War: what is good for?
Why does anyone commemorate the Armistice Day? The cessation of the ‘war to end all wars’ wasn’t followed by a new dawn, not even a mottled dawn. In the West it brought economic upheavals that led to the Depression. It brought fascism. In the Middle East the peace ended all peace - they are still fighting the wars of Ottoman succession in Gaza and Baghdad. Further East, it brought communism. So why commemorate this non-event?
Well, it is an appropriate day to honour the veterans. After all, are most of the veterans not the poor and the dispossesed, or the simpletons who buy the line about the God and the Flag? What better day then to commemorate the lot whose is to simply obey and die than the non-end of a pointless conflict?
More importantly, it is a day to remind everyone that wars are pointless. It is a day to remind everyone that wars don’t have winners or losers, they have survivors. And those who start wars are seldom better off for it.
Of course, if a war is imposed on someone then there is little that can be done about it. The thing is, it’s seldom the case that one can definitely say the other side started it. Or put differently, it’s almost always the case that one can argue that the other side started it — talk to an Israeli and you’d be told it was Nasser who forced the 1967 war on the Zionist entity.
This means that when we talk about ’starting a war’, what we really mean is escalating the conflict beyond a critical stage. Now, if the party that crosses this threshold ends up losing the war, then they are clearly worse off — it would have been better for them to negotiate their way out of the dispute. Even the Pakistani apologists wouldn’t say that the military crackdown on 25 March 1971 was the right course of action given they lost.
But what if a party that initiates the fighting ends up winning the war? Aren’t they better off for it? Not necessarily. Think about the Israelis in the 1967 war — they started it, won handily, more than doubling their territory in 6 days, slam dunk victory if there ever was. And yet, one could reasonably argue that the Israeli objectives would have been better served with a path that didn’t involve war.
Why then do people start wars? Well, game theorists would tell you that quite often wars happen because people misjudge others’ reactions. Quite often wars happen because the party who starts the fight thinks that the other side will roll over and there won’t be actually any fighting. That’s exactly what the Pakistani generals thought in March 1971. Historians tell us that Hitler didn’t expect the British to fight over Poland in 1939.
If wars happen because parties make mistakes about the each other’s intentions, then it follows that improving lines of communication would reduce the risk of war. That was the idea behind setting up hotlines between the Kremlin and the White House during the Cold War.
That same idea — more talk means less fight — holds true in domestic setting too, whether we’re talking about disputes with one’s significant other, or political conflicts within a country. Think about it. How often have you had an argument with your partner that looked completely pointless the following morning? And would 1/11 happen if the heads of AL and BNP actually talked to each other this time in 2006?
War, what is it good for, absolutely nothing. If you think about something this Armistice Day, let it be this.
(Cross-posted at Mukti).