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OAKLAND ROSS
FEATURE WRITER
War may be hell, as the beleaguered people of Iraq know better than most -
but
it is not a universal hell.
Some parts of the planet have been peaceful for decades.
Consider North America.
The
last time the armies of two North American nations lumbered into
conflict against one another was in 1914, almost 90 years
ago, when U.S.
Marines invaded Mexico and occupied the Gulf coast port of Veracruz.
They remained just long enough
to overthrow the short-lived government of
Victoriano Huerta.
"That would be your last example," says K.J. Holsti,
a war historian and
professor emeritus of political science at the University of British
Columbia.
Mexico has
known several outbreaks of domestic armed conflict since then,
including a recent uprising in the southern state of Chiapas,
but for the
most part and for nearly a century, North America has been a huge island of
peace in a global sea of trouble.
This
can affect the way people think about war.
Viewed from a North American vantage point, it sometimes may seem that
armed
conflict is a rare aberration in the generally tranquil progress of human
affairs. Unfortunately, for much of history and
in many parts of the world,
the opposite is more likely to have been true.
"War may be the constant state, and peace
the exception," says Andre
Gerolymatos, a war historian at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. "We
have always had
war."
For as long as there have been Homo sapiens, it seems there have also been
sticks, stones, cracked skulls
- and Homo bellicosus perched upon a rock,
bellowing in triumph and beating his chest.
For purposes of precision,
scholars make a distinction between primitive
conflict and organized war, which tends to involve slightly greater
sophistication
of purpose and more specialization of means.
"I guess the archaeological evidence in Egypt and Syria of organized
warfare
probably goes back 10,000 years," says Holsti.
No one knows exactly how many wars have been waged since then - suffice
it
to say, a lot - but the frequency of such conflicts seems to have been
declining since the beginning of the 16th
century, with a modest if lethal
surge during the century just past. Unfortunately, even as the number of
conflicts
has been in general decline, the ravages of war have been rising
precipitously, especially among non-combatants.
According
to Jack S. Levy, a political scientist at Rutgers University in
Camden, N.J., the world has experienced nearly 600 separate
wars since the
year 1500, at a total cost of roughly 142 million lives.
The vast majority of those deaths have occurred
during the past 100 years.
During the 20th century, four times as many people were killed in war than
during the
previous four centuries combined.
World War II by itself claimed the lives of approximately 57 million
combatants
and civilians, and the deathly brunt of armed conflict has only
continued to increase, especially among those not wearing
uniforms. Since
1945, an estimated 23 million people have been killed in war - 90 per cent
of them civilians.
By
way of contrast, in World War I, just 15 per cent of those killed were
non-combatants.
Meanwhile, the ranks of the
world's refugees - people driven from their
homes by conflict and forced to seek shelter in neighbouring lands - also
have
soared, from 1.25 million in 1951 to 22.3 million at the dawn of the
new millennium.
Wars have become far deadlier
and much more destructive, and their role in
the larger drama of human affairs also seems to have been transformed.
Once
upon a time - in the Europe of centuries past - wars were often
regarded as vehicles for the achievement of honour and
glory, at least
among those of a certain class, who generally remained at a civilized distance
from the fray, sipping
from their flasks of sherry, polishing their medals
and peering through their collapsible spyglasses.
_____
`War may be the constant state, and peace the exception'
Andre Gerolymatos, war historian
_____
"In the 17th and 18th centuries, the whole culture was a culture of war,"
says Holsti. "There was a whole
social class that depended on war."
Conflicts were prosecuted by kings and emperors and were waged in a fairly
restrained
fashion, with rules that governed acceptable conduct. Officers
were generally noblemen who acquired their commissions by
hereditary right.
Except when placing cities under siege, the contending armies usually did
not target civilians. It
was preferable to win, but it was not considered
dishonourable to lose, and the terms of surrender were negotiated in a
gentlemanly
fashion. The disputants often ended just as they began - as
friends, perhaps even relatives.
