Remembrance Day

“The relentless urge to action rather than inaction”

Mike Huben points to some depressing truths about how we’re mostly reared on stories of fighting.

But I think there’s more. At the level of an individual life, most childhoods involve some fighting – and fighting works. Might does make right for some proportion of the time. It’s regulated by authority figures, but we instinctively learn that in the absence of said figures, fighting is at least potentially on the horizon.

So when we get to the world stage and there is no “world policeman” with any recognise authority… well fighting comes back on the horizon.

In general, populations tend to increase to the carrying capacity of the environment.

Then they increase more. When there is a surplus of individuals, some will die.Whatever an individual does that makes it more likely somebody else will do the dying, increases the chance he and his family will survive to the next time of plenty.

Humans have been having particularly good times recently all over the world because our technology has increased the world’s carrying capacity. Coal-powered railroads made it easier to distribute food. Coal-powered nitrogen-fixation made it easier to grow food. Sanitation made it possible for people to live in large cities without continual epidemics. Each advance let the population rise, but then new technology relieved the pressure and let the population rise more.

It might have made sense to spend those centuries sharing, but we weren’t used to long periods of global prosperity. We kept fighting even in the good times. People acted like they just didn’t think there would be enough to go around, and sometimes that was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If we don’t want the world population to fall a whole lot in the next 50 years, we need cheap alternate energy. It can’t be nuclear power because the world can’t afford to have wars fought around, near, over, or in nuclear power plants, and if we have nuclear power plants those will all happen.

I read this post several hours ago JQ, and it’s been depressing me ever since. Most of us would probably like peace, stability and a quiet life, so whence comes war?

The law of the jungle dictates that, for the individualist animal, conflict is the norm: there is no such thing as a right. There is, for example, no private property. You may own you genes and body (until someone eats you), but anything else you must fight to gain or keep. This is modified for social animals, but there is nonetheless competition for resources between groups of the same species, and there are also upheavals and revolutions within social groups.

Humans are highly social animals, usually with at least some loyalty extending beyond the immediate family to wider groupings, but rarely if ever in real terms to the entire species. Empathy is limited. We may help our neighbours, or someone who collapses in the street, or even give large amounts to charity. But, for example, I don’t know anyone who wants an unrestricted open door to all economic refugees and asylum seekers, to the extent of being prepared to share their own homes and food, and also help work and pay for the extra housing and community services needed.

Apart from stupid conflicts over mental constructs like religion, we have two problems:
1) Large groups still compete with each other for natural resources. They will not share with each other unless forced to do so. Indeed some societies thrive by subjugating and parasitising others.
2) Subgroups within a larger social group are also de-facto internal parasites, treating members of their own society as prey.

There is no global authority which can solve 1). Like its predecessor the League Of Nations, the UN was designed to be toothless. 2) can only be solved by internal revolt and revolution, with no guarantee that a new elite will not rise which will be worse than the first.

My father served on the front lines of Korea back when the protection of that nation was essential for our national security. It was a hopeless, stupid war, but mercifully brief.

I reread Tuchman’s Guns of August this summer, in honor of the centennial anniversary of that long ago August. Still have no idea why those trenches were dug and the war lasted forever. Yes, there were reasons, but again, they were stupid and yet all of Europe dug in and the gene pool was decimated. Poppies, poppies, everywhere poppies blooming amidst the blood of all those men.

We go to war for reasons that are illogical and emotional. I’m still stumped over how GW Bush and company so easily aligned Iraq with the war on terror, but there you have it. (Speaking of warring for emotional reasons with Freudian overtones… God bless us everyone if Jeb Bush really does run in 2o16!!!)

We also (in America) no longer have the draft. Makes it much easier to look away from the kills and wounds of war. Our warriors volunteered for it…

We like to make meaning out of our war dead. Here’s Lincoln on a long-ago November day, honoring the war dead:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

“We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate…we can not consecrate…we cannot hallow this ground.

“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The meaning of Remembrance Day has become so muddied I no longer wear a poppy. I used to wear a pin that had a red poppy and a white dove on it and it said “To remember is to end all war.” I’d still wear that if I could find it.

