EGYPT: TWO UNITED NATIONS EMERGENCY FORCES AND THREE WARS

In the summer of 1956, as Palestinian raids on Israeli-held territories and Israeli retaliatory attacks became increasingly frequent, the Arab-Israeli conflict took on new dimensions. President Nasser, the charismatic dictator of Egypt, nationalized the Suez Canal and imposed restrictions in the Gulf of Aqaba for Israeli shipping. The conflict threatened to grow into another full scale Arab-Israeli war with a risk of an open East-West confrontation.

While the main shareholders of the Canal-Great Britain and France-strongly supported Israel, Nasser was determined to settle accounts with her. On October 25, 1956, he concluded agreements with Syria and Jordan on forming united military command. Three days later, on October 29, Israeli forces launched three-pronged attacks toward El Arish, Ismaila, and the Mitla Pass. On October 31, working with Israel on a prearranged plan, British and French forces attacked Egyptian targets from the air and parachuted troops in the area of Port Said and at the northern end of the Canal.³⁴ What Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the opposition in the British House of Commons, called an act of disastrous folly, produced an unprecedented shock and disbelief at the UN, from which even the British and French delegates to the UN were not free. It was in this atmosphere that the first Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly opened at 5 p.m. on November 1.

Before the Emergency Session has begun, the Canadian delegate, Lester Pearson, approached Dag Hammarskjold to suggest that a deployment of a United Nations Force might become necessary. The SG was initially skeptical, but the idea was supported by the British and French governments, under fire also from public opinion in their own countries. Ultimately, on November 4, the Assembly requested Hammarskjold to submit within 48 hours a plan for the setting up of an emergency international force to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities. He began to work on the report before lunch the next day and by 2.30 morning finished what Urquhart called “… a conceptual masterpiece in a completely new field, the blueprint for a nonviolent international military operation.”³⁵ The first UN deployed international force was to enter Egyptian territory with consent of the Egyptian Government in order to help maintain order during and after the withdrawal of non-Egyptian forces. In Hammarskjold’s concept “The force would be more than an observer corps, but in no way a military force temporarily controlling the territory in which it was stationed… . Its functions … could cover an area extending roughly from the Suez Canal to the Armistice Demarcation Lines.”³⁶ Hammarskjold’s recommendations were endorsed by the General Assembly and the UNTSO Chief of Staff, General E.L.M. Burns from Canada, was appointed the Chief of Command of the first United Nations Emergency Force.

The response to the UN request for national contingents to serve with UNEF was surprisingly good. Twenty-four countries offered to send troops; Hammarskjold selected ten from countries impartial to the conflict. At the outset, the new Force was 6,000 men strong but gradually reduced and stood at 3,378 men at its conclusion. It included contingents from Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, India, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. One of the practical problems to be resolved was the identification of the troops. Fortunately, there were large quantities of American helmets readily available in Europe and spraying them blue was no problem. Thus were the Blue Helmets born.³⁷

The unique international situation at the time of the Suez crisis made nearly everyone welcome the Blue Helmets. The Soviet Union faced serious challenges to its domination in Eastern Europe and was not eager to get actively involved in the Middle East. The United States wanted to stay out, and the British and the French governments anxiously looked for a way out of their ill-advised adventure without loosing face. Finally, Egypt knew that the UN was its only hope for averting a disastrous military defeat.

UNEF was a departure from the United Nations policy of not employing any armed personnel. Understandably, the new policy, as expressed in the guidelines for UNEF, was not free from ambiguities. The rules of engagement (ROE) of the first UN armed contingents ordered the UNEF’s soldiers not to use force except in self-defense. They were not to initiate the use of force; they could only respond to an armed attack on them, even if this meant refusing an order from the attacking party not to resist.^38,39 The intention of this diplomatic, rather than military, wording was quite clear; arms were not to be used for carrying out the UNEF’s mandate.

The spirit of the guidelines was in accord with Hammarskjold’s pacifist sentiments and intentions. But it was not so to the man chosen to command the Force, the Canadian General E.L.M. Burns, who requested a strong force, containing heavy armor and fighter aircraft capable of carrying out operations of war. That request was turned down, as were his later requests for authorization to fire on infiltrators in the Gaza Strip. His argument that the Israelis had been accustomed to pushing UN military observers around and that an emergency force which could not use its weapons would be little more than a corps of observers was in vain.⁴⁰ Israel never agreed to a UNEF presence at her side of the frontlines and therefore it was deployed on the Egyptian side along the Armistice Demarcation Line in Gaza and the international frontier in the Sinai Peninsula. While it was unable to eliminate infiltrations, its presence helped to avoid major clashes. The situation was different in the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Jordanian sectors. Since the establishment in 1964 of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its main group Al-Fatah, Palestinian raids and acts of sabotage against Israel became more frequent and so were the Israeli retaliatory actions.⁴¹ In early 1967, tensions between Israel and Syria were mounting and Nasser, with his army generously reequipped by the Soviets, was persuaded that a Syrian-Israeli war was imminent. For the second time in a decade, he decided that the hour of revenge by the Arab world against its Israeli enemy was near, so UNEF’s presence in the Egyptian controlled Sinai became awkward.

It was ten o’clock at night, Cairo time, in Gaza on May 16, 1967, when the Egyptian Brigadier Mokhtar handed General Rikhye, UNEF Commander, a communication signed by the Chief of Staff of the United Arab Republic (UAR), General Fawzi. It read: I gave my instructions to all UAR Armed Forces to be ready for actions against Israel, the moment it may carry out any aggressive action against any Arab country. Due to these instructions, our troops are already concentrated in Sinai on our eastern borders. For the sake of complete secure [sic] of all UN troops which install observation posts along our borders, I request that you issue your orders to withdraw all these troops immediately … ⁴²

Brigadier Mokhtar verbally requested the immediate withdrawal of the UN units from El-Sabha and Sharm el Sheikh. Rikhye replied that he did not have the authority to withdraw on any order other than that of the UN SG. He also said that as long as UAR troops did not attempt to use force against UN personnel, there would be no clashes. But Rikhye’s own instructions to UNEF’s Yugoslav commander in Sinai issued on the same day were tantamount to authorizing surrender. Colonel Prazic was told that “they must … not be involved in any incident with the U.A.R. forces and certainly should not, under any circumstances, resort to use of force in the event they were evicted from their post.”⁴³

His attitude was confirmed in a cable he received next day from U Thant who told him to do what he reasonably could to maintain the position of UNEF without, however, going so far as to risk an armed clash. In his memoirs Rikhye maintained
that he was determined not to withdraw from a single UNEF position, unless he was forced out of it. But this is precisely what happened. Before he received U Thant’s order for withdrawal on May 18, Egyptian troops forced UNEF’s soldiers to leave El Sabha, the camps El Kuntilla and El-Amr, Sharm el-Sheikh, and an observation post at Ras el-Nasrani.⁴⁴

Neither the UN documents nor Rikhye in his memoirs mention any use of force by the Egyptian side in the process of evicting UN soldiers from their positions and it is obvious that they would, if there was any. It follows that the UN soldiers obeyed Egyptian orders before getting an instruction for withdrawal from New York.

In Egypt the circumstances of the decision on UNEF’s withdrawal were not clear. The first message to General Rikhye demanded a withdrawal from the Armistice line in Sinai but did not address the UN presence in Gaza and Egypt as such. The ambiguity continued thereafter. Neither Nasser’s adviser on foreign affaires, Dr. Mohamud Fawzi, nor members of the government were informed about that decision which Fawzi later called a gross miscalculation based on gross misinformation. It was most likely taken personally by two leaders: President Nasser and Field Marshall Amer. The latter, initially not aware of all intricacies involved, issued instructions to intercept Brigadier Mokhtar on his mission and to request him to await further communication. But it was too late and the Brigadier delivered the order to General Rikhye before any counter-order could have been issued. The attempt to alter the course of events failed.⁴⁵

Urquhart rightly maintains that Egypt’s request for UNEF’s withdrawal was in accordance with the relevant agreement. He also called the very idea of a resistance to the Egyptian Army, some 80,000 strong, by the tiny, symbolic UN Force hypocritical and escapist nonsense, still remarkably prevalent in Western folklore.⁴⁶ But it is improbable that the Egyptians would open fire on UNEF when confronted with a resolute opposition. Even a token opposition before the official request for the withdrawal of UNEF was submitted to U Thant on May 18 could have probably opened some space for negotiations and changed the course of events.

A few days later Nasser announced the closure of the Strait to Israeli shipping. Under the existing circumstances, the point of no return from war was reached. U Thant’s attempt to relocate UNEF into Israeli-controlled territory was promptly and flatly rejected even while Tel-Aviv tried to persuade the United Nations not to follow Nasser’s demands for withdrawal.

In the early hours of June 5, Israeli planes struck and destroyed the bulk of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. The third Arab-Israeli war had begun and was again fought in Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, on the West Bank of the
Jordan, and in Jerusalem. Again underestimated by the Arabs, Israel succeeded on all fronts and conquered new territories. The war was over in 6 days. On June 28, the Israelis announced that Jerusalem was reunited. The old conflict assumed new dimensions. The Israeli action was the first exposure of a logic, which-in contradiction to the UN Charter-attributes the right of States to use force preemptively.

In the aftermath of the Six Days’ War, U Thant and the United Nations were widely and fervently criticized for withdrawing UNEF and thus allowing the outbreak of the war.⁴⁷ However, it became clear that the mere presence of the UN troops, without the backing of the SC for sufficiently punitive actions against the offending parties would deter neither the Arabs nor the Israelis from pursuing their goals by military means. It was tragically manifested during the first days of the war in the Gaza Strip when, caught in the cross fire, 15 UNEF soldiers were killed.⁴⁸

No new UN mission was proposed after the withdrawal of UNEF I. Calm lasted in the Suez Canal sector until early 1969, when the fighting broke out again and continued until August 1970. It was full-fledged warfare, except that the positions of the adversaries did not move. On several occasions, the Secretary General appealed for an end to this war of attrition, but without any effect. UNTSO observers, targeted by both sides, were duly monitoring and reporting on the developments. It took United States political involvement to negotiate a cease-fire. The fighting stopped on August 7, 1970. For about 3 years.

Kurt Waldheim, appointed Secretary General of the United Nations in 1972, recalled that looking back, it seemed strange that no one had heeded the Egyptian and Syrian-declared intentions to regain the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. Golda Meir, the then Prime Minister of Israel, 1 month before the outbreak of the war told Waldheim that if only the United Nations would refrain from interfering in the affairs of the Middle East, in 2 or 3 years the Arabs would be prepared to recognize the State of Israel and to concede it the borders which it believed essential to its security.⁴⁹

In 1967 the Israelis took the Egyptians by surprise, but it was now their turn to be surprised. Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, ordered his army to cross the Suez Canal on October 6, 1973, celebrated as Yom Kippur by the Israelis, leaving behind UNTSO observers, two of them killed in the crossfire. The fighting on the Egyptian front soon spread to Golan Heights in Syria.

The Americans airlifted emergency supplies of arms to the Israelis, who quickly recovered from the first shock and drove back through the Canal, cutting off the Third Egyptian Army in Sinai and threatening the Port of Suez. Now, the Egyptian Ambassador to the UN, Ismail Meguid, requested that UN observers step in and stop the Israeli advance. As Sadat called for Soviet and American intervention, neither wanted to get drawn into it directly. Few days later, on October 20, King Faisal from Saudi Arabia announced oil embargo on the United States and the Netherlands. British documents declassified 30 years later revealed that the Americans seriously contemplated invading Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in response to the embargo. The conflict dimensions were changing.⁵⁰

After 2 weeks of confusion, the famous rounds of Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy brought about a consensus in the SC. On October 22, it adopted resolution 338 calling for an immediate cease-fire and asking the SG to dispatch observers. It also called for an immediate beginning of the implementation of resolution 242, which requested the Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967. But the cease-fire, accepted by both sides, did not work.

Following much diplomatic wrangling, the SC agreed on October 25 to deploy UNEF II. Waldheim nominated UNTSO’s Chief, the Finnish General Ensi Siilasvuo, to be UNEF’s Interim Commander. Austrians, Finns, and Swedes from the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNIFICYP) were dispatched within 24 hours. Ultimately, contingents from thirteen countries participated in UNEF II-Sweden, Austria, Finland, Australia, Ghana, Nepal, Ireland, Peru, Panama, Indonesia, Senegal, Canada, and Poland. Its maximum strength was 6,973 men; at the time of its withdrawal it was 4,031; 120 observers from UNTSO assisted the Force.

The essentials of the peacekeeping guidelines for UNEF II, written 17 years after those of UNEF I, remained unchanged. But direct responsibility for the Force was shifted from the SC and General Assembly to the UN SG, the principle of equitable geographical representation in the composition of the Force introduced, and the term of self-defense newly formulated. From now on it would include resistance to attempts by forceful means to prevent it from discharging its duties under the Security Council’s mandate. This last qualification is crucial and largely overlooked, because it gave the UN Forces a blanket authorization to use force in defense of the Security Council’s mandates. Approved by the Council on October 27, 1973, these guidelines have been considered since then as a standard for new UN operations.

The mandate of UNEF II was supervision of implementation of an immediate and complete cease-fire in positions occupied by the respective forces on October 22, prevention of the recurrence of the fighting, and cooperation with the ICRC in its humanitarian activities, cooperation with UNTSO, and supervision of the implementation of the disengagement agreements.

UNEF II was deployed in the buffer zone between the two armies. Its checkpoints, observation posts, and patrols remained until the withdrawal following an American-sponsored peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in July 1979. On November 19, 1977, President Sadat of Egypt brought to Jerusalem a totally unexpected message: peace between Arabs and Israel was possible and necessary. During his 3-day visit he addressed the Knesset where he received a standing ovation. He later visited Yad Vashem, the museum of Holocaust, where he signed the guest book with the inscription: May God guide our steps toward peace… ⁵¹

All parties to the Yom Kippur war suffered heavy losses. It was with a shock that Israelis learned that 2,676 members of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) were killed. They had not suffered such losses since the war of independence in 1948. They also lost 420 tanks and 106 aircraft. The Arab losses were even higher. The Egyptians lost 8,000 and the Syrians 3,500 men. The Arab side lost also 1,280 tanks and 454 aircraft, including 22 Iraqi planes. 52 These figures, explain in part why there has not been another all-out Israeli-Arab war. But an absence of war is not peace.

