War

We’re just a few weeks away from the 25th anniversary of the Kosovo War, which started in March 1999. So, I’d like to do a retrospective on the war’s causes.

This is a long story! It’s going to take at least three posts, and they won’t be short. I think it’s interesting, but it may not be to everyone’s taste, so the rest is below the cut.

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Amid the current horror and propaganda, the pogroms, kidnapping and bombings, and the (at best reckless) violence against civilian populations it is important not to lose sight of what a justish solution might be in Israel/Palestine and it seems to me that this is actually a rather simple matter at least as soon as we set aside outcomes that require the total erasure by displacement or murder of either Jewish Israelis or Palestinian Arabs or the unjust domination of one group by the other. Some “just” solutions are better than others, but in the non-ideal world we have to accept some compromise with geopolitical force majeure and the fact that some people just hate other kinds of people.

Just-ish solutions

1A: A single state in which everyone living long-term within its borders has citizenship on equal terms, irrespective of national, ethnic or religious background.

1B: A single state with some kind of consociational system for power-sharing and, therefore, some explicit recognition of individual national, ethnic, or religious affiliation.

2: A two-state solution involving demarcated territory for each national group, based on some fair territorial settlement between them.

1A is preferable to 1B is preferable to 2, from an abstract liberal and democratic perspective. But given that we live under non-ideal circumstances and peace is also important, then 2 strikes me as acceptable.

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A few days ago, I tooted at Mastodon about a Christmas message I’d had from a Russian friend. I intended my post to convey something hopeful about peace and reconciliation, but got immediate pushback from someone who asked why, if there are are some good Russians, they haven’t stopped the war. Meanwhile, over on Elon’s death site, the theme of holding Russians collectively responsible for the war seemed to be gathering momentum with vehement assertions that this isn’t just “Putin’s war” but one backed by “the Russian people”. I think claims such as these, particularly in their maximal forms are absurd, and become all the more absurd when the alleged collective responsiblity of “the Russian people” is extended to an attitude of hostility and blaming towards individuals, simply because they hold Russian nationality. And many members of “the Russian people” are, after all, children. Yet in rejecting such absurdities, I also want to leave room for those Russians who feel their own responsbility keenly and who feel shame at the Russian government’s actions and who want to take responsibility by resisting, in great or small ways, what that government is doing.

One obvious point to make is that Russia is not a democracy and that Russian citizens have no effective means to restrain their government, even if they wanted to. Rather, they live under a tyranny, quick to mete out savage punishments to its opponents, and where public opinion is partly shaped by relentless nationalistic propaganda. In this light, one might think of ordinary Russians as being among the victims of the regime, even though there are others, most notably Ukrainians, who are suffering much more at its hands. During the Soviet era, it is worth noting, Western governments were keen to frame ordinary Soviet citizens as victims of dictatorship rather than holding them individually or collectively responsible, but this approach has been abandoned in some reponses to the war, including by Baltic politicians who refuse to accept that Russians who refuse to fight for Putin are legitimate refugees.
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And so it begins… Yulia Galyamina, the first Russian professor who got fired because “she is a foreign agent”.

And here’s Dmitry Vasilets, a Real Russian Hero.

Also, while we’re talking about Russia: Please consider supporting Meduza. Russians must have access to free press, just like all of us – and after it got banned, Meduza can only continue thanks to subscriptions and financial support from outside Russia.

My latest piece in Independent Australia

THE RISKS of nuclear war are greater than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not only is Vladimir Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons to stave off defeat in Ukraine, but the North Korean Government has continued to develop and test both missiles and nuclear warheads.

U.S. President Joe Biden has responded to Putin’s threats with admirable calm so far, playing down the risk that Putin will use nuclear weapons and avoiding any threat of escalation.

Leaks from the U.S. Administration have indicated that the response to a tactical nuclear weapon would be massive but confined to conventional weapons.

