leader. Then there’s the fact, already alluded to, that individuals in government & powerful interests close to government actually do rather well out of war. I don’t think I’d go all the way with this, though. Here’s something I wrote a few years ago:

The other day I attended a seminar addressed by Giancarlo Aragona (the Italian Ambassador) and Steven Haines – an interesting speaker who was on particularly good form. Haines’ answer to one question from the floor struck me. An International Relations lecturer asked him where he’d place Bush and Blair on the classic idealist/realist spectrum: I mean, they may like to present themselves as idealists, but can they be really? … Haines was having none of it: the Foreign Office and the MoD were mostly staffed by realists, he said, and they certainly didn’t think Blair was a realist.

That said, of course, those powerful interests can’t be wished away. I think what we had with Bush/Blair was the worst of both worlds – genuine idealists, in their own policy bubble, working the levers of a government machine which was itself predisposed to war.

And out of all that came the message from the news media that we would no longer tolerate this or that and we would commit our forces to stop it happening. As I wrote somewhere else about something else entirely, the problem isn’t what we think – the problem is that there isn’t a “we” in the first place.

“The forces in Sierra Leone were there at the request of the legitimate government, and they were fighting against a bunch of criminals and terrorists who had kidnapped a UN peacekeeping force. It’s not really the sort of thing people mean by “intervention””

Quite possibly true. But certainly an operation which shows the value of having a navy with aircraft/helicopter/marine landing ships when dealing with a littoral state…..

The forces in Sierra Leone were there at the request of the legitimate government, and they were fighting against a bunch of criminals and terrorists who had kidnapped a UN peacekeeping force. It’s not really the sort of thing people mean by “intervention”

Well now, hang on there, you’re moving the goal posts now. If you’re going to say that intervention is bad, and by intervention we only mean the bad sort of intervention, then you’re engaging in a tautology.

For the record, I entirely agree with Eric Titus that our first instinct should be to run away screaming from whichever pundit or politician is recommending war, then only to return if the prospects of inaction are so horrific that even a military intervention gone horribly wrong wouldn’t be much worse.

But you still have the problem of accurately measuring the prospects of inaction. There will always be someone to say that the consequences of your action were terrible, therefore it shouldn’t have been done, because by taking an action you don’t actually see the consequences of inaction.

A bit like people criticising the extreme measures to combat SARS because look it only killed a few people in the end, or people wondering about all the money spent on sorting out the 2k bug when it didn’t turn out to be a problem at all.

118: come on, JQ, you’re more intelligent than that. This is bumper sticker territory.

Alright, relatively few then. I meant in relation to the number of people it could have killed if said extreme measures hadn’t been put in place, yes?

Thanks to all for the instruction about my uninformed comments about the Osirak attack. It appears that it didn’t set back the Iraqi effort to build a nuclear weapon (and given the reactor’s design, it couldn’t have) and yet they never did manage to achieve a nuclear capability. Funny, that. Pakistan’s puny nuclear might hasn’t kept the U.S. from policing its ungovernable borders with death from the skies, and Israel’s nukes don’t seem to have kept its neighbors from lobbing occasional missiles.

Having overwhelming power isn’t necessarily all that useful. It’s a funny thing: over the last couple of decades I’ve never had an occasion to bring my shotgun to a discussion with my neighbors. My checkbook is another matter.

JQ @ 113 — I think you might have been responding to Jamey @ 101, and not me…? Just FTR.

It’s highly likely that the Lıbyan “intervention” was NOT legal (see link below) and in any case it’s irrelevant as the attack was not authorised by Congress and was illegal under US domestic law in any case. But getting legal, proper, authorisation under ınternational law for war is extremely difficult as it should be. But this picture is complicated of course because in reality all countries on Earth must obey international law except the US (and countries “allied” to it).

http://www.academia.edu/576116/The_Libya_Humanitarian_Intervention_Is_it_Lawful_in_International_Law

in any case it’s irrelevant as the attack was not authorised by Congress and was illegal under US domestic law in any case.

