In my last post on Iraq, I concluded with a somewhat snarky reference to pro-war bloggers who reasoned that, since Sadr offered a ceasefire, he must have lost the fight in Basra, and therefore the government must have won. As it turned out, the ceasefire was the product of some days of negotation, brokered by the Iranians, which made the original point moot.
Still, given that the same claim was made by John McCain, who said”Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a ceasefire., I think it’s worth making a more serious point about the fundamental error in pro-war thinking that’s reflected in claims like this.
As usual with McCain’s statements in his alleged area of expertise, the claim is factually dubious (see below). More importantly, the implicit analysis here, and in nearly all pro-war thinking is that of a zero-sum game, in which one side’s gains equal the other side’s losses. The reality is that war is a negative sum game. Invariably, both sides lose relative to an immediate agreement on the final peace terms. Almost invariably, both sides are worse off than if the war had never been fought. With nearly equal certainty, anyone who passes up an opportunity for an early ceasefire will regret it in the end.
The negative sum nature of war is most obvious when, as predictably happened in Basra, the stage of bloody stalemate is reached. At this point, both sides typically want to come out of the fight with some gains to show for the exercise. Fighting on, they sometimes achieve this and sometimes do not. But the losses incurred in the process ensure that both sides are worse than they would have been with an immediate ceasefire.
In this respect, Basra is a microcosm of the whole Iraq war. Six years after the push for war began just about everyone is far worse off than if they had agreed to peace on the most humiliating terms imaginable. Saddam Hussein and most of the Baathist apparatus are mostly dead or one the run, and many of the survivors are glad to take a pittance from the US occupiers. The Shi’ites, despite gaining political power, have suffered more in the years of conflict (with the Americans, the Sunni and among themselves) than they ever did under Saddam. The Americans and British have poured endless blood and treasure into Iraq to no avail and both Bush and Blair are utterly discredited. Even the Kurds have overreached themselves and brought the Turkish army into their territory. The only winners have been the Iranians, as interested bystanders, and merchants of death like Halliburton and KBR, and even these may yet end up worse off
Coming back to McCain’s historical claim, it’s easy to point to cases, like the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971 where the winning side declared a unilateral ceasefire. More pertinently, perhaps, governments fighting insurgent movements have frequently followed up successful military campaigns with unilateral ceasefires and amnesty campaigns, aimed at reintegrating the rebels into civil society. If the government forces had achieved their main goals in Basra within the three-day period initially suggested, it would have made good sense for Maliki to follow this example.
Even more relevant to the argument presented here are the many cases when initial success in war could have been followed by a ceasefire and a peace deal on favorable terms, but was not, with disaster as the common aftermath. Two examples:
* At the end of 1792, the French revolutionary armies were everywhere victorious against the invaders of the First Coalition. Against the arguments of Robespierre and others, the government pressed on, converting a defensive war into one of unlimited expansion. When the fighting ended more than 20 years later, with the restored Bourbons replacing the Bonaparte dictatorship, the millions of dead included nearly all of those who had made the decision to go to war.
* After four months of fighting in Korea, the US/UN forces threw back the North Korean invaders. A peace at least as favorable as the status quo ante could easily have been imposed unilaterally at this point. Instead Macarthur invaded the North and brought the Chinese into the war, resulting in one of the worst defeats ever suffered by US forces (until the greater disaster of Vietnam). Three years and countless deaths later, the prewar boundary was restored.
Finally reaching a conclusion, the central error in pro-war thinking is the belief that every war has a winner. On the contrary, in war there are only losers. Even those who seem to win have usually sowed the seeds of future disaster. The only sane response to war is to end it as soon as possible.
John Quiggin 
Great post.
Well, the ‘winners’ are asking for their armoured cars back:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3661892.ece
On the contrary, in war there are only losers
Not so sure about this. Of course, if we take the goals of the Coalition at face value, then yes, ongoing war and occupation do see less than ‘sane’. Nonetheless, there’s always somebody who turns a profit out of these things. In light of all of the blood and carnage in Iraq, surely some quite concrete benefits are at stake, rather than the heroic invaders suffering for abstract notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’.
