Blowing stuff up

I remember a short story, set during the Vietnam War, in which a few US anti-war activists help a North Vietnamese soldier to get into the US, having carefully arranged for him a suitable plane, bombs, and a military uniform. The uniform is important because the idea is that his mission is a military one; if he weren’t in uniform, it would constitute a breach of the rules of war. As he is in uniform, what’s supposed to follow (in his mind, and presumably in the minds of his superiors who planned the mission) after he’s carried out his bombing run, landed his plane, and surrendered, is being taken into custody as a POW, subject to the rules that apply to that status. The actions of the local US citizens who arrive on the scene where the plane has landed after the bombs have gone off indicate, as you may imagine, no knowledge of the relevant rules; rather, they reflect the asymmetry of emotions described above.

As I understand it, it has long been the case that serious military theorists consider air power to be a useful adjunct to ground forces but insufficient in itself to hold territory.

Remotely piloted drones hold out the hope (and threat) that this can change—that a cheap means of global domination through air terrorism can finally be available, and thus effectively an imperial air force can ‘rule’ the world. Such a world would be terrifying to live in; all would be terrorised, all the time, not by soldiers and policemen, but by high-flying death drones. Instead of building so many vehicles to move soldiers, a great power can build drones, keep them in fuel and explosives, and bully everyone.

Short of that, though, dropped bombs can not in themselves be relied on to achieve any lasting military objective. They are a weapon of terror, little more.

A few politicians may understand this field, a little, but between the ones who filter such understanding through by-jingo nationalism and the ones who are simply more interested in other subjects, the effective level of institutional understanding in a congress or parliament, or even a president’s administration, may be too low to oversee this matter with realistic expectations.

In the USA, where politicians fear (when they do not explicitly serve) civilian ‘donor’ clients who can end a career with an October ad buy, the material understanding is that of the donors. For decades, the question has been what the heads of Chevron, Amoco/BP, Koch Industries, and so forth believe the US military is technically capable of. For all this time the US government and the military-industrial complex have indicated to them that that is a lot, for reasons that have less to do with an honest assessment of the efficacy of any military technology or practice than with an internal political interest. A government that looks powerful might hold corporations to something a little like loyalty, perhaps it can keep them afraid enough to pay some significant fraction of their taxes. But of course business cabals repeatedly take over this machinery and expect it to make the world do what they want, to kneel and to give them its wealth. That is, after all, what the US war department appears to be for.

Myself, I think aerial bombing is too terroristic to be used as a ‘normal’ weapon of war. A bit like nuclear weapons, it should be held in reserve for desperate circumstances; not used as the common USA answer to anything someone back in New York decides the West must unify as a civilisation to dislike.

Hi John, thanks for this. It’s frankly uncanny how this worked. I’ll be seeing American colleagues this week who are generally anti-Trump, but are sure to be supportive of the latest round of blood-letting.

Yet, as much as I agree with the general tenor of your post, I feel you’re failing to make a critical distinction between the satisfaction derived when blowing people up, versus blowing things up. The latter provides little, the former is positively orgasmic for advocates of violence. So, yes, if you agree, I’d recommend making that point much more strongly.

People have to die and be maimed – innocent and ‘guilty’ alike to make the disgraceful exercise truly worthwhile. My ‘favorite’ bombings were from the Iraq wars – remember little limbless Ali, our favorite survivor of errant, but ‘necessary’ strikes?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/chilcot-report-iraq-war-orphan-ali-tony-blair-what-the-orphan-who-became-a-symbol-of-the-iraq-war-a7120506.html

@2
Maybe in the ‘States. In the UK, The Usual Suspects have been as hysterically gung ho as ever, desperately calling for bombs to be dropped at random on the heads of brown people in order that ‘we’ be seen to be ‘doing something’. Naturally, when nothing happens as a result of these air strikes, they will shut up, until the next time their services are called upon by their corporate masters.

Experience has shown that deeds like bombings and assassinations make great propaganda, but not for the side that carries them out.

I am not sure I understand how this summary statement follows from the consideration of the phenomenon you have outlined in your post.

Apparently Trump’s bombing of Syria does generate great propaganda for “our” side, at least in the very short term. You have said as much: “more instant applause.”

The asymmetric response can be a means to an end though, for the “weak” side that provokes it. Did not work out for the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, but Gavrilo Princep and Osama bin Laden accomplished their objectives more or less.

It is the logic of a self-righteous bully to try to persuade by inflicting pain and destruction on people or people’s who are thought to be unable respond in kind and proportion because they lack the necessary resources (or because destructive force itself systematically deprives the other side of resources to respond in any way but surrender). But, if you lack the resources to play the bully on your chosen playground, then the logic of the bully becomes the logic of the terrorist.

For politics, I suppose the problem of the propagandist is figuring out how to stage the violence dramatically to provoke the desired response from the human lizard brain. And for the small d democrat, how to overcome the stupid that follows from effective propaganda by violence so that kindness, cooperation and proportion have a chance to motivate a more sophisticated calculus of how we can set general principles for getting along together.

On the whole, I feel like the stupid has had the upper hand for a long time. I expressed my exasperation about the excuses given for the Syrian bombing — unproven allegations from institutional sources with a notoriously bad recent and not so recent record of lying — to a friend with conventional liberal Democratic views, and was met with bafflement at my anger and radicalism. It didn’t encourage me to think experience matters much.

There are three kinds of bombing, at least, I think. One is terrorism, drone warfare being the technical summit of this kind. There isn’t the slightest indication that this is anything but counter-productive in the strict military sense. But if the real strategy is to continue endless war, this is reasonably effective in keeping the pot boiling without boiling over.

A second is destruction of industrial infrastructure. This is the kind of thing that was attempted against Germany and Japan in WWII, and against Korea. This is extremely costly (in money and lives,) very slow and never decisive in its own right. It is also obviously general war, not a police action. Therefore it tends not to be used. Economic warfare aimed at starving a country, as aimed at Korea, Iraq, Zimbabwe and Venezuela aims at the same results. Like strategic bombing, it is very slow and never decisive in its own right. But unlike strategic bombing, it is relatively inexpensive to the besiegers.

Third, there is tactical bombing against targets in a built-up urban environment. The tactical advantages to a defense even by a relatively small minority there is so great that barring an enormous superiority in manpower, the only way to really defeat a determined and disciplined force in that terrain is to destroy large parts of the terrain. If the bombing force is itself a minority, in the end this will act like terror bombing, and almost certainly fail, as I think you should admit it did in Iraq. If, as seems to be the case in Syria, the bombing agency has the support of the overall majority, then eventually peace can be made.