Here in Canada the military has been increasingly glorified under our current prime minister. With the recent attack on Parliament this has only intensified, and the Legion reports a spike in poppy sales over previous years. Honouring dead soldiers has come to mean supporting whatever conflict they died in. You can’t criticize our foreign policy without sounding like you are saying these men died in vain.

My uncle fought in World War II, and never talked about it except to tell a humorous story. I was an adult before I learned he’d come across a group of men captured and left dead, and they were all from a village near his farm village.

My grandfather fought in both World Wars and carried shrapnel until the day he died.

I remember them.

A World War II poem: Naming of Parts, by Henry Reed

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

Another WWII poem: Keith Douglas, Vergissmeinnicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Bloix at 15: great poem, thanks.

“Died some, pro patria, non dulce non et decor” (Pound)

Yeats, with some but not I think total realism: An Irish airman foresees his death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Lynne @14
About the ineffectiveness of the UN

UN or other peacekeeping missions are quite effective in cases where parties to a civil war have reached a ceasefire. Ceasefire agreements are more likely to stick and be followed by disarmament/demobilization if there is a peacekeeping contingent inserted. In a study by V. Page Fortna of 94 ceasefires in 60 civil wars betw. 1989 and 1999, peacekeepers reduced the likelihood of a renewal of conflict by betw. 55 and 85 percent.

As a writer, I give thanks for the Yeats.

I think having an “enemy” as a target of rage helps people deal with the oppressive burdens of everyday life.

If only they would identify the “enemy” as corporate greed. But they can’t, because there’s no visual image for this elephant.

Lynne, “My uncle fought in World War II, and never talked about it except to tell a humorous story.”
This seems to be nearly universal. My wife organized a Veteran’s Day celebration at church and asked for pictures, stories etc from the vets. For the combat vets, most of these came from daughters, nieces etc, as the folks who were actually in the various wars did not want to talk about it at all. The career military were more forthcoming. My service was short and inglorious, I barely saw action, but even so it’s taken decades to be able to think of the memories without quick and strong revulsion.

The US changed from Armistice Day to Veteran’s Day in 1954, following Korea and WWII. That is part of the problem I guess, we stopped celebrating peace.

Bloix, thank you – I cannot to this day, strip down a rifle without going through the naming of parts, but had not actually read the poem in years.

“Why do we fall for the spurious appeal of a simple, violent solution ?”
simple and violent are really easy to sell.. peace, which in our case we have not got.

“About the ineffectiveness of the UN: it would be far more effective if the US didn’t consider itself to be above and apart from the other members.

The UN was created by the WWII victors with permanent Security Council members who could veto decisions. It was set up to be a tool of, and therefore ineffective against, its founders. Britain of course has been largely a US lackey except in the 60s when Harold Wilson managed to keep us out of Vietnam. The US hosts the UN and contributes 22% of its budget. It would not do this unless, more often than not, the UN could be made a tool of US policy. I’m not saying that this is right – far from it – but it is realpolitik.

As an economic superpower, the US may be in long term decline. I suspect that the reality of that decline may play into the hands of the darker political forces within the US which, given its vast nuclear arsenal, is very frightening.

(Cross-commented from JQ’s site: sauce for goose …)

Ok with the sentiment. But I think JQ needs to look at the data, eg from SIPRI. The trend in casualties from war (and organized violence more generally) since 1945 has been steadily down. 2,000 soldiers died on the Western Front in the morning of November 11, 1918 before 11 a.m. after the Armistice had been signed. We don’t see anything like that today. The trend is even stronger if you leave out violence involving non-state actors on at least one side, like ISIL vs. peshmerga. Is there a single interstate war going on today anywhere?

The decline in numbers has coincided with the growth of the “global village” of TV and the Internet, bringing graphic images of violence to everybody’s house and, nearly, hut. That has created opportunities for clever psychos like ISIS to manipulate large audiences; but it has also increasingly constrained the options of governments in the use of violence. Contrast the actions of the Chinese government – essentially the same élite – in Beijing in 1989 and Hong Kong in 2014. Other forms of oppression and control have become more effective, like electronic surveillance. A police state is an evil thing. But it does not rely on the glamour of war.