UNEF II did its job well and its deployment helped to avoid the Soviet-United States confrontation. 53 But the nonrecurrence of fighting was a result of diplomacy, of coincidence of the superpowers interests, and of Sadat’s courage. Should any of the adversaries decide to attack the other, the Force would just be overrun, as UNEF I was before and other UN Forces have been since.

SYRIA: GUARDING A BUFFER ZONE-UNITED NATIONS DISENGAGEMENT OBSERVER FORCE

Syria’s Golan Heights, occupied by Israel as a result of the 1967 Six Days’ War, are of a paramount strategic importance to both countries. Syrian guns placed there can dominate the plains of northern Israel, but Israeli tanks deployed on the Golan Heights are only 50 miles from the Syrian capital of Damascus. The Syrians, in concert with the Egyptians, attacked the Israelis on October 6, 1973. As on the Egyptian-Israeli front, the surprise Syrian assault resulted in some territorial
gains, but the Israeli counterattacks pushed the Syrians back and pursued them along the road toward of Damascus, retaking the town of Quneitra (occupied by them as a result of the Six Days’ War in 1967) on the way and occupying a salient as far as the village of Saassa. The cease-fire ordered by the SC took effect on October 24, but it did not last long. The Syrians rejected negotiations and hostilities continued, culminating in a heavy battle for Mount Hermon in April 1974, retaken by the Israelis at the cost of twelve Syrian and fifty-one Israeli soldiers killed.⁵⁴

Claiming that until now the deployment of UN peacekeepers had been little more than a substitute for a political solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and a confirmation of Israel’s territorial conquests, Syria’s President, Hafez el-Assad, did not want UNEF II to extend its operation into his country. 55 Eventually, he accepted UNDOF established by SC resolution 350 on May 31, 1974. It deployed immediately with contingents borrowed from UNEF II, coming initially from six countries: Austria, Canada, Finland, Iran, Peru, and Poland. Its strength grew to 1,331 men in 1991. Established for 6 months the Force remains in the field, its mandate repeatedly renewed by the SC every year since then.

The Force’s mandate is to ensure the observance of the cease-fire; to supervise the absence of military forces in the area of separation, and to oversee restriction of arms and personnel in the Syrian and Israeli areas of limitation, and to facilitate the implementation of Security Council resolution 338 which called for a political solution of the conflict.

Although UN sources report that both sides regularly restrict UNDOF’s movements, on the whole it has encountered no serious difficulties. The Force Commander invariably protests the restrictions, which apparently settles the matter for the UN. 56 Both sides appear to be satisfied with UNDOF’s presence and until a political settlement is achieved or until another war comes, it is likely to stay where it is, at their sufferance and UN cost. Thirty-two years of the UN presence in Golan Heights proved to be not long enough for politicians to find a resolution of the conflict.

LEBANON: MUDDLING THROUGH IN A COUNTRY TORN APART-UNITED NATIONS INTERIM FORCE⁵⁷

Lebanon is a small country wedged between Syria and Israel, on the Mediterranean Sea. It is a conglomerate of four major communities divided by religion and clan loyalties. Maronites are Christians; its Druze, Sunni, and Shi’a are Muslims. The delicate political balance that maintained a precarious internal peace in this the multiconfessional society was challenged by the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s. In 1958 the Christian-dominated Lebanese government alleged that the United Arab Republic (Union of Egypt and Syria) was involved in gross interference in the domestic affairs of the country, infiltrating weapons and people in support of extreme opposition groups.

On Lebanon’s request, the United Nations Observation Group in Lebanon (UNOGIL) was established in June 1958, but only after a civil war broke out in May and the president of the country, Camille Chamoun, approached in vain the United States regarding possible intervention. UNOG II’s mandate was straightforward-”to ensure there is no illegal infiltration of personnel (or) supply of arms or other material across the Lebanese borders.”⁵⁸ Twenty-one countries contributed
military personnel to UNOGIL. At its peak in September, the Group consisted of 214 observers, with aircraft and helicopters at their disposal. Not more than a month after UNOGIL’s deployment, U.S. marines stormed a shore in Beirut; the British joined later. The UN mission withdrew, accomplishing nothing. Merely some of UNTSO observers, a remainder of the long defunct Israeli-Lebanon Armistice Agreement, carried on.

Until the early seventies, Lebanon enjoyed calm along its borders with Israel. But as the PLO, forcibly expelled from Jordan in 1970, set up its headquarters in Southern Lebanon, the fragile balance of power among the Lebanese unraveled. A civil war broke out in April 1975 and ended, at least on paper, in October 1976 with the introduction of the Arab Deterrent Force into the country. The force, nominally under the command of the Lebanese president, was actually controlled by the Syrians. In March 1978, a PLO raid on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road took the lives of 39 Israeli civilians and left dozens wounded. In retaliation, Israeli forces entered Lebanon on March 14-15 and in a few days occupied the entire area south of the Litani River, save for the city of Tyre, a Palestinian stronghold.

As an alternative to restraining the Israelis, the United States launched the idea of introducing a peacekeeping mission. There were strong misgivings at the UN as there was no government authority in Southern Lebanon, the PLO was responsible to no one and the Israeli sponsored Christian militia under the command of Major Saad Haddad was capable of disrupting any peace process. To complicate matters further, the terrain of the area, hilly and ravenous, ideal for guerillas, was difficult for conventional forces.⁵⁹

The fate of UNTSO observers illustrated conditions in the country. They had been subject to widespread harassment, obstruction of movements, and outright robbery by various armed groups and factions. Between October 1975 and February 1978, UNTSO lost 124 vehicles in stealing or hijacking. One of the UNTSO members lost five vehicles in 4 months.⁶⁰

But all misgivings about launching a peacekeeping mission were pushed aside under pressure from the United States and the UK. On March 19, 1978, the SC called for strict respect of the territorial integrity of Lebanon, for a cease-fire, and for the withdrawal of the Israeli forces. It also established the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) “for the purpose of confirming the withdrawal of the Israeli forces, restoring international peace and security and assisting the government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area, the force to be composed of personnel drawn from Member States.”⁶¹ Established for a period of 6 months it is still there in 2006.

In spite of the differing circumstances of the mission and a much broader mandate, the guidelines for the force were the same as those applied to UNEF II: consent, impartiality, and self-defense. UNIFIL began its deployment with contingents transferred from UNEF II and soon reached the target of 4,000 men, later reinforced to 7,000. General Emmanuel A. Erskine of Ghana became the force’s commander. Apart from the Israelis, UNIFIL faced the main factions in Southern Lebanon, the PLO and Lebanese Christians who had their own military forces at disposal. Neither PLO and its military wing El Fatah nor the South Lebanese Army (SLA) under the command of Major Haddad controlled all armed militias present in the area. The Lebanese Army was merely a token presence, and the government in Beirut was haphazard. The IDF moved in and out of Southern Lebanon at will. None of the parties present on the ground could agree on the same definition of UNIFIL’s area of operation, so it was never properly defined.

As a result, the Force was deployed as permitted by the circumstances of the day and the disposition of the parties concerned.⁶²

By April 1978, the Israelis had withdrawn from about half of the occupied territory and UNIFIL took over the positions evacuated by the IDF. Checkpoints, observation posts, and patrols were set up to prevent infiltration by any armed elements. But neither PLO nor Haddad’s forces were inclined to cooperate.⁶³ In the next stage of withdrawal the Israelis vacated the territory to Haddad’s militia instead of to the UNIFIL. This led to counterattacks by the PLO and to attacks on UNIFIL by both sides. Attacks in May left 3 French soldiers dead and 14 wounded, including the commander of the French battalion. Harassment by the SLA was also common, and moreover it conducted raids into the UNIFIL area of operation, abducting people and blowing up houses belonging to suspected PLO members or sympathizers and establishing its own positions. PLO also was encroaching.⁶⁴

Negotiations to remove the infringing positions did not bring any results. UNIFIL was unwelcome to anyone in arms in Southern Lebanon.

There was apparently no obstructions, harassments, or attacks on the Force disturbing enough to provoke the SC to resolutely react in defense of its own decisions and the men it had sent out into harms way. After heavy shelling of UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura by SLA, the Council satisfied itself with a resolution condemning the act. In another incident, when three Nigerian UNIFIL soldiers were killed, it took it 5 days to issue a condemnation, largely because the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, opposed the resolution for 4 days long on account that it mentioned Israel in its text.⁶⁵

UNIFIL was on its own, and could only muddle through, oscillating erratically between combat actions and pathetic humiliations from which even the Force’s Commander was not saved. In May 1979 Erskine faced an angry crowd of Haddad’s supporters, was manhandled, and lost his badges of rank and the Blue Beret in the process.⁶⁶ Whatever was left of the credibility of UNIFIL disappeared with the general’s dignity.

Not all of the general’s troops were passive. Norwegians and Fijians were among those more assertive and had fewer problems in their areas of operations.⁶⁷

But no amount of resolve of some of the national troops or even of all of them could have saved a drifting operation not equipped for its task. UNIFIL was unable to control infiltration into the area of its operation nor shelling, raiding, and other hostilities by all parties to the conflict. A steady deterioration culminated in an all-out assault by IDF ground and naval forces on Palestinian positions in July 1981. Another wave of heavy retaliatory Israeli air attacks on targets in Lebanon followed in 1982.⁶⁸

When the new UNIFIL’s Commander William Callaghan met General Rafael Eitan in the morning of June 6, the Israeli Chief of Staff told him that the IDF would launch a major military operation into Lebanon within the hour and they expected not to be obstructed. Callaghan protested, instructed all his contingents to block the advancing forces, to take defensive measures, and to keep their positions unless their safety was seriously imperiled.⁶⁹ As promised, the Operation Peace for Galilee started at 11.00 hours. Two IDF mechanized divisions entered UNIFIL’s area with full air and naval support and progressed along three axes into Lebanon. Only two cases of token resistance by Dutch and Nepalese soldiers were reported. Other troops apparently waved the Israelis through.⁷⁰

By June 8, the UNIFIL became the first UN mission operating in a country occupied by a foreign army. The Israelis moved fast and with full force, causing a large number of casualties and massive destruction. A member of the Israeli forces invading from the sea remembered that The invasion has begun and it was surreal, like going on a pleasure-cruise… . Then
we came up from the beach on the main road, and what we saw stopped us in our tracks… . There were a great many dead… . They lay among the wreckage of their vehicles, the young and the old, the crippled and the fit, men, women and children together, never knowing what hit them… . During the night our paratroopers had helicopters in to secure the beachhead. In the pitch dark, unable to see what was coming at them, they’d poured round after round into anything that moved.⁷¹

On June 11, 1 day after the Israelis had engaged the Syrians at the outskirts of Beirut, a cease-fire was announced but the hunt for the Palestinians continued. On June 18, the Israelis entered the center of Beirut and encircled a few thousands of PLO fighters still there. The Israeli Air Force struck relentlessly, up to 4 hours without intermission. Ultimately, as a result of a deal negotiated by the special emissary of President Reagan, Philip Habib, Arafat left for Greece and the PLO completed its pull out from Beirut on September 1.

UNIFIL had been completely sidelined. The Lebanese government invited the United States, France, and Italy to send forces to stabilize the situation. It believed that these major Western powers would bring about what they were not able to get from the United Nations-the release of their country from military occupation by Israel and Syria. The multinationals duly arrived, some, like the French, on loan from UNIFIL. But they left Beirut by September 10, having accomplished nothing.

Four days later a bomb placed at his headquarters killed the Lebanese president. The next day, the IDF returned to West Beirut. A day after, the Phalangists-the Christian militia-massacred inhabitants of the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila, including women and children. The Israelis looked away and the SC protested for the record. The Lebanese decided to ask for the return of the multinational force and it came back by the end of September.⁷²

The massacre in Sabra and Shatila shocked the world and many Israelis as well. On September 25 in Tel Aviv, 400,000 people took part in the largest demonstration ever held in Israel. An official inquiry strongly criticized Defense Minister Ariel Sharon for having allowed the Phalangists to enter the refugee camps and called him to draw personal conclusions. Sharon resigned from the post of the Minster of Defense, but remained member of the cabinet as Minister without a portfolio.⁷³

In the following months, attacks on the Israeli occupying forces increased in Southern Lebanon as civil war in Beirut intensified between Lebanese fractions. The multinational forces were seen as a party to the conflict, and on April 18, 1983, a bomb destroyed the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. In mid-September, U.S. battleships bombarded positions of antigovernment forces around Beirut, openly taking sides. On October 23, a truck bomb exploded in a suicidal crash into a U.S. Marine barracks, killing 241 Americans while a parallel attack took the lives of 58 French servicemen. Everyone now wanted to get out of Lebanon, except UNIFIL. The SC was regularly extending its mandate, unchanged.

UNIFIL’s functioning on territory under the Israeli control brought about a radical shift in its relations to the main parties to the conflict. It recognized the right of the IDF as an occupying army and of its surrogate force SLA (when in conjunction with the Israelis) to carry on military operations. The right of the Lebanese to resist the occupation was also recognized. But on one hand UNIFIL restricted it in practice by exercising control and confiscation of arms from the local civilians and on the other, when locals did attack IDF/SLA, the Force did not intervene, except to protect its own personnel and noncombatants.⁷⁴ In effect UNIFIL had violated its own mandate and became a spent and useless force.

