Peace is for losers part, 2

During the American Revolutionary War, Nathanael Greene was famous for yielding the field, again and again, after inflicting heavy losses on the other side, considering that a tactical victory wasn’t worth further risk to his troops. He drove Cornwallis out of the Carolinas and forced the remnant British force to abandon their forts and retreat to the coast without ever winning a battle.

Another example: Bismarck ending the Austro-Prussian War after Königgrätz.

If a powerful state is controlled by a madman bent on war, there is nothing that can be done to avoid it.

But this is how most of the wars are justified in the first place. And by each side. The opponent is always a madman hellbent on destroying you and with enough resources to achieve it; you’re defending yourself against an existential threat.

You reject this as a rare bordercase scenario, but this is, indeed, the standard template used by people who advocate wars.

The Shi’ites, despite gaining political power, have suffered more in the years of conflict (with the Americans, the Sunni and among themselves) than they ever did under Saddam.

Do you think the Shi’ites have reached the same conclusion? That they’d bring Saddam back if they could?

Obviously, it’s often the case that a country is worse off in the near term for having over-thrown a tyrant. But I imagine the right frame of reference for the Shi’ites of Iraq will be over a much longer term. How will 20 years of post-Saddam life compare to 20-years of life under Saddam — bearing in mind the latter featured the disastrous war with Iran, the disastrous first Gulf War, the mass killings of Shi’ites in the uprising against Saddam, and the years of ‘normal’ life in a brutal police state. This is a country whose National Olympic Building was used for torturing athletes. Torture that was done by a man who stood a chance of inheriting Saddam’s position (the more likely alternative being his slightly less criminally insane brother).

And, of course, it included a decade of life under a sanctions regime, during which Saddam used and amplified the suffering of Iraqis as a lever to try to undermine the sanctions.

As for the Kurds. Yes, they were doing reasonably well before the war, but they’ve also prospered since 2003, and before then they were in an extremely fragile position that was not going to last. Without the sanctions regime and the no-fly zones, they’d have again been at the mercy of Saddam. And the sanctions regime was clearly not going to last much longer. In fact, from the very beginning, it was expected that the sanctions would be temporary and Russia and France were pushing against them. What would Saddam have done to the Kurds with a free hand and the revenue stream from $100 oil?

Apparently in Slocum’s mind it’s real progress to go from torturing atheletes at the Olympic facility to torturing children in any facility handy.

But I imagine the right frame of reference for the Shi’ites of Iraq will be over a much longer term

… when you point to the disaster he’s caused, he says that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. When you ask where the omelette is, he tells you Rome wasn’t built in a day.

(the specific negative-sum game that the Iraq War resembles AFAICS is a “dollar auction”. We keep on raising the bidding in order to avoid a certain short-term loss, while making sure that the equally certain loss in the long term is much larger).

The reality is that war is a negative sum game. Invariably, both sides lose relative to an immediate agreement on the final peace terms.

Sorry, but wha…? North Vietnam would have been better off accepting the Paris agreements in ’73 rather than launching the campaign that won it the South in 1975? Sorry, no. Arguably it would have been better off accepting the status quo in 1963 rather than committing fully to the war in the South and provoking American intervention — but arguably not, as that would have left the North an impoverished Communist rump state like North Korea, exposed to complete Chinese domination; and the strong and prosperous unified Vietnam we see developing today might never have come into being. Was that strong, self-determined state worth the lives of a million soldiers? Is that your decision to make? And in any case, to say they should have called it quits in ’63 is merely picking a moment at which leaders retrospectively could have played things better, which is of course always possible. But the case you make here, unless I completely misunderstand you, is that declaring a ceasefire is always, at every moment, to the advantage of both the winning and the losing side. Seriously? Would Israel have been better off declaring a ceasefire after the first five days of the Yom Kippur War? Would the ANC have been better off declaring a ceasefire in 1986? Would the KLA have been better off with a ceasefire when the entire Kosovar Albanian population was sitting in refugee camps in Macedonia and the Serbs had successfully ethnically cleansed Kosovo? You can’t possibly be serious about this claim.

“But the case you make here, unless I completely misunderstand you, is that declaring a ceasefire is always, at every moment, to the advantage of both the winning and the losing side.”

I’m not sure, but I think you have misunderstood the proposal, mostly by not taking note of the presence of the word “final” in it. Let S be the political situation that will ultimately be achieved at the end of the war, at some time t. The claim is that at any time during the war t’ < t, if the actors were able to reach S at that time t’, they would all be better off than they are in reaching S at the later time t.

Exactly right. Which is why it’s really, really good to have systems that let those things happen with as minimal costs as possible. (E.g., that’s why it’s good to have long-term contracts that everyone can be happy with.)

And which is why it’s really, really dumb to try to think about whether it would be a good idea to start a war, or whether it is a bad idea to end one, without thinking through the possible costs of that war or its continuation. Which is, I believe, Quiggin’s main point here.

It’s not trivial; it’s just really, really true.

