Ending a War Ain't Easy

When I was a kid, I was blown away by the quality of (a volume of) encyclopedias that my cousin from the US gave us. Before you smirk, remember this was the pre-liberalization, pre-Internet, pre-Wikipedia era when people still put on their loin skins and went hunting for their next meal…

An event I was very interested in was World War I. And boy, did the encyclopedia had lots of information of that. The one question that never occurred to me until I read this article by Stephen Walt was the following:
“We should also ask why it was so difficult to end.”
I realized I never gave it any thought because the answer seemed obvious: the war took as long it took for one side to win conclusively. But Walt is really asking a different question: at some point long before the war ended, he says, surely different leaders on both sides must have felt that the body count was too much, that the eventual economic cost of victory would not be worth it, and that they couldn’t even be certain their side would win! So why didn’t they negotiate a settlement and end it much, much earlier?

Why indeed? Here are some of Walt’s reasons:
1)      All the sides were major industrial powers that “could lose many battles, suffer many killed and wounded men, fire tons of ammunition at each other, endure blockades, and still have the resources to continue fighting”.
2)     In order to recruit allies, each side promised them certain spoils (e.g Germany promised the Ottoman Empire slices of Russian territory; while the British promised Arab leaders independent kingdoms if they revolted against the Ottoman Empire). And to deliver those promised spoils, each side needed an outright win, not a settlement.
3)     Ironically, the longer the war had already lasted, the harder it became for any country to sell a peace settlement to its own citizens. Why? Because people would be furious that they got nothing in response to the “enormous sacrifices” they had already made.
4)     Wartime propaganda by each side meant that their citizens believed victory was just round the corner. How could they justify a draw in a winning position?
5)     The same wartime propaganda had painted the enemy as “brutal monsters guilty of vast atrocities”. How could anyone then justify negotiating with such “vicious opponents”?

Note that most of those points would apply to any war fought today as well. And so what is Walt’s takeaway for present day leaders?
“Once the dogs of war are loose, there is no telling where they will drag a country, whatever its initial intentions may have been.”
Can’t argue with that, can you?

Comments

  1. KumarAugust 5, 2014 at 5:53 PM

    So true! So true sadly.

    We certainly live in a world of "mass-psychology traps". The traps need not be set only for full-fledged wars full of military operations. There are some in every society who whip up strong feelings in people for some cause for which they should go on warpath. Here I mean the cause could be ever so many social/political issues.

    Therefore, Indians with an open mind cannot fail to fully understand your blog on this subject. We as a nation are on warpath, for almost ever since the nation was born in 1947, with all our neighboring countries. With exaggeration nevertheless but not without a good founding on truth, I declare this: Within this nation, virtually every state is on warpath with every other. Further; every group of some identity (religion, denominations within the religion is on warpath with every group of another identity too (e.g. caste within Hinduism or sects of Christianity, Islam), language, region, rich-poor-difference, foreigner etc. etc.) divisive poison can manufactured at will by our self-seeking leaders in every region. [This is the way of our neighboring countries too, but I need not go on with details in this regard. Everyone knows the background of the subcontinent.]

    We can hope for peace only if the dime-a-dozen 'netas' stop their hate speeches with liberal sprinkling of parochial glorification. We can hope for peace if only such brainwashing are not mindlessly taken up by the not-capable-or-thinking masses in every region.

    That is when we realize how the same truth of what you say applies in lesser than contexts too: neither our leaders will change for the better, nor our masses will do better than being swayed by emotions intended, to be precise 'manufactured', to render them mental slaves of the self-centered leaders.

    What the compassionate Buddha said remains true eternally, "Never can we attain peace through hate. Never can we feel quietitude within ourselves if we keep acquiring impure ideas and remain engrossed in them. Liberation from our errors, thus freedom from our suffering, is through proper balance (equanimity). In that we do not lean towards anything extreme. Peace can never come through wars but only through caring. In caring, we cannot have bounds. There can be no peace unless we abide in the right conduct (dharma). Dharma is not something that is imposed on us by someone else, but that which we believe in fully and follow truthfully. We have to act just-fully towards others because that is the only way we can act rightly to ourselves." Who can pick any dogma or religious-threat in what the Buddha says? Can't we ourselves can see in our calm moments as the truth is what the Buddha said? Who can fight eternal wisdom and render it null and void?

    However that is not the cup of tea for any leader anywhere in the world! Many it is not the cup of tea for many ordinary people too.

    But then, just as our self-seeking leaders are a product of our societies, sincere and good leaders are also products of the society. Nothing can stop competent (i.e. in generating good governance) leaders, caring leaders, visionary leaders emerging too, if such a requirement becomes a necessity. In that lies our hope. The good thing in hope is that hope is eternal as the Buddha principle.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more