“ADVANCEMENTS” IN WAR
Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D. 12-11
KEY WORDS: war, pre-emptive war
Warring has three purposes—(1) to defend the group; (2) to take something from another group; and (3) to force another group to do something you want but they refuse to do (give you trade or resource rights at the price you want; convert to your religion; give you some of their territory; take back what they said about you; etc.).
Almost everyone accepts defending the group (or oneself) as justifying the use of force (but see below how pre-emptive war is a creative extension of this concept).
Taking something by force from another group has become fairly socially unacceptable in the world community and is certainly less frequent than in past centuries, when conquest was undertaken for the spoils. Taking what one wants by force, though, is still sufficiently in our genes that while some of us recognize that our own country exists because we took the land from someone else, we feel regret but not abhorrence or disgust about those actions (at least not the same disgust that we may feel about our country’s participation in slavery). It may well be that in the future countries that feel starved of essential resources (oil, computer metals, food) may once again use war to get what they feel they must have.
War as a means of forcing another group to do something we want seems childish, and when we want to do it, we cast about to find other, untrue or meaningless, justifications for it (this was actually our land thousands of years ago; you are a danger to humanity; you can’t manage your own affairs properly so we’ll take over for you; etc.).
Besides more powerful weapons, the other major “advancement” in the making of war is finding ways to make it less personal and less individually dangerous to the warrior (which actually makes it more dangerous to others, since it makes killing more impersonal and easier to justify). Dealing death and destruction using ships and more recently aircraft has greatly depersonalized killing and made war more attractive to policy makers. Our modern drones do this even better and once again make it even easier to decide to go to war. The volunteer army insulates the public from war, for the most part, as has financing war totally through borrowing rather than through current taxes and sacrifices for citizens.
The other major “advancement” in warring is extending the concept of justifiable self-defense to pre-emptive war, in which a presumed future danger from another country is eliminated by attacking them first. The justification for this is that this “self-defense” is accomplished at a lower cost and keeps you from suffering the consequences of their attack in the future. This theory was used by the U.S. to justify attacking Iraq, and it will no doubt be used more frequently in the future, since with modern weapons and methods of warfare, the damage and loss of life to a country that is attacked can be catastrophic right from the first few minutes of the war (which will usually be a sneak attack without declaration of war). Countries are not willing to suffer these consequences if they can prevent them in a justifiable way.
However, the pre-emptive justification is obviously corruptible, since the danger may be only in the eye of the beholder, and countries will err on the side of safety in making those decisions, as the U.S. did in the case of Iraq. More callously, countries may manufacture dangers in order to justify a war as self-defense when the real purpose is taking something from another country. Given the history of human self-deception and skullduggery, we (even ourselves) cannot be trusted to attack other countries fairly!
Given the penchant of human beings to react violently when sufficiently frightened or otherwise angered (it’s in our genes), we will continue to make war and to minimize the costs of war, so it is in everyone’s interest to make wars as infrequent as possible (with the exception of responding to direct attack). Perhaps a worldwide treaty of all countries pledging to attack together any country that makes war (except for defense against an already occurring attack) without the approval of the total group would help, even though the U.S. would probably be the last to sign on and give up any of its “sovereignty” (translated as the right to do anything it wants to do). This approval would have to be specific regarding the conditions for actually attacking another country, since the United Nations’ more general “do whatever is necessary if Iraq is not sufficiently responsive” approval was used by the U.S. to justify attacking Iraq when it turned out that the feared dangers to the U.S. from Iraq did not actually exist.
Some human beings like war and would not want war to be restricted, but I believe that the vast majority would prefer that negotiations and compromises be utilized in all cases of conflict rather than overt war. Are you willing to accept the costs of negotiations and compromise (not getting exactly everything you want) in order to avoid the loss of life and economic costs of open war? I am.
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