Only irrelevant if you’re American, which I’m not.

Anyway, the trouble with International Law is that you can be technically correct, or incorrect, and it will matter not a jot if the “right” powers are behind something.

Who, exactly, do you appeal to if the Security Council has passed a resolution but you think that is illegal? There is no court that can bind them. Sure, there’s the International Court of Justice, but who do they turn to when they make a judgement and a state doesn’t comply. Whoops, the Security Council.

@125 “I expect that the US military could raise $300 billion a year (roughly, 2 per cent of US income) from tax-deductible donations, which is more than the combined spending of Russia, China and India.”

Hang on, isn’t that my line as the local neoliberal nutcase? That we’ll do just fine with the provision of public goods through purely voluntary action, no free rider problems at all, no siree? Higher education, no direct state funding needed at all. Just leave it to personal incomes and charitable donations. Health care for the poor and so on. After all, if the first great duty of the State, to defend it, can be met through such means then absolutely any other of those can and should be.

Is this really Crooked “I’m more structurally Leftist than thou” Timber arguing that absolutely nobody benefits from wars, because the majority of taxpayers don’t see any gain and lots of generally low-income folks get killed or wounded?

I mean, as said above, the Iraq war didn’t work out too well for the average middle-class or lower Iraqi, for the average U.S. taxpayer or for any of the US servicewomen and men wounded or killed. But getting re-elected was a pretty good outcome for Bush, and billions of dollars in no-bid un-audited contracts was a pretty good outcome for contractors, and moving from ‘enemy of the powerful dictator’ to ‘running the country’ was a good outcome for the current Iraqi leadership, even if the country they’re running is as a whole a lot worse off than it was with the dictator.

The problem with the OP is that it frames the question in a country versus country way, turning away from the obvious answer : political elites start wars because they get the benefits but don’t pay the costs.

Now, if the OP was asking “Why do publics support leaders who start wars, when the general public pays the price but gets little benefit?”, that’s an interesting question. But it’s not asking that question; it’s assuming that question away.

@132

Time to wheel out this old chestnut methinks:

“Goering: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that
he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?

Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in
England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is
understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the
people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or
a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Gustave Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the
United States only Congress can declare wars.*

Goering: Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. It’s easy. All you have to do is tell them
they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in
any country.”

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/235519.html

*Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

I’ve never fully understood why everyone holds up Rwanda as an example where intervention should occur. It only needs a quick look at a map of Africa and a minimal knowledge of military logistics to know that a decisive military intervention with sufficient soldiers to provide ‘on the ground’ protection for civilians through the country would have been impossible in the timescale available.

How about Roméo Dallaire, the general in charge of the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, who loudly told anyone who would listen that a scant few thousand properly-equipped soldiers would be sufficient to stop the genocide in its tracks, and was summarily ignored? I mean, maybe he would’ve been proven wrong, but I suspect he had a better idea of the situation on the ground than any of us do. I oppose war in almost all cases, but it would be very difficult to convince me that something couldn’t and shouldn’t have been done in Rwanda.

“I’ve never fully understood why everyone holds up Rwanda as an example where intervention should occur.”

The problem with all of these examples from the 90s is they ignore the progress that has been made. This might be overly optimistic but still a good rundown

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136502/jon-western-and-joshua-s-goldstein/humanitarian-intervention-comes-of-age?page=show

“Despite the international community’s impressive record of recent humanitarian missions, many of the criticisms formulated in response to the botched campaigns of 1992–95 still guide the conversation about intervention today. The charges are outdated. Contrary to the claims that interventions prolong civil wars and lead to greater humanitarian suffering and civilian casualties, the most violent and protracted cases in recent history — Somalia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bosnia before Srebrenica, and Darfur — have been cases in which the international community was unwilling either to intervene or to sustain a commitment with credible force. Conversely, a comprehensive study conducted by the political scientist Taylor Seybolt has found that aggressive operations legitimized by firm UN Security Council resolutions, as in Bosnia in 1995 and East Timor in 1999, were the most successful at ending conflicts…..

