by Jim Powell at http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/six-reasons-why-wars-we-wage-often-go-wrong
Drums are beating for a pre-emptive war to take out
such nuclear facilities as Iran might have. But considerable caution is
in order, because this is basically the same story Americans heard not
so long ago, in 2003, to promote the pre-emptive war against Iraq.
Although the United States “won” that war, intelligence about Iraq’s
alleged weapons of mass destruction turned out to be wrong, the killing
has gone on for nearly a decade, Sunni and Shiite factions appear to be
going at each other again, and with Saddam Hussein gone, there’s a
political/military vacuum that Iraq’s larger neighbor Iran is
undoubtedly eager to exploit.
The calls for another pre-emptive war are particularly ironic
considering that Iran used to be a friend of the United States. Our CIA
helped the Shah secure his power in 1953, because he helped prevent
Soviet penetration of the Mideast. But the Shah went on to establish a
secular, authoritarian regime that made plenty of enemies. Ayatollah
Khomeini became one of the Shah’s most formidable enemies as early as
the 1960s. Because the U.S. backed the Shah, his enemies became our
enemies, and they unexpectedly seized power in 1979. The U.S. affirmed
its status as an enemy by backing Saddam Hussein after he attacked Iran
the following year, in what became an eight-year blood bath.
Iranian leaders have done just about everything to convince the world
that they are a bunch of dangerous fanatics, so the prospect of a
nuclear Iran is scary. But by now we ought to have learned that a
pre-emptive war can multiply the complications.
This is because war is the most costly, violent and unpredictable
thing governments do. Again and again, even decisive victories can turn
out to be serious mistakes, if not catastrophes, because of unintended
consequences. While we might be able to control what we do, we cannot
control how other people react to what we do.
Here are 6 reasons why wars go wrong:
1. Nations at war often try to avenge their suffering, which
means they are likely to inflame hatreds that persist for a long time
and provoke more wars.
In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into
World War I. He claimed it was “the war to end wars.” He vowed that it
would “make the world safe for democracy.” At that time, the war had
been stalemated for three years — neither side able to impose its will
on the other. By intervening on the side of the British and the French,
Wilson made it possible to break the stalemate, win a decisive victory
and dictate terms to the losers.
Wilson imagined he could negotiate peace on noble principles
expressed in his January 1918 ”Fourteen Points” speech before a joint
session of Congress. But almost a million British soldiers and civilians
died in the war. Almost 1.7 million French soldiers and civilians died.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers succumbed to the influenza pandemic.
In addition to battle-related destruction of property, retreating
soldiers destroyed just about everything that might be useful for their
adversaries. They cratered roads, burned homes, demolished factories,
poisoned wells, flooded mines, ruined crops and slaughtered livestock.
Wilson, who had more formal education than any previous U.S.
president, failed to understand how determined British Prime Minister
David Lloyd-George and French Premier Georges Clemenceau were to avenge
their grievances against Germany. Clemenceau, for instance, acknowledged
that “My life hatred has been for Germany because of what she has done
to France.” Wilson was hopelessly outmaneuvered during the postwar
negotiations, and the result was the vindictive Versailles Treaty that
had nothing to do with the Fourteen Points.
The treaty, forced on the Germans, triggered a nationalist firestorm
that enabled a lunatic like Adolf Hitler to attract thousands of
followers by promoting hatred and violence. If the United States had
stayed out of the war, quite likely it would have ended with some kind
of negotiated settlement and better long-term prospects for peace.
2. The overwhelming stresses of war can trigger economic chaos, political crises and totalitarian regimes.
As long as Woodrow Wilson was neutral during World War I, he didn’t
have any reason to care what the Russians did. But when he entered the
war, he had an incentive to keep Russia fighting on the Eastern Front.
This tied up German soldiers there. If the Russians quit the war, as
they were anxious to do, Germany would have been able to move some of
their soldiers to the Western Front, causing more trouble for the
British, French and Americans. So Wilson put pressure on the Russian
government. His policy was “No fight, no loans.” He bribed the
financially-strapped Russians.
