Why Nations Go to War: Causes and Outcomes | Stoessinger PDF

10 ✵ Why Nations Go to War The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart One must imagine Sisyphus happy. ALBERT CAMUS, “THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS” f you look...

10 ✵ Why Nations Go to War The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart One must imagine Sisyphus happy. ALBERT CAMUS, “THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS” f you look too deeply into the abyss,’’ said Nietzsche, “the “I abyss will look into you.” The nature of war in our time is so terrible that the first temptation is to recoil. Who of us has not concluded that the entire spectacle of war has been the manifesta- tion of organized insanity? Who has not been tempted to dismiss the efforts of those working for peace as futile Sisyphean labor? The face of war, Medusa-like with its relentless horror, threatens to destroy anyone who confronts it. Yet we must find the courage to brave the abyss. I believe deeply that war is a sickness, though it may be humanity’s “sick- ness unto death.” No murderous epidemic has ever been con- quered by avoiding exposure, pain, and danger, or by ignoring the bacilli. Human reason and courage have frequently prevailed, and even the plague was overcome; the Black Death that ravaged our planet centuries ago is today but a distant memory. I know that the analogy between sickness and war is open to criticism. It has been fashionable to assert that war is not an illness but, like aggression, an ineradicable part of human nature. I challenge 396 Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 397 this assumption. Whereas aggression may be inherent, war is learned behavior and as such can be unlearned and ultimately selected out entirely. Humans have overcome other habits that previously had seemed unconquerable. For example, during the Ice Age, when people lived among small, isolated populations, incest was perfectly acceptable, whereas today incest is almost universally taboo. Cannibalism provides an even more dramatic case. Thousands of years ago, human beings ate one another and drank one another’s blood. That, too, was part of “human nature.” Little more than a century ago, millions of Americans believed that God had ordained white people to be free and black people to be slaves. Why else would He have created them in different colors? Yet slavery, once considered part of hu- man nature, was abolished because human beings showed capac- ity for growth. Growth came slowly, after immense suffering, but it did come. Human nature had been changed. Like slavery and cannibalism, war too can be eliminated from humanity’s arsenal of horrors. It does appear, however, that people abandon their bad habits only when catastrophe is close at hand. Intellect alone is not en- ough. We must be shaken, almost shattered, before we change, just as a grave illness must pass its crisis before it is known whether the patient will live or die. Most appropriately, the ancient Chinese had two characters for crisis, one connoting danger and the other, opportunity. The danger of extinction is upon us, but so is the opportunity for a better life for all people on the planet. We must, therefore, find a way to confront Medusa and to diagnose the sickness. Diagnosis is no cure, but it is a necessary first step. To begin with, the dawn of the twenty-first century coin- cided with two sea changes in the nature of war. First, September 11, 2001, demonstrated that nineteen fanatical terrorists armed with hijacked passenger planes could inflict serious damage on the world’s only remaining superpower. In the wake of that horrible event, al-Qaida cells, lurking in the shadows, have continued to target victims in countries all over the world, including Morocco, Indonesia, Kenya, Spain, England, and even the United States. Twentieth-century wars, on the whole, had fairly clear-cut beginnings Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 398 CHAPTER 10 and endings. The war against terrorism, by contrast, has ignored national boundaries and will end only on some distant day when ordinary people, going about their daily business, lose their fear of another September 11. The second sea change occurred when President George W. Bush decided to go to war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by invok- ing the doctrine of preemption, or first strike. This decision flo- wed from the president’s conviction that “to wait for America’s foes to strike first [was] not self-defense, it [was] suicide.” In Osama bin Laden’s case, the new doctrine made eminent sense, as it would be fatal to wait for a suicide bomber to complete his murderous mission. But in the case of Saddam Hussein, the doc- trine was widely criticized because the Iraqi leader, despite his brutality toward his own people, did not pose a direct and immi- nent threat to the United States. Bush chose to overturn more than 200 years of American foreign policy on a dubious assump- tion. Be that as it may, the new century ushered in two new kinds of armed conflict: an apparently endless war against men and women who hated so passionately that they would welcome death to achieve their ends; and a preemptive war against an evil tyrant who murdered his own people and was perceived as a threat by a superpower intent on replacing him with a democratic government. Let us now proceed to the major findings of my research for this book. THE DETERMINANTS OF WAR The first general theme that compels attention is that no nation that began a major war in the twentieth century emerged a winner. Austria-Hungary and Germany, which precipitated World War I, went down to ignominious defeat. Hitler’s Germany was crushed into uncondi- tional surrender. The North Korean attack was thwarted by collec- tive action and ended in a draw. Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam war to more than 500,000 American troops because he did not want to be the first American president to lose a war, whereupon he lost it anyway, and paid for it with more than Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 399 58,000 American lives. The Arabs, who invaded the new Jewish state in 1948, lost territory to the Israelis in four successive wars. Pakistan, which sought to punish India through preemptive war, was dismembered in the process. Iraq, which invaded Iran in 1980 confident of a quick victory, had to settle for a costly stalemate eight years and half a million casualties later. And when Saddam provoked most of the world by invading Kuwait in 1990, he was expelled by UN forces. Slobodan Milosevic, whose henchmen “cleansed” much of Bosnia of Croats and Moslems in the pursuit of a Greater Serbia, was forced to give back most of his conquests. And his “final solution” for the Albanians in Kosovo was nullified by an aroused NATO, which was repelled by barbarisms similar to those of the Nazi era. Hitler ended his own life, but Milosevic ended his in a jail cell. In all cases, those who began a war took a beating. Neither the nature nor the ideology of the government that began hostili- ties made any difference. Aggressors were defeated whether they were capitalists or Communists, white or nonwhite, Western or non-Western, rich or poor. Twentieth-century aggressors fought for total stakes and hence made war a question of survival for their intended conquests. Those who were attacked had to fight for life itself, and courage born of desperation proved a formidable weapon. In the end, those who started the war were stemmed, turned back, and, in some cases, crushed completely. In no case did any nation that began a war achieve its ends. It is not premature to draw some conclusions about the two wars that have made the dawn of the new century a watershed. First, none of us will ever be the same again after September 11, 2001. We now know that everything is possible, even the un- thinkable. Even though there has not been another 9/11, there can