There is little doubt that in aggregate war is a negative sum game.
But wars that are sufficiently large and complex offer the possibility to some participants for war to be a positive sum game.
Looking at war from the point of view of individuals, any set of circumstances that materially increases the risk of mortality has to be accounted as a negative sum game. Every individual in Iraq today (both Iraqi and foreigner) is more likely to die today than if she had been in Iraq before Bush’s “Shock nd Awe”.
Yet individuals associate themselves with collectivities to which they often voluntarily devote their efforts despite increasing their risk of mortality in a very material way. These people say that their sacrifice is worthwhile. Other folks are wont to call these people “heroes”.
However, objectively, their self-sacrifice is worthwhile only if their cause is victorious. Do kamikaze pilots get called “heroes” nowadays?
Which brings me to this by JQ:
Certainly, many ordinary Shiites have died. I imagine that most of these Shiite casualties have been only passive supporters of one or other of the Shiite movements. They have died as collateral damage in an ongoing civil war prosecuted by Shiite activists.
In turn, these Shiite activists believe it is a right and proper thing to continue to prosecute their war of ethnic cleansing against Sunni despite (or because of) the atrocities wreaked upon their Shiite co-religionists.
And now there are very few Sunni in large parts of Iraq. That dearth of Sunni would look like victory to many Shiite survivors.
We don’t know what the dead Shiites might think about their sacrifice, but I imagine that the surviving Shiites are busy constructing quite credible myths about the heroism of the sacrifice of Shiites in their war of liberation.
These myths may, objectively, be baseless, like the supposed achievements of the ANZACs at Gallipoli. But like the Gallipoli myth the Shiite myth may serve to drive powerful engines of social and cultural control in Iraq. Such myths are winners’ myths.
Losers contruct other myths. The German “stab in the back” myth of 1918-19 helped to propel Nazism. The US Right constructed similar “stab-in-the-back” myths in the wake of the Vietnam defeat. My guess is that something similar may emerge out of Iraq for the US.
No one likes to own up to defeat. But despite denials, popular myths end up telling who finished a war on the positive side of the ledger.
Indeed, Katz, all this is true which is why it is essential to criticise these myths at every opportunity.
I assume that lost pride is not a significant cost in your calculation. In life it seems to be given a quite high weighting.
‘Pride’ perhaps requires a little exegesis here. Pro-war leaders, here and elsewhere, have spoken of continuing the war, if only for the sake of ‘American prestige’.
What else is this ‘prestige’ other than the perception, illusory or otherwise, that one is the biggest, baddest gangster on the block?
JQ “Invariably, both sides lose relative to an immediate agreement on the final peace terms. ”
I suspect you’re probably right – but I imagine that’s exactly what Chamberlain was thinking in the the late 1930s.
Sometimes things are worth fighting for. I’m not sure Iraq qualifies, in fact I’m almost certain it doesn’t. But although I probably agree that war is a negative sum game – sometimes it’s better off to take a little negative pain than a lot.
Interesting game theory exercise – and true in the business world as well.
Think about price war situations – neither party wins, but if market share trumps margin then you’ve got to go to war.
While I fully agree with your conclusions, Prof Q, you forgot to mention one thing which really should be considered obligatory in all discussions of this war: OIL.
From the Bush/Cheney point of view, whoever ends up controlling the oil is “the winner”. It doesn’t matter to them how many people die, how much money is lost (insignificant, compared to the potential profits), or even how much international prestige is sacrificed (everyone loves a winner, and the winners write history). No doubt many of the violence-prone power players within Iraq today have the same cynical long-term view.
I see the rich warmongers emerging as “winners”, on their own terms at least. Bush and his friends will all walk away from Iraq with their wallets stuffed, and nobody will ever take that away from them.