” the ceasefire was the product of some days of negotation, brokered by the Iranians.”

The iranians were party to the negotiations. Not the same thing at all.

Er, that should be something more like “He is arguing that it is a mistake to think that only a loser….”

Philosopher, I think the language of “negative sum game” is not the proper language here. It’s more effective to say that fighting entails costs, and that a strategist who understands that war is a costly technique employed to achieve political ends will often see that less costly means can at a given moment be used to achieve the same ends, and this may be true after a victory as well as after a defeat. Saying “war is a negative sum game” really does seem to imply that Jaish al-Mahdi is worse off now than they would have been had they decided not to fight the Iraqi Government offensive, which seems, from all accounts, to be the opposite of the truth.

Victory is a PR concept. The proper aim of the statesman is to promote the wealth, power, and happiness of his nation, not to pursue transitory military glory and wave the flag over some stricken field. That doesn’t mean that victory doesn’t have an instrumental value since it does influence public opinion in the short term. Unfortunately, as the course of human history endlessly illustrates, victory intoxicates the leaders as easily as the followers, often with disastrous consequences.

In the Mahabharata, the God Dharma asks his son to give an example of defeat. His answer was victory.

… when you point to the disaster he’s caused, he says that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. When you ask where the omelette is, he tells you Rome wasn’t built in a day.

I’m saying that it is simply appalling for human beings to live in a country like Saddam’s Iraq. And to say that force cannot ever be used in such situations, that it invariably leaves all sides worse off — is to condemn people caught to suffer repression indefinitely, perhaps for generations.

Should Saddam have been overthrown internally? That would have been wonderful. But the Shi’ites tried that at a time, immediately following the first Gulf war, when Saddam was at his absolute weakest point … and he squashed them by the thousands like bugs (almost literally).

Clearly…clearly the last several years in Iraq have been terrible. But would you all really take the bet that in 5 or 10 years, the Shi’ites will agree with you and judge that it would have been better if Saddam’s regime had remained in power? Hell, do a majority of them believe that even now?

Is there an embargo on arguments about Hitler and Nazism? I see them, for example, here at crookedtimber all the time. Godwin’s law isn’t anything like an embargo. It is an acknowledgment that the arguments come up all the time.

The reality is that war is a negative sum game. Invariably, both sides lose relative to an immediate agreement on the final peace terms. In the vast majority of cases, both sides are worse off than if the war had never been fought. With nearly equal certainty, anyone who passes up an opportunity for an early ceasefire will regret it in the end.

I wish it were so, but often it just isn’t and the reasoning here is indeed circular: it all depends on the terms of the ceasefire in question.

If a ceasefire consolidates territorial gain achieved through aggression, the results of an ethnic cleansing campaign and/or the political and cultural subjugation of one of the groups involved – then I don’t see why those on the receiving end of the aggression should accept it or what they would gain from it.

If a ceasefire completely reverses the gains made by the aggressor, then it will never accept it unless forced to do so, most likely by an overwhelming military threat or outright war.

If people didn’t start wars out of hatred, greed, fear or foolishness – well, then we wouldn’t have to discuss these problems in the first place. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Philosopher: you’re right, that was confusion on my part. Obviously you can have a negative-sum game in the sense that there are less total points left at the end of the game than there were at the beginning, yet where one or more players are nevertheless better off than they were at the start.

I’m aware that this may look like scrabbling for rationales, but I still think that the “negative sum game” phrasing is actually less helpful than saying something much simpler like “violence is bad, and most people prefer to avoid it where possible”. I simply think that you are going to find that actually there are far too many wars where people who belong to the nationalities involved, winners or even sometimes losers, consider that the fight was worth the cost, even if you as an observer disagree. The problem is that the “negative sum game” language implies that there is some objective way to tally up the points in the game-state and that all sides are using the same scoring system. But this is unlikely to be the case for any situation where perspectives between two groups have diverged so dramatically that they wind up engaged in violence against each other.

I am sure that game theory, being a discipline developed by smart people, has a long history of accounting for such issues, but I’d like to hear how it does. In general I’ve had a bit of an allergy to game theory since a few years back when Robert Wright tried to convince us that everything in human history was destined to just keep getting better and better because of non-zero logic.

I think that people who start negative sum games might win in the long run. For example, suppose you control 20% of a geographical unit with a GDP of 1 trillion dollars. You fight a war and end up controlling 60% of the geographical unit, now with a 300 billion dollar economy. That’s an overall disaster and your own share is absolutely smaller, but if the economy regenerates you’ll be much better off (especially since 60% control is majority control).

I think that something like that could apply to financial manipulations producing panics and depressions.

Strike that ‘might’.

Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a ceasefire.

Given that McCain finished 5 from the bottom of his class at Annapolis, is there really any reason to believe that he knows anything about military history? (Even apart from his rapidly advancing senility.)

John, but it’s more than just that there are a few parties here or there who might benefit. In any country, the overwhelming majority of people have between jack and sh*t for per capita power, while a few have thousands or millions of times as much per capita. If power were measured like income, what would the Gini index be?