A thought on the most recent bombing: If a chemical weapons dump had been blown up, the poison cloud released would have spread uncontrollably. It is hard to imagine how this caused no casualties. My tentative conclusion is that there were no chemical weapons dumps. But then, I was amazed when I saw the recent pictures of men being doused with water to decontaminate them. Personally I would have stripped off contaminated clothing first. Then I wondered how the gas knew to avoid women (as I didn’t see any in the pictures provided.) It’s almost as if the actors weren’t willing to do nude scenes.

It seems to me that this is sitzkrieg. Like the democratic allies in the opening stages of WWII, the US wants its opponent to accept its place in the world, rather than seeking to revise the verdicts of the previous war. But it doesn’t truly want to fight an all out struggle, because it’s not yet an existential crusade. Likely people will disagree. I thought the movie Dunkirk thoroughly falsified the war by ignoring that the real drama was in the choice to actually fight the fascists, which the UK and France hadn’t chosen to do. Petain made France’s choice plain. Churchill, safer on an island, chose differently. I thought Darkest Hour was in many ways much superior for showing explicitly how little interest there was in fighting fascism on the part of the rulers. It would have been too much to expect a character to observe the British Empire was a hideous tyranny too, of course. But Dunkirk’s quasi-pacifist war is hell mood is ersatz in every sense as far as I’m concerned.

The great nations of the earth don’t believe in strategic bombing because it works. The Strategic Bombing Survey after WWII looked at that question and concluded that the entire Allied strategic bombing effort in that war was a massive waste of scarce resources.

But those sound conclusions could not be accepted, because accepting them would involve an admission of guilt for Dresden and Hiroshima and all the rest. Strategic bombing has to be an effective means of winning wars to make our side the tragic hero who chose to do terrible things to the civilians of Dresden and Hiroshima because that was the only way to win the war and prevent even more terrible things. That story is a sham and has always been a sham. The Allies engaged in killing enemy civilians en masse out of stupidity and fear and, as proven by the difference between the campaigns against German vs Japanese cities, out of racism.

Germany and Japan have admitted their war guilt because they had the good fortune to lose that war. No such luck for the victors of that war, so they continue to wallow in the ignorance and the guilt that requires this particular flavor of ignorance. These former allied powers are now the great powers of the earth, so of course lesser powers emulate them.

Are we really gonna do this this time? I have a pretty tidy list in my head, and surgically bombing the chemical weapon facilities of a dictator currently using them against his own people: pretty OK by me, even if Trump did it. Hell, even if Henry Kissinger collaborated on the deed with Osama Bin Laden. To generically lump this in with targeted assassination programs or carpet bombing in lieu of an invasion etc seems a bit daft to me in a ‘just waiting for an excuse to make the same speech’ kinda way.

Istm that, following a chemical weapons attack of this kind, a multilateral (US/UK/France) targeted response aimed at chemical weapons facilities (and causing, as far as reports have it, no civilian casualties) is justified under int’l norms and arguably also under customary international law (although int’l lawyers will be found on both sides of that question, I’m sure, and a long post by an int’l law prof at Opinio Juris argues the strikes are not legal based, istm, on an overly narrow reading of the UN Charter and other relevant law). Whether the strikes will actually accomplish much of anything is a separate question and I tend to doubt that they will, but in terms of justification, I think they are justified.

On a pt of terminology: the OP refers to “large-scale aerial bombing.” Aerial bombing means the dropping of bombs from airplanes. These were cruise missile strikes, w the missiles fired from, as I understand it, a mixture of sea and air platforms (though I wd have to check the details). Anyway, “large-scale aerial bombing” is not a v. good description for these kinds of strikes.

Very eloquent, very convincing. Absolutely agreed. Pity some progressives did not manage, perhaps did not try to persuade the IRA of the futility of their bombing campaign over so many decades, or to persuade Islamists now; JQ does of course acknowledge the parallel.

With regard to JQ’s wise statement that “The satisfaction we get when our side blows something or someone up is trivial in comparison to the hatred generated when we are on the receiving end”; after IRA or Islamist bombs, a major concern in progressive quarters has been to minimise, if possible prevent the dreaded “backlash” among the victim population against the perpetrators. Does this mean that those who try to minimise backlash are perhaps unwittingly strengthening the bombers?

A really cynical person would be unsurprised:

In fact, it seems that Russia had some idea of what to expect ahead of time. General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that, although the U.S. military did not coördinate targets with Russia ahead of time, it used the “deconfliction” line between the two countries to warn where Western forces would be operating. However, a report in the Russian newspaper Kommersant on Saturday morning said that French military officials had in fact warned their Russian counterparts of the impending strikes. (A columnist in Kommersant dubbed the whole episode “war by agreement.”) In turn, an official close to the Assad regime told Reuters, “We had an early warning of the strike from the Russians.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/russias-madman-routine-in-syria-may-have-averted-direct-confrontation-with-the-us-for-now-putin-trump

@dilbert dogbert:

TL;DR The idea that “strategic bombing” can be applied against non-peer adversaries is itself strategically unsound.

While I’m no fan of our nation’s military adventurism, at least in the case of WWII and Germany, I recently read Adam Tooze’s _Wages of Destruction_, wherein (using economic documents) he makes a pretty strong case that the “strategic” bombing of Ruhr industrial plants -did- have a significant role in diminishing Nazi war-making capacity. That is, he shows that while in the short-term the Nazis were able to use steel stocks and such to keep producing armaments, the breakdown of the feeder industries meant that the Nazis knew this was a last-gasp effort: that once the existing steel was used, they’d be *done*. Tooze’s point seems to be limited, in that it’s about the -factories- (and even moreso the really large ones producing feedstock materials), and not about bombing populations.

But none of this matters: strategic bombing of peer competitors might work by destroying their industrial plants. But against non-peer competitors, it isn’t strategic bombing It’s a strategic mistake

(1) Given that these days arms factories reside in non-combatant countries, his arguments don’t hold: Iran and Russia can supply Syria forever. And even Tooze noted the speed with which basic services could be brought back online after a bombing raid (obvs. not a raid that destroyed an entire city center).