be no real closure to that barbarous event as long as its perpe- trator, Osama bin Laden, is alive or evades justice. In the mean- time, the shadowy struggle against unseen enemies in every part of the globe must continue unabated. The failed attempt, on Christmas Day 2009, by a Nigerian terrorist who was hiding an explosive in his underwear, to blow up a plane carrying 289 other people, is a case in point. It would be facile to assert that George W. Bush won his war against Saddam. To be sure, there was a swift military victory after three weeks. However, Saddam was missing, and marauding Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 400 CHAPTER 10 guerrilla bands still loyal to him killed more American soldiers after the war than during the war itself. The oft-repeated state- ments made by the Bush administration that the war’s outcome was not in doubt certainly did not reflect conditions three months after its official end, which Bush had declared on May 1, 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. On July 3, a day when ten more American soldiers were wounded in three separate guerrilla attacks, the commander of allied forces in Iraq declared that “we’re still at war,” and the United States announced a re- ward of $25 million for the capture of Saddam Hussein or confir- mation of his death, plus $15 million for each of his two sons. “Until we know for sure, their names will continue to cast a shadow of fear over this country,” Paul Bremer, the American civil administrator of Iraq, declared.1 When Saddam’s two sons were killed in a fierce firefight by U.S. troops, their funerals were attended by Iraqis shouting anti-American slogans. And, at Fort Stewart, Georgia, a colonel had to be escorted out of a meet- ing with 800 angry wives who wanted their husbands to come home. In August, there was the disastrous attack on the headquar- ters of the United Nations in Baghdad, claiming twenty-one lives including that of a top UN official. Moreover, November ush- ered in a quantum leap in violence when five U.S. helicopters were shot down, killing fifty-five GIs. Nineteen Italian soldiers, seven Spanish intelligence agents, and several Japanese and South Koreans were killed as well. The November total of coalition casualties approached the 100 mark. The capture of Saddam on December 13 by American soldiers was no doubt the best day for the United States since the outbreak of the war. The president, who regarded Iraq as the central front against terrorism, lauded the event as a major victory. In mid-2004 the Bush administration decided to turn over sovereignty to an Iraqi provisional government and to postpone drafting a constitution and holding national elections until January 2005. Moreover, the Americans embarked on tough new tactics including aerial bombardments, the erection of barriers, deten- tions, and razings that echoed Israel’s antiguerrilla methods. Yet the insurgency continued to rise steadily to a seething fury. “I see no difference between us and the Palestinians,” an Iraqi man com- plained while waiting to pass through an American checkpoint. “We didn’t expect anything like this after Saddam fell.”2 Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 401 The steady escalation of insurgency attacks during the months, and then years, of the “war after the war” clearly denied the Americans the victory they had announced with such confidence when Saddam’s statue was toppled from its pedestal in Baghdad. The facts suggest that Saddam’s capture was a significant suc- cess, but by no means a decisive victory. Americans continued to die in Iraq in ever rising numbers, surpassing the 4,000 mark by 2009. Gradually, the Americans were forced not only to battle a fierce insurgency but to keep Sunnis and Shiites from murdering each other in a desperate civil war. Victory seemed more and more like a mirage. Instead, by June 30, 2009, the date of Ameri- can troop withdrawals, the number of Iraqi victims of suicide bombers had risen to frightening proportions. With regard to the problem of the outbreak of war, the case studies indicate the crucial importance of the personalities of leaders. I am less impressed by the role of abstract forces, such as nationalism, mili- tarism, or alliance systems, which traditionally have been regarded as the causes of war. Nor does a single one of the cases examined here indicate that economic factors played a vital part in precipi- tating war. The personalities of leaders, on the other hand, have often been decisive. Conventional wisdom has blamed the alliance system for the outbreak of World War I and the spread of the war. Specifically, the argument runs, Kaiser Wilhelm’s alliance with Austria dragged Germany into the war against the Allied powers. This analysis, however, totally ignores the part the Kaiser’s person- ality played during the gathering crisis. Suppose Wilhelm had had the fortitude to continue in his role as mediator and restrain Austria-Hungary instead of engaging in paranoid delusions and accusing England of conspiring against Germany? The disaster might have been averted; conventional wisdom would then have praised the alliance system for saving the peace instead of blaming it for causing the war. In truth, the emotional balance or lack of balance of the German Kaiser turned out to be crucial. Similarly, the relentless mediocrity of the leading personalities on all sides no doubt contributed to the disaster. If one looks at the outbreak of World War II, there is no doubt that the financial burden of the victors’ peace terms at Ver- sailles after World War I and the galloping inflation of the 1920s brought about the rise of Nazi Germany. But once again, it was the personality of Hitler that was decisive. A more rational leader Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 402 CHAPTER 10 would have consolidated his gains and certainly would not have attacked the Soviet Union. And if it had to be attacked, then a rational man would have made contingency plans to meet the Russian winter instead of anticipating a swift victory. In the Korean War the hubris of General MacArthur probably prolonged the conflict by two years, and in Vietnam at least two American presidents, whose fragile egos would not allow them to face facts, first escalated the war quite disproportionately and then postponed its ending quite unreasonably. In the Middle East the volatile personality of Gamal Abdel Nasser was primarily responsi- ble for the closing of the Gulf of Aqaba, the event that precipitated the Six-Day War of 1967. In 1971 Yahya Khan, the leader of West Pakistan, took his country to war with India because he would not be cowed by a woman, Indira Gandhi. In 1980, and again in 1990, Saddam Hussein made a personal decision to begin a war. Around the same time, Slobodan Milosevic, driven by per- sonal ambition to become the leader of a Greater Serbia, launched his expansionary moves into neighboring Croatia and Bosnia, and finally, disastrously for him, into Kosovo. There is no doubt that Osama bin Laden’s personality and his fanatical hatred of America inspired the nineteen terrorists who perpetrated the heinous deeds of September 11, 2001. If ever there was a quintessential fanatic, it certainly was the man who organized al-Qaida in the wastelands of Afghanistan. George W. Bush’s road from Afghanistan to Iraq was paved by gradual steps toward the crusading end of the personality spec- trum: First, his evangelical conversion predisposed him toward a Manichean, good-versus-evil worldview; second, the influence of neo-conservative intellectuals reinforced that worldview; third, bin Laden’s slipping from his grasp frustrated him; and last, Saddam Hussein’s attempt to assassinate his father triggered a personal grudge. All of these factors culminated in a fixation on Saddam, until Bush was convinced his tyrannical and dangerous presence had to be removed, peacefully if possible but by force of arms if necessary. In all these cases, a leader’s personality was of critical impor- tance and may, in fact, have spelled the difference between the outbreak of war and the maintenance of peace. The case material reveals that perhaps the most important single pre- cipitating factor in the outbreak of war is misperception. Such distortion Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 403 may manifest itself in four different ways: in a leader’s image of himself; in a leader’s view of his adversary’s character; in a leader’s view of his adversary’s intentions toward himself; and finally, in a leader’s view of his adversary’s capabilities and power. Each of these is important enough to merit separate and careful treatment. 