And given that a few hundred people, even in the US, have so much power, why wouldn’t they decide things in ways which actively hurt the interests of most Americans?

For awhile I’ve been reading about the Swedish Empire which came to an end in 1709. They fought most of their wars on foreign soil and brought home a lot of loot and foreign subsidies, and a lot of their troops were mercenaries. So their wars were profitable for Sweden, though not necessarily for the average Swede.

Sweden’s last imperialist war (Sweden against Poland, Russia, Saxony, and Denmark) was thought of by Voltaire and others as an adventurist disaster. It may be, however, that Sweden had no choice — they were attacked first, and an aggressive response may have been better than a defensive one.

Sweden lost and had to watch Russia and Prussia become great powers instead of them, but they did maintain their independence, unlike Poland and most of the small German states.

Brian Downing (“The Military Revolution and Political Change”) believes that Sweden’s success in financing its modernization with plunder allowed it to modernize without completely destroying indigenous, somewhat egalitarian social forms.

Even the Kurds have overreached themselves and brought the Turkish army into their territory.

My impression is the Turkish army was a frequent visitor before the war too.

John, do you really think the Kurds are not better off because of the war? Of course that doesn’t invalidate your argument or in any way justify the war, but it seems pretty unequivocally to be the case.

I’m saying that it is simply appalling for human beings to live in a country like Saddam’s Iraq.

Well, but it’s apalling for human beings to live in a country like Breshnev’s Russia, or Mao’s China. What should we have done about that? What could we have done without making things much, much worse?

Imagine we’d left well enough alone. Saddam, an old man, dies in a couple of years of natural causes. His sons, not nearly as smart as their father, last about 5 minutes in charge. What happens next? Probably nothing as bad as what happened after the invasion-a million dead, and the country in the hands of Iran’s close allies . . .

48-

OK, fair enough.

To add that the whole history of empire, or divide and rule, in Iraq as in Rwanda[!] is based on some groups doing quite well, at the expense of others.

Perhaps there’s something here to be said about occidental rationality vs. oriental sense of harmony. To a western guy like myself (and McCain, obviously) it certainly seems rational to push ahead as long as you have the advantage. But I imagine not everyone feels that way.

I learnt not to ‘push ahead as long as you have the advantage’ from playing Risk.

;)

– and while you feel you can hold any advantage you have gained.

Even discounting the moral considerations of innocent death and destruction, quitting while you’re ahead (or when you have gained as many of your strategic or tactical objectives as you think is possible) is simply good generalship.

@43,
Sweden had to defend itself or be partitioned, but Charles XII should have quit when he was ahead. He beat Denmark, Russia and Poland in rapid succession and could have negotiated separate peaces from a position of strength, but he instead pursued a policy of regime change in Poland that wore his country down. This wasn’t even the first time Sweden tried to take over Poland and failed, so he had really no excuse.

In the vast majority of cases, both sides are worse off than if the war had never been fought.

This is quite simply unknowable, by dint of the war having been fought. It also appears to ignore the possibility that one of the consequences of avoiding war in April is having to fight one in September.

‘Imagine we’d left well enough alone. Saddam, an old man, dies in a couple of years of natural causes. His sons, not nearly as smart as their father, last about 5 minutes in charge. What happens next? Probably nothing as bad as what happened after the invasion-a million dead, and the country in the hands of Iran’s close allies . . .’

Amongst many other problems, the Decents have never made it clear what differentiated Saddam’s Iraq from every other dictatorship in history. Dictatorships are inherently unstable, because they lack the support of ordinary people (I know this is a ‘D’oh!’ point, but the Decents seem not to know this). To buy this you either have to provide material wellbeing (growth, gadgets etc.) or else turn up the terror or both (Stalin, for example, provided both). But it’s difficult to do that indefinitely: so, generally speaking, over time, Dictatorships tend to either liberalise or else become so oppressive that eventually someone in the higher echelons of power cries ‘enough!’ and overthrows it.*

In any case, all the Decent’s arguments presuppose that the US were genuinely interested in Iraqi democracy. But that, of course, is not true. So it really doesn’t matter what their arguments were, as their initial presuppositions were false.

*Another problem the Decents ignored is that, in reality, dictators do not, in fact, live for ever. Robert Mugabe is a terrible man who has done terrible things to his country, but he’s also 84. Eventually time will take care of him more effectively than ‘we’ could.

I think you are missing the whole point: in situation of uncertainty, prudence dictates that you do nothing or unassuming things, not that you engage in actions that are known to lead to great sufferings and destruction.

No, rather because wars are horrible things it means the test must be a strict one. The logical conclusion of your argument is that prudence precludes the possibility of ever starting a justified or justifiable war; when was the run-in to war – any war ever fought – anything other than a period of uncertainty? Think of the most uncontroversial war fought in the history of humankind and then explain how all events thereafter were foretold and how any other course of action was guaranteed to produce greater suffering. You’ll struggle.