(2) Mass bombing of non-peer (lesser) adversaries can only cause them to resort to asymmetric warfare, against which we have no defense other than to ourselves resort to totalitarianism (to hunt down and kill all insurgents). It’s been widely reported over the years that Iran is prepared with sleeper cells all over the world, to wreak havoc on our country and allies, if we attack them. And it doesn’t take much havoc to cost us enormously. Then there’s the longer-term blowback: long ago Bin Laden’s writings about being in Beirut at the time the Israelis were collapsing the apartment blocks there with F-16 bombing sorties, and his desire to return the favor to the makers of those jets, is pretty clearly an example of such blowback. You can recognize Bin Laden as an enemy, and still also recognize that -strategically- having created him and armies like him, was a stupid, stupid action.

Tom “suck on this” Friedman didn’t realize that he was creating the conditions for ISIS. He should have: that’s what he’s *paid* to do. Many did realize this, and they were ignored. That was a mistake of -strategy-, and you don’t need to be a peacenik to realize it. Foreign policy realism should tell you that unless you’re prepared for a war of genocidal extermination (and the international isolation that would engender), you don’t employ state-decapitation and all the other effects of “mass bombing” against non-peer adversaries.

Frederick Taylor also argues in his book Dresden that the strategic bombing was an important contribution to ww2, at least in Europe. He defends Dresden specifically, arguing that it was a crucial interchange for moving soldiers from west to east, that it had a very large precision engineering industry for e.g. bomb and artillery sights, and that it was a legitimate military target. He also observes that the Soviet Union were pleading with the west to do something to reduce the defenses on the eastern front, which were making the Russian advance very costly, and points out that by the end of the war a sizable portion of the German armaments industry was devoted to defending cities from air attack, which meant that a sizable proportion of the armaments industry was not devoted to slaughtering Russians. I was convinced by his case when he read it, though he doesn’t weigh the damage against the civilian cost directly, and I’m sure that in the case of Japan the mass bombings were at least partly driven by the exterminationist racism prevalent among military planners in the USA at that time.

None of this has any bearing on what happened this weekend of course, which was just a stupid joke.

Everybody on the hard right of politics has cognitive impairments that inter alia impede their ability to comprehend the thinking processes of others and thus predict the conclusions they will come to: this means they only see the first-order outcomes of their actions

“Austerity” [cut outgoings, not realising that this will lead to those whose outgoings you cut will cut your incomings] and “long-range bombing” [reduce the number of those angry with you, not realising that more people will be made angry by having their friends and relatives reduced] are entirely of a piece, the same mistake in different context.

[why do you think they spy so much? because they can’t work out what people will do based on extrapolating from their circumstances. It’s also why they don’t know how to apologise.]

I don’t think it’s useful to look at the effectiveness of strategic bombing in WW2 and the Korean War, and use that for any guide on its effectiveness. Warfare in general and bombing in particular is just very different from what it was as recent as 40 years ago – bombing back in WW2 was incredibly inaccurate by comparison.

But ultimately the more selective and less indiscriminate you want to be, the more you need to discriminate in your target selection and the more information you need to make those discriminations.

And for personalised killing — really, anything smaller than a small factory or a railway station — the amount and currency of the information you need is basically unobtainable without somebody on the ground. No dictator would replace their death squads with an artillery battery on every police station, because… probably they never thought of it. But if they did it wouldn’t work.

UK opinion polls do not suggest full-throated support for the military action. See

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/

@Peter T
Not doing this at proper keyboard so must be brief. First, I think it’s fairly clear that chemical weapons were used — see the accounts of rescuers in apt blocks finding dead persons foaming at the mouth. I also think it’s pretty clear who is responsible.

Second, on the rationale for the strike, I would see it as political: i.e. the use of chemical weapons is an esp egregious violation of international norms that requires some response, esp since this is not an isolated use but has been done by the same actor before. Whether this was the best kind of response is open to v serious doubt, but I see it as, if you want to use the language of gestures, a symbolic gesture rather than an act of petulance or petty, selfish, irrational, groundless anger.

There are not two categories: instrumentally rational action and irrational gestures and nothing else. There’s also a category of symbolic action which is what I would tend to see this as.

Brett, @29

The inaccuracy of bombing in WWII was the reason it had to be directed at cities, which were big and obvious enough for it to hit, while an infantry battalion wasn’t. Yes, bombing is more accurate now, which means that the excuse that it can only target something as big and unconcealable as a suburb is no longer valid. If you’re trying to win a war in 2018, as opposed to committing genocide, you target the infantry or tank battalion, or artillery battery.

RichT claims to take the government case at face value, while ignoring the government claim it wasn’t making a symbolic gesture to stop chemical weapons use, but actually stopping chemical weapon use by Syria by destroying stockpiles and manufacturing. (By the way, at least two comments specifically said bombing works in some instances.)

LFC seems to think the symbolism of bombing empty buildings while claiming to be bombing chemical warfare materiel can only be what the government says it is. I think that if any foreign government should be so unAmerican as to not instantly accept US government statements as fact it might not be so obvious. Were anyone to look at what they do rather than listen to what they say, bombing empty buildings symbolizes not planning on doing any real fighting. Sitzkrieg, not blitzkrieg.

I will note that in all this discussion of government lies, Russia claimed to have shot down a large proportion of the cruise missiles. My guess this is blowhard rant, completely parallel to Putin’s recent proclamations about their amazing new weapons systems. It seems to me to symbolize Putin’s terror, trying to avert doom by threatening apocalypse. Modeled on Saddam Hussein’s mother of all battles?

” I really doubt that the British or French publics care at all about blowing up some abandoned ammunition dumps somewhere in the Levant. ”

The French public expected something to be blown up. When Macron met Putin at Versailles, he drew a red line for the use of chemical weapons. Blowing up a building or two (claimed to be involved in the production of chemical weapons) without any civilian casualties seems to be a win for everyone.

I do think it should be mentioned, here, that in terms of casualties, Trump is a piker compared to Obama. Nobody really cares, save the families of the victims, or the injured victims, but the U.S. led air strikes against Syria have resulted in 11,100 people – many times more than, say, ISIS. There’s been little protest. With Trump, I imagine the people who have been engineering the comfortable slaughter of Syrians will keep congratulating each other that they are preventing the slaughter of Syrians, without looking behind them at the bloody trail of corpses that follows them. Cause fundamentally they are morally inert. Bad people. This isn’t a partisan issue – they are bi-partisanly bad.
I wish Crooked Timber would put up a link to Fellow Travellers, a leftist foreign policy site that is in you all’s area of interest. https://fellowtravelersblog.com/

RichT: the primary objective and motivation is surely that expressed, and I see no reason not to take it at face value

wow

Collin Street, can you help me out here?