But Russia had begun disintegrating from the day it entered the war
in August 1914. Harvard historian Richard Pipes reported that “the army
required each month a minimum of 100,000 to 150,000 new rifles, but
Russian industry at best could provide only 27,000.” Large numbers of
Russian soldiers were sent to the Eastern Front unarmed, and Russian
mothers were outraged. The government conscripted some 11 million
peasants into the army, which depopulated farms and caused chronic food
shortages. In any case, there wasn’t enough railroad capacity both to
ship soldiers to the front and ship food for the people — three-quarters
of Russian railroad lines had just one track. Massive corruption
undermined political support for the government. “There is no indication
that the dark and violent history of Russia ever occupied Wilson’s
attention,” American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan observed in
Russia Leaves The War (1956), which won a Pulitzer Prize.
By keeping Russia in the war, Wilson unintentionally accelerated the
disintegration of the Russian army. Kennan reported, “not only had
Russia become involved in a great internal political crisis, but she had
lost in the process her real ability to make war. The internal crisis
was of such gravity that there was no chance for a healthy and
constructive solution to it unless the war effort could be terminated at
once.” Staying in the war, Kennan added, “provided grist to the mill of
the agitator and the fanatic: the last people one would have wished to
encourage at such a dangerous moment.” Lenin tried to seize power three
times during the summer of 1917, but he failed even though hundreds of
thousands of Russian soldiers were deserting. Lenin didn’t succeed until
his fourth attempted coup in October 1917, when the Russian army had
virtually collapsed.
On August 23, 1939, Lenin’s successor Josef Stalin approved a pact
with Hitler, pledging (1) that Germany and the Soviet Union wouldn’t
attack each other and (2) that they would carve up Poland. “By freeing
Germany from the risk of waging war on two fronts,” noted the French
historian Stéphane Courtois, “the pact led directly to the outbreak of
World War II.” A week after the pack was approved, Hitler invaded
Poland, and the war was underway. We might have been spared all that if
Woodrow Wilson hadn’t been so anxious to have Russia continue fighting
in World War I.
3. If allies have conflicting aims, a war is likely to have conflicting outcomes.
U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill embraced Stalin as an ally after Hitler ordered the
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, even though Hitler and Stalin
had been odious allies up to that point. FDR and Churchill figured they
needed all the help they could get.
But this marriage of convenience changed the nature of World War II.
It was no longer a struggle for freedom, because Stalin ranked among
history’s worst mass murderers — approximately 42 million deaths.
Moreover, the Nazis developed concentration camps based on what they had
learned about earlier Soviet concentration camps. Rudolf Hess, who
organized Auschwitz, cited Nazi reports that “described in great detail
the conditions in, and organization of, the Soviet camps, as supplied by
former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed
on the fact that the Soviets, by their massive employment of forced
labor, had destroyed whole peoples.”
Stalin exploited more opportunities to expand his Soviet empire after
he allied with FDR and Churchill than before. Hundreds of millions of
people were liberated from the Nazis, but most were re-enslaved by
Stalin. He seized Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, generous portions of
Poland, Finland and Rumania. Moreover, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
East Germany, Hungary and Rumania became Soviet satellites.
On August 8, 1945, two days after the United States dropped an atomic
bomb on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war against Japan and
grabbed more territory. The Soviet Union conquered Manchuria, Inner
Mongolia, Sakhalin Island, the Kuriles and Korea. In addition, Stalin
helped Mao Zedong who was fighting to establish a communist regime in
China. Altogether, within five years after World War II the number of
people subject to communist oppression in Europe and Asia soared from
170 million to about 800 million.
4. A vulnerable adversary can become unbeatable if it unexpectedly gains a big ally.
At the National Press Club, January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean
Acheson gave a speech identifying nations that the United States
pledged to defend from an attack. Acheson’s “defense perimeter” notably
didn’t include South Korea. That nation, after all, had long been
embroiled in conflicts involving its neighbors China, Russia and Japan.
