A THOUGHT ON THE FUTILITY OF WAR
By Publius II
In the medieval era kings led their troops into battle. Before starting a war a typical king paused to think through the consequences. After all, he might be killed. Today there is no need for this kind of thinking.
Back then very few people could write. Kings hired those who could to record their battlefield exploits. Probing what little data that still exist, historians writing about that period emphasize wars. Also the compelling drama of war helps to get their works published.
People who read history understandably come to believe that folks back then did little else except fight. If it has always been so, the logical conclusion is that it must always be.
Is fighting inherent in man’s nature? It surely seems so when the record is examined. Perhaps the Creator inserted this grim tendency when man first stood upright because humankind has no natural enemies. Some means of control was needed when growth of populations began to stretch available resources in the environment.
Today there are several methods for controlling growth of populations without fighting. One of these is education of girls. Such girls have fewer babies when they are women.
Today the timing for this is excellent. There are many governments and NGOs (non-government organizations) that promote good education. Other methods involve various types of family planning.
Again the timing is excellent, as today wars between big nations are no longer feasible. Pentagon rhetoric about “rules of war” notwithstanding, there are no rules in warfare. If a war goes badly for one side (as it must) it will deploy nuclear weapons to save itself from being destroyed. This will force a nuclear response and then in the entire world those not killed will suffer terribly.
Immediately after World War II someone said he did not know what types of weapons would drive World War III. But he did know the answer for WW IV: stone axes and clubs.
The discussion now turns to small wars, either within a country or between nations. Small wars generally mean small weapons because the combatants lack the resources to build or acquire big ones.
With each passing year small weapons become cheaper and deadlier. In addition to this, millions of tons of weapons were distributed to governments of poor countries by both sides during the Cold War. They are still there. Firepower is being supplemented with chemical and biological weapons, which are cheaper yet.
Guerilla warfare is being perfected through training and cell phones are available for instant communication, even in poor countries. Suicide bombers have proliferated out of desperation. This development forces the question: Why are they so desperate as to give their very lives to the cause? This issue has generated surprisingly little western press.
Fighters act like the minutemen of the successful American Revolutionary War. They live among civilians and switch to the role of fighter within minutes when the call goes out.
Millions of civilians worldwide are being killed and maimed. Survivors and the rest of the world don’t like this. In a typical 1900 conflict about 10 percent of casualties were civilians. Today the figure approaches 90 percent. Soldiers wear body armor so fewer are killed, but thousands return home with missing limbs and eyes and damaged brains.
Remaining for discussion is the instance where a big nation attacks and occupies a small one. The Revolutionary War provides an example. From his experience as a land surveyor General Washington knew the territory. He learned about guerrilla warfare from Indians. He exploited the logistical difficulties that the enemy faced in keeping an army supplied from a land far away. Finally, he sought help from France.
Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense helped tremendously to rally rebellious colonists and persuade many loyalists to switch sides. At one point Washington exclaimed: “Paine is worth more than the whole army!”
The pen was mightier than the sword back then. Today’s word processor possesses the same potential as it goes up against nukes. Publius II illustrates this truth as he writes.
As discussion moves Afghanistan it seems that little has changed except the development of more devastating weapons such as armed drones. The result of a mid-March 2011 Washington Post/ABC poll showed that nearly 2/3 of citizens believe the war is no longer worth fighting. Guerrilla warfare still works.
A small nation cannot win a war against a vastly stronger bully. But it cannot lose either. This is because its fighters perceive themselves as fighting for survival and to remove a foreign aggressor from their sacred fatherland. This is what motivates most suicide bombers. All have far stronger incentives to fight than does the aggressor.
The big nation cannot win because the enemy will never let itself get maneuvered into a position where firepower can destroy it without killing tens of thousands of civilians. The world would not tolerate this mass slaughter. (Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi and Syria’s Bashar Assad had this truth thrust upon them.)
However, it can lose and will when those who finance the tragic fiasco either shut off the tap or simply lose the political will to persist. The enemy knows this, so it has only to keep fighting long enough. Fighters defending their fatherland always have the greater political will.