1. There is remarkable consistency in the self-images of most national leaders on the brink of war. Each confidently expects victory after a brief and triumphant campaign. Doubt about the outcome is the voice of the enemy and therefore unac- ceptable. This recurring optimism is not to be dismissed lightly by the historian as an ironic example of human folly. It as- sumes a powerful emotional momentum of its own and thus itself becomes one of the causes of war. Anything that fuels such optimism about a quick and decisive victory makes war more likely, and anything that dampens it facilitates peace. This common belief in a short, decisive war is usually the over- flow from a reservoir of self-delusions held by a leader about both himself and his nation. The Kaiser’s appearance in shining armor in August 1914 and his promise to the German nation that its sons would be back home “before the leaves had fallen from the trees” was matched by similar expressions of military splendor and over- confidence in Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the other nations on the brink of war. Hitler’s confidence in an early German victory over the Soviet Union was so unshakable that no winter uniforms were issued to the Wehrmacht’s soldiers and no preparations what- soever were made for the onset of the Russian winter. In November 1941, when the mud of autumn turned to ice and snow, the cold became the German soldier’s bitterest enemy. Tormented by arctic temperatures, men died, machines broke down, and the quest for warmth all but eclipsed the quest for victory. Hitler’s hopes and delusions about the German “master race” were shattered in the frozen wastes of the Soviet Union. The fact that Hitler had fought in World War I and had seen Germany’s optimism crumble in defeat did not prevent its reappearance. When North Korea invaded South Korea, its leadership ex- pected victory within two months. The Anglo-French campaign at Suez in 1956 was spurred by the expectation of a swift victory. In Pakistan Yahya Khan hoped to teach Indira Gandhi a lesson modeled on the Six-Day War in Israel. In Vietnam every Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 404 CHAPTER 10 American escalation in the air or on the ground was an expression of the hope that a few more bombs, a few more troops, would bring decisive victory. Saddam Hussein expected a quick victory over Iran but got instead a bloody stalemate. Ten years later, he once again expected an easy triumph, this time over Kuwait, but instead provoked the world’s wrath and took a severe beating. In Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic’s belief that destiny had chosen him to be the leader of a Greater Serbia nourished his conviction that he was invincible. He did gain much ground early in the war, but later was forced to give it back even more quickly. Israel’s swift victories in its wars against four Arab nations made its military leadership confident of a quick and decisive victory over Hezbol- lah in 2006. Instead, its army was fought to a standstill by a deter- mined guerrilla force. Finally, the Americans were so confident of victory in Iraq that they failed to prepare adequately for postwar reconstruction. The resulting power vacuum invited a fierce insur- gency that nullified the Americans’ early successes. Indeed, coali- tion casualties rose to ever greater heights. In the fall of 2006, when the facts on the ground clearly precluded victory, President Bush still promised it in ringing tones, but his successor’s only choice remained a gradual withdrawal. Leaders on all sides typically harbor self-delusions on the eve of war. Only war itself provides the stinging ice of reality and ultimately helps to restore a measure of perspective in the leader- ship, and the price for recapturing reality is high indeed. It is un- likely that there ever was a war that fulfilled the initial hopes and expectations of both sides. 2. Distorted views of the adversary’s character also help to pre- cipitate a conflict. As the pressure mounted in July 1914, the German Kaiser explosively admitted that he “hated the Slavs, even though one should not hate anyone.” This hatred no doubt influenced his decision to vacate his role as mediator and to prepare for war. Similarly, his naïve trust in the honesty of the Austrian leaders prompted him to extend to them the blank-check guarantee that dragged him into war. In reality the Austrians were more deceitful than he thought, and the Rus- sians were more honest. Worst of all, the British leadership, which worked so desperately to avert a general war, was seen by Wilhelm as the center of a monstrous plot to encircle and Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 405 destroy the German nation. Hitler, too, had no conception of what the Soviet Union really was like. He knew nothing of its history and believed that it was populated by subhuman bar- barians who could be crushed with one decisive stroke and then made to serve as German supermen’s slaves. This relentless hatred and ignorant contempt for the Soviet Union became a crucial factor in Hitler’s ill-fated assault of 1941. Perhaps the most important reason for the American military intervention in Vietnam was the American leadership’s misreading of the nature of Communism in Asia. President Lyndon Johnson committed more than half a million combat troops to an Asian land war because he believed that Communism was still a mono- lithic octopus, with North Vietnam its tentacle. He did this more than a decade after the death of Stalin, at a time when Commu- nism had splintered into numerous ideological and political frag- ments. His total ignorance of Asia in general, and of Vietnam in particular, made him perceive the Vietnam war in purely Western terms: a colossal shoot-out between the forces of Communism and those of anti-Communism. The fact that Ho Chi Minh saw Americans as successors of French imperialism—whom he was de- termined to drive out—was completely lost on Johnson. Virtue, righteousness, and justice, so Johnson thought, were fully on his side. America, the child of light, had to defeat the child of darkness in a twentieth-century crusade. Mutual contempt and hatred also hastened the outbreak of the wars between the Arab states and Israel and between India and Pakistan. In the former case, the Arab view of Israel as an alien and hostile presence was a precipitating cause of conflict. In the latter, the two religions of Hinduism and Islam led directly to the creation of two hostile states that clashed in bloody conflict four times in half a century. Saddam Hussein’s contempt for the Americans and his boast that he would annihilate them in the “mother of all battles” led straight to his defeat. Milosevic’s dis- torted perception of the Turkish victory over the Serbs at Kosovo in 1389 prompted him to turn his fury against the Moslem Alba- nians in Kosovo 600 years later. In January 2002, President Bush designated Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as members of an “evil axis.” Iran and Iraq responded by fanning the fires of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, and North Korea regarded Bush’s statement as a declaration of war. Yet Bush’s primary target clearly was Saddam Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 406 CHAPTER 10 Hussein. Although the Bush administration liked to compare him to Hitler and Stalin, the Iraqi dictator’s reach was never global, unlike that of his two predecessors. Besides, the man who had precipitated 9/11 and murdered 3,000 civilians continued to re- main at large. And Bush unwisely diverted resources from the real criminal, bin Laden, to Saddam. 