Then on June 25, 1950, North Korean communist dictator Kim Il Sung
attacked South Korea. North Korean soldiers crossed the 38th Parallel
and entered South Korea. President Harry Truman decided to try stopping
this communist aggression, even though South Korea was much less of an
issue than China that had already fallen to the communists the previous
year. On July 19, Truman asked Congress for $10 billion of emergency
appropriations to fund a “police action” in Korea — he didn’t want to
ask Congress for a declaration of war and risk having that defeated.
U.S. forces, led by General Douglas MacArthur, landed behind North
Korean lines at Inchon — a very bold move — and within a few weeks he
was advancing into North Korea. He did so well that Truman let him have a
substantially free hand. In late 1950, MacArthur told reporters that
the war was almost over.
He might have been wise to settle for occupying North Korea’s
capital, Pyongyang, but he pushed his luck as he continued heading north
toward the Yalu River on the Chinese border. Then came reports that
indicated South Korean soldiers were “heavily engaged with a fiercely
resisting [unidentified] enemy.” U.S. forces captured some prisoners who
turned out to be Chinese. MacArthur began to hear that Chinese
“volunteers,” as Chairman Mao called them, had crossed the border.
MacArthur commented that the situation was “not alarming.” But the
increasing number of shootouts suggested that a large number of Chinese
soldiers might be in North Korea. Then the
New York Times
reported that “Chinese Communist hordes, attacking on horse and foot to
the sound of bugle calls, cut up Americans and South Koreans in an
Indian-style massacre.”
In fact, some 300,000 Chinese soldiers had swarmed across the border
and forced MacArthur to retreat. The Chinese captured Seoul, South
Korea’s capital. Eventually MacArthur battled his way back to the 38th
Parallel, and the war became stalemated.. An armistice was signed on
June 7, 1953. U.S. armed forces had doubled to 3 million, military
spending had quadrupled, the war had cost an estimated $75 billion (real
money back then), and 54,246 American lives had been lost. Six decades
later, U.S. forces are still in South Korea.
5. Major powers can be thwarted by people who are fighting
for their homeland, know their territory well and have nowhere else to
go.
After running as a peace candidate during the 1964 election,
President Lyndon Johnson authorized the escalation of the Vietnam War.
He embraced the “domino theory” that a communist takeover in one country
like Vietnam could result in other Asian countries falling to
communists. But as noted, the biggest domino — China — had already
fallen.
President Johnson seemed to view Vietnam as if it were a social
welfare program. He declared, “Our foreign policy must always be an
extension of our domestic policy” — namely, his Great Society
entitlements. “I want to leave the footprints of America [in Vietnam]. I
want them to say, ‘This is what Americans left — schools and hospitals
and dams.’” Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey was even more
carried away by the dream of doing good in Vietnamese jungles: “We ought
to be excited about this challenge, because here’s where we can put to
work some of the ideas about... nation-building... new concepts of
education, development of local government, the improvement of health
standards... and really the achievement and fulfillment of full social
justice.”
Johnson made many mistakes besides having unrealistic expectations.
He micro-managed the war and severely restricted what military
commanders could do. His policy of gradual escalation seemed to convince
the communist North Vietnamese that the United States was a reluctant
warrior who could be defeated if they persisted long enough. Johnson and
his top brass over-estimated the American advantages of superior
weapons, especially air power.
Such policies led many observers to believe that if only the military
had been unleashed, they could have won the Vietnam War, but there are
reasons to doubt that. Vietnamese were fighting on their homeland. They
knew the jungles well, they had nowhere else to go, and their survival
was at stake. Americans didn’t know the jungles, everyone figured that
eventually we would go home, and American survival wasn’t at stake,
because the United States was more than 8,000 miles away. Moreover,
since North Vietnamese insurgents wore ordinary civilian clothing, and
they mingled among the South Vietnamese, American soldiers could never
be sure which were the people they were trying to help and which were
the enemies plotting for murder and mayhem. These are crucial advantages
that native people always have when dealing with a foreign military
presence. Such advantages go far to explain why major powers have become
bogged down in guerrilla wars.
