Comments on: A War Weariness That Dare Not Speak Its Name

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:12:58 +0000

The above is a close equivalent to the use of gunboats in controlling colonies in the 19th and early 20th centuaries, so my implying that this is something new is a bit dubious (excepting that landlocked countries are now open to the same tactics that once required a coast or substantial navigable rivers).

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:04:53 +0000

I certainly didn’t mean to imply that I thought high casualty, equally mathced, wars were less unpleasant – I was thinking in terms of the effect on the descision of a western nation as to whether to go to war, even if fewer people (on either side, although still with a huge imbalance) are killed.

As to whether lower casualties on western agressors has lead to more millitary agression, fundamentally there is no way of telling, not having any comparison for the same political situations with more balanced, infantry heavy millitaries. The point about lower public tolerance for death is also a good one.

My point perhaps applies more strongly to the low level air strikes the U.S. is capable of maintaining without even calling it a war, for example, the air strikes against Afghanistan in 1998, or the bombing of Tripoli in 1986 (although in the latter case there was some on-going military conflict and two U.S. servicemen were killed). Of course, military conflicts that fall below the level of wars are not new, but there is something different and disturbing about a country having the ability to use military force in a distant country without any significant direct millitary risk to themselves.

By: Reuben

Reuben — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:00:37 +0000

Yes there is something in what roger is saying. It is influenced in part by civilian life wherein death has become a very substantially less normal part of life for under 50s

By: Roger

Roger — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:09:37 +0000

“The amazingly low casualties western militaries now expect when fighting poorer nations has pissed me off for ages…Apart from the general sense of unfairness, it’s the lowering of the threshold for going to war that bothers me.”

Although I kind of know what you mean, I think it’s probably a feeling to be suppressed. There’s nothing pleasant about evenly-matched conflicts (see WW1, Iran-Iraq for reference), and although I despair of the behaviour of the UK internationally, I don’t think military parity with Saddam or the Taliban would have made war less unpleasant. In terms of the threshold lowering, I think you have to acknowledge that the public threshold for casualties has fallen even faster, to the point where Somalia is considered a disaster because of 18 US rangers killed there 15 years ago. I think this balances the military advances we’ve made – are we seeing a massive rise in aggressive wars since we invented the cruise missile?

By: Tendai

Tendai — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:10:18 +0000

It’s interesting that three years ago, the media was referring to Afghanistan as “the forgotten war”. And now it’s all they’ll talk about. The casualties are relatively low given the intensity of the fighting and the length of the war, and comparison with previous conflicts.
The increasing hostility is surprising when compared to the relative consensus on all fronts when it started. Is it because of disappointment over inadequate equipment? I’m not convinced. Maybe I’m being cynical, but the change in public mood coincides rather neatly with the shift of focus by the media from Iraq to Afghanistan. A picture of every single casualty, and the immediacy of the “breaking news” ticker, is quite an emotive way of reminding us there’s a war on.
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It wasn’t really doubted that this was a Good Fight, until recently. I think Afghanistan really poses a wider, more complex question of how war-averse peoples are to respond to unstable states with a result that justifies losses, or possibly (unrealistically) even avoids any losses at all. In a society that took military force for granted, this would be an easier question to answer. But even such a society would have to accept, as previous ones have, that in responding to unstable states, war is a dead end. And occupation is largely unacceptable for its exepense and the political unease it raises; and it’s ultimately also a dead end. Sanctions? ‘Yeah right’. The discussions in the UN and int. law community leading up to the war convey this deep unease; the idea that the traditional international responses to errant or unstable states are no longer up to the job (to be fair, they were designed in 1945).

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:18:00 +0000

The amazingly low casualties western militaries now expect when fighting poorer nations has pissed me off for ages (191 british soldiers dead in an 8 year war, equivalent to an average 2.5 hours worth of British casualties in WWI). Apart from the general sense of unfairness, it’s the lowering of the threshold for going to war that bothers me.

Related, and more interesting / contoversial, is the issue of proffesional armies vs. conscripted armies and which the left should support (or at least view as the lesser of two evils). Obviously I have no desire whatsoever to do military service, but on the other hand, sending a conscripted army to Iraq of which 60% opposed the war would have been far harder than sending a largely cooperative army to war against the background of a disaproving general public.

Overall I probably do oppose the idea of a conscription on the general principle of wanting a less militaristic society.