Will anyone ever demand that Halliburton repay all their profits to US taxpayers? Or that Blackwater be disbanded and the company assets handed over to Iraqis? Or even that Bush, Blair and Howard go to jail for their War Crimes? Who would ever dare to demand such things?
Only ordinary people like me, people who have no voice.
I think that Katz makes a good point. An external observer might adopt a calculus of wins and losses that is quite different to that of the participants in the conflict. I have little doubt that when Cheney claims the Iraqi exercise has been a terrific success he is sincere, because in his (deluded) mind he is fighting a war against aggressive Islamism that wants to establish a new caliphate from Morocco to Indonesia or whatever the nonsense is that he spouts. No signs of it happening yet so he gives the Iraqi exercise the credit … now on to Tehran!!
It’s arguable that the Iraqi occupation has made Israel better off because its protector and great ally will now have powerful conventional forces in the region for an indefinite period. That makes it extremely unlikely that any other nation in the ME would take military action against Israel, and leaves it free to do things like launch air raids against Syria with impunity.
BTW I think that continuing to use the ‘war’ terminology places any discussion of Iraq into a misleading frame. Wars have enemies and so when ‘we’ are fighting in Basra, the people we are fighting are self-evidently The Enemy who must be defeated. If we abandon the war rhetoric and accept that the USA is occupying a conquered territory after establishing a puppet government, a bit like Vichy France in 1941, people might adopt a more considered approach than the reflexive ‘support the troops’ jingoism associated with wars.
Final BTW … didn’t George Bush snr declare a unilateral ceasefire in the Gulf War in 1991? What a loser … but I guess McCain probably thought that already.
Ohh Gandhi…. when people start blithering on about someone like John Howard committing a war crime it just detracts from any worthwhile points they may be trying to make.
Leave out the nonsense and have another go.
“but I imagine that’s exactly what Chamberlain was thinking in the the late 1930s.”
I’m not sure that applies. Chamberlain offered peace. Hitler was the one who rejected it, and paid the price.
The point though Swio is that Chamberlain offered peace when perhaps the lower cost outcome would have been to go to war earlier.
More generally, I think reasoning for which WWII is the only supporting instance should come under the coverage of Godwin’s Law
I have a very low opinion of GWB. However, I am fairly confident to assert that if GWB thought that the only winners to emerge from the Iraq war would be the contractors, then he would never have gone to war.
Haliburton’s huge windfall was an unintended consequence of the war and in no way a motivating factor for war.
It is true to say, however, that Halliburton is one of the few US winners from the war.
I guess it’s up to US citizens and taxpayers to decide what they think about that fact.
I disagree John. Even if WWII is the only example (which I’m sure its not) – it’s a valid example. Godwins has nothing to do with it.
The broad thrust of your argument is that war is a negative sum game therefore we should never go to war. I think the first part is true but the second part isn’t.
There will be instances when turning the other cheek is a major loss, sometimes fighting back will result in a relatively smaller loss. Therefore, rationally we should go to war in those circumstances if all other avenues have been exhausted.
The problem with the WWII analogy is that it is the exception to the rule, at least as far as Australian/US wars go. Secondly, WWII rhetoric has been co-opted in the propaganda effort for this war. Pundits tried to create a false sense of urgency, and demanded a false notion of ‘patriotism’ by demeaning war-opponents as appeasers, a fairly clear allusion to Chamberlain and WWII.
The conflation of violent Islamic movements with those of Hitler and Mussolini (i.e. through the term Islamofascism) is further evidence of the WWII analogy serving as a propaganda tool and rhetorical flourish, rather than as a meaningful precendent.
Ohh Gandhi…. when people start blithering on about someone like John Howard committing a war crime…
Thanks for illustrating my point, Andrew. How could any credible person even think such a thing, let alone say it in public? It goes completely against the narrative which has been so carefully constructed over all these years.
Never mind that Kofi Annan himself said the war was illegal, and that the Nuremberg Trials defined any such unprovoked invasion as “the supreme War Crime”. There must be another explanation.
