Nothing learned, nothing forgotten

So as a relatively young sort, can I ask? Has it always been thus? Is the incompetence and political calculation in which horror is returned with greater horror a recent thing?

“better than the worst they could conceivably have obtained through negotiation and peaceful agitation. ”
That’s the key phrase for me. My age and upbringing being what they are/were, my immediate reaction is “what about the workers and peasants under the Tsars, didn’t they–after enormous pain–get something better than what they had before?” Maybe reasonable minds can differ on that, maybe not–I’m an old man and a creature of my formation. But John asks a different, and harder, question: could they have done at least as well without the violence and the pain? Counterfactuals are always tricky (to say no more) but “was it worth it if there was a less cruel option?” is a question worth asking–which, as usual, means I don’t have even the semblance of an answer.

Ewwans:

Is the incompetence and political calculation in which horror is returned with greater horror a recent thing?

Absolutely not. In many ways the nadir was World War I, where one could argue that there was only one actual winner: Lenin.

In the past 60 years, there have been plenty of wars that are negative-sum in general, but where there were real, personal benefits to some rich and powerful people. In the case of the US, wars that we lost as a nation were still very beneficial to large numbers of corporations, and also to many people in the officer class of the career military.

This is one reason the US Founders were opposed to standing armies: because it creates a class and an institution that directly benefit from wars, and want more of them.

I think it’s strange to suggest that “no one has learned anything in the decade or so since the Iraq war began.” Now even a conservative Republican like John Kasich has to say that he’s opposed to ‘nation-building’ (see report of his speech at [U.S.] Nat’l Press Club today).

One of the clearest ‘lessons’ of the Iraq war is that forcible ‘regime change’ esp. in a deeply divided society, and esp. when unaccompanied by any sensible planning for what comes after the deposing of the ruler in question, can and prob. will lead to disaster. With the exception of the Libyan intervention of 2011, which arguably disregarded that lesson, it seems to have been learned, at least for the time being, by the U.S. and U.K., the two governments that led the 2003 Iraq invasion. With the exception of the Libyan case, I cannot offhand think of an instance since the Iraq invasion when Western countries used direct force to topple, or to facilitate the toppling of, a sitting ruler of a generally recognized government. (Perhaps I’m forgetting something, in which case I’m sure someone will tell me.)

@8

That’s when you get the grandiose chestbeating that it’d be better to be poorer and free than richer but (in some dubious way) unfree/unequal/undignified/whatever.

Political Violence @ A Glance, a blog I read only rarely (though I shd probably peruse it more often), has been running some interesting posts on ISIS etc. lately, for instance this one by Barbara Walter:
http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2015/11/16/the-strategy-of-isis-logic-or-lunacy/

“you will produce genocidal monsters like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler…”

Oh, C’mon. Ruthless toward his adversaries, perhaps, but Lenin never got the opportunity to validate his genocidal cred. By this kind of slipshod back-casting, Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant and da whole friggin enlightenment become culpable for what came after. For that matter, Jesus H. Christ can’t escape prosecution for crimes against humanity.

Come to think of it, the very idea of “humanity” registers as a crime against humanity.

genocidal monsters like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler

One of those three doesn’t belong on that list (unless you’re speaking in cassander’s voice or some such).

On the main point, though, I’m very sympathetic to the argument of the post.

Reread JQ’s response to cassander after reading js’s comment @17. Looks like I responded literally to a sarcastic remark. Oops.

@JQ

>Let me redo your trolling for you. As the capitalist governments of 1914 proved beyond any doubt, if you engage in war for long enough you will produce genocidal monsters like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, and you may be forced to fight them, as we were in 1939.

Well, Lenin and Stalin were genocidal well before the war. But if your point is that the economic central planning that war demands leads to terrible results, that power is inherently corrupting, and that governments should not be given such power over their own people, then you’ll get no argument from me. The question is why you keep advocating such planning and giving governments such power when you see them misuse it so often in war.

>has pursued this policy with one war after another, each creating the necessity for the next. This has created a series of monsters sufficiently awful that the case for war seems overwhelming.

So, let’s be clear, is your argument that WW2 was a monstrous evil worse than letting hitler conquer the better part of Eurasia? Because I think that will be a hard sell.

LFC @13 and 15

That explanation of ISIS strategy looks to me like an ex post rationalisation. ISIS have made many self-defeating military moves (like persisting in the siege of Kobane until their best troops were decimated), and their bombings have a certain random opportunistic character. While there is certainly some logic to their moves, it’s not a rational means-end calculation in the terms with which we are familiar.

re 15, Clausewitz, of course, pointed to all the ways war can become a life in itself. it’s an often under-appreciated point.

More broadly, war is essentially a group phenomenon. It’s organised. It’s not a calculation of individual advantage, else insulated elites would always be starting wars to which nobody came (which would be a good thing and fun to watch). At the very murky bottom of the pit of war is the a human drive that assumes that the continuance of the group is the most important thing, even above one’s own life or well-being. Perhaps an inheritance from our days as snack food on the plains of Africa? Who knows? Over this are multiple layers of institutionalisation, history, intertwining with other social drives, policy, calculation, changing forms of identity….

But, in the end, the suicide bomber in the market in Baghdad is convinced that the deaths of a crowd of vegetable-shoppers will keep the right form of Islam alive. Deluded? Certainly. Also tragic. But real to them.

@lfc

>) insistence on misidentifying Communism with socialism, then I’m out. (In fact I’m probably out anyway.)

Heaven forbid I identify people with the label they used to identify themselves.

It would be amusing if it wasn’t so awful that it is precisely the folks who never stop prattling about the genocidal “other” who are the staunchest unquestioning supporters of Their Stalin, Their Hitler or Our Freedom Fightin’ Christian Anti-Commie-nist Crusaders.

It’s always those other guys (whose battle cry is always “it’s those other guys!”)!

The enemy is poised to attack.