3. When a leader on the brink of war believes that his adversary will attack him, the chances of war are fairly high. When both leaders share this perception about each other’s intent, war becomes a virtual certainty. The mechanism of the self- fulfilling prophecy is then set in motion. When leaders attri- bute evil designs to their adversaries, and they nurture these beliefs for long enough, they will eventually be proved right. The mobilization measures that preceded the outbreak of World War I were essentially defensive measures triggered by the fear of the other side’s intent. The Russian czar mobilized because he feared an Austrian attack; the German Kaiser mobilized because he feared the Russian “steamroller.” The nightmare of each then became a terrible reality. Stalin was so constrained by the Marxist tenet that capitalists would always lie that he disbelieved Churchill’s accurate warnings about Hitler’s murderous intent, and the Soviet Union almost lost the war. Eisenhower and Dulles were so thoroughly con- vinced that the Chinese would move against the French in Indochina, as they had against MacArthur’s UN forces, that they committed the first American military advisers to Viet- nam. The Chinese never intervened, but the Americans had begun their march along the road into the Vietnam quagmire. Arabs and Israelis generally expected nothing but the worst from one another, and these expectations often led to war. The Palestinians’ conviction that Israel intended to hold on to the occupied territories forever precipitated two intifadas and countless suicide bombings that in turn prompted Israeli re- taliatory attacks—a cycle of ferocity unprecedented even in that tortured region. And Milosevic’s belief at Kosovo that the Albanians were out to oust the Serbs launched his subjugation of other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, especially the Albanians. It was in this area—a leader’s view of his adversary’s intention— that the Americans found the fundamental basis for going to war Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 407 with Iraq. For the Bush administration, the invasion’s core rationale was the suspected existence of hidden arsenals of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, including chemical and biological agents and possibly even nuclear weapons that, if real, posed a direct and im- minent danger to the United States. “I will disarm Saddam,” the president declared repeatedly. This perception persisted despite numerous reports from UN inspectors that struck a far more cautionary note. Finally, when Saddam began to destroy some of his conventional missiles, Bush changed his goal from disarmament to regime change. His fixation had solidified into a determination to rid the world of Saddam, no matter what. After the war, when no weapons of mass destruction were found anywhere in Iraq, the Bush administration, despite accumu- lating evidence that it had selected only those intelligence reports that supported its view of Saddam and rejected all that cast doubt on Saddam’s weapons caches, clung to its assumptions that “we will find them.” Even when, in October 2003, six months after the beginning of the war, David Kay, the United States’s chief weapons inspector, informed Congress that no illicit weapons had been found, but suggested that the search be continued, the Bush admin- istration requested $600 million to carry on the hunt for conclusive evidence. Yet, in January 2004, Mr. Kay, who had decided to re- tire, announced that he had concluded that Iraq did not possess any large stockpiles of illicit weapons at the start of the war in 2003. The UN inspectors, whose reports on weapons of mass destruction turned out, after the war, to be quite accurate, were belittled and denied access to postwar Iraq by the Americans. And, finally, in 2006, Paul Pillar, CIA’s National Intelligence Officer for the Near East from 2000 to 2005, declared that the Bush administration had misused intelligence to justify decisions already made in Iraq. Regarding the alleged ties between Saddam and bin Laden, when no definitive proof of any such link was ever found—when in fact it was emphatically denied by captured al-Qaida operatives— the administration remained adamant that such a conspiracy had ex- isted. It did finally admit that there was no evidence that Saddam had been involved in the attacks of 9/11. So far as the presence of al- Qaida in Iraq was concerned, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy when that nation, during the U.S.-led occupation, became a magnet for terrorists under al-Qaida’s barbaric Abu al-Zarqawi. Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 408 CHAPTER 10 There may be fine lines of distinction between a mispercep- tion, an exaggeration, and an outright lie. But it must be asserted that the decision to go to war is the most solemn one a president can make and therefore must be made on the basis of all the avail- able evidence, not those parts only that fit the doctrine of a cru- sader. Yet, to persuade the American people to go to war on the basis of Saddam’s evil character alone might not have been enough. The direct threat of lethal weapons had to be added to make the case convincing. It was here that truth became a casualty. When it came to describing Saddam’s weapons program, Bush never hedged before the war. “If we know Saddam has dangerous weapons today—and we do—does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and de- velops even more dangerous weapons?” Bush asked during a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002.3 After the war, however, when no such weapons were actually found, the president shifted his emphasis from the immediacy of the threat to the assertion that, no matter what, the world was better off without Saddam Hussein in power. When pressed on the topic by Diane Sawyer of ABC News on December 16, with Saddam already in Ameri- can custody, the president responded sharply: “So, what’s the dif- ference?” he asked rhetorically.4 The answer, I believe, is as follows: “With respect, Mr. Presi- dent, mote than 4,000 American casualties and more than 40,000 American wounded, numerous other coalition casualties, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties for each year of the war, and enormous sums of money that the United States can ill afford. That’s the difference.” This point was underlined by Barton Gellman of the Washington Post on January 7, 2004. Based on numerous interviews with leading Iraqi scientists, he concluded that Iraq’s unconventional weapons arsenal existed “only on paper.” Investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ- warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen—combining pox virus and snake venom— that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 409 months. The investigators decided that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a “grave and gathering danger” by President Bush and a “mortal threat” by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by UN inspectors in the 1990s.5 4. A leader’s misperception of his adversary’s power is perhaps the quintessential cause of war. It is vital to remember, how- ever, that it is not the actual distribution of power that pre- cipitates a war; it is the way in which a leader thinks that power is distributed. A war will start when nations disagree over their perceived strength. The war itself then becomes a dispute over measurement. Reality is gradually restored as war itself cures war; the fighting will end when nations form a more realistic perception of each other’s strength. Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914 had nothing but con- tempt for Russia’s power. This disrespect was to cost them dearly. Hitler repeated this mistake a generation later, and his mispercep- tion led straight to his destruction. One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon took place in the Korean War. MacArthur, dur- ing his advance through North Korea toward the Chinese border, stubbornly believed that the Chinese Communists did not have the capability to intervene. When the Chinese crossed the Yalu River into North Korea, MacArthur clung to the belief that he was facing 40,000 men; the true figure was closer to 200,000. When the Chinese forces temporarily withdrew after an initial en- gagement to assess their impact on MacArthur’s army, the Ameri- can general assumed that the Chinese were badly in need of rest after their encounter with superior Western military might. When the Chinese attacked again and drove MacArthur all the way back to South Korea, the leader of the UN forces perceived this action as a “piece of treachery worse even than Pearl Harbor.” Most amazing about MacArthur’s decisions is that the real facts were en- tirely available from his own intelligence sources, if only the general had cared to look at them. But he thought he knew better and thus prolonged the war by two more years. Only at war’s end did the Americans gain respect for China’s power and take care not to pro- voke the Chinese again beyond the point of no return. Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 410 CHAPTER 10 Despite the lessons of Korea, in the Vietnam War the Ameri- can leadership committed precisely the same error vis-à-vis North Vietnam. Five successive presidents believed that Ho Chi Minh would collapse if only a little more military pressure was brought to bear on him, either from the air or on the ground. The North Vietnamese leader proved them all mistaken, and only when America admitted that North Vietnam could not be beaten did the war come to an end. In both Korea and Vietnam the price of reality was high indeed. As these wars resolved less and less, they tended to cost more and more in blood and money. The number of dead on all sides bore mute testimony to the fact that America had to fight two of the most terrible and divisive wars in her entire history before she gained respect for the realities of power on the other side. In Pakistan, Yahya Khan had to find out to his detri- ment that a woman for whom he had nothing but disdain was better schooled in the art of war than he, did not permit her wishes to dominate her thoughts, and was able finally to dismember Pakistan. Only a quarter century later, when both India and Pakistan went nuclear, did these two nations regard each other with respect and gradually developed their own regional balance of power. In 1948 the Arabs believed that an invasion by five Arab armies would quickly put an end to Israel. They were mistaken. But in 1973 Israel, encouraged to the point of hubris after three success- ful wars, viewed Arab power only with contempt and its own power as unassailable. That too was wrong, as Israel had to learn when, a decade later, Palestinian suicide bombers drove the Israe- lis to despair with a campaign of terror. In the Persian Gulf, the invading Iraqis were amazed at the “fanatical zeal” of the Iranians, whom they had underestimated. In 1991 Saddam Hussein’s belief that the Americans were too weak and cowardly to expel him from Kuwait led straight to his defeat. And again, in 2003, Saddam remained convinced that the Americans would be too fearful to attack him. The Bosnian Serbs’ contemptuous prediction that they would drown the Moslems and the Croats in the ocean came back to haunt them when they were put to flight by their intended vic- tims. And, like Saddam before him, Milosevic’s conviction that NATO was too passive and divided to intervene in the former Yu- goslavia led directly to his own surrender in Kosovo. Finally, the Americans underestimated Iraqi resistance in 2003, not during the war itself, but afterwards when, to their dismay, Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 411 tenacious guerrilla movements claimed a growing number of American lives. “Bring ’em on,” Bush exclaimed in growing frus- tration, but the casualties kept rising nonetheless. This realization forced allied military commanders to admit that the war was far from over. In the case of North Korea, by contrast, Bush, despite his “loath- ing” for Kim Jong Il, had an accurate perception of North Korea’s military capabilities.6 Kim’s nuclear weapons and his 1-million-man standing army no doubt helped deter the American president from a preemptive strike on North Korea à la Iraq. Thus, misperception hastens war, while recognition of reality tends to avert it. Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 constituted a classic example of each combatant misperceiving the other’s power. Israel underestimated the guerrilla army’s tenacity and was shocked when it was fought to a standstill after the longest war in Israel’s history. Hezbollah, and Hamas in turn, were shocked that the kid- napping of one or two Israeli soldiers would trigger such ferocious responses. Hence, on the eve of each war, at least one nation misperceives an- other’s power. In that sense, the beginning of each war is an acci- dent. The war itself then slowly, and in agony, reveals the true strength of each opponent. Peace is made when reality has won. The outbreak of war and the coming of peace are separated by a road that leads from misperception to reality. The most tragic as- pect of this truth is that war itself has remained the best teacher of reality and thus has been the most effective cure for war. HEART OF DARKNESS: RWANDA AND DARFUR Ours is still a far from peaceful world. September 11, 2001, is embedded in the collective memory of our generation, and George W. Bush’s war with Iraq will echo through history for decades. But there are other wars on a horrendous scale that threaten humanity’s future and must not be ignored. Two of these took place in Africa and involved horrible massacres on an almost unimaginable scale. Both were described as genocide by the United Nations, yet they were slow to arouse effective action by Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 412 CHAPTER 10 the international community because neither affected the strategic interests of the great powers. They occurred in Rwanda in 1994 and in Sudan ten years later. The genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 caused the violent death of almost 1 million people. Yet, during my research, I was confronted by a frustrating information gap. With the exception of a shattering report by American journalist Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, and Alan J. Kuperman’s article, “Rwanda in Retrospect,” in Foreign Affairs’s January/February 2000 issue, there were few objective sources on which I could rely. Yet the following truth had become clear: This was not a war between two hostile African tribes; it was the massacre of close to a million Tutsi in the spring of 1994 by Hutu extremists. In Kuperman’s words, it was “the fastest genocide in recorded history,” and it was genocide by stealth.7 Gourevitch’s preface is worth quoting at length: Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994, a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at a dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.8 The reason? More than a hundred years ago, German and then Belgian colonizers had elevated the Tutsi tribe to leadership posi- tions in their colony, apparently because the Tutsi were taller and of lighter color than the Hutu. The genocide of 1994 was the Hutus’ ultimate revenge after decades of Tutsi oppression. Tens of thou- sands of Tutsi were found with their hands and feet chopped off by machetes, the Hutus’ way to “cut the tall people down to