Yet the official doctrine of the U.S. would call for the use of nuclear weapons in exactly the situation faced by Putin today: a conventional war going badly.
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Back in 2011, I wrote a post arguing that

self-defense (including collective self-defense) is justified only to the extent of restoring the status quo ante bellum. That is, having defeated an aggressor, a country is not justified in seizing territory, unilaterally exacting reparations or imposing a new government on its opponent. Conversely, and regardless of the alleged starting point, countries not directly involved should never recognise a forcibly imposed transfer of territory or similar attempt to achieve advantages through war.

What does this claim mean in the context of the war in Ukraine? In my view, it means that the Ukrainian government and its international supporters should seek a ceasefire in which Russia withdraws its forces to their positions of 23 February, without conceding any Russian claims regarding annexations or (if they still operate after the sham referendums) the Luhansk and Donetsk separatist republics.

It is already evident that the Russian army can’t hope to secure a better outcome than this. Judging by hostile leaks and popular opposition, lots of Russians, including in the military have recognised this, even if Putin hasn’t. But, on current indications, it will take a long time before the Ukrainians can recover all the territory currently occupied since the invasion. An early Russian withdrawal would liberate tens of thousands of people from a brutal occupation, as well as preventing vast loss of life on both sides (bearing in mind that the Russian army will increasingly be made up of conscripts, including Ukrainians). And more of the aid flowing to Ukraine could be used for rebuilding, rather than expended in fighting.

A ceasefire wouldn’t imply that Zelensky was going back on the pledge to recover all the territory of Ukraine, including Crimea. The Ukrainian position would be the same as it was before the invasion. But it was clear then that the areas under occupation couldn’t be recovered by force and that is probably still true, particularly as regards Crimea.

An obvious question is whether a ceasefire would give the Russians the chance to rebuild for another attack. In my view, the opposite is more likely. By next year, Russian energy exports to the EU will have ceased, and Russia’s technical capacity will have degraded further through the effects of sanctions and the flight of skilled workers. Meanwhile, Ukraine will have the chance to train its enlarged army, and reorient its economy towards the EU.

Of course, wars change things and an exact return to the status quo ante bellum is impossible. The dead are still dead, the crimes committed during the war will not be absolved, the aggressor can rarely be made to pay full reparation, and so on. Both sides will be worse off than if the war never happened.

I’d be interested in thoughts. However, anyone thinking putting forward a pro-Putin, or anti-anti-Putin position should stay quiet. No comment of this kind will be published, and the commenter will be permanently banned. If you’re in doubt, that probably means you shouldn’t comment.

A few years ago at Crooked Timber, I posted a review of Oscar Martinez’s book The Beast, about the migration route to the United States from Central America through Mexico. It was a horrifying catalogue of coercion, physical injuries, murders and rapes and one friend who read it on my recommendation told me he regretted having done so, because it was so disturbing. If anything a more horrible story is told in My Fourth Time We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route, by the Irish journalist Sally Hayden. It is a book that exposes the deadly migration route across the Sahara to Libya, the Libyan detention camps run by militias, and then the attempts to cross the Mediterranean that are often foiled by the EU-funded Libyan “coastguard”, that often lead to mass drownings and only sometimes to an arrival in Italy or Malta.

There are many nationalities trying to cross to Europe, but many of them, and a particular focus of Hayden’s narrative, are Eritreans. Eritrea is the most repressive state in Africa and by some measures more repressive than North Korea. The Eritreans who are trying to flee this police state are trying to escape a life of indefinite conscription, often punctuated by violence and by sexual abuse. European states, in an echo of their actions in trying to prevent Jews from fleeing Germany in the 1930s, act so as to make it as difficult for people to escape as possible. In doing so, they empower and enrich both the people smugglers who treat these escapees as exploitable assets and the various militias who run detention camps within Libya.