When the ponies appear, perhaps they’ll tell us.
Ken Lovell,
Wars have enemies and so when ‘we’ are fighting in Basra, the people we are fighting are self-evidently The Enemy who must be defeated.
I think the “war” on terror is a tragic misnomer, but I don’t see how you can call Iraq anything but a “war”. The question is why you would identify yourself as part of that “we” involved in the fighting.
As I see it, “we” (here at least) are just horrified bystanders whose only skin in the game is the prestige our nation loses, the guilt we suffer, and the taxpayer dollars of which we are continually fleeced.
The only group with which I can identify in Iraq are the innocent people struggling to keep their families alive in the midst of all this horror.
â€?Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a ceasefire”
Rarely do the winning side accept the losing sides offer of ceasefire before they have achieved their objectives.
“The only group with which I can identify in Iraq are the innocent people struggling to keep their families alive in the midst of all this horror.”
Wow Gandhi – where do you live? Identify with Iraqi suffering? You’re clearly not logging in anywhere from Australia. Did you also identify with the Iraqi suffering under Hussein?
Ohh – the name… I get it, you’re logging in from a Mumbai slum.
Andrew, please avoid this kind of pointless snark.
@Ken Miles.
Good point.
What did the US – er, allies – do in the first Gulf War after removing Saddam’s army from Kuwait? Isn’t that another contradiction of McCain’s assertion? I think the Polish-Soviet war in 1919-1921 is an additional example in support of JQ. Has the Red Army stopped after defeating the Poles in the Ukraine, it would have been a clear victory. As it is, the episode tends to be remembered as a victory for Poland and a defeat of the Red Army.
Rarely do the winning side accept the losing sides offer of ceasefire before they have achieved their objectives.
That’s the whole point isn’t it. What a pathetic fool McCain is and how ridiculously sad that nobody is going to call him on his arse-backward blather. The Successful SURGE narrative must be maintained!
well Sadr isn’t disarmed, is he? And he’s a winner because he proved the point that he CAN’T be disarmed by force. The Iraqi government has conceded the point that it lacks even a monopoly of violence in the capital Baghdad let alone control over Basra’s texas tea. that’s pretty much a win from Sadr’s point of view considering that Maliki’s offensive was done with the aim of retaking Basra’s oil and crushing the “worse than al Qaida” Mahdi army.
I don’t even know the basics of game theory, but to suggest that war is always negative sum seems to suggest that neither side gains out of war. I would argue that looking at it in terms of “sides” misses the point. While America as a whole is obviously much worse off for having embroiled itself in Iraq, it’s been win-win guaranteed profit all the way for GOP-connected military-industrial interests. War is not just a competition between opposing sides but also between the interests within each side. The benefits of war and empire accrue to the overclass, its costs are paid by the plebs. Maintaining a huge, exploitative empire might cost as much wealth as it brings in, but those who benefit and those who pay are rarely the same individuals.
Finally, anyone who cannot see that Howard, Bush and Blair are war criminals must be either appallingly ill informed or indoctrinated beyond the reach of reason.
This raises the interesting question of the identity of the winning side.
The Great War was a not unimportant war.
The Germans agreed to an armistice brokered by the US on the basis of Wilson’s 14 Points, which pledged to offer a non-predatory peace to all belligerents.
In November 1918 the British and the French accepted the terms of the Armistice even though the Armistice did not satisfy their war aims, viz., utterly crushing Germany.
In November 1918 the British and the French were successful in tricking Wilson into thinking that that they had signed on to his 14 Points vision.
However, by June 1919, the truth was revealed in the Versailles Treaty in the way in which the British and the French were able to convince Wilson to renege on the basis of the Armistice Agreement and to sign on to a plan to crush Germany utterly.
So the British and the French did indeed accept a ceasefire before their objectives were achieved.
Having failed to win the war, those two nations contented themselves with winning the peace.
“Having failed to win the war, those two nations contented themselves with winning the peace.”