Just a reminder, in case anyone is unaware of who has the moral high ground here.

https://news.sky.com/story/britains-chemical-sales-to-syria-revealed-10440017

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2012/Jul-01/178928-britain-considered-knighthood-for-syrias-assad-in-2002-report.ashx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Syria

steven t johnson @39
LFC seems to think the symbolism of bombing empty buildings while claiming to be bombing chemical warfare materiel can only be what the government says it is.

Actually I made no reference whatsoever to official govt statements. Those statements portray the action as aimed, inter alia, at deterring chemical weapons use. I was, rather, describing the action as I think it wd appear to at least many outside observers.

p.s. The US govt approach to the Syria conflict has been very deficient. At a minimum the US govt shd be accepting more Syrian refugees and, as Koh mentions, exempting Syrian refugees from any travel bans or other obstacles that tend to make it more difficult for them to get asylum/refugee status. This criticism stands irrespective of what one thinks of the response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

On the latter question, there are no esp. good options, istm. If one jumps through all of Koh’s suggested legal hoops, it’s not clear what the practical outcome wd be. Perhaps the strongest case against this kind of (what I termed) symbolic strike wd be a showing that it will worsen the overall humanitarian situation, either by encouraging Assad to intensify his genocidal actions or in other ways. If I were persuaded that it will worsen the overall situation, then I wd likely oppose it. Unfortunately these are matters difficult to predict, and in the meantime decision-makers are faced w the immediate question of what to do about repeated chemical weapons use. Under the circumstances, a limited, ‘symbolic’ use of force, accompanied (as this was not) by an explicit legal and normative justification, might be the least bad of a range of bad options. I emphasize “might” b/c I don’t think anyone can really know this for sure.

I’m always amazed during these ‘Wag the Dog’ moments at how many western liberals take government propoganda at face value.

This was an entirely symbolic bombing for western consumption. $200+ million spent on PR. The likelihood that the lab which was bombed had anything to do with chemical weapons is extremely low – but it was high enough that they apparently thought it would convince the rubes. It seems they were correct in this belief.

MFB:
But is it to appease a “domestic constituency”? I really doubt that the British or French publics care at all about blowing up some abandoned ammunition dumps somewhere in the Levant. To the extent to which those publics care, they care because they have been encouraged to care by the pro-government, pro-bombing media. So someone who told the media to be pro-bombing must be responsible, not an actual “constituency”

In the US that constituency is the foreign policy elite/commentariat. Public opinion is mostly irrelivant to these things. In the UK it’s about trying to preserve the ‘special relationship’ by being the US poodle. A relationship that only the government/political elite care about. Public support for the ‘special relationship’ was mostly destroyed by the Iraq War Blair/Bush.

should be “there are NO simple conclusions”

Frederick Taylor also says this:

I personally find the attack on Dresden horrific. It was overdone, it was excessive and is to be regretted enormously.

There is something inherently fascistoid in air warfare — you don’t see the person you are bombing and killing or injuring and you have this sort of psychopathic gaze from above.

This was, in fact, a clear-cut case where maximum destruction was the central aim of the attack. There can be no question that the presence of many refugees was factored into the Allies’ calculations.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel-interview-dresden-bombing-is-to-be-regretted-enormously-a-341239.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/post-war-myths-the-logic-behind-the-destruction-of-dresden-a-607524.html

Cian @52 writes:

“If you think that a war of this kind is worth the death of large numbers of civilians (including children) then make the case. I actually think the war against ISIS/Al-Quaeda is one of those wars, just as the war against the Nazis was.”

Seeing as how the US is now working with Al Qaeda in Syria, in the form of Al Nusra, and supported neo-nazis in the Ukraine, in the form of the Azov battalion, I’m curious about which country he thinks should be next to suffer “the death of large numbers of civilians”.

What seems to me somewhat remarkable is the low quality of the propaganda work on behalf of the west. It seems as if they almost do not really care what we think. As a citizen, I feel insulted.

Re the “genocidal” Assad regime, against whom is it committing genocide? Roughly 65 per cent of the population live under its control, all of Syria’s groups except extreme Sunnis have stuck with it, when areas return to government control most people remain rather than take the bus to rebel areas and there is a steady trickle of people from rebel areas back to government areas.

This is not to say it is a nice government, or does not share some of the blame for the civil war. Yet is is an odd use of words when the major rebel groups are explicitly and openly genocidal in their aims (“Christians to Lebanon, Alawis to hell” is one common slogan).

The rebels have used chemical weapons on several occasions. Oddly enough, that did not end western support or result in reprisals.

Military force is effective only when coupled with a detailed understanding of one’s adversary and the means guided by that understanding. Iraq and Syria are both good illustrations of what happens when it is wielded in ignorance (adding to depressingly large pile of similar illustrations).

Peter T @63
Yes, I think I should not have used the adjective “genocidal” upthread and retract it.

Cian@60 speaks of the existing systems used in Syria. I was referring to the new systems claimed by Putin. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/putin-claims-russia-has-nuclear-arsenal-capable-of-avoiding-missile-defenses/2018/03/01/d2dcf522-1d3b-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html?utm_term=.fb10db4a4dcb

I’m afraid I think most observers are directly or indirectly committed to selling anti-missile weaponry. I don’t believe all those missiles were shot down.

I also believe PeterT@63 is completely right about the genocidal intent of the real rebels. Democratic rebels are purely symbolic and have been for years, disappearing within mere weeks as near as I could tell. However, although it is pretty certain that the US government political leadership really thought they could conquer an entire country with bombs, dissolve the old government and collect tribute to pay for the war, it seems to me that regime change of a different sort was intended for Syria.

And de facto partition was planned from the very beginning. The fallback position is only now being threatened by the prospect of a Syrian government victory, so it’s not at all clear that ignorance is leading to failure. De facto partition is quite healthy and there isn’t the slightest indication Putin has an end game. Or that Putin can bring enough to the table to win Turkey’s active cooperation, no matter how difficult its relations with the US get. Al Qaeda, Islamic State et al. have always been both supported by and attacked by the US, which plays both sides.

I haven’t found a cheap enough copy of Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire but it seems like he and Gene Sharp have been key technical advisors for the masters for quite some time.

“What government in the Middle East would fight cleanly facing an enemy that nearly beat it? ”

Correction. What government anywhere would fight a clean war against rebels and outside terrorists armed by other governments, if those rebels came close to winning and inflicted very heavy casualties on government forces? Clearly the Assad government was a human rights violator before the war. You wouldn’t expect a war to improve their record.