As they make their way across the desert, where many are abandoned and die, migrants fall into the hands of smugglers to whom they may already have paid a fee. They are held and their relatives receive pictures of them demanding more money for their onward transit, pictures of sons and daughter being tortured that resemble for all the world those pictures of Abu Ghraib. The smugglers who hold them in these coralls, not only torture for money and recreation, they also rape large numbers of the women held there.
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I’ve donated some of my art to a fundraiser to benefit various charities supporting Ukrainians. I’m inviting you to participate. If my art doesn’t speak to you – I get it, it’s a very particular style – then I hope you’ll consider bidding on other works representing diverse media from oil to watercolor to mixed media in numerous styles depicting varied topics. Sunflowers are popular, but there is lots of other content to choose from. Don’t think of this as frivolously (is there such a thing?;-) buying art, think of it as making a donation while getting a piece of art in return.

The auction is hosted by the great art site Daily Paintworks. They are letting artists list their pieces for free and are not taking any commissions. Once you pay for your piece, the artist donates to the charity they designated and ships you your piece. (I will send proof of donation to Médecins Sans Frontières.)

Ukrainians need our help, both those still in Ukraine as well as the millions of refugees (over 3.5 million in less than a month!) who’ve left everything behind. There are countless ways to lend support and if this approach doesn’t inspire you, I hope you are helping in other ways. For those living in Europe, chances are refugees are already in your town. You can donate housing, food, furniture, kitchen appliances, your time, money, the list is endless. Those of you elsewhere can probably help best through donations. Whatever it is, please do assist and encourage others to do the same. Thank you.

Note that when I post this on CT, the second set of images will only have 17 hours left of the auction so by the time you read this, they may be gone. (I’m thrilled to see that they’ve all been bid on already so I won’t be relisting them.) There is lots of other art to choose from so please check out all the work. Or if you are an artist yourself, consider donating your own art.

I recall that a few years ago, when Israel bombed the Gaza strip in the middle of the (Northern Hemisphere-) Summer, I felt angry and powerless. People, locked up in what was essentially an open air prison, had nowhere to escape or hide. The war in Syria similarly has led to horrible suffering. There have been many other wars or armed conflicts, but most of them hardly receive sustained reporting. And now there is the Russian war in Ukraine.

I am sure many of you ask, in such circumstances: “What we can do?” And I’ve heard some say “There is nothing we can do”. But that is not true. I’ve come up with the following answer to that question for myself, and am interested in learning how you answer that question for yourself. [note: trolls don’t even need to try; in case of doubt, I’ll delete]. [click to continue…]

In Ukraine people, mainly women and children, are leaving their homes. This means leaving, probably forever, the private spaces in which they have constructed lives. It means leaving carefully planned gardens, or collections of books or objects, of projects of home decoration on which thought and labour was expended, of knives, sieves, pots and cookery books. For children it means leaving all those toys and books that can’t be carried. In short all the everyday things that people make from their lives. It means ruptures, perhaps permanent, in personal friendships and acquaintances, with those left behind to fight, with playmates, with cousins. It means the loss of familiar landscapes with their distinctive weather and their animals and plants. And then a trudge through danger and the possibility of instant death to put oneself at the mercy of strangers, as an object perhaps of their solidarity, but also of their pity. Paths trodden by other refugees, by Palestinians, Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Sudanese and Somalis in the recent past, by many in Ethiopia right now.
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My university’s online newspaper reported earlier today that the Rectors of Russian Universities (their presidents/chancellors) have posted a statement of support for Putin’s war. Below the fold you find the translation that Deep-L made for us from Russian to English. (I don’t read Russian but my other experiences with Deep-L are pretty good).

So, the Rectors support the war, and adop the rethorics of the need for the “denazification” of Ukraine. The give their support to president Putin, and say they “support our President, who has made perhaps the most difficult decision of his life, a hard-won but necessary one.” Sadly, they also see it as their “fundamental duty, … to teach our students to be patriotic and to strive to help their motherland.”

I only hope that the Rectors had to do this because they could not do otherwise – a scenario so bad that, say, they would be put in prison and tortured, or their students endangered and universities put on fire. If no threats and coercion as serious as that made them write such utter horror, they should ashamed of calling themselves ‘academics’. Not just because they support Putin whose regime is massively violating human rights, not just because they support a brutal and unnecessary war, but also because they have not understood what the University is for.