Collectively, these new conflict management and civilian protection tools have contributed to a marked decline in violence resulting from civil war. According to the most recent Human Security Report, between 1992 and 2003 the number of conflicts worldwide declined by more than 40 percent, and between 1988 and 2008 the number of conflicts that produced 1,000 or more battle deaths per year fell by 78 percent. Most notably, the incidence of lethal attacks against civilians was found to be lower in 2008 than at any point since the collection of such data began in 1989.”

“Obviously, as I mentioned above, capitalists the military industry benefits from war but at the expense of capitalists other industries. ”

Or to be more specific, capitalists ın other countries. Obviously some capitalısts dıd better than others out of the the invasion of Iraq, but one thıng that united them all was that they were all American.

Iraqi capitalists? Not so much.

Because one can create economic activity without blowing things up.

That’s different from saying that no one benefits from a war. Politically, it seems, war is the easiest way to introduce a massive stimulus. No one is complaining (ironically) that money is wasted or spent on undeserving scoundrels .

Vanya

I think your comment would be better directed to Hidari@62, who wrote
“the next best case would have been for the “Allies” to have collapsed immediately and let the Germans win.”

That is an argument I have met before. Oddly, I have never come across it in the inverse form: “the next best case would have been for the Germans to have collapsed immediately and let the Allies win.”

I’m not sure why that is so. One could argue, immediate German collapse impossible because of outstanding German army: but equally, immediate Allied collapse seems hardly possible because of wet wobbly stuff around Britain + outstanding Royal Navy, combined with Russia being too big and with too many Russians.

Maybe Hidari could explain why he regards hypothetical immediate victory for German autocracy as desirable, equally hypothetical victory for liberal democracies in France and UK as unthinkable?

@150 I’m good with either.

Incidentally neither the UK nor France were “liberal democracies” in 1914.

Hidari: liberalness, and democracy, are always relative.

Reference an ideal, perfect liberal democracy, yes of course you are right in saying that neither France nor the UK were such in 1914. Was anywhere, then? Is anywhere, now?

Compared to even Germany, yes, they were very much more liberal and very much more democratic, weren’t they?

Please delete inexplicable duplicate.

As regards politicians, the penalties for losing wars seem to be much greater than the benefits from winning them: see Saddam and the Bushes.

What?! As far as I remember Bush and Blair got reelected, and have done pretty well for themselves since.

the war will cost the US government $2-3 trillion. A fair chunk of that is going to come out of profits. So, US capitalists as a group are among the big losers from the war.

US capitalism is nothing without US hegemony, so no, the capitalists are very happy.

“I also have a hard time taking your sympathy for Poles and Ukrainians seriously if you think a German victory in WWI could have possibly been any worse for those two nations than what actually happened in that region over the next 30 years.”

Actually, it could.

There were very strong anti-liberal, nationalist, and imperialist views in Wilhelmine Germany. The point has been made that a rapid German victory over France, followed by success in the east against the Russians, would have strengthened those views and the people supporting these views remarkably. Even fairly early in the First World War, some German war plans envisaged the ethnic cleansing of large parts of central Europe and their resettlement by Germans.

A conflict like the Second World War, with an imperialistic and nationalistic Germany waging war against the rest of the world, may have been inevitable. Germany’s defeat in the First World War might have been necessary in order to keep it from starting with the domination of continental Europe.

If we’re going for a counterfactual scenario, it’s definitely

Hidari @ 162 You are misinformed.

If you subscribe to the Domino Theory, and the theory that the collapse of the Soviet Union (and thus the Comintern) was inevitable, then the Vietnam War was an American success to the extent that it delayed by ten years Vietnam’s fall into Communist hands.