What you will likely achieve is a convincing argument for why war on that occasion made sense. Herein lies the problem: what convinces one person won’t convince another.

Intelligent people can have arguments about the merits of war in each case (not so fast, Hidari), but what you cannot do and what it is disingenuous to claim as possible is to demonstrate with anything approaching certainty that no war would have produced favourable results.

The truth is that anyone making such claims is guessing.

‘Intelligent people can have arguments about the merits of war in each case (not so fast, Hidari), but what you cannot do and what it is disingenuous to claim as possible is to demonstrate with anything approaching certainty that no war would have produced favourable results.’

Yes but that is not really the key point. Away from Decentland, in the Real World, legal theorists and politicians, have, since 1945 been laying out the criteria for what constitutes a ‘legal’ or (following on from this) ‘just’ war. And the basic criteria are, at the time of writing, either self-defence OR any military action authorised by the UN security council.

So it’s not just that the Decents have to justify just any war. They have to justify a war that was, by definition, illegal (as Kofi Annan recently pointed out).

That does not, necessarily, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that any war, even an illegal one, can’t have positive outcomes. But it does set the ‘bar’ for the burden of proof even higher than it would otherwise have been.

This point, of the ‘burden of proof’ is the key one and, again, is greatly misunderstood. Brownie writes:

‘Think of the most uncontroversial war fought in the history of humankind and then explain how all events thereafter were foretold and how any other course of action was guaranteed to produce greater suffering. You’ll struggle’.

This is of course entirely true and it is why, before any serious discussion about anything can get started, we have to work out: ‘on whom does the burden of proof fall’? It is certainly true that before the war, I couldn’t PROVE that an invasion would make things worse for ordinary Iraqis.

But that was irrelevant.

Given that the war (i.e. the war that was actually fought, after the failure to get the second security council resolution) was illegal, by definition, I didn’t have to prove anything, or, for that matter, even offer any evidence or arguments. The burden of proof all fell on the Decents. To justify war the Decents would have to prove:

1: That Saddam possessed WMD’s, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

2: That he was in a position to use them and intended to, against targets in one or all of the attacking countries (America, Britain).

Or, perhaps:

3: That Saddam had ongoing operational co-operation with Al-Qaeda, that he was involved, in some way, with 9/11, and that he and Osama Bin Laden planned to strike the US again.

Failing that, some other argument had to be produced as to why this was an extraordinary situation, and that standard international law would no longer apply.

And to be fair, the proponents of the war in power (thought not the proponents of war, for the most part, in the blogosphere) did actually grasp this point, which is why they went to such great lengths to mislead the public and imply that points 1,2, and 3 were all true. But we now know they are all false, and so, ceteris paribus, we now see that ‘illegal’ aspect of the war was the key one.

Following from this, the fact that, with the possible exception of some Kurds (not all of them) almost every Iraqi is objectively worse off than they were before the war and that this is unlikely to change anytime soon, rams home what a bad idea the war was, but isn’t the crucial point.

Eventually time will take care of him more effectively than ‘we’ could.

Is there actually any precedent for a dictator with modern technology and no personal or domestic moral constraints being removed by anything other than external intervention?

#66 – isn’t that the point? Why have we not invaded North Korea, China, etc.? Why are Iraqi’s freedoms more valuable than those of the subjects of Castro, Kim, Mugabe, etc.? Or is it about something else?

‘Is there actually any precedent for a dictator with modern technology and no personal or domestic moral constraints being removed by anything other than external intervention?’

The Soviet Union, of course, democratised without ‘external’ ‘help’ (the fact that Russia now seems to be redictatoring itself is irrelevant for this point).

Spain, Portugal, Greece, most of the South American terror regimes, South Africa…..I could go on.

Further to #69 – there exists an imaginable world* in which your powerful country has consistently battled dictatorships fueled by good intentions and a hope for a better world for all. In that world, one can argue for that element of justification of the Iraq adventure with intellectual honesty. Problem is—that world is not this world, not even in the same area code.

*How do I know it is imaginable? Because my friends and I fervently imagined it on the playground as 8&9 year olds in the early 60s, reassuring each other that America had never started nor lost a war and was ever vigilant in the pursuit of bad men everywhere. It was comforting and made you feel good about yourself.

If the American people are free to have Bush as their supreme leader for 8 years, why shouldn’t people of Iraq be free to have Saddam for 30 years? I don’t see any logic in this. The Bushies probably have less popular support than Saddam on his worst day, but I don’t see them resigning. During the months left they will – with any luck – wreck more havoc and kill more people than Saddam did in 30 years. And then, when McCain is elected, he’ll probably start a nuclear war right in his first year; you know, being a tough cookie and all that.

Let’s be honest. If you want to make the case that it would have been better to leave Iraqis to live under Saddam & Sons indefinitely, for many years or even decades to come, have the intellectual honesty to make the damn case.

Let me make that case.