Umberto Eco:

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

I was a supporter of the war and for some time when my stupidity was revealed I just blamed idiot execution when the entire principle was wrong. So mea culpa and now I say intervene no where. But at the same time I think blasting Raffa from the map has merit, because sometimes you have enabled monsters and letting them run amok is immoral. The confiteor says “what I have done and what I have failed to do”, and while we tolerate things far more awful than Assad, letting IS alone seems both wrong and stupid. After all backing Stalin in 1941 was a better call than letting Hitler win. If Hitler had had Stalin’s resources he would have made him look like a piker. Assad jr is nonal Bagdadi and the FSL is a worse than nothing.

Now we have planes and drones and missles and some men who have decided that despite their almost super human physical prowess they want more than anything on earth to fly expensive aircraft into danger and travel to exotic lands to kill enemies, so if I do not reject violence completely it seems that maybe cleaning up part of the mess would be the better course, but I have my doubts as well. Obama has proved himself as feckless and maybe even more murderous than GW. Though still not as morally awful as the pragmatic elder GHWB, because whole GW took his crusade seriously and did not run from it, Obama has replaced torture chambers with pure murder and his Syria, Iraq, and Libya policy seems even less excusable than Bush’s, after all Bush never had either his own example nor did he pretend to have the wisdom to condemn its fecklessness.

I almost think destroy IS and begone, but then I wonder what monster will come next. Maybe just leave it to Putin, but considering Grozny that has its issues too.

Feel free to despise me, my only defense is I claim the wisdom to be disgusted at myself.

LFC @24
Cassander is an annoying troll and should be pointedly ignored. Leaving in a hissy fit is not ignoring.

John Q,
as a general point, as someone who has also been attracted to pacificism, I’m not sure that it works as a general strategy. Quite simply, you can’t ignore people who pop up in front of you and point a gun at you. Ruling out any violent response just makes people who don’t rule out any violent response dominant. Ultimately we didn’t win WWII by laying down our weapons. I’m glad that ISIS incessant provocation of basically everyone, means that eventually they will lose all their territory (what follows, I’m not sure about). There are hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind a defensive aggression response.

That is not to say of course that any aggressive action is justified either morally or from a cause/effect analysis. I just don’t in general it is useful to adopt a position and passively sit on it without continuing to think further (if in doubt, doubt if you like). Progress comes from scepticism, of everything.

Well I think I’ve made the other move, growing up with the Good Friday agreement and then Iraq I came to the conclusion that all conflicts should negotiated and military intervention rarely , if ever , engaged in. I’ve come to realise though that it doesn’t really matter what I think

I’m very sympathetic to this point of view – I’ve gone from being generally ‘opposed but open minded’ about military interventions to an ‘only as a very, very last resort’ on the basis of the chaos we’ve seen the past 15 years.

But in the interests of debate, there have been military actions which ‘probably’ worked for the better. An historical one that comes to mind is the Vietnamese intervention against the Khymer Rouge. It was at least partly motivated by KR massacres of Vietnamese civilians on the border (Paul Pot seems to have had the crazy idea that if he went to war with the Vietnamese the Chinese would join in), but whatever the origin, there seems little doubt that the Vietnamese invasion worked. It got rid of one of the most appalling regimes in the 20th Century, and arguably would have worked even better had it not been for the incompetence of the UN when it stepped in later and the mendacity of the US and Britain in offering military aid to the remnants of the KR. Even if the Viets had imposed a Viet friendly communist regime (as opposed to the autocratic semi-democratic chronically corrupt pro-Western one now in place), it would surely have been better than the KR.

A more recent one was the French intervention in Mali (Operation Serval) in 2012. While you can argue that the origins of the conflict lay in the stupid intervention in Libya, there seems little doubt that this was genuinely a case of a relatively cosmopolitan urban population facing a potentially catastrophic conflict with a bunch of ex mercenaries and desert raiders with an Al-Q/Isis influenced ideology. A few French airstrikes against mobile columns advancing on the main Mali cities did a very good job in protecting them. I find it hard to argue that this intervention didn’t save a lot of innocent lives.

Another potentially genuine cause for interventionism is of course the embryonic Kurdish state in Syria. If there can be said to be ‘good guys’ in Syria, the YKK soldiers are surely them (well, mostly ‘good girls’ I suppose). Of course, in the guise of Turkish F-16’s, NATO is actually bombing them…

Unfortunately, his work has disappeared behind a paywall, but the blogger ‘War Nerd’ (he now writes with Pando) is very a very good read on various conflicts around the world.

Why does there have be only one outcome in this debate? Sometimes you intervene and sometimes you don’t. Actually, you always intervene but only in rare cases are things so bad that you need guns for that intervention. In thIS case, well, whomever is to blame, I think guns are unavoidable.

If we had our druthers, all quarrels would be settled by negotiation. Even where overt violence is out of court, this is not always possible. Obama, for instance, has not got far negotiating with Republicans (and a great deal of misery and not a few deaths result from the stalemate). Likewise, attempts to negotiate on slavery did not get far in the decades before 1861, and it is now fairly clear that neither Berlin nor Vienna were prepared to negotiate in 1914, nor Berlin in 1939. Its also worth noting that the classical liberal order of the C19 involved a great deal of force – orderly states are not built without much use of the stick.

This is not to advocate war. Simply to note that sometimes the use of force is inevitable, and it therefore behooves us to think very hard about whether and how to use it, what stakes and issues all the parties have, how far they can be influenced and so on. And to bear always in mind that war has a logic and momentum of its own, is rarely predictable and always hard to control.

In the present case of Syria and Iraq, it seems to me Obama has done fairly well. His strategy of the careful use of airpower (most missions against ISIS return without firing anything, because targets are not hit unless they can be reliably verified as ISIS) in support of the Kurds and Iraqi Shi’a is working to diminish ISIS ability to attack and allowing these to recover territory. The strategy defends people who would otherwise be massacred, encourages the locals with the greatest stakes, and avoids all the issues that come with US troops on the ground.

chris

Fair point. But there’s a mix of motives: general Sunni grievances about treatment by the government (some merited, some more about loss of privilege); a general Sunni feeling that rule by Shi’a is illegitimate in itself, a spillover from Syria (the border is historically new – there are close elite family ties between Aleppo and Mosul); a large number of youth impacted by decades of sanctions and occupation…

But the Sunnis are not united. Indeed, they lack any cohesive political structure. Many tribes sided with ISIS (for various motives); those who did not were subject to vicious attacks. In areas regained, one function of the Shi’a militia has been to keep a lid on reprisals by those hit by ISIS. Lately, a militia force has been moved to Tuz Khurmatu to keep the peace between the Kurdish Peshmerga and the local Turkmen. I’ve seen some reports of Sunnis joining Shi’a militias (better pay and more reliable comrades). Hadithi in Anbar has been defended quite competently by a force of Shi’a militia, local Sunnis and Iraqi Army units.