size.” By the time the Western world learned of the Rwandan di- saster, most of the intended victims were dead. Neither President Clinton nor UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 413 aware of the true dimensions of the slaughter. Both Kofi Annan, Boutros-Ghali’s successor, and Clinton apologized in 1998 for their ignorance, if not their indifference. It appears that by the millennium a consensus had been reached that international intervention was justified in cases of aggression by one country against another—as with Iraq in Kuwait—and in cases of genocide by dictators against their own peoples—like Milosevic in Kosovo. But this understanding is not all-encompassing. It does not as yet include the continent of Africa, which still seems to evoke Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Western minds. Per- haps it was this indifference that the Hutu counted on in the pursuit of their genocidal goals. Kuperman concludes that more UN forces deployed prior to the genocide could have deterred the killing.9 But such a deployment would have presupposed a collective will, and it was precisely that will that was absent. In December 2003, almost a decade after the massacre, a United Nations Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, convicted three Rwandans of genocide and crimes against humanity for using radio stations and newspapers to mobilize the Hutus against the Tutsis and to lure the victims to killing grounds where they were exterminated. The panel of three African judges, drawing a legal boundary between free speech and criminal incitement, meted out two life sentences and one twenty-seven-year prison sentence. “There is a wide range for free expression,” the court declared, “but when you pour gasoline on the flames, that’s when you cross the lines into unprotected expression.” Prosecu- tors called the verdict a historic victory.10 One man did light a candle in this pervasive darkness. A hotel manager in Kilgali, Paul Rusesagabina, shielded about 1,200 terrified Tutsis from the murderous wrath of the Hutus. He did this by calmly informing them that their intended victims were paying guests in his hotel and that any harm done to them would have serious con- sequences for their would-be murderers. Through a combination of bluff, cajolery, and bribery, he talked the Hutus out of killing his Tutsi wards, putting his own life on the line several times in the process. Like Oskar Schindler half a century earlier during the Nazi Holocaust, Paul Rusesagabina, an ordinary businessman, showed a courage so extraordinary that his name will never be forgotten. Peace came too late for Rwanda. The genocide had run its course, and justice, too, was tardy. To be truly humanitarian, Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 414 CHAPTER 10 justice must be colorblind. Unless determined international action truly embraces Africa, as it did in Kosovo, hope itself may become genocide’s ultimate victim. After the Rwandan genocide, numerous statesmen the world over pledged that such a catastrophe would not be allowed to hap- pen again, and yet it did, this time in the Darfur region of western Sudan. As in Rwanda, race and greed were the driving forces. In 2003 the government of Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, began to encourage and finance nomadic Arab tribesmen to get rid of the blacks in the region. The Janjaweed, as the nomads were called, embarked on a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the “black slaves.” They would ride on horseback into hundreds of villages, rape and kill their victims, loot at will, and then burn their huts, still occupied by little children. Over a three-year period, at least 200,000 Africans were killed by the militias, and at least 2 mil- lion fled for their lives, becoming refugees in their own land. The Janjaweed women, known as Hakima, would break into song to cheer on their warriors: “The blood of the blacks runs like water, we chase them away and our cattle will be in their land. The power of al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs, and we will kill you until the end, you blacks!” It was Hitler’s Lebensraum all over again, this time applied by Arabs against blacks in Africa. The victims of Janjaweed brutality found themselves at the mercy of thousands of humanitarian workers who mustered the courage to expose themselves not only to the harsh desert terrain of western Sudan but also to the wrath of the killers. Foremost among these unsung heroes were the men and women leading UN relief and refugee agencies and Doctors without Borders. When the ferocious Janjaweed chased another 200,000 blacks from Sudan into neighboring Chad, the humanitarian workers were overwhelmed. The UN’s World Food Program, which had accepted responsibility for feeding more than 2 million refugees, was forced to cut food rations in half. The response by the world to this catastrophe was tepid to begin with. The African Union dispatched 7,000 peacekeepers to the area; they were completely overwhelmed. Clearly, a more massive effort was essential. President Bush, who now described the carnage as genocide, recommended a more robust UN mission of at least 20,000 peacekeepers. Although the UN concurred in describing the Darfur situation as genocide, actual dispatch of the Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 415 peacekeepers was stalled due to maneuvers by member states such as China that needed access to Sudanese oil. As time went on, Sudanese president al-Bashir began to in- vent new reasons why the UN peacekeepers should not be al- lowed on Sudanese soil. He blamed “Jewish organizations” for promoting UN involvement and, despite clear evidence to the contrary, insisted that the 7,000 African Union soldiers were quite capable of enforcing the peace. If they proved insufficient, al- Bashir maintained, his government would quell the unrest itself. Since he ran the very government that had unleashed the Janja- weed against the Blacks in the first place, that offer seemed absurd. As prospects for rescue grew dimmer, disease and hunger took their toll. It was not bullets that killed most people in the refugee camps now. It was pneumonia borne on desert dust, diarrhea caused by dirty water, and malaria carried by mosquitoes to straw huts with no nets. “The world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” as the United Nations described Darfur, had become a killer without mercy. To make matters even worse, the humanitarian aid workers themselves became victims of the growing violence. According to the United Nations, more aid workers had been killed during the month of July 2006 than in the previous three years of conflict in Darfur. On August 31, after an acrimonious debate, the UN Security Council authorized the creation of a peacekeeping operation un- der Chapter VII of the UN’s charter, consisting of a military force of up to 17,300 troops and a civilian police force of 3,300. This new body would replace or absorb the 7,000-member African Union force whose mandate was to expire at the end of Septem- ber. The problem of obtaining Sudanese consent seemed insuper- able, however, since President Bashir let it be known that he would not grant it. As a result, Russia, China, and Qatar, the only Arab member on the Council, chose to abstain. China’s am- bassador said that the resolution would make the violence in Dar- fur even worse. Finally the only way to get the resolution passed was to have it “invite” Sudan’s consent, not to require it. On September 19, the African Union members met in emer- gency session and decided to extend the life of its 7,000-member peacekeeping force until the end of 2006. The hope was to buy time and exert pressure on al-Bashir. In the meantime, Hollywood actor George Clooney and his father, both of whom had just visited Darfur, addressed the UN Security Council with an impassioned Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 416 CHAPTER 10 