Analyzing the UNIFIL’s future in 1991 Marianne Heiberg saw three options: withdrawal, reduction, or major reinforcement. Her arguments for withdrawal were most convincing. First-argued she-the operation is too costly. UNIFIL ties up enormous assets consuming some two-thirds of all funds for UN peacekeeping. Moreover, in many respects it has lost sense of mission, became over-bureaucratic, administratively wasteful, and inefficient to the extent that may have irreversibly undermined its military and political credibility. UNIFIL’s role in providing security and assistance to the local Lebanese population was commendable, but in light of the human catastrophes that loom in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere, this role cannot be assigned a sufficiently high priority.⁷⁵ Four years later, a study requested by the UN SG did offer neither alternatives to the existing concept of the mission nor changes in its composition.⁷⁶

During the Operation Peace for Galilee, PLO ceased to exist as an organized presence on the territory, but tens of thousands of Palestinians remained in the Tyre pocket in official and unofficial camps. A new force appeared on the stage-Hizbollah. Having links to Iran, Hizbollah was, if anything, more secretive, militant, and fundamentalist than the PLO. It targeted all Israelis, soldiers and civilians alike, whenever and however it could.⁷⁷ Lack of a political solution and impotence of UNIFIL contributed to the rise of an organization more militant, as the PLO was crippled by the Israelis.

In April 1996 Hizbollah began to increase the number and viciousness of its attacks. Towns in Galilee were repeatedly shelled and it also struck elsewhere. The Israelis struck back with a new blitzkrieg that lasted 3 weeks. Thousands of Lebanese left their homes, and more then 150 were killed. As usual, UNIFIL reported the attacks and tried to protect civilians.

On April 18, IDF shelled UNIFIL’s base at Quana, killing more than 100 Lebanese civilians seeking shelter there. The Israelis reacted to the outcry in the international media by explaining the shelling as a result of a mistake by an artillery officer who was responding to Hizbollah’s firing rockets from the vicinity of the UN base. While a UN report prepared by a Dutch general contested that claim, Israel and the United States denounced it. A spokesman for the Israel Foreign Ministry retorted: “They accuse us of cold-blooded murder, but they do not take a moral stand on what Hizbollah did.”⁷⁸

Hizbollah’s choice of launching the rockets from its mobile units at the immediate proximity of the UN compound could indeed be an attempt to provoke the Israeli fire. But the UNIFIL Commander, General Stanislaw Wozniak of Poland, said: “renewed launching of rockets from the vicinity of UNIFIL’s compounds cannot be excluded.”⁷⁹ It follows that, while resolving nothing, the UNIFIL’s presence might bring about more risks and suffering.

During the period from its inception in 1978 to February 28, 2006, it absorbed more than half of the fatalities suffered by all United Nations peacekeeping operations in the Middle East since 1948. The muddling through, to which it was condemned by its utterly unrealistic mandate, took the lives of 257 members of the Force, compared to the total losses of the UN Forces in the Middle East amounting of 503 personnel.⁸⁰ To avoid such a costly failure the UN had either to give the mission an executive authority in Southern Lebanon, to reduce its mandate and composition to an observer mission, or to withdraw. It did neither.

In 2000, as a result of the growing domestic opposition to its ineffective presence, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Southern Lebanon, leaving the ground to the triumphant Hizbollah. On July 31, 2001, the SC decided to cut the number of troops and, after 23 years of endorsing a futile operation, asked the SG to present plans that could reconfigure the Force to an observer mission.⁸¹

Apart from proving the futility of an ill-conceived UN operations, Lebanon offered devastating arguments against deployment, outside of the UN framework, of hastily improvised multinational forces, armed with everything but a clear and
feasible political objective.

EMERGING PATTERNS

The number, size, and longevity of the UN peacekeeping operations in the Middle East made it the formative ground for shaping of the UN peacekeeping missions. Distinct patterns which emerged there were to appear at other peacekeeping
theatres in the future.

Whether at the level of the General Assembly in New York or of an observation post in Sinai, United Nations’ decisions and personnel were trampled upon at without any consequences for the offenders. The partition plan for Palestine overthrown by force, the unarmed observers sitting duck for both the Egyptians and Israelis fighting at the Suez Canal war of attrition in 1969, and the UNIFIL soldiers killed in Lebanon are cases in question. The UNEF I soldiers evicted by the Egyptians from their positions in Sinai, the Indian soldiers killed in Gaza in the Israeli assault in 1956, and UNIFIL’s positions overrun in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 are other examples of irrelevance of the UN military presence in face of determined belligerents.

Keeping up the flag became a priority in observer missions even whereupon it did not signal anything else than the organization’s impotence. The Secretariat’s decision to leave the UNTSO machinery intact after the withdrawal of Israeli
participation in the Armistice Agreement structures was later imitated by the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), continuously deployed after India withdrew her recognition in 1972.

UN engaged in three largely successful conflict containment operations, UNEF I and II and UNDOF. All of them came into being under convergence of interests of the Big Powers, which sought to avoid a direct East-West confrontation in the Middle East. But the UN withdrew UNEF I hastily under a political pressure, making the outbreak of a new war in 1963 more likely. UNDOF’s presence in the Golan Heights between Syria and Israel since 26 years illustrates in turn a paradox. An effective containment operation not followed by equally effective diplomacy takes off the urgency from a political resolution and is likely to petrify the conflict. The Israelis reached their strategic goals in Golan and the Syrians recognized having no chances for a military comeback. The UN became a guardian of that stalemate. But it is only an expression of a wider stalemate in the Arab-Israeli conflict and of the marginalization of the world body.

The uninterrupted military presence of the United Nations in Middle East did not prevent either a succession of Arab-Israeli wars or the political stalemate from continuing. The roots of the failures in the Middle East are in the betrayal of trust by an absentee United Nations in Palestine in 1947-1948. Upon leaving Jerusalem on May 14, 1948, the last Chief of the British Palestine Government, Sir Henry Gurney, put the keys to his office under the doormat.⁸² That bitter gesture testified both to the failure of Britain and that of the United Nations. It is far from certain that the young world organization would succeed where the British failed, but chances were not negligible, especially in Jerusalem, where an internationalization of the Holy City seemed a feasible option. The UN never recovered the keys to Palestine left by Sir Gurney and the consequences are being felt not only by the Israelis and Arabs, but by the rest of the world, still.

The next chapter shows how, without changing the tune, Hammarskjold, the same UN Secretary General who had established the first peacekeeping operation in Egypt, created an operation of a different type. Powerful outside interference, immaturity of the local leaders, and his own inconsequence deprived him from having succeed. But the Congo adventure had shown that there were alternatives to the UN’s position of bystander or pushover. Opting for such an alternative the organization annoyed almost everyone and its Secretary General lost his life.

Source: Andrzej Sitkowski, “UN Peacekeeping: Myth and Reality,” Praeger Security International, London, 2006

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

In 1945 the United Nations proudly pronounced itself determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Its Charter equipped it with an arsenal of tools needed to pursue such a lofty, almost utopian, goal. In 1947-1948 the Middle East and Palestine offered the UN the first major opportunity to employ these tools and to test the organization’s credibility. The results were negative: instead of preventing the local conflict from escalating, the UN helped to turn it into a major international conflagration. By introducing for a territory engulfed in a civil war a partition plan without the intention of enforcing it, the UN made an international war for Palestine inevitable. It also failed in bringing this war to an end, despite the deployment of several military missions in the Middle East theatre. The partition of Palestine is an ongoing process, leaving Israel without internationally recognized borders and the Palestinians without a state of their own. The Arabs and Israelis feel the consequences daily and with them the rest of the world.

This chapter sheds light on the circumstances and results of the UN military presence in the region, which became a continuous testing ground for the exercise of peacekeeping. Out of the six UN peacekeeping missions undertaken in the
region, three are ongoing.

MISHAPPENED MANDATE AND A FAILED TAKEOVER

On Friday May 14, 1948, the British High Commissioner of Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, left Jerusalem without anyone in attendance but his soldiers, who left soon thereafter. Jerusalem, the cradle of Judaism and Christianity, holy
for centuries to Muslims as well, was about to change hands again. But the new master, the United Nations, was neither present on the ground nor prepared for the takeover. The organization, which accepted the responsibility for Palestine after the surrender of the mandate by the British in 1947, left the territory’s fate to be decided by the struggle between the Arab and the Jews. It was a sorry end to the hopes aroused only 30 years earlier when the first Christian army since the times of the Crusaders had arrived at the gates of Jerusalem. On December 11, 1917, another British general, the commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, Sir Edmund Allenby, promised order and equal treatment for all communities present in Jerusalem.¹

Initially, both the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine looked up to the British as liberators from the Ottoman rule. But the efforts of the British Military Administration to maintain a peaceful equilibrium between the two increasingly hostile peoples did not bear fruits. Not even the most benevolent administration could have overcome the underlying ambiguities and contradictions of British policy toward the territory. Arthur Koestler described Lord Balfour’s declaration of 1917,
which promised a National Home to the Jews of Palestine, as one of the most improbable political documents of all times, because one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third. Other British politicians, rallying for Arab support in the fight against the Ottoman Empire, suggested prospects for an independent Arab Kingdom, which was to include Palestine.

The creation in April 1920 of the British Mandate for Palestine on behalf of the League of Nations and the replacement of the Military by a Civil Administration did not arrest the growing tide of conflict. During the first year of the Mandate riots broke out, Jews and Arabs were killed in a pattern that would repeat itself ad nauseam. The end of World War II in Europe only intensified the hostilities and increased the British costs of policing the territory. The main reason for this deterioration was the determined effort of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust to reach the land of the Jewish National Home and the growing impatience of Jewish organizations intent on establishing a Jewish state. The British maintained strict immigration quotas and turned overcrowded rickety ships bringing refugees away from the shores of Palestine. Upon arrival to the Promised Land people saved from Hitler’s gas chambers were sent to detention camps in Cyprus and Mauritius.

It was a bitter irony that the very power that had announced its intention to establish a Jewish Home added now to the monstrosity of Holocaust another cruelty. Terrorism by Jewish extremists intensified in response, culminating in July 1946 in the bombing of the British administration’s headquarters that was in the King David Hotel. Ninety-two people—Britons, Arabs, and Jews—died. The extremists, who included two future Israeli Prime Ministers—Menahem Begin
and Yitzhak Shamir, pursued a “blood and fire” policy to get the British out.

Unable and, perhaps, unwilling to check the increasing disintegration of its mandate, the Government of His Majesty, in the throes of a serious post-war economic crisis, criticized from all quarters for the creation of the problem and its handling, on April 2, 1947, requested the Secretary General of the United Nations to place the question of the future government for Palestine on the agenda of the General Assembly. Sir Alexander Cadogan summarized the British position
simply. “We have tried for years to solve the problem of Palestine,” he said. “Having failed so far, we now bring the question to the United Nations, in the hope that it can succeed where we have not.”² The British washed their hands off Palestine. No one had any idea how the UN could proceed to a success, but it approached its task eagerly and vigorously.³

In the same month yet, diplomats gathered at the special session of the United Nations Assembly at a converted skating ring in Flushing Meadows, not far from New York, and appointed a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). As a result of its work, the Committee failed to reach unanimous conclusions and two conflicting proposals emerged. The majority (seven members) recommended partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state bound together in an economic union. Jerusalem would be initially governed separately as a UN Trusteeship and its future decided later. Three members of the Committee recommended a single federal state and one abstained from voting. The principle of partition clearly prevailed in the face of fierce opposition by most Arab countries. The plan did not differ much from two earlier British proposals prepared during the Mandate.⁴

On November 29, 1947, at a stormy Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations the partition plan was adopted in resolution 181 by a vote of 33 to 13 with 10 abstaining, Britain among them. The majority included the United States, the Soviet Union, and the countries of Western and Eastern Europe. The walk-out of the representatives of Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen immediately followed the vote. In Jerusalem, the news from the UN was greeted with public jubilation by the Jews and hostile silence or isolated attacks on Jews by the Arabs.⁵

The decision on the partition plan inflamed a smoldering conflict between Palestinians Jews and Arabs. More and more people died in armed attacks and counter-attacks. The figures published by the British on January 9, 1948, showed 1,069 Arabs, 769 Jews, and 123 Britons killed in the 6 weeks following that decision, with some 50 people killed every day in Jerusalem alone. Civil unrest had become a full-scale civil war.

With signs of an imminent British withdrawal the fighting intensified. Volunteers from neighboring countries infiltrated to fight on the Arab side, but politically and strategically the Arabs were disunited. On April 5, 1948, when the Palestinian
charismatic commander Abdul Kader al-Husseini visited Damascus with a plea for arms and ammunition he was flatly refused.⁶ After he was killed later in the battle for the Jerusalem-Tel-Aviv highway, many of his followers left the battlefields. The Jews took Haifa and Jaffa. Arab villages, conquered by Jews, were leveled to the ground and their inhabitants expelled. Others left the land on their own. The first Palestinian exodus began. Whether it was a result of what would be now called ethnic cleansing is a subject of controversy between scholars and writers.⁷The General Assembly resolution on partition provided also for the establishment of a new Palestine Commission, which was supposed to take over administration from the Mandatory Power and to establish in the Jewish and Arab independent states Provincial Councils of Government that would gradually receive full responsibility for the territory. Its mandate also included the supervision of the erection of the administrative organs of central and local governments, the creation of an armed militia and the creation of an economic union between the two states—a tall order for a territory consumed by hatred and fighting.⁸

Lie called the members of the new Palestine Commission “five lonely pilgrims.” The representatives of Bolivia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Panama, and the Philippines met at Lake Success on January 9, 1948. The commission’s means were not proportionate to its task. Its predicament became visible when the representatives of Great Britain, the Arab Higher Committee, and the Jewish Agency were invited to join its deliberations. The British appointed Sir Alexander Cadogan and the Jews Moshe Shertok, but the Arab Higher Committee cabled Trygve Lie on January 19, 1948, that “it determined to persist in rejecting partition and in refusing recognition of the UNO resolution in this respect, therefore it was unable to accept invitation.” Later, the Higher Committee said that “… it would never submit or yield to any Power going to Palestine to enforce partition. The only way to establish partition was to wipe them out—man, woman and child” (the Committee meant the Arab population of Palestine).⁹

Nor were the British cooperative; they did not agree for the Commission to proceed to Palestine earlier than 2 weeks before the date of the termination of the Mandate and to progressively turn over authority to the Commission but only abruptly and completely on May 15. Only the Jews cooperated. The Jewish Agency had already indicated that it would accept partition even while claiming that the plan demanded territorial sacrifices from them.¹⁰

It became obvious that there were no chances for the Commission to discharge its mandate without enforcement. In a special report of February 16 to the SC on the problem of security in Palestine, the Commission noted that Arab interests both inside and outside Palestine were engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by violence the settlement recommended by the UN Assembly. Armed forces from surrounding Arab states had already begun infiltration of Palestine. In the view of the Commission, a basic issue of international order was involved. A dangerous and tragic precedent would have been established if force, or the threat of the use of force, was to prove an effective deterrent to the will of the United Nations. Unless an adequate non-Palestinian force was provided for keeping order after May 15, the period immediately following the termination of the Mandate would be a period of uncontrolled, widespread strife and bloodshed in Palestine, including the city of Jerusalem. Such a result would have been a catastrophic conclusion to an era of international concern for the territory.¹¹ The representatives of five small countries stated plainly what was at stake.