So far, government forces have regained Sunni areas south-west of Baghdad, in Tikrit and north of Tikrit, around Ramadi and between Ramadi and Baghdad without too many ructions. The real test will come after Ramadi is cleared and pressure comes on Mosul.

Syria is an altogether more complex proposition. The Russian/Iranian proposal that backs Damascus without Assad (after a face-saving interval) is probably the least bad option.

The Cold War dominated international relations for roughly four and a half decades, from the end of WWII to 1989. If we date the current regime from 9/11, then we’re almost a decade and a half in. Can we afford to waste three more decades on this?

It’s so weird–I remember having this argument with people in 2003 and getting the ‘no it won’t’ from so many. Intellectual colleagues. The people with PhDs. They thought I was crazy to think the US invasion of Iraq was a Big Deal.

There’s no pleasure in saying ‘I told you so.’ And they still wouldn’t get it. I would bet my house that just this week a couple of them are right now ruminating about ‘Islam’ and ‘the Muslim problem’ and ‘what should we do about that problem because that’s obviously the problem here.’ I think they are supposed to be the liberal, enlightened and aware people. They barely remember anything about how we got into the war in Iraq last I checked. And you can’t say it is because they are Americans–this was a multi-national group of people from all over the world, other continents, developing countries, etc.

They know the war in Iraq was a mistake and they weren’t in favor of it. My point is that there’s a set of ideas that has such a deep hold on people in our societies that madness and folly looks like just one reasonable set of things on the table–something that we might be against–but that it doesn’t take a struggle to stop. It’s just a ‘policy option’ not a crusading, destructive murderous ideology.

There are two military options for the US, basically. We can go and fight and maybe win against ‘Isis/Daesh’ and then we can either find very, very, very skilled and brutal dictators to be our puppets. Or we can occupy the middle east forever. Permanent occupation. Terrorism will still happen under these circumstances by the way.

The other strategy would be to become very, very serious about security, do minor military intervention when totally unavoidable, accept some terrorism may occur, try to promote economic stability and peace when possible, create a lot of diplomatic alliances and wait for the incentive to die out for these groups.

Part of the second option means weaning ourselves off of oil. Or it’ll work much better if we do that.

With both options you get terrorism.

The reason it is hard to resist the military option is that the timeline is short between elections–so it’s really actually possible that democracy forces the hand of leaders so they look like they are ‘doing something.’ Then when the chickens come home to roost and they get blamed, they are already retired and playing golf somewhere.

> From now on, I’m just going to delete troll comments.

You could delete them, but in the words of immortal philosopher David Eddings, “an empty cross doesn’t prove anything”.

But seriously, leaving some posts at least [probably obfuscated by disemvowelling or a click-through wrapper] means that there’s a permanent record of “this is not acceptable behaviour”. Not just for the poster-in-question but also for others, including late-comers.

@ 55: let’s not obfuscate. No Iraq War, no ISIS. We don’t know what new militarism will elicit, but historical evidence suggests that bombs make enemies, unless you drop so many that there’s no one left.

#55: “it is an attempt at absolute deduction, but reality supports it, at best, as a partial induction”.

A similar line of thinking means I have a strict policy of keeping my foot firmly on the gas throughout any car crash.

A lot of the countries in the region have important political divisions that are probably not resolveable without significant violence

On one hand, you’re right. On the other, the question is whether the US/UK/France ought to be a part of that violence. Is our violence likely to exacerbate the problem? Is it likely to lead to violent blowback felt in our own territories? History suggests the answer to both question is yes. And in a moment when we face monetarism/austerity along with massive social and infrastructural pressures, having our precious state revenues allocated towards military intervention is criminal if not totally insane.

Pilsudski and Masaryk did pretty well out of World War I, and the latter definitely did better than Lenin.

AN @50
I think what you are saying is attractive, but unfortunately also wrong. The problem is that ISIS gains popularity and recruits by winning. ISIS will be less of a threat in the long run if it is completely defeated and is less of a threat even if it is only obviously losing. This is not true of all enemies.

For what its worth, I think Ezra Klein’s take on this is pretty good. http://www.vox.com/2015/11/17/9749962/isis-america-overreact

Part of Cassander’s post 65 makes sense. The US has intervened just enough in Syria to keep the war going, along with several other outside groups. Left to itself, Assad would have probably crushed the uprising the way his father did in Hama back in 1982, with a lot of ruthlessness and slaughter and war crimes, but the death toll would have been an order of magnitude less. Or so I speculate anyway. I think it’s right, though, that all the outside help has probably made things worse.

I know this would never happen but imagine if we just give up. No more Homeland Security, no more Anti-Terrorism Task Forces, no more TSA. We come out and say “You know what, we can’t stop this, no matter how much we spend on it. We’re going to spend the next 1.7 trillion on helping the poor people around the world instead of enriching the police and military.”

So the next day there are 100 terrorist attacks, including planes and trains being blown up. On day 2 that drops to 50, then 25, then 10. Would it hit zero? Would they stop at some point? I think they would, because the game wouldn’t be fun anymore.