Or, more accurately, losing the peace, since Versailles led directly to Hitler, while yielding no sustained benefits to either Britain or France.
Well, yes. It all depends on foreseeability.
There are foreseeable effects of any action but on the other hand there are also unforeseeable effects.
If the British and French had been able to continue to oppress the German nation and had been willing to ensure that the Versailles Treaty was honoured to the letter, then Hitler might have been crushed as soon as he reneged on paying the first scheduled reparations instalment. (All this required was French and British boots being ground into German faces in perpetuity.) [*/end irony]
On the other hand, Britain hemmed and hawed over claiming Corsica as reward for winning the Seven Years War against France.
The British decided not to annex Corsica. Soon after Napoleon was born in Corsica. He might have been a British subject. Think about how much trouble that may have averted!
You tug at a strand of history somewhere and it is very difficult to predict what might unravel.
Honestly people, why keep blogging? What a fruitless endeavour. Ignorance piled on ignorance, stupidity on stupidity, opinions upon opinions going round and round, getting nowhere.
“Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
I hope I find the wisdom to never blog again.
A negative sum game can still have winners and losers.
The definition of a negative sum game is a game where the total assets at the completion are less than the total at the beginning.
One side can still come out ahead of where they started, it just means the losers lose more.
The notion that war always turns out horribly for all parties is obviously false. Take for example the opium war: Britain lost very little, while gaining Hong Kong and exclusive trade rights with China. Britain was a very big winner and China a very big loser.
I’ll probably get skinned alive for saying this but the Mexican American War came close to being a win-win war although I doubt many Mexicans see it that way.
Mexico lost a huge area of land – which it had almost completely failed to exploit or settle.
Roughly 60,000 Mexicans living in the annexed territory became American citizens and most of them ultimately ended up materially better off as a result (apart from some landholders whose title weren’t recognised by the US).
The US settled the land and suppressed Indian tribes such as the apache and the Navajo who had long been raiding inside Mexico. (Given how Mexico has treated many of its indigenous people you could even argue those tribes ultimately benefited.)
Trade with new US settlers in the annexed territory almost definitely provided far greater economic benefits to Mexico than the relatively few pre-war settlers.
“Finally, anyone who cannot see that Howard, Bush and Blair are war criminals must be either appallingly ill informed or indoctrinated beyond the reach of reason.”
Thank you, Gerard, for that. Many millions around the world agree, but most of them are not Westerners.
I simply cannot understand why even passionately anti-war Australians are unable to accept this narrative: the War Criminals must be held to account or our nation’s soul is forever tarnished. We are all complicit in the murder of a million people. This is what we have become. What are we going to DO about it?
Andrew @ 20, I challenge you to watch this video through to the finish (not suitable for children) and tell me which side you identify with.
War is hell, if anyone cares to look closely enough. It brings out the worst in men. And not just those on the field of combat either.
As Terje said at #5 above, we lose more than just blood and treasure: we lose a part of our humanity.
The notion that war always turns out horribly for all parties is obviously false. Take for example the opium war: Britain lost very little, while gaining Hong Kong and exclusive trade rights with China. Britain was a very big winner and China a very big loser.
exactly yobbo.
if only the united states in iraq, like britain in the opium wars, was engaged in a straightforwardly imperialist war of aggression, intent on crushing any meaningful iraqi independence, in order to gain maximum economic advantage by controlling iraqi trade. then we could soberly discuss the ins and outs of whether the united states has acheived its aims and therefore won.
but, sadly, the united states would not fight a war for such base motives. right, yobbo?
The USA spends $2.5 billion per day on oil imports.
The occupation of Iraq costs $300 million per day.
The > 100 billion barrels in Iraq are worth at least $10 trillion.
If the USA imported all Iraq’s oil over the next 4,000 days at 25 million barrels per day(it’s current import figure) then the occupation cost even at present rates would add only $12.50 to the price of each barrel.
This is not an exorbitant price to lock up a major oil field when China and India are out there scouting the globe for their future oil requirements.