And one final point—obviously the fact that so many Syrian soldiers have died shows that a great many Syrians fear a rebel victory more than Assad.

@68
“I think those of us on the antiwar side should be cautious about relying on heavily on the notion that Assad didn’t use chemical weapons in Douma.”

Important point. The next step after a finding of CW use is a referral to the UN. At that point, decent human beings devise a course of action that will improve the situation rather than exacerbate it. The leaders of the US, UK, and France are lawless sadists, however, concerned only with projection of power and domestic politics.

Thanks for that extra information Novakant. I couldn’t remember Taylor’s position on the moral balance of the situation from my reading of the book.

I don’t understand this claim that Assad has no motive for the gas attacks. He’s been committing atrocities against his own people for years – barrel bombs, snipers, indiscriminate bombing. He has used starvation as a weapon and he and the Russians have been attacking hospitals with, if anything, even more zeal than America does. Why would he not use chemical weapons, if they were the better tactical choice? Especially when he knows that Russia will stymie any coordinated international action. It’s clear that the last American attack didn’t have any serious impact on his military power, and now that he has Russians spread all through his bases he can be confident that America won’t do a generalized attack that would significantly degrade his military power now. That horse has bolted. So why would he not have motive? He needs to kill rebels in a densely populated and complex area and gas reaches the places other weapons don’t, so why wouldn’t he? I’m all for realistic tactical assessments, but attempting to pretend it must have been a false flag because Assad has no motive is just silly. The dude bombs hospitals. What motive does he lack?

“relying on heavily on the notion that Assad didn’t use chemical weapons in Douma. I don’t think it is clear either way. The motive argument is weak, imo. I don’t always know why we do some of the barbaric things we do”

I would say that based on the timeline, that this use of CW seems to have accomplished its military goal -getting government control over Douma. It was roughly a week between the “attack”, and the rebel evacuation. Of course small sample sizes can lead to incorrect conclusions, but I don’t expect that caution to have much effect of the conclusions that Assad draws. What we know about CW, is they are not very effective against a well prepared army, but an irregular force, -especially one that cares somewhat about the civilians, many of whom are family members, might be convinced to accept an evacuation over staying on and suffering from further strikes.

I’m not saying that Damascus did not use chemical warfare – it has in the past. I’d just use extreme caution before accepting any particular claim. I’d also say that the narrative of the war is framed by wishful thinking, a heavy dose of propaganda and highly selective reporting. For instance “barrel bombs” are simply bombs dropped from helicopters. In an urban environment characterised by a maze of alleys and small courtyards, this is an effective tactic. That in such environments civilians and fighters are inextricably mixed is a fact of life (see Mosul, Fallujah and many world war II battles).

Hospitals are multi-story buildings, heavily constructed. They rapidly become headquarters or spotter posts for artillery fire – centres of combat activity. al-Kindi hospital in Aleppo, for instance, held out against the rebels for months (the rebels publicly killed all the defenders when they finally captured it). The main hospital in Aleppo was a bastion of the ISIS defence, and so on.

Both the rebels and a large chunk of the government forces are locals defending their turf, civilians in the quiet hours, soldiers when the fight is on. Uniforms are scarce. Both sides snipe, starve, loot and shell at random. The government can apply more force, but its record in treating civilians is better, if only because their forces are not motivated by sectarian passions – so you are not executed just for being a Christian or the wrong kind of Muslim. The Saudi-backed group that held Douma, for instance, reportedly took around 4000 prisoners. 200 were alive when they surrendered.

War has its own repellent logic. One is that when the stakes are really high, the ruthlessly expedient course will be taken, if the alternative is losing. In a sectarian civil war, the stakes are really high.

And in any case, what sort of monster would kill what is reflexively called in the ‘Decent’ media ‘his own people’?

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1117/161117-austerity-deaths-england

Or using weapons of mass destruction?

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59262540b3db2b0d0d6d7d2b/t/59fbd873e31d19c9d1730554/1509677191992/Meyers.Fallout.Mortality.Website.pdf

A point that I’ve also found puzzling is – why does the Assad regime have research facilities the development of chemical weapons? Chlorine is chlorine, nobody needs much of a recipe for that. High end chemical weapons? That ship sailed a century ago, and went under in the fifties of last century, and by now I expect reliable synthesis recipes for sarin to be available for whoever really wants it. And then it’s off the shelf equipment that is needed, very unlike the gas centrifuges needed for enriching Uranium, e.g.

So… what the hell was it that the west blew up?

P.S: I agree with the analysis of Peter T @77 on the messiness of this war.

@ steven t johnson: I really wouldn’t worry about Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, which makes all sorts of odd assumptions about its subject, and effectively treats the migrations of assorted tribes and warrior bands from central Eurasia as a co-ordinated invading force similar to the Warsaw Pact. Better to look to his more general works, such as Strategy and History, for a sense of his ideas without so much of the unhelpful anachronism.

@81

Mario, at the end of the “Conservative Intellectuals” thread, you claimed:

“If you spend enough time in academia, you will see well-entrenched fields that are intellectually bankrupt. Some of them quite disastrously so. Especially in the social sciences, but also in the natural sciences. These fields don’t seem to be collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions, so I’d say you are wrong on that.”

Several readers wanted to know about the “bankrupt” fields of the natural sciences, but the thread was closed before you could answer. Could you expand on your point here please? It may even connect with your comments on the Assad regime having research facilities.

Here is a different link. Not sure if this will post. This was a poll of 160 Syrian refugees, most fleeing both rebels and Assad.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2017-03-22/five-myths-about-syrian-refugees

Thanks to Neville Morley for the input.

@84

“But it’s jarring to read smart and presumably non-psychopathic people so eager to contextualize a crime against humanity, and so eager to contextualize civilian deaths in general – “a fact of life”; or to imply that it’s perfectly legitimate to target hospitals and medical centres.”

Anyone who grew up in the UK or US since 1945 will have been exposed to a great deal of contextualisation about the mass killing of civilians in Germany and Japan, which was formally justified as strategic destruction of industrial production, although the best evidence shows it was ineffective in that respect, and in practice was simply directed at areas of cities.