Today the outlook seems to be improving somewhat. Maybe Iraqi “insurgents” have had enough and are no longer interested in kicking the aggressor out of the country? Or maybe the government-controlled media are painting a rosy scenario as they did during the Vietnam War?
As of Mothers’ Day 2011 the media hype persists despite the killing of Osama bin Laden a full week before, and still not a word about what impelled Mr. bin Laden to engineer so much killing and stoke so much fear among US citizens. Right after 9/11 some writers tried to fill his gap, but they got practically no press because President GW Bush was determined to perpetuate his nation’s 50-year reputation as the world’s bully.
People who go to church regularly and pray for peace came to ground zero to denigrate violence. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims celebrated right after 9/11. The news media roundly criticized them then, but helped local folks to enhance the bully image.
US policy in the Middle East has for 50 years been stability and a dependable supply of cheap oil. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice recently remarked, “We have achieved neither goal.” In 2011 rebellions in that region are called the “Arab Spring.” Publius II would like to see a nonviolent “American Spring.”
Maybe the Iraqis plan to have the US stick around as long as the money is good. Salam Adhoob is a corruption fighter who fled the country in fear of his life. But not until after he uncovered massive fraud and theft of taxpayer funds.
One group formed a sham company and sold deteriorating equipment for outrageous sums. None of them have been prosecuted. A 2005 report found that around $8 billion had disappeared.
As noted elsewhere, top Iraqi officials conspired to steal oil. They sold it for profit and routed the money to al-Qaeda. “Adhoob is convinced that these actions caused US soldiers to be killed. A small minority of these officials were prosecuted, but they quickly bribed their way free.” (This is just one of many such instances.)
For half a century arms races have been justified by career warriors in the pentagon. They keep telling their lackeys in government about the vital need to maintain a balance of military power.
Career warriors are deeply concerned about national defense, but they are also egotists and personal power seekers. Therefore there are never enough ships, fighter planes, tanks, bombs, missiles, etc.
They look with horror on the arms build-up in a potential enemy and send their lobbyists to visit congressmen with astronomical requests for money. Today military spending in the US is roughly $830 billion. And that was only what showed on the books. (President Bush kept the $300 million a day for Iraq off the books, but the taxpayer will be forced to pay anyhow.) Obama wanted $800+ billion for FY 2011.
But there can be no end to this lunatic behavior because of a psychological concept called selective perception. This concept can be defined through an example. Two devoted baseball fans are watching a game. Each is routing for a different team.
During a tense moment in the bottom of the ninth inning with the score tied and a runner on third base the plate umpire calls a pitch a strike. One fan reacts with great anger; anyone could see the pitch was a ball. The other fan perceives no problem. Both saw the same pitch, but each perception was distorted by allegiance to his team.
Top generals and admirals of one nation may actually believe they have achieved a balance of power. Or, they do until they see another nation with a different perception adding to its arsenal of weapons. Panic-stricken, they immediately launch an expensive crash program aimed at restoring their perception of balance. Top warriors in the other country see this, panic and quickly add more, etc.
This example is limited to just two nations. It doesn’t take much thinking to arrive at an amazing tho logical conclusion: There is no such thing as a balance of power. Warriors use this gimmick to pry loose hundreds of billions of taxpayer money.
The US military-industrial complex spent $286,000 of the taxes of a typical family of four during the Cold War (1948-1991, in 2003 dollars). Multiply this by an average of around 60 million families and the tragic total comes to about $17,160,000,000,000, or something over $17 trillion.
Professor H. W. Brands reviewed a book by Jack Matlock, Jr. This diplomat served as US ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991 as part of his long experience with that country. Included in Brands’ remarks is the following quotation.
“The most protracted, and typically the most bitter, fighting in the Cold War occurred not just between the opposing camps but within them. On each side, would-be peacemakers sought to reach across the chasm that separated the superpowers, hoping to reduce the tension.
“Every time they did their own hard-liners counterattacked furiously, ratcheting the tension back up. The hard-liners almost always won, with their success measured in the decades the Cold War lasted and the trillions of dollars and rubles it diverted from more constructive purposes.”