The UN Secretary General dealt with the crisis with an extreme restraint and reluctance. He produced a statement for the SC referring to a sufficient degree of agreement reached earlier for the establishment of a United Nations emergency international force that would be more than adequate to cope with any Palestinian challenge. Lie stressed that the UN could not permit violence to be used against its decisions and organs and that if the moral force of the organization was not enough, physical force would have to supplement it. But that statement was never presented, because he considered submitting it hazardous and wanted to sense better the trend of the Council’s discussion and action. Not without a hint of satisfaction, he later recalled that the caution proved to be well justified. After an impressive presentation by the SC’s Chairman, Karel Lisicky of Czechoslovakia, of the dramatic Palestine Commission report on February 24, 1948, the British representative Arthur Creech Jones said that His Majesty’s Government could not promise the kind of cooperation now requested. In view of the earlier British pronouncements it was not surprising. A surprise came from the U.S. representative, Warren Austin. He now claimed that the SC could take action to maintain international peace, but lacked the power to enforce partition or any other type of political settlement.¹² From now on it became clear the mericans had washed their hands off Palestine, too. Without them and without the British there was no hope anyone would act.

But on March 19, the American representative—in reverting to an earlier proposal by Australia—performed a complete reversal of the original U.S. position. The United States now believed that a temporary United Nations Trusteeship for Palestine should be established and that the partition should be suspended. Instead of embracing the American proposal as a way out of the impasse, Lie took the American reversal as a personal rebuff and did nothing to support it.¹³ On April 10, the Palestine Commission reported that the armed hostility of both Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arab elements, lack of cooperation by the Mandatory Power, the disintegrating security situation in Palestine, and the fact that SC did not furnish the Commission with the necessary armed assistance, made it impossible for the Commission to implement the Assembly’s resolution on the partition of the territory.

The SC repeated its call for a truce and by the resolution of April 23 established a Truce Commission, composed of the consular representatives in Jerusalem of Belgium, France, and the United States. A Spanish diplomat Pablo de Azcazarte was appointed its Secretary.

The second special session of the General Assembly on Palestine opened on April 16, and debated for a month. It refrained from taking any action and rejected the Trusteeship proposal, even after the Americans announced that they would be prepared to assign troops to enforce it. It now was the United Nations that washed its hands of Palestine. On May 14, 1948, by resolution 186, the Assembly relieved the Palestine Commission of its responsibilities and created the office of the UN Mediator for Palestine. The few diplomats who believed that the UN decisions were serious enough to be enforced disappeared from the picture. The Mediator was empowered to use his good offices with the local and community authorities in Palestine to arrange for the operation of common services necessary to the safety and well-being of the population of Palestine; assure the protection of holy places, religious buildings and sites in Palestine; and promote a peaceful adjustment of the future situation of Palestine.

The UN’s new course was a very different one from that envisaged by Brian Urquhart, then a promising young UN diplomat and an aide to Lie: In 1947 we were naively optimistic—recalled he—as to what could be done about this most complex and tragic of historical dilemmas, where two ancient people were in an equal, but deadly competition for a small, but infinitely significant piece of territory, a struggle made crucial by Hitler’s annihilation of the Jews of Europe on the one hand and the emergence of Arab nationalism on the other. British must be enabled to relinquish the Mandate for Palestine with dignity. The Jewish refugees from World War II must be allowed to settle. The Palestinians’ interests and rights must be protected… . The international community, through the United Nations, must restore peace and execute the plan. In our innocence, none of these things seemed to us impossible.¹⁴

On his arrival on May 14, 1948, to Jerusalem from Amman, Pablo de Azcazarte, the Secretary of the newly created Truce Commission, witnessed these expectations unraveling: “The High Commissioner and the Chief Secretary had left Jerusalem that morning … in this almost clandestine manner twenty hours before the official expiry of the mandate … I had always counted on the British trying to hold off as long as possible (especially in Jerusalem) the chaos, which must inevitably follow their departure… . The time had come for the plunge into unknown.”¹⁵

In fact it was not so unknown. In the void created by the British withdrawal and the UN absence, the war could only intensify and there were parties eager to quickly filling this void. At 4.40 a.m. on May 14, 1948, David Ben Gurion, the Chairman of the Jewish Agency, read out a Declaration of Independence and announced the establishment of a Jewish State. In another reversal of its policy, the United States immediately recognized the Provisional Government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel. It was the personal decision of the U.S. President Harry Truman, taken against the advice of his main international policy advisers who saw in support of the Jewish case a danger to American interests in Arab countries.¹⁶ The first recognition de jure came later from the Soviet Union. On the same day in Egypt a very different announcement was drafted. When the SC met on May 15, it had on its table a blunt cable from the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs, reading that “Egyptian armed forces have started to enter Palestine to establish security and order …”¹⁷ The invader presented himself in writing. But the only statement made by the SG about his role in Palestine in May 1948 was that “I have dispatched an advance party of the Commission to Jerusalem… . The conditions in that city gave me serious concern for their personal safety, and I took all possible measures to ensure that they were safely evacuated.”¹⁸

Reduced to the role of passive observer of the violent disintegration of a country, which he had called not long ago yet “the sacred trust,” the last British High Commissioner, General Cunningham, closed a chapter of history in embarking by ship to Britain on May 14, 1948. Surrendering the Mandate amid chaos and violence, the British repeated the gesture of Pilate in the same city 2,000 years ago. They knew well what they were doing. But by taking over responsibility for the Mandate, the United Nations apparently did not.

At the SC meeting in the afternoon of that day, as Arab troops crossed the frontiers, the representative of the United States did not say a word. For Lie there seemed to be a conspiracy of silence in the Council (with the exception of its Soviet member), reminiscent of the most disheartening head-in-the-sand moments of the Chamberlain appeasement era.¹⁹ It took the Council 2 weeks to adopt a resolution calling for a truce and threatening to apply sanctions to a party refusing to comply. Both Arabs and Jews accepted the demand.

Count Folke von Bernadotte, a member of the Swedish Royal Family, appointed Mediator for Palestine by the Security Council, negotiated terms of the truce and its supervision. But the truce, which took effect on June 11, had been broken by July 9 already. Renewed fighting lasted for another 8 months, interrupted by several short-lived and never strictly held cease-fires.

On the battlefield, to the surprise of many, the Jews—better organized and fighting according to strategically sound plans—stood up well to the Arab onslaught. The only real setback for Jewish forces was the surrender, after heavy fighting, of the Jewish Quarter of the Old Town of Jerusalem to the Arab Legion. The main losers of the war were Arab Palestinians, who left the country by the tens of thousands, either expelled by the Jews or desperate to escape the war. Jews had nowhere to go.

Bernadotte established his headquarters at the Greek island of Rhodes and shuttled from there in a white plane, with big “UN” letters on its wings, between the capitals of the belligerents. Military observers assisted the Mediator, all of them officers delegated on the UN request by members of the Truce Commission—Belgium, France, and the United States. They were unarmed and wore their national uniforms with white-blue armbands to mark them as UN personnel. On September 17, Bernadotte was assassinated when on his way by car to visit the Israeli military governor of Jerusalem. A French colonel, Andre-Pierre Serot, was also killed. The murder was committed by the Jewish terrorists, members of the Stern Gang. In spite of numerous arrests of suspected terrorists by Israeli authorities, the killers have never been apprehended.²⁰ Ralph Bunche,
then the Secretary’s General Personal Representative, took over Bernadotte’s work.

During his short-lived mission, the first UN Mediator had not been impressed either by the policies or by the practices of the organization he served. Bernadotte considered the partition plan for Palestine an unfortunate decision and held the view that “The United Nations showed itself from the worst side. It was depressing to have to recognize the fact that even the most trivial decisions with regard to measures designed to lend force to its words were depending on the political calculations of the Great Powers.”²¹

As by 1949 the Israelis had reached most of their military objectives and the Arabs had lost their hopes for a military victory, Bunche could negotiate an armistice. By the end of July 1949, bilateral Armistice Agreements between Israel and Egypt, Israel and Lebanon, and Israel and Syria had been concluded, including establishment of demarcation lines between the belligerents. The partition of Palestine was now a fact accomplished by military force; it had nothing to do with the plan for a Federal State of Palestine adopted by the United Nations. The territory of the former British Mandate was divided between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. Israel annexed 2,555 square miles, about 50 percent more than envisaged by the partition plan; Jordan annexed 2,200 square miles; and Egypt the Gaza Strip, about 135 square miles. Jerusalem was divided between Israel and Jordan. The Palestinian Arabs were not a party to any settlements and hundreds of thousands of them left the country, leaving everything behind and joining those refugees who left during the war already.²² Israel paid for its right of existence with the lives of 6,000 of her citizens (4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians) and the enmity of the Arab world. The Arab losses have been probably much higher.²³

The British Commander of the Arab Legion, Glubb Pasha, commented afterward: This chain of tragic events shed light on the enormous fault of the United Nations, who voted for a partition plan without providing deployment of an international force for its implementation. Should a neutral army have been introduced to Palestine in the spring of 1948, the Israelis would not undertake to occupy all of the country, the Arab States would not intervened, the Palestinian question would not concern the whole of the Middle East… . Finally, Jerusalem would remain under international control.²⁴

The first Secretary General of the United Nations was of a different opinion. Lie maintained that “Ultimately, the Security Council did solid work to bring peace to Palestine.”²⁵ History proved Lie wrong because the Agreements contributed to no more then few years of absence of war and 60 years after his judgment there is no peace in Palestine. Glubb Pasha’s was perhaps overoptimistic, but, most likely, deployment of a neutral international army would make a great difference. Extremists from both camps were bound to oppose it, but an all-out involvement of Arab states against the UN would be most unlikely. A measure at least of an internationalization of Jerusalem was not an unrealistic prospect because of the Jewish initial, if reluctant, support for the idea. In 1950, there were even segments of Jewish population of the ancient city who preferred an international rule in Jerusalem to that of an Israeli government.²⁶

UN OBSERVERS CORPS: A PRESENCE AT ANY PRICE

On August 11, 1949, the Security Council terminated the office of Mediator for Palestine and the Truce Commission became known as the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO). No single resolution established the UNTSO’s mandate and its tasks were defined case by case. It was responsible for demarcating armistice lines, mediating the differences between the parties, establishing demilitarized zones, deterring an arms build-up, facilitating the exchange of prisoners, and investigating complaints of violations of the Agreements. The last task fell to the responsibility of the Mixed Armistice Commissions (MAC) working under Chairmen appointed by the United Nations. Three demilitarized zones were established; in the El Auja area on the Israeli side of the demarcation line with Egypt, near Lake Tiberias between Israel and Syria, and on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem.²⁷

From the outset severe understaffing diminished the potential impact of the new organization. UNTSO took over the military personnel employed by the Mediator for Palestine, but their number was slashed by 95 percent, from 572 to 21. Seven Belgians, 7 Frenchmen, and 7 Americans were expected to supervise armistice agreements involving 5 countries and hundreds of miles of cease-fire lines and demilitarized zones.

The example of the Jordanian-Israeli MAC demonstrates the scale of the understaffing. Its five observers based in Jerusalem had to cover a 350-mile stretch of the demarcation lines, as well as to attend two or three weekly meetings between the local Jordanian and Israeli commanders, investigate the complaints concerning violations of the Armistice (roughly one on each day), and respond to urgent occasional calls for arrangement of a cease-fire.²⁸

The observers lacked support from the parties involved and had to deal with growing tensions between the belligerents. There were constant obstructions of the freedom of movement of the UN observers and continuing petty harassment. The UN restricted itself to lodging protests, which were usually ignored. No party of the conflict had ever properly marked the demarcation lines on the ground, leaving space for conflicting interpretations. Moreover, the observers lacked the ability to check the cross-border infiltrations and raids from both sides.²⁹By early 1955 commando raids on Israeli civilians by the Palestinian fedayeen supported by Egypt had become frequent and provoked Israeli retaliatory attacks. Innocent victims on both sides became a sad reality. In September 1956, Israeli forces occupied the demilitarized zone of El Auja, which was the site of MAC and prohibited the Egyptians from access to the area. For all practical purposes the Commission was dead. But it moved to Egyptian-controlled Gaza and, despite the absence of any Israeli cooperation, continued to examine complaints submitted by Egypt. 30 The Israelis could have been encouraged in the takeover by the earlier experience from Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Contrary to a signed agreement, they had never allowed the UN to take over the control of the zone and even prevented the UNTSO’s Chief of Staff from entering it.³¹

The Israel-Syria MAC was virtually paralyzed by complaints from both sides. By October 1966 it had registered 35,488 Israeli and 30,600 Syrian complaints. It ceased to meet regularly in 1951 and its last emergency session was held in 1960. The other two Commissions, those for Israel-Jordan and Israeli-Lebanon performed only a little better but survived until the outbreak of the 1967 Six Days’ War.

Dag Hammarskjold, who succeeded Lie, did not accept the Israeli unilateral denunciation of the Armistice Agreement with Egypt after the outbreak of the Suez Canal War in 1956 and requested UNTSO to maintain its structures. Neither did he recognize the later renunciation by Israel of the other agreements. Since these did not provide for unilateral termination, Hammarskjold’s position was legally correct. However, the continued deployment of UN military personnel in the field
despite the fact that it was not recognized by one of the parties to the conflict meant the introduction of a make-believe element into the presence of the UN in areas of armed conflagration. Flying the flag for its own sake became a priority, recognized by Hammarskjold’s successors to the detriment of the credibility of the UN ever since.

