War: A Big Drag for Everybody

TigerHawk, the war-loving blogger from New Jersey has a curious post up in which he expresses his exultation that there is a pro-war bumper sticker outside Princeton (link).

I’m probably not the right audience for this piece because I’ve never bought the notion that war is never a good idea.

But but but—well for example, start with one of the most “necessary” war in our history: the American Civil War that ended slavery. If ever there was a war with a good result, this was one. But it was also a colossal waste. That is: there is good reason to believe that if we had freed the slaves with full compensation to the slaves and to the slaveowners, it would have been lost costly than the war. This doesn’t make the war any less necessary for Lincoln and the north in 1861. But it was a damn fool blunder on the part of the south, and a failure of statesmanship all around.

Or take another “good” war: World War II. Again, it is hard to imagine how a war could be more “necessary,” at least if you start from the moment Hitler rolled into Poland in 1939.

But as many have noted, you can’t really understand World War Two in isolation. What you have here is the culmination of a long, ugly and destructive process that starts in 1914. And if ever there was a war unnecessary, topside and bottom, it is World War One—unnecessary to start it, unnecessary to keep it going (and, of course, unnecessary to end it as it ended).

We’re veering close to Turtledove country here, but it’s still fair to ask: what if we hadn’t botched the first war in the first place? Isn’t it a reasonable possibility that we wouldn’t have needed the second?

The point is that in each case, the highest priority is wisdom, in the form of statesmanship and good luck. War can’t be off the table. But there isn’t any situation in which war should be recognized as anything other than a failure.

Afterthought: On second look, I see that another problem on the list of those that war "solved" is "Communism." Say wha--? I should think the amazing thing about the collapse of Communism was how little war had to do with it. Even by the conventional conservative narrative, war had really nothing to do with it: Ronald Reagan just huffed and puffed and blew their house down.

Well: I suppose the War Party would say it only worked because we built up the war machine. It's certainly true that Reagan let Cap Weinberger spend money like a drunken sailor (or maybe he never noticed). But once again folks: it is far from clear--how much, if any, role American defense spending had in leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We do know that Mikhael Gorbachev was not impressed: when his generals said he needed to spend money to fend off the Americans, he rebuffed them with the tart assurance that the Americans weren't going to risk a war. And what we know most of all is that when push (the Soviets) came to shove (East Germany), it was Gorbachev that did the absolutely unexpected. Just months after Tiananmen Square, here in the Vortex of the cold war, Gorbachev did nothing and let it all fall apart.

Nobody expected that--certainly not the uber-hawks in the Reagan defense department, who had staked their fortunes on the premise that the Soviet Military Juggernaut was damn near unbeatable. Indeed, one of the more entertaining sideshows after the fall of the Berlin Wall was to watch the hawk revisionism as they tried to show that what they had never anticipated was really what they had planned for all along.