+ Stephen #23: Yeats’ poem is very fine, but not honest. 200,000 Irishmen volunteered in the British armed forces in WWI, and were urged to do so by John Redmond. 49,200 died. Some no doubt volunteered out of a desire for adventure, but realism surely set in during the autumn of 1914. The obvious explanation is that they agreed with Redmond that the cause was just: defending Belgium, another small and bullied country. Pearse and company reflected the view of a tiny minority; it took the stupid repression of the Easter Rising to make them into important martyrs. Yeats’ poem manages the trick of half-honouring the Irish war dead in a way that denies their real reasons for serving. You could say the same of the Gettysburg Address.

With so many contemporary wars being fought over ever-scarcer resources, I wonder what the future face of war will look like once we run out the resources that fuel it. Hand-to-hand combat with machetes and clubs? Because I don’t think you can run a modern army on windmills and the sun. But for now, the major powers are primed to wage war for oil so they’ll have enough oil to be able to continue to wage war for oil. I think it was Georges Clemenceau once said, It is the business of government to make peace more exciting than war by encouraging the arts.

Why do we fall for the spurious appeal of a simple, violent solution to complex and intractable problems?

I found myself wondering why the reverse of this question is generally derided as hopeless idealism. And for some reason, a quote (which I’ll still have to paraphrase) came bubbling up out of memory — from, of all things, The Strawberry Statement by James Simon Kunen : ‘If you’re going to stop making war, you should just stop. Maybe that’s stupid, but it seems that simple to me.’

Surveillance drones are already extending flight times with photovoltaic cells on the wings. Large and light enough aircraft can charge during the day and fly on batteries at night. Several machines have already demonstrated the capability, though none are yet in serial production.

For that matter, Europe had about 400 years of warfare involving gunpowder before the Industrial Revolution. Military rockets, machine guns, and high explosives predate the military transition to liquid fueled transportation by decades. The prospects of national armies reverting to edged weapons at close quarters are quite remote.

I wonder what the future face of war will look like once we run out the resources that fuel it.

Genetically engineered plagues and immunities? Maybe our enemies and/or resource competitors just all fall asleep, or are perpetually on Ecstasy, or are only a tenth as fertile as we are, and so forth and so on. (Or turn into zombies or the Screwfly Solution. Excellent for stories, not likely to be pleasant really.)

@ anderson

>Possibly these are tragic relish to the dish of glory, but I think it’s more than that.

I’ve always come away feeling the opposite The Illiad is basically the story of a genocide with the people doing the killing portrayed unabashedly as the heros. Achilles might have some personal angst over his choice of glory over happiness, but no one ever says that he chose wrong. His path might not be easy, but it’s the path you’re supposed to take. making that path hard just elevates it.

A depressing thing about the discussions of war and conflict here is that they almost entirely ignore the *enormous* amt of scholarship on these issues, in a way that wd be considered bizarre if done in a comparable thread on philosophy or political theory or whatever.

Is there another side to this question?

http://inthecornermumblinganddrooling.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/the-triumph-of-peace-25-years-after-the-fall/

“half-honouring the Irish war dead”

He wrote it for his friend, Robert Gregory. Who was himself a volunteer. KIA 1918. I don’t think Yeats was “half-honoring” anybody.

Nor was he presenting it as a general statement about the Irish war dead. It’s titled “AN Irish Airman Foresees HIS Death.” I presume that William Butler Yeats was capable of choosing his words with some care.

I’m just a joiner I guess. Now they keep making me stand up in church, and it’s embarrassing.

Everyone I have met who served in WWI either refused to talk about it entirely, or said it was a pointless futile waste that needlessly squandered the lives of countless bright and talented young men. None of them ever said anything about glory or patriotism.

Now that the soldiers are all gone, the Jelly-bellied Flag-flappers have been allowed to take over the commemoration.

Primo Levi wrote,
We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.