Notwithstanding full-fledged Arab-Israeli wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973, the organization established for supervision of a truce continued to function and even flourished by acquiring more personnel and deploying at new places. In the war of attrition between Egypt and Israel along the Suez Canal in 1969-1970, UNTSO observers were sitting duck not only because they were under crossfire, but because both sides deliberately targeted them.³² At present the UNTSO observers are on loan to UNIFIL in Lebanon and to UN Disengagement Observer Force on Golan Heights (UNDOF), which allows to keep up the UNTSO facades in Jerusalem, Beirut, and Damascus.

UNTSO unequivocally failed in fulfilling its function of maintaining the cease-fire lines and preventing incursions across the international frontiers; “the parties to the conflict were not prepared to cooperate with the UN observers, the demarcation lines were not clearly marked, and the observers were not equipped, politically or militarily, to deal with the type of confrontations that developed in the demilitarized zones.”³³ The only tangible effect of UNTSO’s deployment was monitoring and reporting from the conflict areas done at the sacrifice of lives of 44 personnel as of February 28, 2006. UNTSO’s experience exposed the SC and the Secretariat’s powerlessness in face of deliberate obstruction of the missions and direct attacks on UN personnel. The offending parties did not suffer any consequences from their actions incompatible with their obligations as UN members and with the specific agreements concerning the mission. UNTSO also showed that it was easier to launch a mission than to wind it up.

Source: Andrzej Sitkowski, “UN Peacekeeping: Myth and Reality,” Praeger Security International, London, 2006

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

Soldiers from all corners of the world congregate under the Blue Flag in god-forsaken places they have difficulty of finding on a map. What brings together young men from Zimbabwe and France, from Russia and Fiji, from Poland and Bangladesh, from Argentina and UK, and, rarely, even from the United States of America? Their common cause is United Nations peacekeeping, which in words of the UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “… stands out, as one of the
Organization’s most original and ambitious undertakings in its efforts to control conflict and promote peace.” ¹ But Fred Cuny, an American from Texas, the legendary international relief leader, liked to say that, if the United Nations had been around in 1939, we would all be speaking German.² He was not alone in thinking that the contribution of the colorful contingents fell miserably short of the grand expectations people had of them.

I shared these expectations. The experience of the Second World War in Warsaw (Poland) made me to believe in the need for a world in which peace and freedom for people is internationally protected. The United Nations Charter contained such a promise. A few decades later, I was lucky enough to participate in a UN operation that delivered on that promise by ushering Namibia (South West Africa or SWA) into its independence in 1989. But that success was an exception rather then a rule and what followed was not a New World Order, promised also by the U.S. President in the wake of the first Gulf War, but a string of UN failures and humiliations in Somalia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. Not convinced by confusing, contradictory, and simplistic explanations of these debacles offered by the media and by the politicians, I begun to search for more plausible answers on what went wrong and why. There were no simple answers in sight and I embarked on a closer examination of the subject the results of which I am sharing with the reader of this book.

Ultimately, I have come to believe that the UN doctrine and practice informed by the alleged contradiction between peacekeeping and peace enforcement is divorced from the reality of most contemporary armed conflicts. It is wasteful
and cripples all levels of a UN peacekeeping mission. Abdication in advance of peace enforcement by UN peacekeeping contingents has severely limited their effectiveness and allowed aggressors and warlords to carry on their trade of war,
atrocities, and ethnic cleansing with impunity.³ As Edward N. Luttwak rightly observed, the very presence of UN forces unable to effectively protect civilians inhibits the normal remedy of escape from war. Deluded into thinking that they would be protected, the endangered people stay in place, until it is too late to flee.⁴

FROM SUEZ CANAL TO RWANDA AND SREBRENICA

The first UN peacekeeping operation, United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), was deployed in 1956 to separate belligerents in the Suez Canal War. It acted under three guiding principles: consent of the parties to the conflict, impartiality, and use of force only in self-defense.⁵ Until its premature and forced withdrawal, it was a success. Peacekeeping was never formally defined by any UN organ or by its Secretariat. But this was not necessarily a problem, because the lack of an official definition could have been an advantage, allowing the UN to tailor its missions in keeping with the nature of the conflicts. Yet, although Brian Urquhart, one of the major architects of peacekeeping, considered the UN mission in Egypt to have been a face-saving operation of a unique kind,⁶ the UN choose to codify the UNEF’s guidelines as a doctrine which it has subsequently applied indiscriminately for some 50 years. As a result, international military contingents have deployed with the same face-saving guidelines as those formulated for UNEF, even when one of the faces to be saved was that of a genocidal killer, as it happened in the Rwanda of 1994. The ill-conceived and abusive deployment of lightly armed international contingents in areas of armed conflagrations has gradually made peacekeeping a travesty of the initially brilliant concept.

In 1995 the “safe area” of Srebrenica in Bosnia was overrun by Serbs despite the presence of a UN battalion which did not put any resistance to the attackers who massacred thousands of Bosnians afterward. The Security Council (SC) in resolution 836, which established the safe areas, explicitly authorized use of force to deter attacks on them. But the UN Secretariat argued that such an authorization should be read in the context of self-defense, which does not imply defense of a territory. It also pointed out that “deterrence” is different from “defense” or “protection.” As a high UN official in charge of the ex-Yugoslavia desk in the New York headquarters explained before the fall of Srebrenica “… we were deployed to help extinguish the flames of war, not to fan them.” After the enclave’s fall, he maintained that peacekeepers were being blamed for failing to do things that they were not mandated to do.⁷ It was not just UN officials who promoted this view.

In Yugoslavia the media shaped the perceptions and influenced the actions of their audiences by disseminating an image of peacekeepers made impotent by some undefined “international laws.” Parroting their sources and trotting out stereotypes, journalists bore considerable responsibility for the failure of the American and the international public to understand the conflict and to grasp the UN role in it.⁸ Indeed, the media has shaped our perceptions of other troubled UN missions to other tortured nations as well.

But the United Nations is too noble a project to debase itself by turning a blind eye to areas of its military deployment becoming killing fields, as it did in Rwanda and Srebrenica.⁹

DOCTRINAL CONFUSION AND CONCEPTUAL VOID

The real nature of the UN military interventions is obscured by the existing confusion about “peacekeeping” and “peace enforcement,” neither of which appears in the UN Charter. Both are open to differing interpretations, but in the UN view, first and foremost, are incompatible. According to Ghali: “The logic of peacekeeping flows from premises that are quite distinct from those of enforcement… . To blur the distinction between the two can undermine the viability of a peacekeeping operation and endanger its personnel.”¹⁰ But the guidelines for UNEF II, established in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur Arab-Israeli War in 1973, provided that the UN troops can use force in self-defense, “which would include resistance to attempts by forceful means to prevent it from discharging its duties under the Security Council’s mandate …”¹¹ In less diplomatic language it means that force can be used in defense of the mandate, and such an action is nothing else than enforcement. These guidelines become standard for the future operations but that fact did not disturb the UN in repeating its mantra of a strict contradiction between peacekeeping and peace enforcement.

Members of UN Forces from the Commander to the privates face, therefore, hard choices. Is a forcible removal of an illegal roadblock on the way of a UN convoy an act of peacekeeping or an act of peace enforcement? The UN mission to Cambodia illustrated mutually exclusive but seemingly correct interpretations of the UN policy. The Force’s Commander, General John M. Sanderson, and his Deputy, General Michel Loridon, differed on the appropriate strategy toward the Khmer Rouge who, contrary to previous agreements, prevented UN peacekeepers from entering their zone. The Deputy rightly insisted that it was within the mission’s mandate to use force, if need be, to compel rebels to honor their own pledges and to maintain the UN troops’ freedom of movement. The Commander believed that such an action would amount to an offensive, which was outside the mission’s mandate. Both generals could have claimed to be following UN principles but the Deputy was sent packing.¹² It was a telling illustration of a conceptual confusion that reigned at all levels of the UN peacekeeping operations. The results un peacekeeping of that confusion and of the conceptual void proved to be tragic for everyone
concerned.

The incompatibility of the original concept of peacekeeping with the nature of the prevailing intrastate conflicts has not gone unnoticed. But the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s bold admission of failures and errors in Srebrenica fell short of calling into question the peacekeeping doctrine itself. “It became apparent that the old rules of the game no longer eld,” declared Annan in his report on the fall of the enclave. Yet, he again insisted that peacekeeping and peace enforcement were distinct activities that should not be confused. A report produced in 2000 by a panel of experts contained a fitting analysis of the existing shortcomings, but confirmed the validity of the consensual peacekeeping principles, unchanged from the time of the Suez Canal crisis.¹³

Outside of the UN system, military strategists and academia produced in the last decade a vast body of theoretical contributions on peacekeeping’s doctrinal adjustment to the new challenges. To describe better the complex realities new
ideas and semantic innovations have been introduced, such as “robust,” “wider,” “expanded peacekeeping,” “peace support,” “peace restoration,” or “inducement” and also “humanitarian” operations-to name a few. As for peace enforcement a consensus seems emerging in considering it a subdivision of UN operations, falling into a “gray area” between peacekeeping and war fighting.¹⁴ But the existing debates have not affected policies and practices of peacekeeping, yet. Whatever turn these debates may take in the future, their participants cannot afford neglecting stark realities of peacekeeping on the ground, because what can be easily differentiated on paper may defy such a distinction in the field. Neither theoreticians nor practitioners should overlook the experience of the former commander of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia, General Michael Rose. According to the general, “… it is impossible to draw a clear line between the permissible use of force in a peacekeeping operation and an act of war.” ¹⁵ Until the theoretical questions are resolved, a common sense principle could be perhaps agreed upon: before deploying peacekeeping operations the UN should make sure that its military contingents are ready to defend themselves and their mandate and that they have means to do so. Otherwise it is better for the organization and for the soldiers that they stay home.

CONSTRAINTS OF CHANGE

An effective UN peacekeeping faces serious constraints on the part of the Secretariat of the organization and of the troop contributing governments. The leaders of the organization never came to terms with the idea that war sometime must be fought to keep up or create peace. The governments shy from commitments to operation exposing their troops to casualties. Thus, changing the UN peacekeeping doctrine or introducing more robust rules of engagement cannot by itself radically alter how the organization confronts challenges to international peace. The roots of the malaise reach deep, growing out of a soil fertilized by ubiquitous contradictions and an illusion. The first contradiction is a declared desire for peace but an unwillingness to pay its price. Equally contradictory is the nature of the United Nations composition. The very offenders of peace and human rights are among its members and exercise a corroding influence on the organization’s capability in challenging these violations. The illusion is the belief, widely spread in the West before September 11, 2001, that conflicts in distant, exotic places do not affect our own safety.

The reluctance of states to undertake risky interventions in foreign conflicts in the interest of an abstract concept of international peace found an institutional expression in a profound, if undeclared, shift in role of the United Nations. The world body whose Charter enabled it to restrain aggressors and prevent wars became in 1948 in Palestine an organization offering good offices for mediating, monitoring, and reporting from areas of conflict. The member governments either welcomed that shift or did not mind. That shift articulated during the cold war into the replacement of the collective security sought by the UN founding members by a less ambitious strategy called “peacekeeping,” which William Durch defined as “carving out a more narrow security role.”¹⁶

But the Great Powers, which exercise the veto over the Security Council’s resolutions, did not have a common agenda even after the cold war was over. Initial hopes for a more assertive role by the organization quickly floundered, thus. By 1996, a clear confirmation of the old stance came from Ghali, who pronounced the UN “a neutral intervening force and honest broker.” ¹⁷ He did so in spite of the Charter of the organization, which in Chapter VII provides for a ollective response to threats to international peace, including, as the last resort, military actions against the aggressors (see Appendix).¹⁸ Ghali’s confirmed retreat from the original aims of the UN was an expression of the institutional culture of neutrality that took a firm hold in the organization and Annan’s pronunciations to the contrary proved insufficient to break up that lock.

The ambiguity of the current official language on use of force by the UN remains an obstacle to any meaningful reform. It is best exposed by the contradictory interpretation of the mandates of the SC formulated in resolutions 678 and 836. Both resolutions authorized the intervening international contingents to employ “all necessary means” to discharge their mandates. The former was interpreted as an authorization for a flat-out war with Iraq or Desert Storm by a U.S.-led coalition of the willing. The latter was deemed insufficient for inducing a UN battalion to use force either in deterrence of attacks on the safe area of Srebrenica or in defense of itself.¹⁹

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

Short of a radical rewriting of the present peacekeeping rules, the Secretary General has no reason for wearing the sheriff’s star. The UN Secretariat should then follow its own logic of neutrality and disarm by restricting its peacekeeping missions to the dispatch of military observers. The organization can only gain from abandoning the false promises of peacekeeping by noncombatant troops, maintained at tremendous costs and to no avail. Building up its negotiating and mediating capabilities has a greater potential for the support of peace than feeble sable rattling. The money wasted on failed interventions could be released for a better use.²⁰ Moreover, with UN pretences abandoned, neither islanders from Fiji, paratroopers from Belgium, nor young men from any other country would need to die in places like Bosnia, Lebanon, or Rwanda in actions that are no more than exercises in international hypocrisy, provided that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and coalitions of the willing who already replace Blue Helmets in UN authorized peacekeeping operations will learn from the organization’s failures.

But as the organization proved capable of absorbing the results of worst failures without a visible damage or change of its course, it may well be that peacekeeping will just continue in its present frame. The symbolic presence of international troops provides a smokescreen, a substitute for an effective intervention, and there is a constant demand for such a commodity on the international political market. It was recently confirmed in Afghanistan. After the American defeat of the Taliban regime in 2001, a multinational International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) authorized by the UN Security Council has been restricted to patrolling the relatively calm capital city of Kabul, while the provinces were left to their fate-armed clashes between competing factions, common banditry, and flourishing narco-business. NATO, which took over the command of the operation in August 2003, went outside of Kabul (after the U.S. administration dropped its opposition to that move).²¹ But it restricted the initial deployment to a symbolic force in the one and only, relatively calm region of Kunduz with the task of protecting a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). NATOS’ minimalist response to the risk of Afghanistan sliding into anarchy again shows that it is not immune to the UN peacekeeping syndrome of expecting to alter the behavior of warring parties by a symbolic presence of international noncombat troops. Some of the alliance’s members even believe that their peacekeepers need to obtain assurances of security before being deployed.²²

When even NATO, the most powerful military alliance in the world, wavers in deployment of its might, may the UN play any significant role in what is called peacekeeping? It is an open question, but even in face of failures and shortcomings only too obvious, the organization cannot be dismissed easily. On the second anniversary of the terrorist attack of September 9, 2001, John Mearsheimer, leading American realist thinker, bluntly submitted that the United States cannot run the world by itself and that institutions like the UN are needed.²³ If this is so, the question is not whether, but what for is the UN needed in the field of international security.