Both Gulf wars plus the sanction destroyed an estimated 2 decades GDP of Iraqi infrastructure. Roughly 20% of the population is displaced; 10% including much of the middle and professional class has left the country.

In other words, the conditions have been laid in place to make Iraq a perpetual failed state.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan didn’t lead to a democratic Marxist paradise then, nor do the prospects look brighter now, thirty years later.

There are many systems preferable to life under Saddam. Quite possibly internal or external forces could have brought about or imposed such systems on Iraq under particular circumstances. Such ‘humane intervention’ however is not, and has never been on the cards. The history of the Gulf wars post 1991 has been about securing US access to oil first, ensuring the security of other Gulf oil-producing states a distant second. Ensuring the security of the US (the public rationalization of the war) and the welfare of the downtrodden Iraqis never were serious motivations. A prosperous, liberal Iraq was never the goal of this war to begin with, and is thus unlikely to be the outcome, even (or especially) unintentionally.

@#70: brownie, I asked a perfectly civil and entirely general question, which seemed to me to be a propos of the nature of the argument that was taking place on this very thread. It seems to me that if we can’t produce any examples of the kind of justified pre-emptive war that was in question, when we’ve already gone back to C18 Sweden for our examples, then there may be a reason for that absence of useful examples.

If I might make a personal observation, your habit of conflating everyone who has said something you interpret as disagreement into a single oppositional, and by implication, factionally-motivated, bloc is mildly irritating, to say the least.

The gains to the French peasantry had nothing to do with the wars of Napoleon, nor even of those of a decade earlier; they had been established by the nature of the revolutionary land-settlement in late 1789. War brought several million dead to western Europe between 1792 and 1815 – can it realistically be argued that those corpses would have been less economically useful if they were still alive and working? As for what came after, you could just as well argue that a generation of bloody warfare, culminating in victory for the side of conservatism and legitimism, made the adoption of nationalism and liberalism as political principles slower in Europe, rather than faster.

The gains to the French peasantry had nothing to do with the wars of Napoleon, nor even of those of a decade earlier; they had been established by the nature of the revolutionary land-settlement in late 1789.

Which took a kind of war — a civl war, at least — to secure, no?

Which just reinforces my point — until we can say something about where the line between negative- and zero-/positive-sum wars lies, it’s not really meaningful to say that most wars fall on the negative side.

(Anyway, if anyone cares, I’m trying to mkae Quiggin’s argument clearer and more coherent, not dispute his conlcusions that in the 21st cetnruy, wars are overwhelmingly highly negative sum and a war of choice is, quite simply, a war that shouldn’t be fought. And yes, Iraqis (and the rest of us) would be better off if Saddam were still in power. Obviously.)

The most obvious and relevant example of a victor unilaterally stopping a war is the US and coalition after freeing Kuwait.

Or is McCain saying Saddam won Gulf War 1?

84: soru, I hate to jump at the bait you’re trolling, but I should point out that as far as I know neither Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Idi Amin, nor Tojo ever had anyone of either sex shot in the Kurfurstendamm, Red Square, the Forum, or whatever the local equivalents were. In fact, the only time he faced determined public protests (over sending the mentally ill to concentration camps) Hitler backed down.

About the only ones on the list who got as far as actually having their people shot, in public, for opposing their regime are Ceaucescu and the Shah, as far as I know, and both of those were still toppled by internal forces (in fact, that’s when the shootings happened). The fact that the Shah and Ceaucescu stopped being able to do it is because they were being toppled at the time. Not many dictators in recent times have actually had people shot in the public square.

In other words I think your criterion is silly.

It’s also close to self-fulfilling – a “no true dictator” fallacy.

ie.

soru: No true dictator was ever removed without external intervention.
the Plain People of the Internet: (produce lists of dictators who were removed without external intervention)
soru: Ah, but those weren’t true dictators.

This “negative sum game” argument is, in fact, simply an argument for law&order and against wild-west-style conflict resolution. It’s not an argument for getting along with bandits, rather it’s the argument for getting laws, a sheriff, judge, and executioner.

If comparisons to WWII are to be relegated to the dustbin, what about the US Civil War? You’ll recall that the Civil War cost the US about 10% of its able male population (about 600,000 deaths), with a comparable reduction in economic prosperity post-war. About 2/3rds of those losses (if I recall correctly) happened in the last two years of the war, after Grant was promoted to lead the Union in 1864 — and that’s not counting the need to rebuild after the devestation Sherman caused, nor the later racially-motivated economic stagnation in the South.

There is no doubt that both the United States and Confederate States would have been more prosperous had Lincoln formally recognized the CSA and sued for peace in 1863. Should his decisions to appoint Grant and continue the war be counted as a loss?

Unfortunately this is either trivial (if both sides simply agreed to the outcome without fighting, & the outcome was identical to the one which would have been achieved by fighting, then we would save on all the costs of war), or, if meant in a non-trivial sense (if offered a cease-fire, one should take it) simply false.

The most obvious sense in which it is false is in terms of power or security. In terms of those variables, international politics is often, if not always, a zero-sum game. I suspect it’s also false, long-term, for other variables as well.