plea to deploy its peacekeeping force without further delay. Spon- taneous demonstrations to save Darfur were held by the hundreds all over the world, and President Bush appointed a new special envoy, Andrew Natsios, a former head of USAID, who knew Sudan well, to help broker peace. In November, the Khartoum regime declared that it was prepared to admit 15,000 UN peace- keepers to Darfur if they were Africans and agreed to merge with the existing African Union force. This concession was made “in principle,” but, in practice, al-Bashir continued to stall. UN emis- sary Jan Egelund announced that if there were further delays, the crisis would become infinitely worse. In the meantime, conditions facing the refugees had indeed become desperate. Then at last, a respite. In March 2009, the International Crim- inal Court in The Hague ordered the arrest of al-Bashir on the charge that he played an “essential role” in the murder, rape, tor- ture, and displacement of large numbers of civilians in Darfur. Almost immediately after the indictment was announced. Al-Bashir decided to leave Sudan in order to attend a summit meeting of the Arab League in Qatar. There he was warmly em- braced by his fellow Arabs who congratulated him on his coura- geous stand against the “insult” he had suffered from the Court. With al-Bashir more or less out of the way, the situation in Darfur improved dramatically. The hybrid African Union— United Nations peacekeeping mission, the largest in the world, which took years of negotiation to put in place, made a huge difference. The infamous janjaweed, the marauding bandits who raped, killed and terrorized countless civilians, went into hiberna- tion. “Frozen,” said Lt. General Patrick Nyamvumba, the Rwan- dan commander of the 20,000 UN peacekeepers in Darfur, “It is a good word for the situation. It is calm, very calm at the moment, but it remains unpredictable.” 11 Sudanese fighter jets that used to bomb villages, sat idle on the runway, their cockpits covered in canvas. And tens of thousands of farmers, for the first time since 2003, returned to their villages to plant crops, an activity that might have been considered suicidal only a few months earlier. The biggest remaining problem arose from the tens of thou- sands of homeless people who still lived in crowded refugee camps, waiting for food handouts, and who feared that their transient lives might become permanent. Idleness, depression, and homelessness were taking their toll. There was also fighting over shrinking Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 417 grazing land. “The possibility is that they might be here forever” said Mohamed Yonis, a top United Nations official in Darfur. And the world was still watching—and waiting. It is a judgment on our times that, more than half a century after the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so many human beings still find themselves trapped in the interstices of the world community. Refugees have no rights and must depend on charity and chance to survive. There are more such homeless people in the world today than ever before in history. The com- munity of nations now confronts the community of exiles. I remember because I was one of them for most of my youth. LEARNING FROM HISTORY If we are to seek understanding from history’s vast tapestry, we must also pay attention to its “might-have-beens.” These “might- have-beens” are not just ghostly echoes; in some instances, they are objective possibilities that were missed—most of the time, for want of a free intelligence prepared to explore alternatives. Hence, it is our responsibility not to ignore these “ifs” and “might-have-beens” for they could have been. One such tragic “might-have-been” has echoed down the corridors of time. It concerns an earlier crusader, John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisen- hower. Dulles, a stern Puritan, had scoffed at the containment policy and had advocated a new policy of “rollback” and “libera- tion” of Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union. During the Geneva Conference of 1954, which marked the exit of France from Indochina, Chou En-lai, Communist China’s Foreign Minister, quite by accident, ran into Dulles in one of the corridors of Geneva’s Palais des Nations. The Chinese statesman stretched out his hand to Dulles in a gesture of reconciliation, but the American put his hands behind his back and walked away. A good Puritan would have no commerce with the Devil. It is tempting to speculate about the repercussions of this episode. What if Dulles had responded? Might the Vietnam War have been avoided? We shall never know. But one is forced to wonder, especially when one contemplates the 58,000 American deaths and the 3 million Vietnamese deaths that were to follow. Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 418 CHAPTER 10 One final warning: How often have we heard that a particular war was “inevitable”? In my research, I have come across this phrase dozens of times since the “iron dice” of World War I. Crusaders are particularly fond of making such assertions. In truth, no event in the affairs of states has ever been inevitable. History does not make history. Men and women make foreign policy de- cisions. They make them in wisdom and in folly, but they make them nonetheless. Often, after a war, historians look back and speak of fate or inevitability. But such historical determinism be- comes merely a metaphor for evasion of responsibility. There is, after all, in our lives, a measure of free will and self-determination. One such case in point is deeply troubling. In November 2003, it was revealed that Imad Hage, a Lebanese-American busi- nessman, had been sent by the chief of Saddam’s intelligence ser- vices to contact the Bush administration, during the final days of its rush to war, with three major concessions:12 First, Baghdad was prepared to invite 2,000 FBI agents in addition to American weapons experts to Iraq in order to prove that there were no hid- den weapons of mass destruction; second, the regime would pledge to hold elections under UN supervision; and third, Iraq would extradite to the Americans a leading suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. At the time this offer was made, the Bush administration’s preparations for war were complete. There was no turning back; war was seen as inevitable. The point here is not that a deal might have been reached; it is that the United States rejected the offer out of hand and thereby made the war inevitable. Now we shall never know and that, given the lives that were lost, is a tragedy. In his testimony before Congress on January 28, 2004, David Kay, who had served as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq over a nine-month period, declared simply, “We were all wrong, prob- ably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.”13 He did add, however, that there had been no political pressure exerted by the Bush administration on intelligence analysts to exaggerate the threat from Saddam’s Iraq. In short, the books were wrong, he believed, but they weren’t “cooked.” But as we have seen, this judgment was too generous. In the words of Paul Pillar, the na- tional intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, “intelligence was misused publicly to justify deci- sions already made.”14 Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 419 What is clear in the end is the absolute certainty with which all members of the Bush administration justified the war on the basis of the alleged existence of large stockpiles of illicit weapons in Iraq when, in fact, there was plenty of room for doubt. Moreover, the administration refused to grant a little more time to the UN in- spectors who, as it turned out, had done a creditable job in dispos- ing of Iraq’s illegal weapons. Finally, Dr. Kay declared in his testimony that it was “impor- tant to acknowledge failure.” I believe that people learn more from failure than