The only thing I will ever agree with Cassander about is go big or go home. The post-Cold War wars have been wage as hobby wars – they are more like the wars of the 17th and 18th century, when Kings could muster forces and use them without the consent or consultation with the people, than anything else. I do think populations learn things. They learn them quickly. One thing they learned after Korea and Vietnam is that they didn’t want their kids dying in wars that only made sense in the elite’s geo-political game. The solution, then, was to disconnect the war from the population – to privatize as much of it as possible, and to rely on a vast increase in spending on technology and a volunteer force. The result is the longest and loosingest wars in American history. Who really believes that, after the US withdraws from Afghanistan, where it has been for fifteen years, that the Taliban won’t come back. The Taliban! I read recently that every time an american soldier calls in a strike on a taliban sniper, the engagement costs the US approximately 500,000 dollars. The Taliban, on the other hand, spends what, a thousand for the rifle? Not even that much, probably. This policy of insulating the home population from even thinking seriously about the war the elite is engaged in came to its climax in France. France, under Chirac, wisely avoided the American led charge into the quagmire in Iraq, but under Holland, and particularly Fabius, the neo-cons and liberal interventionists are in charge. Consequently, France went to war with Daech without ever doing the things you do in a war – like alerting and securing the homeland. That we live in an age of globalization is a phrase that has died of being repeated a billion times, but apparently, it is still a surprise to the Western elites. Yes, if you can get socks from India and computer parts from China in real time, people who want to carry guns and ammo into your cities are going to have a fair chance of doing so – even if they live in Syria. The most sensible thing written about the attacks from the point of view of their unsurprisingness appeared in the London Book Review. This Jeremy Harding piece has a certain GB Shaw aura – it is common sense made shocking by being plainly stated. http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/11/17/jeremy-harding/who-is-the-enemy/
Of course, at the present, the only attachment to military action demanded from the populations that pay the taxes and supposedly govern themselves is that they have “solidarity” – with the victims, with the soldiers, with, in general, the war, which is put in the most ambiguous terms (like – we are at war with radical Islam, instead of, we are at war with Daech – the former being simply a lie, since radical Islam is a phylogenetic extension of Saudi Arabia, and France is a huge ally of Saudi Arabia). The fog of war is caused by fog machines, not so cleverly put in place by the propagandists. It isn’t hard to cut through.

Bur what was wrong atall about what Vietnam did after WWII? It was us and France whom

Aren’t you wrong abour revolutions? And those are always happening, like the Arab Spring today, yay.

No,,Japan was the only WWi winner. Because armor on water was easy faster before the tank was invented The Civil War-era ironclad sta

Lenin felt betrayed by Germany for his try at unilateral disarmament. And Russia felt starved and out of bullets. Russians were better off because they had a real constitution, after.

Libya made me a pacifist – it was clear that not intervening would have been a disaster, but intervening created an even bigger disaster. And that’s pretty much the best you can say about any war in living memory other than WW2.

Although younger than Professor Quiggin, I’ve traveled the same route.

In World War II the German and Japanese regimes were very nasty. Thanks to the Marshall Plan and Social Democratic years, the Germans and Japanese are much better. Nation-building worked.

But that’s no longer the case. Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t rebuilt. They were subject to bizarre free-market fantasies. The elite won’t spend the money at home or abroad.

So any war will just rip the country apart like Syria, with little rebuilding afterwards.

Having said that, the major nations’ Syria policy has been a disaster as well. So yeah Libya is a mess but so is Syria.

Of course, I can’t go into details with getting freaking arrested…Look Kardashians!…but there is no peace, peace is not on the table, all we get to decide is who dies, and we are deciding…Look Kendall’s new bathing suit!…we are deciding by being passive that it is Syrians who die when it should be, umm, assholes closer to home.

Maybe us. If I get a diagnosis, I plan on a kerosene bath in a public place. Probably chicken out.

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/air-war-isis-may-be-satisfying-won%E2%80%99t-defeat-terror-group

@81 R. Bhandari
Judging from the opening paragraphs of the M. Ayoob piece you link, he’s saying pretty much what some in this thread have been saying. (I.e., airstrikes alone won’t do it, need local (non-Western) forces on the ground. It’s the combination.)

On the question you raised earlier about how the Iraq war affected the Assad regime, I’m not sure. The Arab Spring seems to have been a more proximate spark of the Syrian civil violence, combined w/ drought as has already been mentioned in a previous thread here. Which is not to deny that everything is at some level connected.

The alignments on the ground and otherwise are also such that the analysis @82 makes no sense.

I mean, if you were an amoral investor, the beginning of a protracted air war is about the clearest signal towards a good bet as you are gonna get in today’s world.

Check the trends for raytheon and northrop grumman as well. They are all doing fabulously. Tripling in the span of a few short years.

There’s an article on how a climate deal in Paris is the best hope for peace in the Middle East by Jason Box and Naomi Klein in the New Yorker:

” When our safety feels threatened, it’s difficult to think of anything else. Major shocks like the Paris attacks are awfully good at changing the subject. But what if we decided to not let it happen? What if, instead of changing the subject, we deepened the discussion of climate change and expanded the range of solutions, which are fundamental for real human security? What if, instead of being pushed aside in the name of war, climate action took center stage as the planet’s best hope for peace?

The connection between warming temperatures and the cycle of Syrian violence is, by now, uncontroversial. As Secretary of State John Kerry said in Virginia, this month, “It’s not a coincidence that, immediately prior to the civil war in Syria, the country experienced its worst drought on record. As many as 1.5 million people migrated from Syria’s farms to its cities, intensifying the political unrest that was just beginning to roil and boil in the region.”
….
A climate summit taking place against the backdrop of climate-fuelled violence and migration can only be relevant if its central goal is the creation of conditions for lasting peace. That would mean making legally enforceable commitments to leave the vast majority of known fossil-fuel reserves in the ground. It would also mean delivering real financing to developing countries to cope with the impacts of climate change, and recognizing the full rights of climate migrants to move to safer ground. A strong climate-peace agreement would also include a program to plant vast numbers of native-species trees in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, to draw down atmospheric CO2, reduce desertification, and promote cooler and moister climates. Tree planting alone is not enough to lower CO2 to safe levels, but it could help people stay on their land and protect sustainable livelihoods.

….. as the author and energy expert Michael T. Klare argued weeks before the attacks, Paris “should be considered not just a climate summit but a peace conference—perhaps the most significant peace convocation in history.””