But a real problem here is the failure of the argument to recognize the strategic nature of the game. My choice of strategy depends on my view of your self-maximizing strategy, which depends on my view of your view of my self-maximizing strategy… etc.

So, for instance, Country Q runs through the analysis I take at face-value in the post, and determines it is always better to settle than to fight. I know Country Q believes this. I get into a dispute with Country Q. What’s my rational strategy? To credibly commit to a war unless Country Q meets my terms.

the ‘could/would shoot a photogenic local female in the capital city square’ test

This is known, I believe, as “Cleopatra’s nose” theory of history.

Not to mention that it doesn’t have anything to do with dictatorships specifically, as elected governments have shot plenty of photogenic local females.

At Kent State, for example. Not a single perpetrator has been tried so far.

I find arguments like Brownie’s, that use WWII as a template, interesting. Because, if anything, WWII is a war that broke the template – after it was over, the global powers tactitly agreed not to do anything like it again. For good reason. The air force generals in the Pacific theater joked, in 1944-45, that if the U.S. lost, they would be tried for war crimes. And in fact if anybody committed war crimes, they did – since they did nothing less than firebomb sixty Japanese cities, killing at least 600,000 civilians, and then obliterated two other cities, more than matching Japan’s Rape of Nanking.

In the nineteenth century, a power that proposed to go into a city and put all of its inhabitants to death was considered irredeemably barbaric, a throwback to the dark ages. Tolstoy, mulling over the idea of killing all soldiers captured, was considered to be making paradoxes in War and Peace.

Luckily, the behavior that was countenanced by all sides in WWII has now becomes a no no, so that the U.S. and Nato, which allowed General Curtis LeMay to smash and obliterated hundreds of thousands of Japanese women and children and did not hang him or even try him, but promoted him, decided that Serbia couldn’t do that kind of thing in Bosnia in the nineties. Of course, given the selective terror bombing campaign the U.S. is waging in Iraq at the moment, we might be slipping back under President Torture. But I’m hoping that is an aberration.

“In fact, the only time he faced determined public protests (over sending the mentally ill to concentration camps) Hitler backed down.”

According to Henry Friedlander, in Origins of the Nazi Genocide 136 and Chapter Seven generally, this is false:
“Hitler’s stop order did not stop the killings; they soon continued in German hospitals by other means.” He goes on to show that the taking of “lives unworthy of life” was in fact a continued component of Nazi policies.

Nope. Brownie is arguing that it’s nothing more than a bald assertion to suggest that “in the vast majority of cases, both sides are worse off than if the war had never been fought”. It’s an entirely non-falsifiable claim.

On the contrary, the converse of this claim is almost always un-falsifiable. To assert that both participants in a war are better off (despite strictly quantifiable economic and human losses as measured at the end of the war) than if they had not participated in it, is essentially unfalsifiable. The exception to this is if the war results in a reduction of the existing net death rate or damage to property.

This is not to say that plausible cases can never be made for wars being a net benefit, even when the outcome was an increase in death and destruction, but it is these cases that are essentially unfalsifiable, relying as they do on the acceptance of alternative scenarios.

I’m not certain you’ve thought through the implications of holding to this position (at least, I hope you haven’t), given it renders illegitimate the UK’s decision to declare war on Nazi Germany, for example.

How so? The UK declared war on Germany because it had a defense pact with Poland. Poland was attacked by Germany. My criterion does not rule this out at all. Likewise, the first Gulf war, to restore the sovereignty of Kuwait, looked pretty justifiable to me. Self-defense and calling to help in self-defense are of course acceptable, and I mentioned explicitly in my first post.

elliott,

To assert that both participants in a war are better off (despite strictly quantifiable economic and human losses as measured at the end of the war) than if they had not participated in it, is essentially unfalsifiable.

I have to say that it’s not pure luck, then, that I didn’t make any claim to the contrary. The bald assertion was not that warring parties are almost always better off than if they had not participated, but that “in the vast majority of cases, both sides are worse off than if the war had never been fought”. The fact that an argument I ddin’t make is as unfalsifiable as the one that was made by the poster hardly counts as a rebuttal.

z,

I suspect you’re satisfied that I’m aware of the circumstances that led to Britain’s declaration of war against Nazi Germany, but your criteria as articulated in your prior comment are your criteria, and they were:

if you have the certainty that someone is attacking you or that someone is killing huge numbers of defenseless people that you could save without inflicting immense sufferings on innocent bystanders (and those things are quite easy to ascertain), then there might be a reasonable argument for war. Outside of those cases, yes, my argument pretty much precludes starting wars.

Britiain was neither being attacked nor, at least at that stage, intervening to prevent the killing of huge numbers of defenceless people. Moreover, it was pretty well understood that the declaration of war against the greatest military power of the modern age would result in “immense suffering” for “innocent bystanders”.