"There was a notion
that wars must be fought for just reasons and fought
justly," says Allen Sens, a military historian at UBC.
Somewhere
along the way, perhaps in the muddy and miserable trenches of
World War I, that notion seems to have lost most of its brassy
sheen.
Even now, however, it is difficult and perhaps impossible for the leaders
of modern democracies to plunge
their compatriots into war without providing
some credible justification, some reference to a noble or at least ethical
cause.
Failing that, they can always lie.
In August, 1964, for example, the U.S. administration of Lyndon B. Johnson
spread
news of an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on the
destroyer, the USS Maddox, in the Bay of Tonkin. This alleged
provocation was used to justify the launch of American bombing missions against North Vietnamese targets, raids that marked
the effective beginning of the Vietnam War.
Nowadays, it is generally agreed among scholars that the torpedo attacks
were a U.S. fiction that never actually
took place.
In the end, roughly 1.2 million people perished in that war, including
approximately 50,000 U.S. military
personnel who died for no easily
discernible purpose. Yet there are some who defend U.S. involvement in the
conflict
even now.
"It seems to me that war, in the Western sense, is worked into something
rational," says Ron Haycock,
a history professor at the Royal Military
College in Kingston. "Part of war is trying to manage an act of violence
and
make it a tool of state."
Or, increasingly, a tool of some armed and militant group operating within
the borders
of a state.
Most of the wars that have been fought since 1945 have been waged not
between nations but between hostile
ethnic or political factions within
weak or failed states. In the wake of World War II, such civil conflicts have
easily
outnumbered international wars and they have been concentrated in
certain particularly troubled regions of the world -
South Asia, the Middle
East, Eastern Europe and Africa.
"At any given time, there might be a war somewhere," says
David Welch, a
political science professor at the University of Toronto who nonetheless
sees war as an exception rather
than the rule in human affairs. "In parts
of the Congo Basin in West Africa, war is all people know."
Since the
second Great War, however, none of the major European powers as
gone into battle against another - an extraordinary contrast
to the
merry-go-round of martial campaigns they conducted in previous centuries.
Meanwhile, in the early aftermath
of the Vietnam War, it was widely
speculated that the United States had lost its stomach for military
entanglements,
at least those that required a commitment of U.S. troops.
That theory began to disintegrate in 1983, when the world's greatest
military
power soundly defeated Grenada (population: roughly equivalent to
Peterborough) in a brief tussle.
After that, it
began to appear that the United States had no particular
objection to armed overseas adventures as long as (a) its troops
were in
and out quickly, (b) they suffered minimal casualties and (c) they won.
In 1989, U.S. forces invaded Panama.
In 1991, they drove Iraq out of
Kuwait.
In 1994, they occupied Haiti. A year ago, they chased the Taliban from
Afghanistan. Now, they are surrounding
Baghdad.
Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, many observers
believe Americans are willing to
tolerate longer, more costly military
operations and accept higher U.S. casualties.
"In a way, this is a throwback
to the 19th century," says Gerolymatos,
referring to a time when war still seemed readily defensible and even
honourable.
"We
live in a world more similar to the late 19th century."
At least until recently, bitter memories of World War II -
when an average
of 900 bombs were dropped for every target hit - may have made war
difficult to prosecute by democratic
societies.
The unthinkable potential devastation of nuclear weapons may have acted as
a further check on the willingness
of rational people to stumble into war.
But this could be changing.
As the march on Baghdad has clearly illustrated,
the world's only
superpower is no longer shy of imposing its will by force of arms. In fact, say some observers, if tactics
now being employed prove successful in Iraq - low
civilian and military casualties, little damage to civilian infrastructure
-
they may well make future wars easier to contemplate and therefore to wage.
"War is becoming sanitized, on
our side," says Holsti. "By making war more
sanitary, one makes it more likely."
Iraq could be just the beginning.
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