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-a-climate-deal-is-the-best-hope-for-peace

Waiting for Godot @88

Since you seem to consider “war” one big, undifferentiated category — not distinguishing between kinds of actors involved, casualty levels, technology, aims, or anything else –why start with 1914? What about, just to go back another century for example, the Napoleonic Wars, Opium War, Crimean War, Franco-Prussian War, Balkan wars, Boer War, etc.? Since you don’t distinguish between kinds of wars but lump all wars together, you can hardly claim that ‘perpetual war’ only started in 1914. On your own implicit premises, that makes little sense.

If you want to pick a date for the start of a new era of war, arguably the 1790s-1815 is a better candidate than 1914. One historian argues that the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars inaugurated the notion of war as an ‘apocalyptic’, cataclysmic event, as contrasted with the more routinized, relatively restrained wars (in Europe any way) of the 18th century. (I’m referring to David Bell’s The First Total War.)

I’m somewhat skeptical of that argument, but it’s not totally off-the-wall. It makes more sense than dating the onset of ‘perpetual war’ to 1914. If ‘war’ is an undifferentiated category, and you don’t care that battle-deaths have declined fairly steadily since WW2 until a recent uptick (see the chart linked by Ronan in a previous thread), then why start with 1914? It would be more logical, on your implicit premises, to see ‘perpetual war’ since the beginning of recorded time.

Oh, fuck! Just lost a long comment (partly a response to LFC) because of too much semi-drunk fast typing! Tomorrow.

I really don’t know why JQ is surprised. Two centuries of experience, thought and policy have not deterred investors and regulators from thinking that this time is different and inflating yet another financial bubble. Why should war be different?

A lot of the blather around the ME does not stop to ask what can practically be done. Blithe talk of nation-building, or of Germany and Japan post World War II, or of sending in the troops are all stupid hand-waving. Iraq is not Germany, wars are no longer conducted in the way they were in World War II, the US does not have an army large enough to police even Iraq, and certainly does not have the military or other capacity to occupy any substantial part of the ME (the last Iraq war pushed the US army to the very limits, and there it was opposed by only a fraction of the Iraqi population)). Policy has to start from these facts, not gesture it away.

The course of the fighting has made it clear that what counts is not so much weaponry or numbers (although these are factors), as commitment and political cohesion. ISIS has both – although the latter draws on a very narrow base; so do the Kurds, the Shi’a and affiliated militias, and Hezbollah. The radical Sunnis have commitment but not cohesion, Assad’s army is decidedly short on commitment, the small secular factions lack both commitment and cohesion. If it were simply an intra-Syrian fight, the radical Sunnis or ISIS would probably have won (and driven surviving the Christians and Alawis into flight). But it could never be simply an intra-Syrian fight – there are too many cross-border ties (Kurds with Iraq and Turkey, Alawis as a branch of Shi’a with Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, Sunnis with Saudi and Iraq and so on). So it was always going to boil over.

A western policy that hangs around the edges hoping for a unicorn does more harm than good; massive force is both not an option and destructive of any solution. Intervention that boosts the parties with the capacity to actually win has some chance.

@95 ‘Intervention that boosts the parties with the capacity to actually win has some chance’

Of accomplishing what, precisely, to what end, and what are the consequences both for the region, and for the larger community. I’m frankly astonished that someone with your evident knowledge of the complexities seeks some sort of violent unilateral solution, rather than turning to the UN, or some other regional solution that does not involve killing more people. Re: Germany and Japan. Please don’t confuse analysis with advocacy. The comparisons are instructive because, as you and others here note, the US has lacks the resolve and the resources to make this happen. Personally, I’d like to draft every son-of-a-bitch who supported the decision to invade, from Drezner to Sullivan to Pelosi and plant their asses in the ME for the first decade of what looks to be a protracted occupation, if it is in any way going to work. But I’m not in charge, so those who supported the war (without a loaded gun to their heads as is/was the case with the Iraqi populace, the Japanese, the Germans, the Brits, the Americans, the French, the Spanish, the Swiss, the Israelis, the Koreans, and any sundry number of civilians forced to suit up and fight whether they want/wanted to go, or not, these clowns get to walk away from their ‘mistake’ and leave the mess for all of us to clean up. Back in 2002-3, it was already clear to me that what some of the costs of this fiasco were going to be, and who would end up getting promoted after sending us all into the sinkhole. But I digress.

I stand by my original opposition to all the ME interventions, and see no evidence whatsoever that using western force to aid any of the actors is going to do anything but install another gang of evil assholes who will begin their own program of exploitation and recrimination with us supplying the whips and bullets. If we have no faith in the UN and other institutions, why support them at all? Let the law of the jungle rule and let the savages slaughter each other whilst we contemplate how best to exploit their weaknesses and misery. Or, we could refuse to give into the temptation to just do something!!!, when that something involves blowing shit up. Much of the ‘urgency’ is self-created.

People like me, who have served in the military and understand elementary logistics understood from the get go that getting out was always going to harder than getting in. Cheney’s claim ‘we will be greeted with flowers’ was greeted with gawps and drools rather than the scrutiny the assertion demanded. Who precisely billets and feeds an occupying army of the size the US dispatched? Not the locals, as it turns out. So, the entire occupation becomes extremely expensive.

As much as I fervently opposed the invasion not least because of the challenges we face in phase IV, that once there all those who supported the war should have been shipped in to ‘volunteer’ in camps, teach, and provide any of the sundry services that might just add some stability to the region. A ruinous future is far from cast in stone, but destroying three states: Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and then walking away is likely to do more damage than the initial goofy decisions to remove S, G, and now A.

The solution isn’t more bombs, however.

@90
‘We never had to get the Germans to stop killing each other.’

While there are other people on the internet who are wrong, that single sentence contains more wrongness than the average site, and some top level domains.

I doubt it is even deliberate Holocaust denial, merely casually not recognizing it as a politically-relevant historical fact.

kidneystones

The argument I am making is that, if war is inevitable, then it is best ended quickly on tolerable (not ideal) terms. War itself breeds a great many other evils, and also tends to spread. And this involves a real effort to understand the capacities, attitudes and resources of all the parties involved. Force may be an option but, if used, has to be tailored to the situation and amended as the situation changes.