6. People don’t want somebody else building their nation,
even when they’re making a mess of it — especially during a civil war.
In 1957, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency fixed parliamentary
elections in Lebanon. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti recalled, “the
CIA had helped elect so many pro-American candidates that the
established Arab nationalist politicians were furious, realizing that
the cheating was eroding their power base. The feud that had been
brewing between Arab nationalists and the pro-Western Christians erupted
into civil war. President Eisenhower sent in the marines. They were
withdrawn after a few months, but what had been perhaps the most stable
state in the Middle East was on the road to total polarization and
eventual disintegration.”
A quarter-century later, U.S. and French forces were in Lebanon
again. They attempted to serve as peacekeepers amidst the civil war that
raged on. In October 1983, two truck bombs struck the barracks — an
inviting stationary target. Among the dead were 58 French personnel and
241 Americans. The American death toll included three Army soldiers, 18
Navy seamen and 220 Marines. Apparently recognizing the futility of
trying to referee a civil war, President Ronald Reagan ordered that U.S.
forces be withdrawn from Lebanon.
In 1993, Bill Clinton imagined that the U.S. could build a nation in
Somalia — or as Clinton’s then-UN ambassador Madeleine Albright put it:
“nothing less than the restoration of an entire country.” The first step
was to be the disarming of warlords. Of course, they wouldn’t be
warlords without their guns, so the U.S. found itself embroiled in
another civil war. Tragically, American soldiers were killed for nothing
that involved a vital U.S. interest, certainly nothing that
well-intended intervention was capable of resolving. Clinton recognized
the futility of the intervention and withdrew U.S. forces.
The following year, however, Clinton was at it again. He ordered
20,000 U.S. soldiers to Haiti, so they could help alleviate hunger and
establish a democracy. Eight years later, Haitian poverty rates were
higher, literacy rates were lower than when the mission had begun, and
political turmoil persisted. Why was anybody surprised at the futility
of this intervention?. Since Haiti gained independence in 1804,
Historians Robert Debs Heinl, Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl described it as
“a country with nearly 200 revolutions, coups, insurrections and civil
wars.”
After 9/11, President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces into
Afghanistan to destroy the camps where al-Qaeda terrorists were trained.
This mission became a decade-long (and counting) nation-building
project. Now, although almost 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died there and
hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent fighting, Afghans
continue to grow opium, stone women and engage in bloody power
struggles. One might have thought that our sacrifices would have at
least bought a loyal ally. But Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared
his country would side with Pakistan in the event of a conflict with the
United States. The British weren’t able to reform Afghanistan, nor
could the Russians, and it’s doubtful whether we’ll be able to do any
better.
Clearly, if government intervention cannot save relatively small
nations like Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti or Afghanistan, there’s no reason
to believe the world can be saved by having our government spend more
money and order more American soldiers into harm’s way. Washington would
do well if it could save itself from bankruptcy as a result of runaway
spending and debt.
What people everywhere need is more freedom and free markets. We
can’t force these things on others, but we can reverse anti-business
policies that have throttled the American economy. When America becomes a
dynamo again, more people overseas will find it in their self-interest
to adopt the kinds of policies that work for us, much as millions of
people embraced English as a principal language of business, science,
technology and popular culture.
We need less foreign intervention, not more, to avoid gratuitously
making enemies and contributing to difficult situations like we face
with Iran now. This means restraining the government sector — the sector
of bellicose rhetoric, seizures, embargoes, blockades, sanctions and
wars. We need to encourage more voluntary, people-to-people
international relations by businesses and nonprofits as well as
individuals. Government can help do this by reducing restrictions on the
movement of people, goods and capital.
Meanwhile, we need to be vigilant about maintaining a strong national
defense that can protect us against aggression and perhaps more
important, a strong national defense that can convincingly deter
aggression. Deterrence is probably our best bet with Iran as it proved
to be with the Soviet Union and China. Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher paid Ronald Reagan a supreme compliment when she declared that
“He won the cold war without firing a shot.”