At the strategic level, there is a consensus, including the sole superpower, that authorization of the UN SC, if not necessary, is at least much desirable for any international military intervention, peacekeeping included. At the operational level in missions labeled peacekeeping, strict adherence to the consensual peacekeeping prevail. But an unexpected and undeclared divorce from these was taking place at an obscure front in the Congo at the end of 2005. UN and Congolese forces, acting in hot pursuit, killed about 80 rebels in a week south of Beni in the North Kivu district. Further, Congolese troops supported by the UN contingents retook nine localities in the Ituri district.²⁴ Not a single cornerstone of the consensual peacekeeping doctrine remained in place in that operation. Consensus of the parties, impartiality of the UN troops, and the restriction of use of force to self-defense-all these principles were overturned. Strangely enough the edifice of peacekeeping did not go tumbling down in the UN HQ or anywhere else. It remains to be seen whether these events are an isolated incident or a quiet test of a new policy. But with even NATO having troubles in staffing its noncombat mission in Afghanistan, the later, if ever true, does not seem to have much chance. Availability of men ready to take risks under an international flag is at the roots of a success or a failure of any meaningful reform of peacekeeping.

Urquhart, remembering the remorse, felt by anyone involved, for the failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, rallies for giving the UN a real muscle by creating a volunteer-based rapid reaction force, permanently at the disposal of the SC. One of the UN peacekeeping architects, who was in the past against a permanent UN Force and peace enforcement by soldiers under the Blue Flag, clearly recognizes now that a changed nature of challenges require changes in response.²⁵ Alas, his voice sounds like a call in the wilderness.

Conceivably there are also other new avenues for peacekeeping. An opportunity for opening an entirely new space for deployment of the Blue Helmets might had been lost during the countdown to the invasion of Iraq. While even the supposedly solid intelligence can turn out to be mistaken, the temptation to avert the danger of an imminent attack by a preemptive strike is great and the risks of inaction incalculable. Tedious and often-obstructed work of arms inspectors could had been supported by the UN international troops protecting the inspectors, aggressively supervising suspicious sites, and ready on coercive action in emergency. Their presence would amount to a preventive international occupation, leaving only the trappings of sovereignty intact. According to a publication in a usually well-informed German weekly, a project along these lines was supposedly considered by the German and French authorities before the invasion of Iraq.²⁶

A permanent UN rapid reaction force and a preventive UN occupation are-by current political standards-unrealistic, to say the least. But reality is not a fixed commodity. It is rather a moving target defined by our priorities and perceptions. Any idea about coordinated air attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon was utterly unrealistic-until it was proven otherwise by a bunch of obscured fanatics. These attacks transformed the reality radically but the matching adjustments of international security strategy are yet to come about.

In face of increasing global threats the UN may either take part in formulation of new strategies and their implementation or opt out by clinging to flawed concepts and practices. But doing business as usual seems to enjoy continuing support of the membership of the organization and of influential international policy makers. That support is qualified only by the recognition that high-risk operations should be performed by coalitions of the willing (under authorization by the SC) instead of by the Blue Helmets. As we are witnessing in Afghanistan, that qualification does not prevent problems experienced in the UN-led operations to appear in the new context. Continuation of business as usually is therefore the most likely scenario for the peacekeeping theatre.

A few years ago a prominent member of the UN Secretariat advanced a fitting comparison of the peacekeeping to other public services. It is clear, he said, that if the world wants the UN to serve, even occasionally, as a fire brigade, it will have to do better than the present system, under which the fire breaks out, the aldermen on the Security Council agree it needs to be put out, and the fire chief is then sent out to hire firemen, rent fire trucks, find hoses of the right length, and look for sources of water to put into them while hoping that, when he has what he needs, there will still be enough survivors to rescue.²⁷ But the otherwise accurate description invites an essential supplement: the firemen may use the water hoses only in self-defense, when their own pants catch fire. Despite the calamities suffered and contrary to declarations of readiness to change, the old paradox seem to keep all actors in the peacekeeping theatre in a lock: the firemen brigade refrains from making any use of the water hoses in order not to fan the flames; the peacekeepers do not make use of their arms because they do not want to inflame wars. So, the UN either leaves wars and other violent crises alone so that they can burn themselves out, or, when in place already, keeps a safe distance from fire and reports on the outcome. Thus, global policing of this imperfect world is practically left to the United States with an occasional input from UK and France, the later mainly in emergencies affecting their former colonies. It is only too obvious that the scope of such policing must be severely restricted by political and material constraints. In absence of any meaningful input from the UN or from any other unlikely party stepping into its boots, the global insecurity may only grow more intractable than
before.

Until the political elite, the international media, and the public take a genuine interest and learn to detect and repudiate the real substance of the present peacekeeping policies and practices, the chances for change are negligible.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

Chapter 1 is an inquiry into the theoretical background for peacekeeping that is but one of tools in the arsenal of tools for conflict resolution. But, according to A.B. Fetherston, in essence, we are still largely in the dark in terms of improving analysis, effectiveness, and success of peacekeeping. That is the case, he said, due to the lack of theoretical underpinning for the field.²⁸

The UN military contingents alone do not provide for a quick fix-up of violent conflagrations. To meaningfully contribute to conflict resolution or, less ambitiously, to its management or containment, the Blue Helmets have to be credible and effective. But views on what for they appear in distants land with their guns differ widely. There is no clear answer from the UN still and an emerging consensus on placement of peace enforcement in the gray area between peacekeeping and war fighting does not inform the policies and practices of international military interventions yet.

Chapter 2 analyzes the responsibilities of the main actors in running the peacekeeping operations and shows how these were discharged.

The Security Council, empowered by the UN Charter to decide on matters of peace and war, resembles a security organ of a world government that neither exists nor will exist in a foreseeable future. The Council launches UN peacekeeping operations under its exclusive discretion. Whether it deploys international contingents on a successful mission to Namibia or on a misconceived one to Somalia, or does nothing to effectively intervene in a much bloodier civil war in Sudan, there is no official scrutiny. More often than not the emphasis in the Council is on political correctness of resolutions with scant regard to the realities on the ground. In the case of ex-Yugoslavia the sheer volume of the Council’s official pronouncements amounted to a political pornography: more than seventy resolutions have been issued in 3 years and largely ignored.

Peacekeeping operations are authorized by the Council either under Chapter VI or VII of the UN Charter (see Appendix) and the latter are commonly but inaccurately labeled peace enforcement missions. It may be recalled, that the Council authorized the use of force in the first UN operation in the Congo without evoking Chapter VII.²⁹

The Secretary General of the United Nations and his staff, the UN Secretariat in short, function as the executive arm of the Security Council. The Secretariat is a bureaucracy, only more so because of its international composition and unaccountability. Convinced of its impartiality, for half of the century it portrayed itself steadfastly as a neutral technical force simply following orders by the SC or other intergovernmental UN bodies. But Annan, the first UN Secretary General elevated from among the UN bureaucrats, made a dramatic and unexpected turnabout. In a clear break with the long tradition of the UN infallibility, the repenting now SG exposed serious mistakes and errors of the Secretariat in failed peacekeeping missions in Rwanda and ex-Yugoslavia.³⁰ Alas, neither of these groundbreaking reports seemed to attract the attention they deserved and the UN peacekeeping rules remained unchanged.

The troop-contributing governments’ role in the peacekeeping theatre is three-fold. As members of the Security Council and/or of the General Assembly, they bear the responsibility for the actions of the organization. Outside these assemblies, they represent sovereign states, capable and willing to criticize these actions and the organization itself. Finally, they can and more often than not they do meddle in the conduct of the missions by instructing their national contingents over the heads of the UN command. Real motives and implications of governmental decisions concerning contributions to the UN peacekeeping operations remain often obscure not only to the public opinion, but also to the political elite. It is the military men of all ranks that carry the burden of their governments temporarily disowning them, of the ambiguous marching orders of the SC, and of the fuzzy policies of the UN Secretariat. But it is the commander of the UN Force who has to translate the mandate into the rules of engagement for his men and to decide if and how they should defend themselves and their mission. Despite all limitations, his and his men’s attitudes make a difference to the outcome of their mission.

The case studies in Chapters 3 to 9 show how peacekeeping worked in the past. The nineteen missions described are representative in size and kind of the totality of the sixty peacekeeping operations undertaken by the UN from the first
mediating and monitoring mission in Palestine in 1948 through 2005 (thirteen were launched in the 40 years prior to the end of the cold war in 1989 and forty-seven since).

This book covers the region of Middle East, five countries (the Congo, Namibia, Somalia, Cambodia, and Rwanda), and a federative state under dissolution (ex-Yugoslavia). An exception from the country-by-country presentation was made for the Middle East, which became a formative ground for the UN peacekeeping doctrine and policies. Three operations are ongoing in that region yet and the UN continuing military presence there for about half of a century allows to assess its effects from a historical perspective. The featured operations range from a simple monitoring of cease-fires or armistices to securing and supervising elections, protecting humanitarian missions, and nation building. Both of the only two cases in which the peacekeepers went to war-in the first and second operation in the Congo and in Somalia-are included, and also the extremes of the peacekeeping experience are reflected in the most successful operation to date in Namibia and in the tragic failure of the mission to Rwanda. The aggregated total maximum strength of the UN contingents deployed in the operations fea-
tured in this book was over 160,000 of military and police personnel compared to uniformed personnel of 71,554 deployed worldwide in sixteen missions in 2005.³¹ In reconstructing origins, records, and results of these operations, I focused on the impact that the guiding principles of UN peacekeeping doctrine had on the outcome of the operations. In analyzing the anatomy and functioning of the operations, I particularly highlighted the performance of the troops in regard to the right to use of force to self-defense of themselves and of the mandates, their ability to move freely, and the impact of an authorization to act under provisions of Chapter VII of the UN Charter. I also tried to shed light on considerably varying interpretation of these principles by UN civilian and military leaders. The conflicts themselves, and their historical background, are described only to the extent necessary for understanding the environment in which the international troops deployed.

The concluding Chapter 10 reflects on prospects for change. The international response to the ongoing genocide in Darfur (Sudan) does not leave much hope for a substantial reform of UN peacekeeping. Should it be undertaken, however, the UN has to refrain from recycling the stereotypes about what its peacekeepers should do in favor of declaring what they can achieve. For a clear break with the past, the term “peacekeeping” should best be dropped out from the political discourse.
“Peace support operations” or PSO seems a suitable candidate to replace it. All PSO, except the observatory missions, should be deployed under the provisions of Chapter VII of the UN Charter. New avenues for deployment of international troops should be explored with a preventive deployment given a priority. The present system of troop contribution on call does not work for missions of high risk. The alternatives seem to be limited to recruitment of UN volunteers to be permanently at the disposal of the SC and to employment of corporate armies. But in the present political climate none of these alternatives seems to have chances of approval. Therefore demilitarization of the UN by restricting it to military observer missions might be a lesser evil than the protracted and ill-fated deployment of armed but helpless contingents.

Since the prospects for a renewal or a reinvention of the role of the UN in promotion of peace are bleak, the responsibility for what is going to happen in the international security environment rests with the members of the organization directly. But even the only one of them who is capable of worldwide deployment of troops would benefit from sharing the burden with a more efficient organization.

Source: Andrzej Sitkowski, “UN Peacekeeping: Myth and Reality,” Praeger Security International, London, 2006

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

(Translated from Polish by Ireneusz Adach)

The history of mankind is branded with armed conflicts of greater or lesser cruelty. In the twentieth century, which was no exception, violent conflagrations reached, in fact, a tragic peak in the number of mainly civilian victims and in the scale of abhorrent crimes committed. The drama of the Second World War and the suffering of victims of the totalitarian Nazi and Stalinist regimes gave rise to a search for effective international countermeasures. The United Nations Charter and the Universal Human Rights Declaration were supposed to provide the foundations of a new order in international relations which would make it possible, not only to react effectively to brutal violations of basic human rights, but also to prevent such violations; a strong desire prevailed among the communities affected by war atrocities as well as their elite: no more Auschwitz, Katyn, Hiroshima, or mass deportations. The cold war put an early end to such hopes. The genocide perpetrated on the people of Cambodia, though without doubt the largest in scale, was only one example of the atrocities committed in defiance of basic human values. The United Nations, an international organization that came into existence to prevent such crimes, proved to be helpless.¹

The objective of Solidarnosc, the popular Polish movement of the 1980s, was to reclaim personal freedom and dignity through recognition and respect of basic human rights. The struggle against the totalitarian regime on the domestic front was also a struggle for a reshaping of international relations. Both the democratic transformations in Poland and the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, along with its symbolism, gave rise to expectations that international organizations would change their ways as well. Such hopes looked closest to fulfillment in Europe.

The early 1990s seemed to provide a solid basis for optimism. Peaceful deve opment in international relations was solemnly heralded in Paris. NATO invited new members to join the alliance, the European Union announced its intention of enlargement, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe became more active, and democratic transformations were being felt throughout the continent. In this context, the war in Yugoslavia came as a complete shock. Initially
Europe hoped to be able to deal with the conflict by itself. It soon turned out, however, that the European structures were incapable of coping with armed conflicts of this kind, and the involvement of the United Nations became indispensable. Significantly enough, it was not until August 1992 that the UN Human Rights Commission started considering the subject: and only after the drama of Vukovar’s fall, after the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and many other tragic manifestations of that war.

