Wars and Crimes

There has been an ongoing conversation in comments about wars in the post-war period. Since 1945, very few major wars have ended in the sort of decisive, politically unambiguous victory that characterized World War II. The Falklands War and the Gulf War are among the clearest examples. Others haven’t been wars, they’ve been single operations or counter-insurgencies, or haven’t been victories as such, they’ve been withdrawals, ends to the hostilities.

Take the Korean War, for example. It was definitely a war but there was not a clear victor and North Korea and South Korea have been separated ever since.

An example that has been raised is the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. I would characterize it primarily as a counter-insurgency rather than a conventional interstate war. Whatever label one chooses, it did not end in a decisive victory; the Soviets eventually withdrew.

There were notable similarities among the Gulf War, the British-Argentine War, and World War II. The similarities include:

• All involved what the ultimate victors deemed to be unacceptable territorial aggression, Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.
• All involved naval, air, and ground forces.
• All involved conventional militaries.
• All involved alliances, e.g. the Allies in WWII, the UK, US, and France in the war against Argentina, and a broad coalition in the Gulf War.
• All resulted in decisive victories.
• The victor used overwhelming force against the defeated and had clearly enunciated goals.

I would be remiss in not mentioning a very different explanation of war and success which is that all wars involve some degree of what we are increasingly calling criminal behavior. Before the start of World War I there was an accord to which all parties were signatories, the forbade the use of chemical weapons. That was violated by both sides, increasingly so as the war wore one. In World War II the Allies treated the morale of the Axis nations as a legitimate target of war. That was the rationale for the firebombing of Dresden and the Tokyo air raids, which killed tens of thousands of civilians. General Curtis LeMay later observed that if the United States had lost the war, those responsible for the bombing campaign might well have been prosecuted as war criminals. Whether one agrees with that assessment or not, it illustrates how even the most successful and widely supported wars often involve actions whose legality and morality remain disputed decades later.

Even the “good wars” remain controversial. Critics argued that coalition bombing in Baghdad stretched the laws of war, while opponents of the sinking of the ARA Belgrano contended that it violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the declared exclusion zone. These are rationalized as mistakes.

The longer a conflict continues, the greater the probability that mistakes, misjudgments, or violations will occur. Don’t be surprised if, as the war against Iran wears on, we make more mistakes.