My father was drafted to Vietnam, wounded in action, discharged without any serious lasting physical disabilities. In my whole life I think the longest I ever heard him speak continuously about the war was 3 or 4 minutes. His tiny speeches over the years amount to less than half an hour. The longer speeches were about more trivial things, like the tricks of heating your food over a burning lump of plastic explosive. The shorter ones made a deeper impression.

“How would you like it if someone poured burning gasoline on you?!” — his furious reaction to my over-enthusiastic reading of an encyclopedia entry on incendiary weapons, when I was 8.

“I learned that there are things much worse than boredom” — explaining how he lost his draft deferment by flunking out of college as a freshman, then becoming an A student when he re-enrolled after leaving the army.

Silently crying, as he watched the evening news about the US going to war with Iraq in 1991.

By the numbers I know the suffering was orders greater among the Vietnamese. The glimpse of the war’s misery that I catch through my father has already been projected through a pinhole and shielded behind dark glass. There are depths of misery that can only be intuited, never transmitted, because they are not survivable.

Bloix@50: for Robert Gregory (kia 23 Jan 1918) to have shot down the Red Baron (kia 21 April 1918) would have been a remarkable feat.

That it’s a complex poem, I quite agree.

LFC @45 “A depressing thing about the discussions of war and conflict here is that they almost entirely ignore the *enormous* amt of scholarship on these issues”

Most of these discussions include a comment along these lines, and a suggestion that the original post is simplistic or naive. Usually, as here, there is no reference to literature. But where there is, it rarely tells me more than “it’s more complicated than that”.

I don’t claim to have succeeded in answering the questions I posed above, but if there is an answer (or more than one answer) in the scholarly literature, I’d be glad to have it pointed out. (Obviously, I know about things like sunk costs).

My own impression though, is that the experts have more detailed knowledge about particular conflicts, and may have better ways of analyzing some of the subsidiary issues (say, the relationship between democracy and war), but that the questions that concern me are excluded by assumption (true of economics and philosophy in important respects also).

Why do we fall for the spurious appeal of a simple, violent solution to complex and intractable problems? And why is it so hard to end a war once it has started?

Because lots of people, especially powerful elites, profit from war, isn’t it obvious?

We ALL love war, sadly. Or why else were neutral democracies in on Libya and Kosovo? And, too many generations, like ours,are extra cursed with warmongers. Wars last forever, because there’s so much turf, and you need a longer occupation phase because the police and army need distrusting.

Are you sure Russia isn’t similarly contemptuous of the UN as us? What about Ukraine? But I forget we’re the only bad guys in the world.

Damn – should have been all three paragraphs in italics of course…

Oh, and I think it’s in the first chapter of his Age of Extremes that Hobsbawm gives an account of why the war had to last as long as it did and end as it did, etc. More or less. I’m basically again interested in why you seem to find this kind of explanation for why wars continue as they do to be unsatisfactory.

But: as someone who’s probably just about as opposed to any given war—or war per se—as you are, I have difficulty understanding what kind of answer you’re looking for.[…] But you, i.e. JQ, seem to be making a different kind of claim—like, that’s the wrong kind of answer. So: what are the criteria of adequacy on the right kind of answer? Genuine question, this.

As I think I told John once in person, I completely share this sentiment and I find particularly hard to understand what John is getting at in the context of WWI, which involved a web of decisions spanning decades at least. What kind of argument (moral? historical? intellectual?) could possibly count as a justification for it?

“Because lots of people, especially powerful elites, profit from war, isn’t it obvious?’

This is an obvious but wrong answer. By 1918, four of the empires that went to war had been swept away, and the other two fatally damaged. The sons of the elite died in disproportionate numbers. Similarly it’s hard to see how US elites have benefited from any of the wars (mostly losing) in which the US has engaged in the past 50 years or so.

To my mind, at least a portion of the answer to the question of “why we keep on making the same disastrous mistakes” lies in the way

a) the new mistakes are perceived as fundamentally, qualitatively different from the old ones (as in “we used to go to war for reasons of imperialism/oil/bad thing, but THIS WAR is for democracy/legitimate self-defense/good thing”),

b) the military establishment can claim that they’ve learned from the mistakes of the past and can wage war in a way that spares the innocent/lets “our” soldiers survive/lead to technological breakthroughs in civilian fields, and

c) the way “we” does a lot of work in this sentence, since as upthread commenters have already noted (in particular, js @ 32) the “we” consists of a large number of “I”‘s that never voted, supported or particularly wanted war.