Insofar as, as others have pointed out, WWII broke the template for intervention, there are those who might argue that the horrific consequences of the decision to engage Nazi Germany in the very late 30s and early 40s are a direct result of a refusal to do likewise half a decade earlier. Which is not to say that the consequences of a 1936-1941 war would have been any more palatable, but then it’s never been my contention that we can be certain about the benefits and costs of both participation and non-participation in conflict.

elliott,

In what way does the “WMD age” change the “parameters” of the debate?

Let’s see if we can, just for a second, leave Iraq to one side. But let’s envisage a similar scenario where it is strongly suspected a failed/failing state with a recent history of belligerence is suspected of possessing a weaponised WMD capability. Let’s say, for sake of argument, that intelligence in this case is widely accepted as beyond question. Without wishing to present a case for pre-emptive war on a whim, I would have thought it’s entirely reasonable to ask whether the post-WWII jus ad bellum concepts still apply, given an agressor no longer has to mass infantry division on your border and mobilise its navy and air force in order to represent a clear and present danger. Acting in self-defence when facing such an enemy means, perhaps, having to wait until a nuclear missile is winging its way towards your capital city. At least conceivably.

To indulge in a little pre-emption of my own, no, I’m not interested in supplying just cause carte blanche to any nutbar who happens to make it to the Oval office, or any other office for that matter. I’m looking for an acknowledgement that 21st century weapons technology and the nature of the enemy we face in the modern era mean that we will likely have to make some rather tricky decisions where the consequences of a miscalculation are catastrophic and without historical precedent.

You don’t need to be a “decent” or “pro-war” to recognise this, surely (althought it probably helps)?

‘Insofar as, as others have pointed out, WWII broke the template for intervention, there are those who might argue that the horrific consequences of the decision to engage Nazi Germany in the very late 30s and early 40s are a direct result of a refusal to do likewise half a decade earlier.’

If Britain (or any country) had attacked Nazi Germany earlier the probability is that they attacking country would have lost (people arguing that ‘we’ should have attacked when Germany was ‘weak’ avoid the key point which is that ‘we’ were also weak at this point). Moreover it’s not at all certain that the British (let alone American) public would have gone along with this.

This really is the key point: Decents invariable assume that military ‘interventions’ are going to be both successful and publicy supported. But as Vietnam and now Iraq showed this is quite simply not necessarily true.

Incidentally, WW2 did NOT break the paradigm for ‘intervention’ which remained precisely the same (in international law) as it had done since Westphalia. Poland was perfectly entitled to defend herself against Germany (this was understood) and, again, she was perfectly at liberty to create a mutual self-defence pact with the UK, which was activated when she was invaded. This was all perfectly standard behaviour and created no innovations in international law.

Insofar as anybody tried to create an innovation in international law it was Adolf Hitler who openly cited ‘pre-emption’ as his justification for his invasion of Russia. (I might add that he was right to do so: his idea that if he hadn’t invaded Russia, the Russians would have invaded Germany was almost certainly correct: compare and contrast ‘our’ fantasies about WMD).

Insofar as the American invasion of Iraq has a legal predecessor it is in Germany’s ‘pre-emptive’ (on grounds of ‘self-defence’) invasion of Russia, NOT Poland’s act of military self-defence against an aggressor, which the UK was treaty bound to participate in.

Brownie, then the Decents have a heckuva record on judging the feasibility of wars, which is another good reason to tell them to STFU.

“In what way does the “WMD age” change the “parameters” of the debate?”
Posted by Elliott Oti ·

It’s the latest and greatest justification, because the former top hit, ‘God wills it’, doesn’t have crowd-drawing power that it used to.

…on the Right large sections of the British political class were ‘appeasers’ because, essentially, they approved of Hitler’s programme.

…and especially his promise of ‘drang nach Osten’. And the invasion of Poland was, from their point of view, step in the right direction – to the East. Thus the “phoney war” that followed.

In this view, Hitler and Mussolini were ‘moderates’ who stood as bulwark (with the British Empire) against Soviet expansionism.

Incidentally, this attitude is still alive and well: Was World War II Worth It?

Okay, last thrust.

However, Brownie ignores the fact that on the Right large sections of the British political class were ‘appeasers’ because, essentially, they approved of Hitler’s programme.

I’m not ignoring anything, but neither am I purporting to present a fulsome account of all influences and facotrs. I’m merely making the point that it wasn’t only a belief that “we weren’t ready” that motivated a majority to oppose war with Nazi Germany in the mid-30s. I’m referring back to the ‘consequences of no war now’ theme that was discussed earlier. How much was appeasement and how much a genuine belief that major confrontation with Hitler could still be avoided is irrelvant to any positon I’m taking. It is at least arguable that a multi-lateral response to Hitler’s earlier agressions half a decade before the formal declaration of war would have produced fewer corpses than the war that ended in 1945.

To clarify, I’m not claiming certainty about any of this. I’m leaving that to others.