The handling of the first Gulf War was a huge mistake; launching the second was a major crime. The Syrian civil war is a huge tragedy, as is the Iraq civil war. Yet there they are. It falls to the current crop of politicians to find some way to do what they can. Massive force is not an option; leaving the parties to fight it out is also not an option – the consequences would be both grim and not contained to the Syria and Iraq. The groups who might achieve a tolerable peace are the Syrian Kurds and affiliates (Christians, Yazidi), the Iraqi Shi’a and the Damascus regime. The others are either incapable, uninterested (the Iraqi Kurds will fight for their region, but not beyond) or intolerable (eg ISIS, but also an-Nusra). So the policy that has the best hope of achieving the least horrible outcome is to back all these with enough force to allow them to prevail. Syrian Kurds, Shi’a militia and Damascus are already in de facto alliance.

The alternative is to line ships along the Lebanese coast to take off 40 per cent or so of the Syrian population, plus most of the Lebanese population.

@SamChevre, you write as if German Jews (and other groups murdered by the Nazis) were not Germans, then you call the remainder a unified nation that doesn’t kill its own.

As far as the question of pacifism itself goes, consider what Ricouer has to say about it:

“It seems to me that non-violence can be a valid attitude only if one can expect from it some influence–perhaps quite concealed–upon the course of history. What advantage is there for a man to refuse to kill and accept death in order not to soil his hands? For what does his purity matter? Is he pure if all others are unclean? And doesn’t his act fall back into history with the deadly effects which he did not intend but which nevertheless fulfill the meaning of his act? Thus the violence which one refuses to embrace turns to the profit of another violence which the former did not prevent or perhaps even encouraged. Hence if non-violence is to have meaning, it must fulfill it within the history which it at first transcends. It must have a secondary efficacity which enters into account with the efficacity of the violence in the world, an efficacity which alters human relationships.” (from History and Truth)

As a posture, or an attitude, pacifism is no better than violence unless, and this is key, it engages with the world — with history– and in so doing confronts the violent turn toward which humans are quite naturally prone. Meaningful pacifism is the manifestation of a form of efficacy. It is not simply refraining from or rejecting violence, or refraining from the support of violence. It is an action within this violent, war prone world that seeks peace, peace not as a balance or preponderance of force, but peace as the recognition of and respect for other humans in their irreducible alterity.

That being said, using that principle as a guide to developing a coherent Middle East policy is far above my pay grade. In personal terms, as a pacifist I understand the need for a policy of military containment of Daesh, but only because that use of force opens up the possibility for a massive humanitarian effort on behalf of those displaced by the broader turmoil in the region. Minimum force, maximum aid is the path I would, for what it is worth, advocate.

The war in Syria should never have been encouraged by the west. Curiously, where democracy threatens Saudi Arabia, the West looks the other way, as in Egypt and Bahrain, and where dictatorship threatens Saudi Arabia, the West suddenly becomes all liberal interventionist.
However, it is striking that the only topic of discussion is the use of the military. This Jonathan Steele article makes the case that the Kurds in Northern Syria, who are disliked by the Turks and by the rightwing parties in Northern Iraq, have carved out some areas of actual peace, while maintaining a quasi official truce with Assad. What those Kurds need is money. A lot of money. All the billions the Americans wasted in Iraq, or, more truthfully, recycled to American companies, should be more wisely spent on projects building up these territories – not only the military forces, but infrastructure. As in Northern Iraq, one can expect that the established ruling families will cream a lot for themselves, but in the end, Northern Iraq was not – mostly – a zone of conflict in the war, and we should ask why and extend that lesson. Nation-building is impossible when, as in Iraq, the occupying power is not only too small to enforce its whims, but it dissolves the state, from the army to the sewage inspectors. But given a state that has generated its own structures of governance and has shown competence in defending itself – why not a coupla tens of billions? Hey, and it doesn’t even have to bust a budget – just cancel the Trident in the UK, and a coupla expensive and useless military programs advocated by Pentagon generals who are looking forward to sitting on the boards of the contractors who who planning on building the useless and expensive stuff – and bingo, you have money!
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/dec/03/syrian-kurds-are-winning/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/dec/03/syrian-kurds-are-winning/

Anarcissie–I am constitutionally not disposed to that kind of fatalism. At the same time I think you are right to emphasize the magnitude of the problem, and I’d agree that there is no policy measures capable of fixing the grievous harm done (most proximately arising out of the invasions of Iraq). Having sown the wind, there is alas a whirlwind to be reaped. But while violent actions in history resonate in ways foreseen and unforeseen for a duration beyond even our best intended and conceived efforts to “fix” them, actions in the name of peace keep open a sense of hope for the future, hope that the causal chain of violence and retribution might in time be broken. And yes it is a thin thread to cling to, but there is a power in it that can, sometimes, work in astonishing ways.

I’m encouraged somewhat by both 107 and 108. Re: what the constituent groups want. I’m certain that 70-90% of each group simply want to live in peace, retain their own culture and values, and go about their business. We’ve seen repeatedly that once we get the key actors to the table – pay off the intransigents and exploiters (the non 70-90%) and create the dynamics for growth, people set aside their arms. I very much enjoy, btw, the posts of those very familiar with the individual actors. The key for me is recognizing that we all share very similar goals re: freedom to live as we please. There will always be those ready to exploit fears for power and profit. Resisting these forces (not eliminating them, a different problem) always requires our best thinking and our willingness to be imaginative, flexible, and resolute. I’m certainly not in any way a pacifist, I simply choose not to degrade my life and that of others by employing the cudgel unless I’m convinced that I’ve absolutely no other option. Increase the number of ordinary stakeholders, reduce the number of those seeking to exploit their own peoples, and inject cash, educators, jobs, and infra-structure. We’ve long known that the international arms manufacturers spread nothing but death. Perhaps we should look more closely at limiting/curtailing their activities in conflict areas. The people suffering in these regions need workable laws and a reliable judiciary, not just more guns.