One can also talk about the way commemoration and rememberance of past wars shapes the narrative into supporting either a) or b) above, how much text and talk is devoted to either telling about the mistakes of the past so that we can wage war better next time rather than avoid it entirely.

“why we keep on making the same disastrous mistakes”

lots of different theories out there, of course. IR theory will want people to look at this from 3 ‘levels of analysis’, namely: 1) war is about individuals. either the specific personalities of key leaders, or the general ‘human nature’ and psychological habits that define us, these drive us to conflict. 2) it is about the character of specific states. democracies don’t fight wars but autocracies do; or the USSR is aggressive cause they are founded on Leninism; or certain domestic institutions like a free press or etc stop states from jumping into wars blindly. 3) it is about the international system, which lacks reliable conflict mediation short of war, and which is a space where security is a first order concern for all and security for state A implies insecurity for its neighbors necessarily (the security dilemma).

I am not entirely satisfied with this tripartite model for approaching international conflict, however, as it does not have much space for approaches with more idiosyncratic views of the state.

If we want to talk about WWI and draw forward, we could do worse than extend the AJ Mayer thesis, namely: reactionary aristocrats in the gov. (especially German) saw the writing on the wall for their class, but the war offered them a chance to keep hold on power as it re-affirmed their usefulness (as the martial class). The classic myths cited in the textbook WWI literature (ie: fast war, offensive bias, etc) were thus entirely self-serving and therefore very appealing. The potential that the war would either splinter the social democrats/communists gathering strength across Europe into either separate domestic factions, or paint them as traitors to the war effort (if the internationale held), was just gravy.

Can we extend this into today? Possibly. You need to dis-aggregate the polity and get rid of the notion of the ‘national interest’ to do so. Identify some 1) a reactionary elite class; 2) some threat to that elite class, whether structural or more classic party politics; 3) class incentive to pursue conflict abroad.

I have long contended that the Bush White House’s foray into Iraq in 2003 was driven in no small part by the political calculation by Karl Rove/others that ‘war presidents’ get re-elected. (the data is clear that this is a solid bet). They had an agenda they wanted to pursue, but holding on to power was the first step in getting in done, and the war would be an easy way to secure incumbency. All these old HW administration stalwarts knew the chance they blew in the Gulf War, and this time they did not want to blow it, especially given how great a new war would be for their stock portfolios. I am not sure if there was an political-economy component to it as well (military Keynesianism), given what we now all know about the state of affairs in the US economy around that time.

It is not as persuasive as the AJ Mayer thesis applied to WWI, of course, because there is far less coherence to ‘the Bush White house’ as a coherent class actor than there was for the Junkers in Wilhemine Germany. You need to add some additional layers to the approach – recognizing that the Bush presidency was the titular head of a broader alliance between more disparite social forces and such. But I think there is an important lesson in dis aggregating the society a bit, and parsing out who really stands to gain from conflict abroad, in terms of economic gain as well as who can use that conflict to gain political standing or dissolve mounting political challenges.

I would be very interested in hearing what others posit as an answer to this question.

Whoops. Sorry. #55, of course.

LFC: “I don’t stay up at night worrying that some crazed right-wing loony is going to break into an ICBM site in Wyoming”

Nor do I – I worry that some crazed right-wing loony is going to be given the keys to the White House and hence all the ICBM sites. In fact, many current US senators seem to be proud to be ignorant to the point of stupidity. Another 10 years of Fox-led GOP glorification of the Dunning–Kruger effect in science and economics will cause (more) serious economic and social stress in the US. Then suppose the Chinese set up a moonbase and it becomes obvious that the US isn’t top-dog any more. The only way to salvage national pride will be by increasing military adventurism. Enter President Palin.