In the August of 1992, I accepted nomination as the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights in the former Yugoslavia, not without serious doubts. Still, while being aware of the large scale of war crimes committed there,
I was overwhelmed with what the reality represented. I noticed at the same time that the attitude to the conflict of the international community was equivocal and full of contradictions. On the one hand, there were calls for peace, mediation,
numerous appeals for a cease-fire, a wide stream of humanitarian aid, and, on the other, an evident lack of political will to engage forcefully in stopping the conflict. The performance of the UN peacekeeping forces in the Balkans provided
a dramatic illustration of this attitude.

The author of this work presents the mechanisms of the functioning of peacekeeping operations very convincingly. Time and again, I was witness to the dis-heartening effects of the overall confusion concerning the role of the United Nations troops in Bosnia. But, reflecting on the impact of the particular military commanders, or on the contribution of these or other national contingents of the Blue Helmets to the outcome of the mission, is of rather limited usefulness. There
are far more important issues to be discussed. Is the present system of reacting to such conflicts adequate to the challenge? In his book, Andrzej Sitkowski attempts to give answers to all these questions. I am not going to make an assessment of the solutions suggested by the author, but I fully share his diagnosis of the present state of affairs. My assignment in the former Yugoslavia made me once again acutely aware of the old truth: in order to avoid war one has to be equipped with tools of effective action, armed operations included, and be prepared to make use of them.

Is it ever possible to devise a universal tool kit that will be applicable wherever armed conflicts cause a breakdown of law and order and massive victimization of whole nations, a system equally applicable to Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor, or Chechnya? Experience prompts a negative reply, but we should not give up trying to work out a better system of international relations. We must not indulge in repeating the words “never again” without supporting them with changes in the way we respond to threats to international peace. Without the wholehearted support of the international community, however, the efforts of individuals or particular governments will not suffice. We all need to realize that the responsibility for the drama of Srebrenica does not only rest with a handful of Dutch peacekeeping soldiers and their commanders.

As members of the United Nations, we all bear the responsibility, because it was in our name that a safe area was established there, only to become an area of death. If the horror of Srebrenica is not to remain just an item on a long list of mass atrocities committed in the world, it has to generate a buildup toward finding more articulate and effective ways of dealing with similar risks. I hope that this book will contribute toward an in-depth analysis of the subject discussed.

Tadeusz Mazowiecki (PM of Poland 1989-1991)

Source: Andrzej Sitkowski, “UN Peacekeeping: Myth and Reality,” Praeger Security International, London, 2006

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

Foreword

Introduction

1. Script
2. Main Actors
3. Betrayal in Palestine and Its Legacy (Middle East)
4. Stumbling into War (The Congo)
5. Mission Accomplished (Namibia)
6. The Failed Authority (Cambodia)
7. Defeated by Warlords (Somalia)
8. Witnesses to Genocide (Rwanda)
9. The Predictable Disaster (ex-Yugoslavia)
10. The Prospects

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. Eisenhower. Dulles, a stern Puritan, had scoffed at the containment policy and had advocated a new policy of “rollback” and “liberation” 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.

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 decisions. 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 becomes 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 businessman, had been sent by the chief of Saddam’s intelligence services 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 hidden 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, probably 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 national intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, “intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made.” ¹⁴

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 inspectors who, as it turned out, had done a creditable job in disposing of Iraq’s illegal weapons.

Finally, Dr. Kay declared in his testimony that it was “important 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 Pakistan with a proposal for the UN Security Council to designate Saddam Hussein as a War Criminal while also quadrupling the number 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. Moreover, the United States could have avoided the breach it confronted 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 International War Crimes Tribunal, Louise Arbour, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in May 1999 when he was still in power 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 million 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 evidence 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 history does not take reservations. It does, however, reward respect. Why does the human species learn so slowly and at such terrible 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 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 humanity’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 tribunals. 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 bulldozing 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 entered 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 meaningful and caring lives in a world still beset by war.

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.

Source: John G. Stoessinger, “Why Nations Go to War,” Cengage Learning, Boston, 2011

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

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 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 positions 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 thousands 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 disaster, most of the intended victims were dead. Neither President Clinton nor UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was 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. Perhaps 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.” Prosecutors 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 consequences 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, 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 happen 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 million 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 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 invent new reasons why the UN peacekeepers should not be allowed 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, alBashir maintained, his government would quell the unrest itself. Since he ran the very government that had unleashed the Janjaweed 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 under 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 September. The problem of obtaining Sudanese consent seemed insuperable, 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 ambassador said that the resolution would make the violence in Darfur 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 emergency 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 plea to deploy its peacekeeping force without further delay. Spontaneous 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 peacekeepers 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 emissary 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 Criminal Court in The Hague ordered the arrest of al-Bashir on the charge that he played an “essential role” in the murder, rape, torture, 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 embraced by his fellow Arabs who congratulated him on his courageous 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 hibernation. “Frozen,” said Lt. General Patrick Nyamvumba, the Rwandan 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 thousands 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 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 community of nations now confronts the community of exiles. I remember because I was one of them for most of my youth.

Source: John G. Stoessinger, “Why Nations Go to War,” Cengage Learning, Boston, 2011

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

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 unconditional surrender. The North Korean attack was thwarted by collective 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 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 hostilities 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 unthinkable. Even though there has not been another 9/11, there can be no real closure to that barbarous event as long as its perpetrator, Osama bin Laden, is alive or evades justice. In the meantime, 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 guerrilla bands still loyal to him killed more American soldiers after the war than during the war itself. The oft-repeated statements 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 reward of $25 million for the capture of Saddam Hussein or confirmation 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 meeting with 800 angry wives who wanted their husbands to come home. In August, there was the disastrous attack on the headquarters of the United Nations in Baghdad, claiming twenty-one lives including that of a top UN official. Moreover, November ushered 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, detentions, 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 complained while waiting to pass through an American checkpoint. “We didn’t expect anything like this after Saddam fell.” ²

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 success, 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 American 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, militarism, 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 precipitating 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 personality 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 Versailles 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 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 responsible 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 personal 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 spectrum: 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 importance 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 precipitating factor in the outbreak of war is misperception.

Such distortion 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 unacceptable. This recurring optimism is not to be dismissed lightly by the historian as an ironic example of human folly. It assumes 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 overflow 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 overconfidence 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 whatsoever 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 expected 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 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 Hezbollah in 2006. Instead, its army was fought to a standstill by a determined 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 insurgency that nullified the Americans’ early successes. Indeed, coalition 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 leadership, and the price for recapturing reality is high indeed. It is unlikely 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 precipitate 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 Russians 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 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 barbarians 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 monolithic octopus, with North Vietnam its tentacle. He did this more than a decade after the death of Stalin, at a time when Communism had splintered into numerous ideological and political fragments. 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 determined 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 distorted perception of the Turkish victory over the Serbs at Kosovo in 1389 prompted him to turn his fury against the Moslem Albanians 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 IsraeliPalestinian conflict, and North Korea regarded Bush’s statement as a declaration of war. Yet Bush’s primary target clearly was Saddam 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 remain 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 selffulfilling prophecy is then set in motion. When leaders attribute 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 convinced 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 Vietnam. 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 retaliatory 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 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 imminent 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 accumulating 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 administration requested $600 million to carry on the hunt for conclusive evidence. Yet, in January 2004, Mr. Kay, who had decided to retire, 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 existed. 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 alQaida 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.

There may be fine lines of distinction between a misperception, 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 available evidence, not those parts only that fit the doctrine of a crusader. 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 develops 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 American custody, the president responded sharply: “So, what’s the difference?” he asked rhetorically.⁴

The answer, I believe, is as follows: “With respect, Mr. President, 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 germwarfare 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 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, however, that it is not the actual distribution of power that precipitates 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 contempt for Russia’s power. This disrespect was to cost them dearly. Hitler repeated this mistake a generation later, and his misperception led straight to his destruction. One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon took place in the Korean War. MacArthur, during 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 engagement to assess their impact on MacArthur’s army, the American 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 entirely 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 provoke the Chinese again beyond the point of no return.

Despite the lessons of Korea, in the Vietnam War the American 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 detriment 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 successful 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 Israelis 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 victims. And, like Saddam before him, Milosevic’s conviction that NATO was too passive and divided to intervene in the former Yugoslavia 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, tenacious guerrilla movements claimed a growing number of American lives. “Bring ’em on,” Bush exclaimed in growing frustration, 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 “loathing” 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 kidnapping of one or two Israeli soldiers would trigger such ferocious responses.

Hence, on the eve of each war, at least one nation misperceives another’s power. In that sense, the beginning of each war is an accident. 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 aspect of this truth is that war itself has remained the best teacher of reality and thus has been the most effective cure for war.

Source: John G. Stoessinger, “Why Nations Go to War,” Cengage Learning, Boston, 2011

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

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”)

“If you look too deeply into the abyss,” said Nietzsche, “the 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 manifestation 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 “sickness unto death.” No murderous epidemic has ever been conquered 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 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 human nature, was abolished because human beings showed capacity 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 enough. 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 coincided 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 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 invoking the doctrine of preemption, or first strike. This decision flowed 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 doctrine was widely criticized because the Iraqi leader, despite his brutality toward his own people, did not pose a direct and imminent threat to the United States. Bush chose to overturn more than 200 years of American foreign policy on a dubious assumption. 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.

Source: John G. Stoessinger, “Why Nations Go to War,” Cengage Learning, Boston, 2011

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

The twenty-first century brought with it two new kinds of war: the horrendous events of September 11, 2001, which precipitated an invasion of Afghanistan but failed to find the elusive perpetrator of the 9/11 disaster, Osama bin Laden. Instead, the United States embarked on a highly controversial preemptive war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. An analysis of this war with some new reflections on its resolution constitutes Chapter 9 of this edition.

Seldom has the world changed so much in so little time as it has since the new millennium began. These changes are reflected in substantial updates of the chapters on Korea, India and Pakistan, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa. The many global initiatives of a newly elected American President, Barack Obama, are given careful consideration as well.

The analytical framework that has held the book together over the years has served the present edition well. Overall, the book remains essentially a product of reflection. I have benefited greatly, however, from the excellent and dedicated work of Amparo Pat Rocha. Janis Lasser also has my gratitude and appreciation for numerous thoughtful suggestions. Finally, my students at the University of San Diego have been most helpful, sharing many comments that showed extraordinary intellectual and emotional maturity. No teacher could be more fortunate.

I continue to hope that this book might make a modest contribution to the understanding of humanity’s most horrible self-imposed affliction.

John G. Stoessinger

Source: John G. Stoessinger, “Why Nations Go to War,” Cengage Learning, Boston, 2011

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

By John G. Stoessinger
Distinguished Professor of Global Diplomacy University of San Diego

Preface

1. The Iron Dice: World War I
The Kaiser’s Fateful Pledge, The Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia, The Closing Trap, The Iron Dice, Conclusion

2. Barbarossa: Hitler’s Attack on Russia
Hitler and Russia, Stalin and Germany, Conclusion

3. The Temptations of Victory: Korea
President Truman’s Decision, General Macarthur’s Gamble, North Korea’s Brinksmanship

4. A Greek Tragedy in Five Acts: Vietnam
Act One: Truman-Asia was not Europe, Act Two: Eisenhower-The Lesson of France Ignored, Act Three: Kennedy-The Military, Act Four: Johnson-The Catastrophe, Act Five: Nixon-Full Circle, Conclusion

5. From Sarajevo to Kosovo: The Wars of Europe’s Last Dictator
The Dismemberment of Yugoslavia Begins, The War in Bosnia, The Tide Turns Against the Serbs The Dayton Peace Accords, The UN War Crimes Tribunal 153 Kosovo and Milosevic’s Downfall, Conclusion: A New Dawn of Peace with Justice?

6. In the Name of God: Hindus and Moslems in India and Pakistan
Colonialism, Partition, and War, The Kashmir War of 1965, The Bloody Dawn of Bangladesh, Nuclear Viagra, India’s 9/11: Mumbai, November 2008

7. The Sixty Years’ War in the Holy Land: Israel and the Arabs
The Palestine War of 1948, The Sinai Campaign and the Suez Crisis of 1956, The Six-Day War of 1967 The October War of 1973, The Lebanese Tragedy, The Palestinian Uprising, The Peace Process: Between Fear and Hope The Second Palestinian Uprising and the Road Map, History Interrupted, “Giving War a Chance”: America, Israel, and Hezbollah, War Over Gaza, Conclusion

8. The War Lover: Saddam Hussein’s Wars against Iran and Kuwait
The Iran-Iraq War: The Price of Martyrdom, Saddam’s Aggression Against Kuwait

9. New Wars for a New Century: America and the World of Islam
George W. Bush: From Pragmatist to Crusader, War Drums, The “War After the War”: Dilemmas of Occupation, The Capture of Saddam, Mission Accomplished? Elections in Iraq, The Descent Into Civil War, Law and Society Under Islam: Three Vignettes Nato’s War in Afghanistan, The Iranian People’s Uprising of 2009 and the Nuclear Crisis, The Trial of Saddam Hussein, Reflections on Iraq’s Past and Future What Went Wrong?, What Can be Done to Set Things Right?, Conclusion: Perils of Empire

10. Why Nations Go to War
The Determinants of War, Heart of Darkness: Rwanda and Darfur, Learning from History

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

The centrality of war in history emerges clearly in any discussion of particular countries or of specific centuries. A brief study written by a British author for a British publisher risks putting the premium on conflicts involving Britain, but the emphasis here has been more wide-ranging, not least with the discussion of developments in China. Such a focus serves as a reminder of the very different political and geographical environments for conflict. A stress on contrasting political environments is of particular importance because there is a tendency to emphasize regular warfare-wars between states; rather than paying due attention to conflicts within states, such as, in the case of China, the Sanfen and Taipeng Rebellions and the Chinese Civil War.

An awareness of variety in goals, contexts and means of waging war underlines the difficulty of judging capability and assessing developments. The conceptualization of war and of military history is a sparse field. This might appear a surprising remark given the number of words deployed about Clausewitz, Jomini, [Sun Tzu], Mahan, Corbett and others, but is in fact the case. First, in comparative terms. The writing on the theory of social, gender or cultural history, for example, is far more extensive. Second, although particular writers, themes and episodes in military affairs and history have attracted conceptual literature, many have not. Moreover, the conceptualization has frequently been fairly simple. Whiggish notions of improvement in terms of a clear teleology are rampant, not least with regard to weapons technology. War and Society approaches also attracted teleological treatment, not least with the idea of improved social mobilization in modern industrial warfare. Alongside teleology came determinism, notably with the assumption that superior resources explained results. Thus, determinism was bound up with the material-culture approach to war.