Peter T 11.21.15 at 12:47 am @ 112:
‘… So get the war over asap, but not in a way that destroys any prospect of reasonable governance. …

The problem with this plan is that you don’t know how to do that.

@LFC 11.19.15 at 11:35 pm
>Assumes it is in US’s power to “end” or “win” (?) Syrian civil war, which it isn’t. … The U.S. can’t wave the equivalent of a magic wand and end the Syrian civil war tomorrow.

Well, as for what keeps the Syrian civil war going, I suppose it might just be worthwhile to consider an alternative universe in which the United States and its regional allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are, for a change, *not* supporting the rebels, as they currently are and have been for years. In this context, the common practice of presenting the US as an uninvolved bystander and the Syrian war as just ‘happening’ naturally by itself is … funny. I suppose nowadays anything short of actual invasion counts as ‘non-involvement’ by US pundit standards.

@OP
>It would be a salutory effort to look over the wars, revolutions and civil strife of the last sixty years and see how many of the participants got an outcome (taking account of war casualties and so on) better than the worst they could conceivably have obtained through negotiation and peaceful agitation. Given the massively negative-sum nature of war, I suspect the answer is “Few, if any”.

Certainly, violence is a bad thing, war is an extremely bad thing, and I don’t really expect anything good to come of any more ‘boots on the ground’ in Syria (though neither do I see ‘negotiation and peaceful agitation’ as an appropriate approach to something like ISIS). That said, I don’t think general reflections like the above quote tell us all that much. First, whether negotiation and peaceful agitation produce better (or any) results depends very much on the behaviour of other participants. Second, negotiation and peaceful agitation typically rely on a more or less remote, but credible (and therefore occasionally realised) threat of violence. Third, descriptively, it’s difficult to calculate the effects of war on ‘participants’ and therefore assess its rationality, because sides in a conflict are not really monolithic entities prioritising the maximum happiness and survival of their constituent individuals.

@Ze K 11.19.15 at 9:42 am

>The world is a gangland. Either you’re a violent bully, or you’ll be someone’s bitch. That said, even a violent bully should be content with a limited sphere of influence. … Claiming the whole world is the problem.

Wow, that’s deep. However, if the world is going to be a gangland, I don’t see what objections one could or should have against a global capo di tutti capi in Washington. It’s the natural outcome given such rules of the game, and centralisation can be expected to bring at least some degree of order and stability eventually. Not my cup of tea, but then again, I’m a leftie and thus naturally unappreciative of the simple beauty of this sort of thing.

kidneystones – just wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed reading your comments in this thread and your perspective – it has helped change my thoughts on the use of war to solve political problems.

(at least that’s my understanding. I didnt mean that to sound so definitive)

Also worth reading (last I’ll post for a while)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n23/adam-shatz/magical-thinking-about-isis

@Ronan
A lot of political scientists appear to want to find coherency and sophistication in tactics and strategy, whereas the norm seems to be incoherence and lack of sophistication

depends on the group, no? Viet Cong were pretty sophisticated, perhaps Algerian FLN or whatever their acronym was, also. But I don’t really know…

@Ze K 11.21.15 at 9:50 am

>Well, we’ve seen now what it looks like: the global capo immediately goes batshit crazy, completely out of control.

Not really, he is just doing his best to increase his power further. It’s natural to have conflict at the boundaries of an expanding (or contracting) empire, whereas the bulk is mostly in a state of a pax Romana/Americana/whatever. Similarly, the process of destruction of the old feudal lords in many countries was painful, but eventually this produced more efficient and advanced regimes of absolute monarchy. So, if one is OK with bosses and bullies as such, one could argue that the only regrettable fact is that our current top boss and bully is not powerful enough yet and hasn’t completely defeated his weaker rivals such as Russia, Iran and China, so we should help him to do that in order to hasten the advent of global peace and prosperity.

>It’d be better (imo, and, I believe this is also a commonly accepted view, outside the US) to have a system with (roughly) equally powerful regional bosses, providing some balance of regional interests; with global sit-downs for conflict resolutions, and so on. Multi-polar world, they call it. A world with multiple centers of power.

I’m sorry, but I don’t really see how several bosses/poles are substantially better than one, and how, say, being a slave (or, as you put it, ‘bitch’) of Russia is better for Ukraine or Poland than being a slave of America. Ditto for Vietnam, China and America and so on. The existence of several rivalling bosses may create some space for potential manoeuvring of certain smaller players between them, but that potential is very uncertain, unstable and temporary and is offset by a much greater instability and frequency of violent conflicts. In the end of the day, the stability of undisputed dominance by one boss will be much preferable. There’s a reason why pre-modern human societies have tended to stabilise in the form of despotic monarchies.

>And I don’t see what any of this has to do with being ‘leftie’, whatever that word may mean for you.

Well, let me formulate it like this: my being a leftist means that I have a strong preference for freedom and equality as opposed to hierarchy. This includes freedom and equality both between citizens of a nation and between nations within the international community. This freedom and equality is to be achieved through rules that apply to everyone and defend equally the interests of all, strong and weak, as opposed to a lawless ‘gangland’ situation where power and violence determine everything and the strong (‘bullies’) impose their will on the weak through violence, creating hierarchical relations (regardless of how many hierarchies there are). This means that I’m for international law, for the UN, against aggression and against US imperial authority over Latin American countries (the Monroe doctrine) as well as, say, Russian imperial authority over the neighbouring countries, or any other arbitrary authority exercised in international relations. I don’t think this is a very original position, indeed the current official international system presupposes it, but perhaps formulating it explicitly would be of help to someone who assumes everyone else to be an authoritarian imperialist (or, considering the natural implications of this gangster attitude for internal affairs, let’s just say fascist for short).

Iran and Hezbollah are much more explicitly regional opponents of the Saudis et al, snd Obamas cooling of relations with Iran was against Saudi protests, so I think you’re overstating that.
The US was actually much less willing to arm the rebels than the gulf states (perhaps because they were doing the job for then, probably not) and the evidence seems to support the idea that Obama fought Clinton, the CIA et al when they were looking for greater involvement in the conflict

In late October, acc to Reuters, “the Democratic Forces of Syria, which joins together a U.S.-backed Kurdish militia and several Syrian Arab rebel groups,” launched an offensive against the Islamic State in a province in N.E. Syria.