The Avro Lancaster bomber was flown along with the Supermarine Spitfire during commemorations of the Battle Of Britain, even though it did not exist during that phase of the war. Although the Lancaster was employed in the immediate post-war to transfer food supplies to Europe, and it was also used to attack German ground forces in areas where the Allies had aerial superiority, its main use in the war was to kill civilians and destroy housing far away from the front lines.

I am fascinated whenever a young neo-Stalinist (or whatever the denomination is supposed to be) spouts off about how the Allies were irrelevant and the Red Army won the war with one arm tied behind its back. If that’s true, what the hell were all those Germans incinerated for?

@Ignatz:
Barrel bombs are not just bombs dropped from helicopters. They are used oil drums filled with explosive and scrap metal, designed to maim and kill indiscriminately. They regularly get dropped on civilian areas. Pretty similar in effect to the suicide bomber at Manchester Arena.

So pretty typical bombs then. Lot like many of the bombs used by the west. I’m baffled by these people who believe in humanitarian bombs, or think bombs made in factories are somehow nicer. Are people really this naive? The point of a bomb is to blow stuff up and kill people.

Facts are being obscured (where have we seen that tactic before?)

In every war since the cave men? Again, tell me about this propagandaless war.

propaganda consumed and disseminated

Indeed, much of it by the rebels, their allies and the west. None of which is unsurprising given that it’s a WAR.

and the resulting confusion serves to imply that the half a million people who have been killed and the six million currently displaced inside Syria somehow only have themselves to blame

Err no. It implies that the Syrian government is not solely to blame for the violence and carnage. And that perhaps much of the blame lies with the Islamic rebels, the foreign fighters, the Turks and the various funders/enablers in the gulf states, CIA, etc.

and that the end of the conflict justifies any and all means.

There are two ways in which the conflict can end:
1) The rebels win, and we’re probably looking at a pretty massive war crime directed against anyone who is not a Sunni (and probably lots of ‘bad’ Sunnis also).
2) The government win and things return at worst to the way they were before. Which wasn’t genocide.

The longer the war goes on, the more people will die. So either pick (1), (2) or basically admit you’re okay with endless war.

But it’s jarring to read smart and presumably non-psychopathic people so eager to contextualize a crime against humanity, and so eager to contextualize civilian deaths in general – “a fact of life”; or to imply that it’s perfectly legitimate to target hospitals and medical centres.

I’m against war. The reason I’m against it is because I’ve bothered to educate myself on what warfare is actually like. Urban warfare ALWAYS results in many many civilian deaths. It’s inevitable as soldiers are hard to spot, are mixed with civilians and any invading force will face heavy casualties (fact of life – soldiers are a bit more indiscriminate when they’re fighting for their life. If you think you’d be any different, I call bullshit). These are the costs of war. If you are pushing for a war which will take place in urban environments, then you’re arguing that your desired outcome justifies these deaths. I personally think the Islamist rebels are terrible enough (terrible in a Nazi kind of way) that these costs are justified. Because I think if the rebels win many many more civilians will die. I might be wrong, but that’s my reasoning.

There are laws, in case anybody forgot, and there used to be norms.

Such as in Yemen which is a completely unjustified war that exists only because the Saudis want to punish the Houthis. They are deliberately starving them, and deliberating bombing civilians. The US and UK are assisting them in this grotesque war crime for which there is ZERO justification. A war of choice that the Saudis could end whenver they felt like it. So yeah, talk to me about norms.

Or how about Gaza where the Israelis just executed civilians for civil disobedience to indifference among western political elites? Or Fallujah?

I don’t know what’s going to happen in Idleb but the potential scale dwarfs what happened in Sri Lanka. I would really hope that we can remind ourselves of what’s legal and what’s illegal, and what the responsibilities of state actors are, before it happens.

Given that the Syrian government has not done anything like this in any of the other areas what’s different this time? What makes you think there won’t be another negotiated settlement, probably with the rebels and their families going to Turkey?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore

Ignatz @84,

But it’s jarring to read smart and presumably non-psychopathic people so eager to contextualize a crime against humanity, and so eager to contextualize civilian deaths in general – “a fact of life”; or to imply that it’s perfectly legitimate to target hospitals and medical centres.

Out of curiosity – how do you expect this to play out? Is one not allowed a single further thought once a medical centre has been bombed? What you call contextualizing is just the way one uses ones’ own brain to understand what is happening. Do you expect me not to do that?

[The Olympian gods, while very stoned,] saw the founding of a great republic and proclamations hailing new gods named Due Process and Equal Rights for All. And they saw many in high places in the republic form a separate cult and worship Mammon and Power. And the Republic became an Empire, and soon Due Process and Equal Rights for All were not worshipped, and even Mammon and Power were given only lip-service, for the true god of all was now the impotent What Can I Do and his dull brother What We Did Yesterday and his ugly and vicious sister Get Them Before They Get Us.

(Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!)

@casmilus #91 re Lancasters. The pedantic answer as to why there was an anachronistic Avro Lancaster flying in the Battle of Britain commemorations is that the RAF has an official heritage flight team that appears at such events, named the ‘Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’ but intended to evoke the whole of WWII and beyond. Plus, I imagine, they happen to have an airworthy Lancaster, rather than a Blenheim or something else. But I think your wider point about willingness to celebrate machines designed to bomb cities is right; developed partly through films like Dambusters (or Memphis Belle for the US market) focusing on the tight-knit crew and whether they’ll all make it back, rather than on the nature of their missions.

Mario @90
If the West had wanted regime change, as you assert, they could have moved vs Assad shortly after the civil war started. For various reasons, they didn’t. Even someone who followed US policy casually from 2011 on would have noticed that it was an inconsistent mess w Pentagon and CIA sometimes supporting different groups and pursuing different strategies. That was partly because it became clear from fairly early on that the moderate or pro-democratic rebels were not strong compared to the hard-line Sunni groups. It was only the rise of ISIS that really gave Western or at least US policy a focus. Under both Obama and Trump the main focus of US policy in Syria has been the defeat of ISIS, not the overthrow of Assad or the alleviation of the humanitarian disaster or anything else.

LFC@103 claims the main focus of US policy in Syria has been the defeat of Islamic State. Of earlier alleged confusions in US policy, diverting from regime change, LFC writes “That was partly because it became clear from fairly early on that the moderate or pro-democratic rebels were not strong compared to the hard-line Sunni groups.”

It was clear from fairly early on that US arms supplied to so-called pro-democratic rebels were rapidly transferred into the hands of the hard-line Sunni groups, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State. The US bombed Syrian government troops to block an attempt to relieve the IS siege of Deir Zeor, as I recall. The US also evacuated IS forces away from the Syrian army. And of course the very recent bragging of massive Russian casualties were undertaken to keep Syria from resuming control of what oilfields Syria once had.