I’ve often wondered whether Rupert Murdoch wasn’t a secret Chinese agent anyway. Every policy he and his networks support damage the long term future of the US, and help the ascendency of the Middle Kingdom.

“The obvious explanation is that they agreed with Redmond that the cause was just: defending Belgium, another small and bullied country.”

Would you say so ? I dont know enough about the history, but my impression was that the Redmond volunteers were a small enough contingent of the overall Irish forces, so people probably signed up for a number of reasons (already in the British army, allegiance to/want to protect Britain, peer (social/political) pressure/commitment, adventure, money etc) of which ‘wanting to defend Belgium’ featured pretty low ?
This seems to be the thing with soldiering. Everyone wants to give the soldier/revolutionary a perspective that aligns with their own priors, but really they’re a mix of indecipherable motives. (or so I’d guess. I’d assume very few understood or cared about the geopolitics in any meaningful way, but I could be very off base on that)

LFC #48: The Gettysburg Adrress is so good that we forget its problematic side. The Union soldiers had fought and died very largely to get rid of slavery, the Confederate soldiers had fought and died to keep and extend it. That as not quite why Lincoln himself had led the Union into the war. He was IMHO rewriting history for posterity so that somehow the defeated Confederates could identify with the future peace. As we know, postwar the initial attempts to complete the abolitionist project through reconstructing Southern society were abandoned in the face of violent opposition, and the establishment of Jim Crow given historical cover by the historical myth that the issue of secession was simply secession vs. union – a myth that drew sustenance from Lincoln’s words.

P.s. I do think the statement in the OP that “there are probably more wars, frozen conflicts and insurgencies now than there were when I started blogging” is likely wrong, but I would have to check the numbers, and anyway it’s sort of a side point. The overall trend in battle deaths over the past several decades is downward, as J Wimberley noted upthread. (The Syrian war has produced an uptick, however.) That doesn’t, of course, mean the problem of armed conflict has been solved, which it obvs. hasn’t, but the recent overall trends have been in the right direction.

My question is why we keep on making the same disastrous mistakes.

One, I would take on gianni’s point (@78) about distinguishing expectations from outcomes. Two, I would drop the premise that whatever goals some state or group hopes to achieve through war or violent conflict could be peaceably achieved (I can’t quite tell, but something like this premise seems to be operative). In some cases, the premise may hold, but there’s no reason to think it generally does.

Now it may still be true that the outcomes of violent conflict are almost always significantly worse than the expectations, and it may be the case that the costs of engaging in war end up outweighing the benefits of whatever goal the state was pursuing. If something like this is true, then you could rephrase the question along the lines of: “Why do actors get these calculations consistently disastrously wrong?”

I don’t have an answer to this question, but at this point I wonder whether it only applies to cases of violent conflict. I suppose I’m tempted to counterpose something like: “Why don’t ‘we’ do something climate change when we know the cost/benefit analysis heavily favors doing something about climate change?” Etc.

There’s also disagreement in the literature about the effect of nuclear weapons, i.e. to what degree nuclear weapons are responsible for the absence of great-power war in the last 70 or so years. For example, Mearsheimer (in Tragedy of Great Power Politics) stresses nukes’ role in (somewhat) reducing the likelihood of great-power war, whereas Mueller in Retreat from Doomsday (p.116) says the memory of WW2 is a deterrent against a repetition of it, even without nuclear weapons. It’s probably a mixture of various factors, as these things tend to be.

I don’t think blaming human nature is the same as saying war is inevitable bc human nature is evolving like everything else. But I do think, as others have suggested above, that our inability to look squarely at reality (including history of course) is the main culprit. We suffer as a species from wishful thinking.

LFC @92:

That’s totally fair. My point in bringing up Hobsbawm wasn’t so much to defend his analysis as to highlight the distinction between a response that says (a) that gives the wrong answer to my question, and one that says (b) that doesn’t even answer the question I was asking. As I expected, JQ went with (b).

I think I at least now understand what question JQ is asking and (sort of) what kind of answer he is looking for. I guess I don’t see why there need be any general answer of that sort—at least, a relatively simple one.