Translation below the fold.
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In the wake of the US defeat in Afghanistan, I’ve reinforced my previous belief that outside powers (particularly Western democracies) are almost always going to lose in counter-insurgency wars of this kind. One of my earliest contributions to Crooked Timber covered this theme.

But what was the source of the confidence that wars of this kind could be won? One of the most important was the Malayan Emergency, in which Britain defeated a communist insurgency, supported mainly by impoverished Chinese workers on British-owned rubber estates. The tactics included a reprise of the concentration camps used in the Boer War (though of course they had to be renamed “protected villages”), which were copied by the French and then the Americans in Vietnam. Even after the Vietnam debacle, Malaya was presented as an example of how to get things right.

It’s true that the insurgents were defeated (though a smaller group resurfaced later). But their support base was a minority of a minority (neither the majority Malays nor the urban Chinese business class supported them), they were heavily outnumbered by British forces, and they had no neighbouring power to provide them with refuge and military support.

Morever, most of the demands that had mobilised nationalist support were realised anyway: Malaysia became independent, the British planters left and their estates were ultimately taken over by Malaysian firms. And, a few years later, Britain abandoned its commitments “East of Suez” and the SEATO alliance, modelled on NATO was dissolved. Malaysia didn’t go communist, but even the countries in Indochina where communist insurgents were victorious have ended up fully capitalist.

Despite all this, the British continued to treat the Malayan Emergency as evidence of their superior skill in counter-insurgency, up to and including the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters.

All of this has been derived from a limited look around the Internet. If anyone has better sources to point to, I’d be interested to find them. (Just as I finished, I found this which covers much of the same ground. It’s from a journal of the Socialist Workers Party – I don’t know exactly where they fit into the scheme of things these days)

The chaotic scenes now playing out as the Taliban take over Afghanistan have unsurprisingly drawn comparisons to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in 1975. But there have been many similar instances, though most were a little slower: the end of Indonesian rule in East Timor (now Timor L’Este), the French withdrawal from Algeria, and the earlier Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The common feature in all these cases is the attempt by an external (sometimes neighbouring) power to impose and then sustain a government of its choosing, usually in the hope that it will ultimately secure the support of the majority of the population along with international acceptance. The usual outcome is a long period of relatively low-level conflict, during which it can be made to appear that a successful outcome is just around the corner. In some cases, actual fighting ceases and is replaced by a ‘frozen conflict’, in which life proceeds more or less normally most of the time, but without any final resolution.

Very occasionally, these attempts succeed (the US invasion of Grenada is one example, and I expect commenters can come up with more). But far more commonly, the external power eventually tires of the struggle and goes away. Alternatively, frozen conflicts can continue more or less indefinitely, as with Israel-Palestine.
If successful interventions are the exception rather than the rule, it’s natural to ask why they are so popular? Certainly, the military-industrial complex benefits from war and lobbies for it, but the same is true of any activity that involves spending a lot of public money. Then there are psychological biases which seem to favor both starting wars in the expectation of an easy win and persisting when the conflict drags on.

But learning takes place eventually. After taking part in centuries of bloody conflict, all around the world, Europeans seem mostly to have tired of war. And in the US, weariness with ‘forever wars’ seems finally to be eroding the belief that armies can solve complex problems in other countries

102 years ago today, the guns fell silent, marking the end of what was then (optimistically as it turned out) called The Great War or (even more optimistically) The War to End War. I’ve written many times about this disaster, but only once about the influenza pandemic that began in the last year of the war and ended up killing millions more people than died on the battlefields. It’s hard to think about anything else today, even as the existential threats of climate change, nuclear war and the collapse of democracy loom large in the shadow of the pandemic.

As on the day of the original armistice, we can hope that better days may lie ahead, but can only hope and do our best to bring them about.