Again, the US has both supported and attacked Islamic State. It has never slackened its animus against the national secular government, not for one moment. The irresolution on regime change LFC claims is in my propagandistic delusion, not real.

For those holding forth here from whatever moral-political or ideological “principles”, there’s this old article from the late Robert Parry:

https://consortiumnews.com/2013/10/16/how-us-pressure-bends-un-agencies/

I myself am not really interested in the proclamation of high-minded principles, but rather in what the ascertainable empirical facts of the specific case might be, what there implications might be and how the exercise of power actually “works”.

As a further slightly OT comment, one of the more “amusing” side issues of this horrific fiasco is the conflicting claims between the Americans and the Russians about the actual efficacy of the bomb strikes. The Americans claim to have launched 105 missiles and the Russians say 103, so that at least is in pretty close agreement. But the Americans say that 3 sites were targeted and all missiles landed on target, whereas the Russians say that 71 missiles were shot down and 5 airfields were targeted in addition to the 3 evacuated and undefended lab sites. Cruise missiles usually carry a 1000 lbs high explosive warhead. Here’s a before/after photo of one of the targeted labs:

http://www.moonofalabama.org/images6/barzeh.jpg

I’m no photo bomb damage expert, but it’s 4 2 story buildings covering maybe an acre of ground (,4 hectares). You can guess the scale from the surrounding buildings. Also note that there is no apparent damage to the surrounding buildings in the aftermath. Does that look like the damage of 10+ tons of high explosive or that so much explosive power would be required to reduce such a small site to rubble?

The U.S. and Russia are the 2 largest arms exporters in the world, though the Russian military budget at least in $ terms is less than the recent increase in the U.S. military budget and similarly the $ value of U.S. arms exports is similarly greater than Russian arms exports. Behind the scenes no doubt both military establishments were keen to field test their (anti-)aircraft capabilities and sus out the opposing side’s, as a side benefit of the politically determined brouhaha . And no doubt the claimed results will be appearing in slick promotional brochures at various international trade fairs. So which side is the biggest and boldest liars?

p.s. I also don’t think the Trump admin has much interest in regime change in Syria. Trump himself doesn’t like the fact that some 2,000 US mil. personnel are on the ground there and has said he wants to withdraw them (though w/o giving a timetable). His advisors are prob of a diff. opinion on that particular issue. But when one considers how much consternation there (understandably) was when Trump appointed Bolton natl sec adviser, what one saw in the US/UK/France strike on these lab sites (or whatever they were exactly) is prob pretty much what wd have happened had McMaster stayed in the job, istm. So the change in natl sec advisers prob made no difference w/r/t this particular action. Not that that is esp on topic, simply an observation.

David Ignatius, obviously saddened that we didn’t intervene on a larger scale, thinks it is wrong to say the C.I.A. weapons program didn’t accomplish anything. The CIA backed rebels supposedly killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-the-demise-of-the-cias-anti-assad-program-means/2017/07/20/f6467240-6d87-11e7-b9e2-2056e768a7e5_story.html?utm_term=.15e0a40a2769

There is something a bit sociopathic about America’s foreign policy “ community”.

You can also google the website of Conflict Arms, where you will find a 200 page study from last year about the weapons supplied to ISIS. Some came indirectly from the US, which bought weapons from countries in Eastern Europe and then illegally gave them to moderate rebels and from there they ended up in the hands of ISIS. I would supply the link, but am feeling lazy.

john c. halasz re: “high-minded principles” versus how the exercise of power actually “works”

One way power works, apparently, is to work very hard at “controlling the narrative” while not really caring over much about deliberating on objectives, ways, or means. One might suspect that the latter tends to undermine the latter. If power is focused on producing effective propaganda as job 1, and the middle-men purveying that propaganda have no more interest in exposing the game than is necessary to remind power that their cooperation must be bought, one wonders whether anyone is left to earnestly worry over the relation of policy to interests or outcomes.

In a world of liars, high-minded principle is a handy means to all ends. Lie with sufficient moral conviction and righteous self-regard and you can successfully motivate support from the ignorant while obscuring your actual intent or interests, assuming you have identified either even in private. There is a story for pundits and chattering classes to discuss, with very few actual facts constraining the scripts that can be recited on cable news. It would be such a bother if news organizations needed reporters or pundits to know anything about anything, other than how archetypal narratives play out.

It may be of some small interest to notice how little concern there has been in recent years with regard to law or precedent in formulating the narratives rationalizing U.S. foreign policy. Several commenters here have invoked “law” and at least one seems to think one can observe what makes the U.S. happy, and infer intent from that, as if the U.S. were a unitary actor with a personal psychology, even while mentioning in passing well known conflicts among advisors and such.

I can well imagine that Putin has the semblance of a plan, a sense of acting in and for a Russian national interest by calculated use of means at his disposal. Bashar Hafez al-Assad must have a remarkably fine grasp of what is necessary to keep the political machinery of a state besieged operational.

Is it even remotely plausible that anyone in the U.S. government in a position of authority and power has the slightest idea of acting in a conceivable U.S. national interest? I do not mean to rely over much in expressing my incredulity on the incapacity of Trump personally. He has the superficial but sincere patriotism of a guy who likes to yell at the teevee, and prefers to make up facts rather than make the effort to learn anything. It is easy to gaze on his antics and feel one knows the type. But, the U.S. foreign policy establishment — the Blob(tm) — is absurd in its bloodthirsty immunity to experience or criticism of its performance.

The OP’s snark, I thought, was well-applied to the conventions of moral labeling that are ritually applied to the political gesture or rituals of military “blowing things up” but it remains to us to wonder aloud if the propaganda and controlling the narrative is all there is to American power.

Certainly to me, it seems that American power is increasingly a contradiction in terms, “intent” merely a storyteller’s stylings. Power in this case does not work, does no work at all.

Possibly not irrelevant.

The UK Government’s contribution to the attack on Syria was 8 ‘Stormshadow’ missiles (someone has been reading too much Lord of the Rings) which cost £790,000 each, coming in at, therefore, a total of £6.32 million. They are manufactured by BAE systems, the largest shareholder in which (and which, therefore, will see its profits rise as a result of this action, like Raytheon’s did) is Capital Research and Management, the tax avoidance facilitating company which employs Theresa May’s husband. Until last year, the vice Chairman of the ‘we love all wars by the UK’ BBC was also the Chairman of BAE.