Anybody who believes that the war is too expensive for the USA to still, at this stage, consider this a win is, not looking at the figures.
But that’s not a realistic description of what would happen to Iraqi oil if the Bush administration got its way and the Maliki government passed the Oil Law thoughtfully drafted for Iraq by the Bush administration.
That oil would be sold on the open market to the highest bidder. Major beneficiaries may include US oil minors who would repatriate their profits from the royalty deals back to Houston.
But the oil itself would be as likely to find its way to Shanghai as to Phoenix.
So this state of affairs does not favour either US producers or consumers over producers and consumers anywhere else, including China.
Ghandi, it is well within the definiton of the word to ‘identify’ with the Iraqi’s without personally experiencing their horror.
The actions of Bush, Howard and Blair in the Iraq conflict are well within the definition of ‘War Criminal’.
For many people, the ‘War Criminal’ status of Bush, Howard and Blair is well within the definition of ‘an inconvenient truth’, and they need to be confronted, shirtfronted even, with videos such as that.
#27 As regards foreseeability, an obvious test is whether the consequences were foreseen. They were in 1918 by Keynes and in 2003 by many opponents of the war, all of whom were ignored
#28 Yobbo, if you reread the post carefully, you’ll see that your point has been addressed. What I’d be more interested in from you is a comment on the relationship between libertarianism and support for the most coercive of state (or would-be state) actions, namely war.
For pity’s sake Gandhi: if you’re sending us to watch a work of fiction as you just did, especially when it’s on a webpage where it’s presented as fact and never mind that in real life some small number of US and all soldiers is indeed guilty of rape and murder ….. could you please tell us? The video is clipped from Brian de Palma’s “Redacted” which won him “Best Director” at the Venice Film Festival last year. See a promo
here.
That fact matters, in fact.
#31
Gandhi, the footage is a work of fiction, a point that Brian de Palma has emphasised
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redacted_%28film%29#Political_Controversy
wbb #33, I am not too confident in any of the official oil figures coming out of Iraq. I think a lot is being sold on the black market. We have no way of knowing.
frankis #37 and rog #38, I did not know that video was from De Palma’s film, or I would have noted it.
But I don’t care because it really doesn’t matter: these things (and worse) are happening every day in Iraq. Did you see how those soldiers from Haditha are all being let off the hook? Did you see the latest memo telling Bush he could torture and get away with it using “Executive privilege” and all his torturers could just make false claims about plausible self-defence?
This is totally state-sanctioned horror, our government remains a party to it, and we all just sit here with our fingers in our ears…
We need a Royal Commission into the Iraq War, including the WMDs, the AWB, the ONA, the media coverage, everything.
The Haditha case collapsed, for want of evidence.
JQ, Keynes foresaw bad consequences in 1918, but he did not foresee the specific form they took. At that level of detail, they were not foreseeable. In fact, other of his assessments of the peace treaty were quite wrong, in particular his idea that the Europeans had run rings around Woodrow Wilson. With hindsight we can see that Woodrow Wilson put in things that were very long acting and worked to undercut imperialism as then practised.
Katz Says:
I’m not sure what this means. The “reneging” started to occur in 1921.
Hitler’s rise didn’t really start until the Depression, and only achieved real power in 1933 or 1934.
As I see it, the Depression was as a big a cause of the Hitler’s rise as the reparations. The reparations set the stage for discontent, but it was contained until the Depression came along. Hitler was jailed in 1924 for the inflamatory nature of his speeches.
The Depression was the trigger that enabled popular discontent to turn into an overthow of the existing order.
Here’s journalist Robert J Samuelson on on the Depression:
Australia seems complicit in the OIL as a ‘win’ as it despatched another warship last week for a six month stint in the Arabian Gulf. It strikes me as a little strange that Rudd is terminating the troops in Iraq but keeping the RAN on the job unless you factor in the oil. Keeping a finger on the (oil) pulse with no risk to life (IMO) would seem to constitute a fairly good insurance policy which equates to a ‘win’ I guess. Could be enough to lie behind the Rudd salute to the supreme commander perhaps?