During the Cold War career soldier and President Eisenhower: “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Although a soldier thru most of his life, Ike was also a leader when away from the battlefield. He could see how a pentagon unless restrained could “—-destroy what we are attempting to defend.” He repeatedly went eyeball-to-eyeball with this gigantic bureaucracy and made it blink every time.
This is what happened to the Soviet Union. Overemphasis on the military caused destruction of what the Soviets were attempting to defend. The news media hyped a false conclusion. The US and the West did not win the Cold War. Rather they growled back at the Russian bear and outlasted him. The Soviet loss was to the enemy within. The implication for America is obvious to any thinking citizen.
A prominent author named James Mann wrote The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War. He argued that the Soviet Union collapsed due to Reagan’s “instinctive” understanding that Mikhail Gorbachev was a different kind of leader than those who had gone before.
This insight was reinforced by “back-channel” communications (under the radar). Finally, the inherent flaws in the Soviet economic system brought down the USSR. Neither the arms race nor Western efforts to undermine the Soviet economy can claim credit.
Communist Joseph Stalin had heard of capitalism. But he made little effort to understand it as he believed Karl Marx when he wrote that capitalism would fail.
After World War II the Soviet economy was a basket case. Stalin did not want his hobbled economy tainted by capitalism, as he had enough problems already.
By logical extension Stalin saw no reason to attack the West. All he needed to do was hang in there until capitalism destroyed western economies. To this end he diverted up to 25 percent of the entire Soviet economy to defense.
After working closely with Stalin for decades, Nikita Khrushchev became Party Secretary upon his death in 1953. In his memoirs he stated that, “I never once heard Stalin say anything about preparing to commit aggression against another country. His biggest concern was putting up antiaircraft installations around Moscow.”
Stalin had seen how Dresden and other key East German cities were flattened by Allied bombers during World War II. Stalin and Jefferson both believed in defense of the homeland only; no foreign military adventures.
The conclusion is that the Soviet Union was never a threat to the West or to the US. But warriors operate on hype and not truth. Apparently most of that $17 trillion was wasted. That is a lot of “—- the sweat of our laborers, the genius of our scientists, the hopes of our children.”
Charles Adams wrote in For Good and Evil (1993): “If you leave it alone and don’t pester it, in time it will die. By brooding over Communism, and by fearing it and attacking it, we give it a power which it does not otherwise possess.” Cuba springs to mind.
The founding fathers knew about a Europe dragged through the hell of war for several centuries prior to 1787. They therefore decided that the commander-in-chief of the US military would be a civilian.
Presumably he/she would act like Eisenhower and keep the military from dominating the citizens whom it was supposed to protect. It is interesting to note that recent presidents dodged military service and they were warmongers. What a contrast!
This statement does not exhaust the irony in this issue. Very shortly after this nation was born British warships began harassing US merchant shipping and forcing captive US sailors to join the British fleet. War fever arose among young hotheads. They quickly convinced a majority to go to war.
But former general and President George Washington refused to cooperate, believing that his infant nation lacked the resources to wage war. Because he also believed in republican government (majority rule) his conscience tormented him.
But he persisted. Later he said he risked the one thing he valued most: the love of his citizens. Occasionally a leader must do this. Still later even the hotheads concluded that he was right. It always takes time for reason to attenuate passion. (9/11 springs again to mind.)
In a democracy the president has great responsibility, but he/she is only a public servant. The intent of the Constitution was and is to create an active population of citizens who would ensure that the president remained a servant.
The kicker here lies in citizens who are no longer doing their job. They have been stuck with a king who does not lead his soldiers into battle. Did Barack Obama encourage citizens to be different? As of early 2010 it did not look like it; the Nobel peace prize recipient sent sending more troops and weapons abroad.
Later in 2010 Canadian Prime Minister Harper tried to make his peaceful country into a warrior nation. But his citizens refused to cooperate. In 2005 Brazil established a peacekeeping school, to boost that nation’s standing in the world.