I suspect that at least some of the 40+ Mexican students who were abducted and killed were thinking, at some point, that war is NOT futile– I bet some of them wished they had been better able to make war against their captors.

So, who is saying that war is futile? Someone who feels that he can withdraw safely to his home, where his family is not in danger? Where war is optional, war is wrong. That seems clear. But of course, the argument is made that many wars that may seem optional are really not.

“the reasons why the Great War didn’t end earlier include
Sunk cost fallacies
War propaganda promising victory and demonising the enemy
The displacement of the relatively moderate leaders who started the war by aggressors committed to victory at any costs”
and, as always, the absolutely correct beliefs by the governments concerned that peace without victory would lead to the fall of that government and its replacement by another, an outcome that governments tend to look on as a good deal worse than (a little) more war till victory is reached.

@87 raises some important considerations.

You note that some outcomes are only attainable through war. An example of this is the sort of national unity and support for the current ruling elite that can be counted on in times of war. This is the whole idea behind the strong link between fascism and war. Because fascism all about national unity, it has strong incentives to artificially create unity through external aggression and the ‘rally around the flag’ effect. Pyschologically, see the Tajfel hypothesis

You then talk a bit about rational deliberations over potential outcomes. If we are in the mood to be consulting academic work, the foundational piece in IR on this question is J Fearon, ‘Rationalist Explanations for War’

Basically talks about how uncertainty over resolve requires costs be borne in order to effectively signal intent, also talks about how some goods are non-divisible (who controls the Holy Land) and as such conflicts over them cannot be resolved by bargaining. Additionally, there are strong incentives for states to over-state their warmaking capabilities, and as such you cannot effectively bargain prior to conflict because you cannot accurately discern who would win, and at what cost.

My summary here does the essay a disservice. You can find it here:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2706903?uid=3739704&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104524401811

Or they can just the read the article directly, if they have access. There are prob free pdfs of it available. (It’s a basic piece, as you said, behind one kind of analytical approach. Doesn’t nec. mean it’s right about everything, of course.)

js.
Yeah, I am a bit of an IR heretic in seeing domestic considerations as taking primacy over geopolitical ones in many instances. I guess my rendition would be – oust the Sandanistas for what purpose? (probably to clear the ground for US corporate interests). But your basic point that warfare is a unique tool has obvious merit.

As for Fearon, the essay is really remarkable in terms of analytic clarity. I can’t praise it highly enough, (despite thinking that its considerations are largely irrelevant to the question at hand!).

LFC
Do you know if Phil Arena is still blogging? I used to follow him but he stopped for some reason and I have not really checked back.
I missed your mention of Fearon, as I try to steer clear of discussions of WWII as a rule. I am interested in how it came up tho so I guess I’ll dig through that thread as I continue to procrastinate tonight.

p.s. which is tautological, I know…

—

btw, I never read Fearon in grad school, prob b.c the article came out around the time I was taking the required 1st-yr seminar on contemp IR theory, so it didn’t make it onto the syllabus. So can’t say I ever really bothered to grapple w it properly. (Nor did I learn how to follow the sophisticated reaches of formal modeling, etc., etc., etc.)

Andrew F. @106:
There’s an interesting, if too short, Wikipedia entry on the inefficiency puzzle of war.

On an admittedly extremely quick glance, this Wikipedia entry would appear to be basically a short summary of the Fearon article mentioned by gianni and by me in the comments immediately preceding yours. (Though the intro to the Wiki entry also refers to something by Robert Powell.)

The inefficiency puzzle of war assumes, incorrectly, that human beings are rational.

p.s. It’s a simplifying assumption of the sort that P.Arena (for one) wd argue can be useful for certain purposes even if it’s not entirely ‘realistic’.

But there is by now a pretty big lit. on foreign policy decisionmaking that tries to bring in psychological (and/or neuroscientific) findings. See, e.g., Stephen Rosen, War and Human Nature (2005), esp ch.2 on “Emotions, Memory, and Decision Making”; Y.F. Khong, Analogies at War (1992) (a study of analogical reasoning w/r/t the LBJ admin’s Vietnam decisions of 1965). And a ton of other stuff that I have neither the time nor expertise to list here.