Yeah, I know. Just trying to put the occupation costs in context. They may sound big but there are bigger numbers out there.
Still, I stuffed up the (rough) figures. 25mbd is US daily consumption. Only half of that is imported.
The point is that if oil is under the control of unfriendly governments you do not get to buy it at Nymex at world prices. Other unfriendly governments get to buy it under agreement.
Oil is a strategic resource like no other. US oil companies operating foreign fields and US military bases are linked. US foreign policy secures a region thru fair means or foul – and the oil companies come in to do the drilling and selling.
If oil is simply another commodity sold at market then the US wouldn’t have cared if Saddam had invaded Kuwait. The difference in cost between production of oil in Gulf deep sea locations and Iraqi shallow sand deposits is immense. That price gap is the prize. That and the security that comes from knowing that you are able to ship it back to your domestic market. You control the government; the fields, the companies; the piplines; the shipping routes/chokepoints. The oil comes home (at world price ultimately) but with all the gap between production and benchmark price nicely repatriated.
If the US had to start paying in euros for all their oil imports they’d go bust next month.
But they don’t, they pay in USD and as much of that is profit to US oil companies it’s all domestic recycled currency.
I would propose that war may end up a positive sum game. Take Blair’s wars. In the early engagements of Operation Desert Fox, NATO in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, the final resolutions are arguably good. Later with Afghanistan Blair leveraged his stockpile of clout for international unification, re Pakistan, India and Karzai. The choice to bomb the heroin trail saved lives (although post-Blair production is up).
I believe in these conflicts Blair had learned that “war has benefits”. At least for his image and ego. He thought he would get a repeat of earlier successes in Iraq, and the Brown administration would deal with the fallout. He urged that by remaining by the side of the US he could influence Bush’s tendencies for unilateralism to push the UN in order to curb the already decided and isolated US cabinet and media.
I believe that if Blair could have convinced Bush to focus on the Afghanistan front and/or rejected to go into Iraq, he would have left office in a much stronger political position. This would have isolated the states, and made them die of thirst. Rather Blair opted for one more war, at the costs of global destabilization and economic ruin in the US. Now it looks as he will forego any shot at the European Presidency because he has taken that teaching job at Yale.
I blogged earlier on the peace dividend and now am advocating war. I feel like I am chasing my own tail and it’s getting closer.
It takes the occasional war to make us realize (and be willing) to negotiate a peace.
If everyone accepted that a negotiated cease-fire on unsatisfactory terms was better than a war, then there is always the motivation to be a little more demanding/unreasonable/hawkish in those negotiations, in the hope/belief that the other side will ceed more ground to avoid war. Usually, there has to be some belief, on both sides, that the other side is willing to go to war, for peace negotiations to work.
So I guess I agree with JQ’s point (a cease-fire on perceived bad terms is almost always better than a war), but if this were to become widely accepted, then any remaining hawks would soon push the boundaries of peace settlements to exactly the point where the peace was almost unacceptable even to the doves.
25mbd is a truly astonishing amount of oil. At 159 litres per barrel, the USA consumes 3.9 Gigalitres of oil per day, or the entire storage capacity of the Dartmouth reservoir every single day. Lost for words really but disgust is in there.
Forget the Dartmouth comparison, it holds 3,900 Gigs. Sorry, early dementure I’m afraid.
Possibly the best book on this subject is the following:
Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions
By Dominic D. P. Johnson
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=tsKhvsdSXE0C&dq=overconfidence+in+war&pg=PP1&ots=iKzEJmJUSw&sig=x74x41Bg_G9KowQ5ts5nAZDjBxA&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&rlz=&q=overconfidence+in+war&btnG=Google+Search&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail#PPA1,M1
Even just the preview of the first chapter answers some of the pro and cons of wars and often why they happen.
Worth a read.