from success—if one keeps an open mind. But it is precisely that which a crusader finds almost impossible to do. Let there be no misunderstanding about this: Saddam was a murderous thug who demonstrated once again, when he meekly surrendered to American soldiers, that his highest priority was his own survival. But, as I have attempted to show in this and in the preceding chapter, he posed no imminent threat to the United States when President George W. Bush decided to go to war with him. I believe that Saddam Hussein was not worth the loss of a single allied soldier’s life nor that of a single innocent Iraqi civilian. I believe that he could have been brought down without a war. As you may recall, during the final days of diplomacy in March 2003, I had approached the UN delegation of Pakis- tan with a proposal for the UN Security Council to designate Saddam Hussein as a War Criminal while also quadrupling the num- ber of UN inspectors in an effort to speed up the inspection process. The Pakistanis were prepared to sponsor this resolution on March 17, but that very afternoon the president announced that the time for diplomacy had expired. Two days later the United States was at war. From my experience with the United Nations for which I worked for seven years, I believe that this resolution would have been passed by the Security Council as an acceptable alternative to an invasion of Iraq, which had deadlocked the Council. More- over, the United States could have avoided the breach it con- fronted with its NATO allies and with the United Nations. The precedent of Slobodan Milosevic is instructive here. He had been indicted by the then–Chief Prosecutor of the Interna- tional War Crimes Tribunal, Louise Arbour, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in May 1999 when he was still in power Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 420 CHAPTER 10 as president of Yugoslavia. Two years later he had gone from power to prison as a defendant in The Hague. In short, he had become a pariah before the world. The massing of a quarter mil- lion of American and British troops around Iraq, combined with more vigorous UN inspections might well have led Saddam to propose much earlier the desperate measures which he did in fact propose several days before the war broke out. And his new role as an international pariah would probably have motivated the survivor in him to act while there was still time. At the very least, he could have been defanged, and, at best, deposed without a war. The cliché is wrong: History does not repeat itself, at least not exactly. But it does teach us through analogy. In 2009, the Americans faced a turning point in Iraq not unlike the British who, after World War I, tried to fuse three disparate provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Ultimately, they failed in that attempt. Hope still remains that their modern-day successors will fare better in their efforts to help invent a new Iraq. Shakespeare described this challenge well in Julius Caesar: There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the Flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of our life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full tide are we now afloat And we must take the current as it serves Or lose our ventures. President Barack Obama faces the same challenge in Afghanistan where he made an inherited war his own in 2009. So far the evi- dence suggests that this thoughtful pragmatic leader will do better than his predecessor. I love my country and wish it well. But I also know that his- tory does not take reservations. It does, however, reward respect. Why does the human species learn so slowly and at such ter- rible cost? I keep wondering. What I do know is that, in the last analysis, the answer to war must be sought in humanity’s capacity to learn from its self-inflicted catastrophes. Why did the Germans and the French make war between them well-nigh impossible after a century that had witnessed three horrendous wars and the Holocaust? Perhaps because Germany and France produced Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 421 visionary postwar leaders like Konrad Adenauer and Jean Monnet, who said No to war once and for all. Why was Nelson Mandela able to prevent a bloody civil war in South Africa? Perhaps it is total exhaustion and despair that produces visionaries. And perhaps it is the same as with ordinary people, some of whom learn and grow from shattering experiences, while others just get older—and more stupid. Since the last edition of this book appeared, there has been a slow dawn of compassion and global consciousness over human- ity’s bleak horizons. This is true despite, or perhaps because of, the catastrophe of 9/11. Increasingly, war criminals like Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadjic, and Saddam Hussein are being held individually accountable for their actions before international tribu- nals. In July 2006, a UN-Cambodian tribunal was sworn in, at long last, eight years after the death of Pol Pot, to bring to justice the remaining war criminals of the “Khmer Rouge” killing fields. And, in December, the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, sentenced a priest to fifteen years in prison for the bulldoz- ing of 2,000 Tutsi refugees who had found refuge in his church in Rwanda in 1994.15 And in 2009, the main pepetrator of this crime was arrested after hiding in eastern Congo for fifteen years. Yet, even more important is the fact that in every culture, regardless of race, culture, or creed, there are men and women who will say No to absolute evil and thereby preserve our common humanity. Oskar Schindler during the Nazi Holocaust and Paul Rusesabagina during the Rwandan genocide are only two among many who have en- tered history. There is progress, though it is maddeningly slow, and yet I choose to be an optimist. If I were not, I probably would not be alive today, as the Epilogue to this book makes clear. Humanity has built both cathedrals and concentration camps. Though we have descended to unprecedented depths in our time, we have also tried to scale new heights. We are not burdened with original sin alone; we also have the gift of original innocence. Finally, I ask my readers’ indulgence to permit me to close with my favorite poem. It was written by William Ernest Henley a century and a half ago in England and expresses the need to transcend despair and tragedy with courage and with hope— qualities this generation too must live by if we are to live mean- ingful and caring lives in a world still beset by war. Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. 422 CHAPTER 10 Invictus Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gait, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. NOTES 1. New York Times, July 4, 2003. 2. Ibid., December 7, 2003. 3. Ibid., December 18, 2003. 4. Ibid. 5. Washington Post, January 7, 2004. 6. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 340. 7. Alan J.Kuperman, “Rwanda in Retrospect,” Foreign Affairs (January/ February 2000), p. 98. 8. Philip Gourevitch,We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998). 9. “Rwanda in Retrospect,” p. 115. 10. New York Times, December 4, 2003. 11. New York Times, January 2, 2010. 12. New York Times, November 6, 2003. 13. Ibid., October 30, 2003. 14. Paul R. Pillar, Op. cit. Foreign Affairs March/April 2006. 15. New York Times, December 14, 2006. Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  WHY NATIONS GO TO WAR 423 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Bacevich, Andrew J. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Beigbeder, Yves. Judging War Criminals: The Politics of International Justice. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. Berkowitz, Bruce. The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century. New York: Free Press, 2003. Blainey, Geoffrey. The Causes of War. 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