Last I looked, ISIS was opposed to the Assad regime.

So this is how the US is degrading the Iranian-backed Hezbollah: it’s supporting an alliance in NE Syria that is fighting ISIS, which is an opponent of the Assad regime that Hezbollah is backing. In other words, every step the US takes to combat ISIS helps, at least indirectly, Hezbollah, b/c, ceteris paribus, the weaker ISIS is, the stronger Assad is, and the stronger Assad is, the stronger Hezbollah becomes by association.

I’m sure it’s yet more complicated, and geographical angles etc factor in. But I think I’ve sufficiently suggested why I don’t think the main aim of US policy now or in the recent past has been, in Manta’s words (or close paraphrase thereof), “to prolong the Syrian civil war so that Hezbollah and Iran will be weakened by having to spend resources to prop up Assad.” This just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given the admittedly limited amount I know about the conflict. Every additional month the Syrian c.w. continues is not nec. a month that Hezbollah grows weaker. Cd be the reverse. One wd have to know a lot more about the present condition of Hezbollah than I daresay virtually anyone on this thread knows to make these kinds of assertions with any confidence.

Here’s a limited defense of the “do nothing” option—or rather, an attempt to explain what “do nothing” might mean, at least to some people. The thing is: if “do nothing” simply means do nothing with respect to the Syrian civil war, it’s obviously insane. But consider what the US does in the ME as a matter of course: it funds certain regimes, militarily and otherwise (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Bahrain), it finds opposition groups in other countries (Iran, perhaps Syria [i.e., prior to the civil war]), etc, etc. I mean, it’s got its hands in pretty deep anyway—and has had since long before ISIS was a kern of an idea in some gun toting madman’s imagination.

Now, if we were to imagine “do nothing” as the US not doing any of that, then we can at least ask whether the outcomes under that scenario would be on balance any worse than they are now. (I’d think not.) Now as a policy proposal, this is obviously a non-starter, and not only because it is quite literally a ‘no policy’ proposal. Still, in thinking about the overall effects of US involvement in the region, it might be a useful counterfactual.

Fwiw I absolutely agree with the “do nothing ” argument (at least as it comes to adding fuel to the fire ) and would love to see a “benevolent ” US hegemon. (Divorced from power politics and counterproductive interfering ). As a whole I think the US has a is has a significant amount of responsibility for the situation that now exists . I just tend to think (especially re Syria ) it can be overstated

I also agree with many of the points in this post, and relevantly here the pt that the West’s actions are not the only thing that drives outcomes in the region.

Useful to remember how the Arab Spring started in 2011 — with the underemployed fruit vendor (iirc, an educated young man who cdn’t find a job to match his training) who set himself on fire in Tunisia. Now at some level one might blame neoliberalism and global capitalism for that, but it’s hard to link it to a specific U.S. foreign-policy action. So unless one is going to hold the U.S., and the West more generally, primarily or, more to the pt, *exclusively* responsible for social and economic injustice and turbulence everywhere in the world, it seems reasonable to think the M.E. wd have problems, stemming e.g. from local corruption and misfeasance of elites and autocratic regimes, even without any Western involvement.

That’s not to deny that U.S. involvement over the years on balance has made things worse — it almost certainly, in many respects, has — but rather to suggest that the problems of the region are a result of a complicated interplay of local, national, regional, and int’l forces. To which many might say “duh, of course, tell me something I don’t know,” but to judge from some comments upthread it’s not a perspective shared by everyone here.

Wasn’t Ben Ali in power for many years? How could he have modeled his autocratic rule on the Patriot Act, which is post-9/11?

I don’t doubt there is a definite connection betw. Ben Ali’s getting military aid from the U.S. and his ability to stay in power for a long time, but do people who know a lot about Tunisia blame the economic conditions that triggered the 2011 uprising on Ben Ali’s ties to the U.S.?

LFC @136 — I pretty much agree with all of that. My @133 was (a) probably not making a ton of contact with most other things going on in this thread, and (b) a rather belated response (if it can be called that) to @84 and some of the other stuff around there (cf. @93).

Ugh, blockquote fail. First para in @142 quotes Ronan @135.

LFC @139:

I don’t doubt there is a definite connection betw. Ben Ali’s getting military aid from the U.S. and his ability to stay in power for a long time, but do people who know a lot about Tunisia blame the economic conditions that triggered the 2011 uprising on Ben Ali’s ties to the U.S.?

Well someone can rule for a long time but get worse over time. The argument about the Patriot Act would be that in the 1990s, there was no “Grand Enemy” which illiberal policies could be justified so easily against (at least, not justified to Western ears). However, post-2001, dictators can say (either to external observers or their own population) “Oh no, we’re not shutting down free speech/dissent! Those people we’ve locked up? They’re terrorists! We’re protecting our national security!”

As for the economic conditions, I’ve seen it argued that it takes a combination of factors – in the good times people had less reason to complain about his dictatorship if they had an okay standard of living. But once the economy worsened, there really was nothing to gain from Ben Ali being in power so it allowed revolt to occur – with the revolution being against his dictatorship, which specifically was US-backed. That said, one can easily make an argument that US policy led to the economic conditions themselves too. Not just your point about the US getting neoliberal reforms @137, but also the original weakening of the global economy occurred as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States.

Alex:
ok, I see what you’re saying re the Patriot Act etc. now.

ps. If JQ meant to ask how many wars in which the USA was a prominent actor produced “an outcome (taking account of war casualties and so on) better than the worst they could conceivably have obtained through negotiation”, I would entirely agree the answer is “not many”. But that may say more about US foreign policy than about the nature of war.

Also: it would be a mistake to suppose I think all the wars, etc., in that list were justified. But I do think that in the medium term, which is the most one can usually hope for (permanent success and peace being very difficult) they did achieve their objectives.