War is far more lucrative than peace — for the elite class in Washington. Members of Congress vote shiploads of taxpayer money to the pentagon with almost no supervision concerning how it is spent.
There is so much money that even the pentagon doesn’t know where much of it goes. But congressmen know where some of it goes, — back into their pockets. They use these corrupted taxpayer kickback bucks to help themselves get re-elected time and again. This explains why there are so many hawks in the Congress even as their constituents continue praying for peace.
Recall Orwell’s 1950 novel entitled 1984. In it the proles (common people) were brainwashed to believe that “War is Peace.” Once they had accepted this lie as truth Big Brother could wage constant war, and that is what he did. Perhaps Orwell got his inspiration from Adolf Hitler: “What luck for rulers, that men don’t think!”
By fall 2004 the Iraq War was going very poorly. Joe Klein in his book Politics Lost commented. “—— shortly after the election: Tommy Franks, CIA director George Tenet, and Coalition Provisional Authority director L. Paul Bremer were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“It was a perfect Orwellian moment. Along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, these men had been the prime architects of the Iraq disaster.” Apparently even the aura that surrounds a presidential medal has been politicized.
The discussion now returns to democracy in order to finalize the argument for the futility of war. Alarmists (hotheads?) among readers must surely be wringing their hands and preparing to hang Publius II by his thumbs.
The entire military-industrial complex could be phased out in the interest of world peace. But then what would stop any tin pot dictator from conquering and occupying this country on a whim? After all, this is what dictators do. Saddam Hussein and Kuwait and Bush and Iraq spring to mind.
Over centuries top government officials in practically every country have gradually amassed greater and greater personal power. They took it from the people bit by bit (or sometimes all at once). Therefore an attacking army need only capture and control the center of power. The top-down institutions of personal power would be in place and functioning as they restrict citizens’ liberty.
The conquering dictator would spread his lieutenants among those institutions and so the task of occupying the conquered nation would be simple. People would previously have become used to being ruled and not led. So, here comes another ruler. Let us pray that he will be a little better.
Today direct democracy is not only possible; it is technologically feasible. There is more information on this subject elsewhere (Pocket Gofer 16).
In a democracy power would be dispersed thruout the nation. Almost all of it would be placed in thousands of grassroots localities, and kept there by alert citizens. So the question arises: If a dictator, tin pot or otherwise, should attack, how would he make out?
Well, there would be no center of top-down dominant political power to conquer. Napoleon’s disastrous campaign against Russia springs to mind. Therefore he would be forced to spread hundreds of thousands of lieutenants all over the landscape to do his bidding.
But without the top-down institutions of personal power in place how would he control them? Building such institutions would take years, even with cooperating citizens.
Furthermore these lieutenants would find themselves fighting thousands of grassroots rebellions. Having tasted democracy, citizens would never accept such rule over them. As soon as they learned that the local emperor had no clothes he/she would be toast. And they would learn this quickly.
Finally, rulers who contemplate conquering another nation would realize that dominating a democracy cannot work and look elsewhere. It is said that democracies don’t fight each other. There is truth to this, even among most nations that only call themselves democracies.
When citizen governors restrain the military-industrial complex the door would open for the merchant to replace the warrior on the world stage. War-prone national governments with their political power hang-ups would be displaced in favor of the economic power of companies. Pocket Gofer 18 elaborates.
The latter power is nonviolent. It enables citizens to build strong economies and improve their lives. Economic competition — not armies, weapons, death, maiming, colossal waste, theft, deceit and destruction — will limit the growth of this kind of power. In the future conflict would occur, but it would be between companies and not armies. Taxpayers would keep their hard-earned money.
Any egotist in charge of a top-down government can start a war. To move forward toward peace requires a united and courageous group of thinking citizens. The most militarily powerful nation in the world would logically be the one to seize the initiative in setting the world on the path to peace and prosperity.
“Human nature will only find itself when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal.” Mahatma Gandhi said that.
Money and love go out and away from a good person. The key to a moral society lies in tight control of the first and less of the second, because it will return in quantity.
For centuries people the world over have prayed for peace. Let it begin. Let the power of love peaceably displace the love of power.