President Trump also owns stock in Raytheon.

(sources from various places on the web that I can’t be bothered posting here, but it’s easily enough checked. And please don’t reply by arguing that this wasn’t the ’cause’ of this strike ‘cos I’m not claiming it was. I’m just saying it’s….interesting).

To B Wilder and some others: I am v aware that govts are not “unitary actors” as will be obvious to anyone who reads my comments in this thread. Sometimes in the interest of time one uses shorthand. Steven t Johnson misreads my comment at 110 but I don’t intend to engage w him further, except to mention that my pt about regime change did not depend on any characterization of the Assad govt and its degree of popular support. Thanks to Donald Johnson for certain links. I intend this to be my last comment here.

Ok, I know I said I was done commenting but I had forgotten about this until just now when I happened to read the old draft of a unpublished post at my (no longer active) blog.

In summer 2016, 51 State Dept employees signed a Dissent Channel memo arguing that the Obama admin’s ruling out of the use of direct military force of any kind against the Assad regime was undermining Obama admin policy, which at that time was to reinforce what turned out to be one of several fairly short-lived ‘cessations of hostilities’ in the hopes that it would lead to a negotiated political solution.

To hear steven t johnson tell it, the Obama admin was committed to regime change; and indeed rhetorically there were gestures in the direction of commitment to a political settlement that, at least at one time, envisioned Assad’s departure. And yet 50 State Dept employees were so sure this policy was doomed to failure in the absence of some at least threat of force that they used the dissent channel to register their objection to how the admin was carrying out its Syria policy. Were the dissenters right? In retrospect I tend to think targeted mil. strikes prob. would not have changed much. But it’s worth recalling this, simply as a matter of recent historical record, b/c the State Dept dissent channel, set up during the Vietnam War, is not used I think all that often, and for 50 foreign service officers to sign such a memo was, and is, quite unusual.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/world/middleeast/syria-assad-obama-diplomats-memo.html

LFC, that memo you cite proves something a little bit different from what you think. It’s well known that Obama was a reluctant interventionist by DC Beltway standards, where nearly everyone seems to be firm believers in American exceptionalism and our right to intervene and only quarrel about tactics and whether we need coalitions. For instance, Obama was pushed by Powers and Clinton into bombing Libya. There was a piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine about two years ago about Benjamin Rhodes, one of Obama’s advisors, who called the Beltway interventionists “ the Blob” and expressed his contempt. Those foreign service types are an example. Kerry was another. He wanted more bombing. Clinton wanted a no fly zone, which would have required massive bombing. Michael Morell two years ago told Charlie Rose we should have a covert operation in Syria, publicly denied, where we would kil Russians in Syria. They would know we were doing it, that would be the point, but we would deny it.

The Blob attitude which you also would find in liberal pundits is that we weren’t intervening in Syria even though we had poured weapons into the country and it is generally conceded that outside weapons kept the war going. The standard here is that it wasn’t intervention unless we were bombing or invading on a sufficiently large scale and yet now we have an established ground force in Syria. Intervention can never fail— the policy can only be failed because we needed to do more of it or handle it differently or we “ need a strategy” ( or strategery) as several liberal critics of Trump’s kabuki bombing recently chanted.

Obama also began the policy of actively supporting the brutal Saudi war in Yemen, which has been said to have killed 10,000, but has actually killed at least tens of thousands of children via malnutrition. There was no mass Foreign Service revolt, though some lawyers did say we might be guilty of war crimes. Nobody cries out for bombing Riyadh, and nobody says we should arm Hamas because of brutal Israeli intransigence. Of course we wouldn’t do that, but the Blob would also go hysterical if some other country began acting the way we do, but with our allies.

This isn’t just moral hypocrisy— it also shows an apparent inability to see our actions objectively. Why shouldn’t someone bomb the Saudis or Israel or arm Hamas all in the name of humanitarianism? All these actions would be crazy and would have unpredictable and quite likely catastrophic consequences, yet this is how we behave. It’s weird. What I can’t figure out is to what degree the professed humanitarian motives are real. I think the underlying motives are not humanitarian, or we would be more consistent in our actions. Governments usually cloak their actions in humanitarian robes, but now I am talking about the various individuals who participate in arguing for intervention. I assume some are sincere, but there is natural selection in that world for people who think in that way. People who believe in humanitarian bombing are considered Serious. People who don’t are ignored or called isolationists.

@123 This and your other comments on this topic and thread are generally excellent. As a staunch opponent of all bombings, and of war, in almost all cases, I fear you err seriously when you write:

“Of course we wouldn’t do that, but the Blob would also go hysterical if some other country began acting the way we do, but with our allies.”

Other nations do act the same way as the US, but perhaps not on the same scale and in the precise same way, especially with select US allies. China and Viet Nam have fought and likely will fight far more wars than the European powers waged during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Sino-Russo wars on their shared border during the cold war are, at best, single footnotes in discussions of IR. There is nothing benign, or moral, about nation-state fp, or relations. Foreign aid assuages the sensibilities of the exploiter nations, while handing graft opportunities to local power brokers – see Sudan, Somalia, etc.

A framework of international laws and justice is employed selectively when two roughly equal states find themselves unable to leverage proxies and are looking for a profile of normality. The debates over the islands and resources in the far western pacific are a case in point.

Supplying arms is what all nations do, and given that parties on the ground are keen to get weapons to use against their local competition, an entirely amoral market has been in place at least since the time of Rome and very likely far earlier. As a species we like killing stuff, as individuals and as nation states we need to resist that impulse, both out of self-preservation, and because better solutions are usually available. The rise of Hitler looked like a good thing to many in the west – that’s why he ended up feted and on magazine covers because Stalin and the reds were deemed (rightly) as a great threat to western imperialism – and, yes, the British empire still existed explicitly as an empire in the early 20th century, and many others – French, Dutch functioned as empires.

We’ve made immense progress in a very short period of time on a number of fronts. Yet, as you clearly understand, there’s nothing to say we can’t head in the other direction in a great hurry.

Maintaining a strict policy of not bombing other nations for any reason seems like a good method of avoiding too rapid, or reflexive, a retreat into barbarity, and would certainly be a welcome development in the attitudes of the politically ‘responsible’ such as ‘We came, we saw, he died’ and ‘Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran,’ currently being lionized as sane alternatives to the doofus currently in office. I’m not holding my breath.