Further, it’s again at least arguable that an earlier intervention would necessarily qualify as “pre-emptive” war and render the allies “aggressors” given Hitler’s own breaches (militarization of the Rhineland, for example), but leaving this aside, what if the true dichotomy is:

a – War of self-defence fought 1939-45 producing 60 million dead, 2/3rds of whom are civilians.

or

b – Pre-emptive war fought 1936-1941 producing half that number of corpses

?

Do you plump for option one becasue option 2 has St. Augustine turning in his grave?

By the way, your penchant for using “decent” as a synonym for anybody who might disagree with you and pretence that there is a ‘decent’ line on subjects such as, for example, the Hitlerian threat and the economic climate in 1930s Britain, are some of the reasons why I normally avoid discussion with you.

It’s true that most British people bought into the ‘peace in our time’ stuff, but the invasion of Poland brought home to most people that the rise of Hitler would threaten British interests and that some form of military confrontation between the two Empires was probably inevitable.

You must be referring to the poll taken on September 2nd 1939 between the invasion of Poland (1st) and the British declaration of war (3rd). No, the point is that – and I’m prepared to be corrected by those who can do better that your sorry attempt to discredit – that as late as summer 1939 there was still no appetite for war amongst the British people. This is important only insofar as you believed a lack of public support for an earlier confrontation was important.

but if you are implying that there was not mass agreement in the US that action had to be taken against Japan after Pearl Harbour, again I’d like to see your source

Nope, and I suspect you know full well that this was not my point, which was that between 1939 and Dec 1941 there was no/fleeting majority support for US intervention in the war. Again, I’m happy to be corrected.

The lesson is that most right-minded people are less than thrilled at the prospect of war. I reckon this is generally a good thing, but I don’t think it is necessarily a useful barometer of whether a particular war has the required legitimacy, or indeed whether it can be said to be “just” and/or “moral”.

That really is me.

brownie, it was touch-and-go with the russians in 1942 – do you know if it would have been any different in 1936? If they had lost we would all be wearing lederhausen now.

Your argument is too heavy with supposition for my liking. What if Dunkirk had happened in 1936, minus Churchill? And what trigger would the British have had in 1936 for going to war? Too many unknowns. Which is exactly the point.

Brownie:
But let’s envisage a similar scenario where it is strongly suspected a failed/failing state with a recent history of belligerence is suspected of possessing a weaponised WMD capability.

I don’t see the relevance of this scenario. The USSR was a strong state, had a history of belligerence, was known to be in the possession of vast quantities of WMD and efficient means to deliver them, and had explicitly made clear their enmity with the US.

This was the case for sixty years.

How does a weak state, with an uncertain WMD capacity at least three orders of magnitude smaller than the USSR’s in the very worst case, with the range of delivery limited at most to that of the SCUD, suddenly change the parameters extant for more than half a century previously?

neither am I purporting to present a fulsome account

Oh, but you are, Brownie.

ful·some –adjective
1. offensive to good taste, esp. as being excessive; overdone or gross: fulsome praise that embarrassed her deeply; fulsome décor.
2. disgusting; sickening; repulsive: a table heaped with fulsome mounds of greasy foods.

@120 but invading the Soviet Union would have been hard…. Therefore, other options were explored.

The question of the temptation to deploy overwhelming force just because you can is the elephant in brownie’s room here…

But let’s envisage a similar scenario where it is strongly suspected a failed/failing state with a recent history of belligerence is suspected of possessing a weaponised WMD capability. Let’s say, for sake of argument, that intelligence in this case is widely accepted as beyond question. Without wishing to present a case for pre-emptive war on a whim, I would have thought it’s entirely reasonable to ask whether the post-WWII jus ad bellum concepts still apply

Can we bomb the USA now or do we have to wait till a few more civil rights disappear and a few more elections are rigged?

To get back to the question of why a winner would declare a cease fire I’d like to quote the War Nerd:
“1. The first job of a guerrilla army is to stay alive. That’s much more important than winning a Western-style victory. The Mahdi Army is intact, ready for the next round.
2. The next most important job of a guerrilla army is to maintain and grow its support in the neighborhood. Sadr has his own constituency—and I mean that literally, since all the Shia groups are positioning themselves for elections this Fall. By calling off the fight, he spares his people further gore and destruction and comes off as the compassionate defender of the poor. Just in time for campaign season.
3. A guerrilla army facing occupiers with a monopoly on air power is committing suicide by going for total victory on the ground, seizing an entire city or district. Just ask the Sunni, who bunkered up in Fallujah and got slaughtered. By melting back into the civilian population, the Sadrists are now invulnerable to air attack.
4. After four straight days of failure by the Badr Brigade/Iraqi Army, the US was frustrated enough to start committing American ground troops to the assault on Sadr. That would have meant serious casualties for the Mahdi Army, as it did when they took on US forces in 2004. Not that they’re afraid to die for their neighborhood—Shias? You kidding me?—but because it would be stupid to die fighting the Americans when everyone in Iraq knows the US just doesn’t figure much in the long term.”

Simple and to the point. This cease-fire was declared from a position of strength.