A contrary approach, albeit one related in its simplicity, was the notion of national or cultural ways of war. This was an approach that drew on a number of roots, but particularly on the organic ideas of identity that became more prominent in the nineteenth century, which was very much an age influenced by biological approaches and, notably, Darwinian ideas of competition. These organic ideas of a distinctive response to environmental circumstances creating a synergetical basis for identity proved particularly interesting for those concerned with international competition. They led, moreover, to vitalist notions in which environment was linked to will. The concept of a national will proved especially conductive to commentators, not least those considering the nature of capability in an age of mass-conscript armies. The idea of superior national will appeared to provide an explanation for how to ensure success, particularly through better morale.

A separate strand contributing to the same end emerged from the idea of cultural competition. The concept of distinctive cultures appeared to match that of different national identities. Each drew on a notion of essentialism and one that can be seen as indicative of the strength of neo-Platonic ideas. Cultural essentialism was potent in the nineteenth century as a description both of present and past. It appeared to provide an explanation for Western expansion and also to link it with past conflicts that could be seen in cultural terms. The key rivalry was that of civilization and barbarism, and, to that, all else could be subordinated. This idea drew on the attractive notion that the then modern West was the embodiment of the Classical world. This linkage between Classical Greece and Rome and the modern Europe and the United States seemed obvious to commentators reading the classics in the original and seeing their legislators emerge from neo-Classical buildings. If the neo-Gothic Palace of Westminster did not appear to match this, nineteenthcentury British prime ministers such as Derby and Gladstone not only read the classics in the original Greek and Latin, but also wrote knowledgeably about them.

The idea of a linkage was scarcely new at that juncture. While important during the Middle Ages, this idea had received a powerful boost from the Classical revival that had been so significant during the Renaissance. This revival had a direct military manifestation with interest in writers such as Machiavelli seeking to employ Classical ideas and models, a practice taken forward by the Princes of Orange during what was later seen as the Military Revolution of 1560-1660, and again by Maurice of Saxe and French commentators in the early eighteenth century. The sense of parallelism had varied manifestations over the following century, ranging from the response to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), a response that indicated a sense that Britain in the age of the American Revolution was moving in the same direction, to the conscious use of Classical echoes by the French Revolutionaries and Napoleon. Indeed, the latter was a modern Caesar, with his coup, his legions and his imperial aspirations.

Western imperialism during the post-Napoleonic century took this cultural approach to new heights. It drew on a revived Romanitas, with modern Western proconsular generals and governors seeing themselves as successors of the Romans. Napier’s ‘Peccavi’, the Latin for ‘I have sinned’, in response to his conquest of the region of Sind in modern Pakistan in 1843 was commentary as much as joke: the magazine Punch portrayed him sending this telegram; in fact he never did so. Here, however, was another view of the modern Caesar, not as a Napoleon making war on fellow Europeans, but as a warrior bringing barbarians to heel. This idea also drew on a strong notion of religious superiority, and, in particular, on an activist pulse that was also seen in large-scale missionary activity.

The amalgamation of these ideas was important because war was waged outside Europe not only with those who could be presented as barbarians (not least by the application of a stadial [stages] theory of development), but also because there was conflict with states that were seen as products of decayed civilizations. It was thus that China and Persia, Burma and Egypt, Turkey and Ethiopia were presented. Only Japan escaped this conceptual trap, and then because it Westernized so rapidly. Thus, the modern Europeans were akin to the Classical Greeks resisting Persia under Xerxes and Darius, while their generals were latter-day Alexanders the Great. The notion of Western warfare therefore drew on strong cultural impulses and these gave it an identity that helped explain and justify success. Christian providentialization and cultural superiority were also present in the explanation of technological progress, which, in turn, was held to demonstrate them. Different commentators presented this account with contrasting emphases, but it was, nevertheless, a key element in the positioning and explanation of warfare.

The Western interpretation of warfare in terms of Christian providentialism and Western cultural superiority became far less prominent in the twentieth century, although it was definitely to the fore in the opening stages of the First World War. After that, there was a shift away from nineteenth-century notions, although again for varied reasons that were of different importance for particular commentators. First, the emphasis from 1914 to 1989 on struggle or confrontation within the Western world-the assassinations that launched the First World War at Sarajevo, to the Fall of the Berlin Wall that ended the Cold War-did not encourage such a clear-cut and consistent cultural and moral approach as the ‘less developed’ world was not so consistently the sphere of imperial warfare. Looked at differently, however, such approaches were deployed during both the two World Wars and the Cold War, but they were short-term and particularly associated with one or other side. Thus, German assumptions of a right to rule and of cultural superiority were discredited with the failure to establish a German empire in Europe, while Communist counterparts also proved unsuccessful.

Second, the failure of the West in sustaining imperial rule or even post-imperial power across the Third World was a prominent feature of the period 1919-75, and, more particularly, 1945-75. Ideologies of cultural superiority did not provide victory for the French in Indo-China and could not ensure lasting domestic support for the Portuguese government in its resistance to insurgencies in their African colonies in 1961-74.

Lastly, the warfare of the age of total war appeared so different to what had come before that historicist accounts of conflict seemed redundant. The Western Way of War was not thus to the fore in the late twentieth century. Indeed, one of the key concepts of the 1990s, the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) was particularly unreceptive to such a designation, because its technological impetus and definition were presented as possibly for diffusion across cultural boundaries. The 2000s, however, witnessed a rediscovery of the concept of the Western Way of War, most prominently with the writings of the American historian Victor Davis Hanson, although not only with him. This rediscovery was very presentist in character, resting as it did on the concatenation of expeditionary warfare and the ‘War on Terror’ with the need to provide a new doctrine and exegesis to replace, or at least supplement, the RMA. Hanson, an expert on warfare in Classical Greece, sought to provide reassurance and certainty, arguing that Western cultural factors brought strength and success, and that, once this was understood, it should encourage a firmness of purpose. He also proposed a clear lineage, linking the ancient world to modern conflict.

The details of Hanson’s approach have been much criticized and its lacunae and flaws are clearly highlighted, not least with the absence of the clear linkage he proposed between the citizens’ army of ancient Athens and such armies in the West over the last quarter millennium; but less attention has been devoted to a more central flaw, that of essentialism or a central identity. In short, whatever the questionable nature of the belief in a Western Way of War having certain characteristics, there is the issue of whether there is something that can be defined as a Western Way of War.

The questioning of the latter can come from a number of directions. It can be argued that the key element is that of national military culture and that there was/is such a powerful variety among the latter that the idea of an aggregate Western Way of War falls to the side. It can also be suggested that the national dimension has been overplayed, an argument that can be made not in order to privilege a Western Way of War, but, instead, because most military development is task-driven, and changes in the context that condition and affect tasks are crucial. For example, talk of a distinctive and consistent Way of War means little for militaries and societies that have to adapt to the changes entailed by switching into and out of the practice and consequences of conscription, or between conventional and counter-insurgency conflict.

Variety occurs across space as well as time. A Western Way of War in 1650 would have had to encompass the ‘regular’ forces of Western Europe, the greater role for cavalry in Eastern Europe, as well as colonial forces, most obviously in Latin America, and those thrown forward by civil wars. Moreover, it would be necessary to show that these forces were recognizably different in type from those seen elsewhere in Eurasia. Once external contrasts are taken out of consideration, were the force structures and doctrines sufficiently contrasting to non-European/Western counterparts to think in terms of distinctive European patterns, whether or not they were to be aggregated in terms of a Western Way of War? The answer is probably not. In particular, there was considerable overlap between methods of warmaking and fighting in Eastern Europe across the Christian-Muslim divide. Comparisons with the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) can then be extrapolated by asking about the extent of the contrast between, say, the armies of Tsar Alexis of Russia and John Sobieski of Poland or those of the Kangzi Emperor in China and Aurangzeb, his Mughal counterpart in India.

If contrasts between Western and non-Western warfare emerge more clearly by 1750 and, even more, 1850, it can be asked whether this was due to essential differences or to stages in a developmental process, the latter a thesis advanced by those interested in Westernization and diffusion, and, notably, in some of the writing on Indian military history; or to contingency. Moreover, contrasts between West and non-West have to be set alongside a reality of variety in both West and non-West, with these variations also involving overlap with the other category. This situation has remained the case throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present age.

Parallels are also instructive. The ability of governments, not limited to Western ones, to impose their will on the state or nation in order ultimately to achieve their objectives, and the extent to which they are willing to expend resources, including population, to achieve that end, are crucial. If this warmaking is defined as a ‘Western’ characteristic, then, however, as a key qualification, it has to be noted that war among states beyond the West, such as between the Ottoman and Persian Empires, or the recent Iran-Iraq and India-Pakistan Wars, were conducted in an analogous fashion. Indeed, the ability and willingness of these governments to sustain heavy casualties to achieve their objectives suggests that the notion of a distinctive Western way of war should be questioned or perhaps simply stated as the way governments wage war, irrespective of geographic region.

If the idea of a distinctive Western Way of War is therefore suspect from a number of different directions, this does not mean that a Western-dominated mindset has not conditioned much of our (Western) understanding of warfare, with war understood in terms of a largely Western vision. A similar point can be made elsewhere, and the related deficiencies could also be serious. For example, the Chinese understanding of war in the nineteenth century was even more flawed than its Western counterpart because the relevant range of experience was more limited (no recent transoceanic or naval warfare), and the same point can be made about other states and ‘cultures’, whatever the latter are to be understood as meaning. Whether belief in a Western Way of War can be successfully detached from a Western-dominated mindset is unclear, but the freedom of expression in the West and the breadth of scholarly discussion (within the academy but also outside it) offer some encouragement on this head. The extent of sophisticated debate within the American military and related military academies and think-tanks is particularly impressive. In large part, there has been a strong critique not only of the RMA but also of any notion of technological determinism.

There has also been much call for a need for task-based warfare rather than the capability-centred emphasis on output: force delivered, for example bombs dropped. An interest in outcome certainly entails an attempt to place warfare more centrally in its political context. All this can be seen as conforming to or clashing with the/a Western Way of War, which simply highlights the questionable nature of the latter concept if it is to be employed as a coherent analytical tool and building block.

Yet, approached differently, it is precisely because the idea of a Western Way of War is so loose that it has proved so valuable, especially to broad-brush writers. Indeed, it is the very looseness of concepts that makes them useful. It can be argued that this feature is particularly the case with military history, not least because many of the writers are popular historians or military figures who are not adept at, or interested in, sophisticated (or any) conceptual discussions. The latter point suggests that the Western Way of War still has considerable mileage. Like many ideas it fills a gap. As such, it offers a parallel to such concepts as the early-modern European Military Revolution (see pp. 61-76). The extension of the idea of military revolution indicates the value attached to any concept that is available.

This situation again, in part, is a reflection of the degree to which the field often lacks intellectual sophistication, although, looked at differently, the treatment of military developments by specialists in more conceptual fields, such as sociology and politics, is scarcely encouraging. Moreover, it would be inaccurate to suggest that military affairs lack a changing vocabulary. The large-scale diffusion from the 1980s of the concept of the operational dimension of conflict is particularly instructive, as is a more general engagement with doctrine. Furthermore, in the 2000s, the range of discussion of COIN (Counter-Insurgency) doctrine and methods repays attention as evidence of a capacity for a considered response to circumstances and experience.

Whether other societies have different response methods and models is unclear, for one of the problems that is worth considering is the extent to which there is a lack of published critical discussion of the situation by many other societies. Indeed, however much Western-centric perspectives are to be criticized, they are less flawed than what appears to be on offer elsewhere. For example, it is unclear how much the insurgents in Iraq or the Taliban have a sense of the wider parameters of military change. Looked at differently, they locate their own activities in an experience that provides not only motivation but also an ability to respond to challenges. This situation was seen in Afghanistan with the response, first, to the Red Army in the 1980s and, second, to Western military power in the 2000s. Yet, considered in another light, the Iraqi insurgents, like the Taliban, found that their ideas and practices brought less success than they had anticipated, and this failure contributed to a general inability of warmaking in 2001-8 to achieve desired results. The extent to which this inability reflected widespread conceptual limitations, both in the West and in the non-West (in so far as they can be aggregated and distinguished), repays attention. It also suggests that criticism of simple practices of Western-centred analysis should be set in a wider context of failure, and, more generally, underlines the need for comparative assessment when judging capability. That is not simply the case for historians, but also for those considering war today as well as its likely future development.

Source: Jeremy Black, War: A Short History, Continuum UK, London, 2009

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

We were promised the end of war with the ‘end of history’ or with the obsolescence brought about by nuclear weapons. The reality has been very different. War has been a major aspect of politics since 1990, notably, but not only, in Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. As I write, the Russians are invading Georgia while NATO forces are under pressure from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the threat of hostilities remains a key feature in world developments, not least, in terms of ‘high spectrum’ weaponry, with talk of future confrontation between China and the United States, and, at ‘lower spec’, with discussion of conflicts over resources, particularly water. On top of this comes terrorism, as well as conflicts within states. A key element of the modern world, and one that threatens to be an important feature of the future, war therefore deserves re-examination. This book sets out to do so by providing a short thematic history, with references forward to present and future.

Several points are worth underlining at the start. War is a key element in world history. Far from being Braudelian ‘epiphenomena’ of scant consequence compared to underlying realities, wars have played crucial roles in geopolitics, social developments, economic history and in the cultural/mass psychological dimensions of human life. War indeed is cause, means and consequence of change. Second, most work on war deals with conflict between states, but a key element, often the forgotten dimension, is that of the distribution and use of power within states and societies. Focusing on this provides a different narrative and analysis of military history and the history of war, and looks toward the present situation. Third, Western interpretations of military capability and change are generally mechanistic, and deterministically so. These have a certain value, notably for sea and air capability, but are far less appropriate for land power and conflict. This situation is linked to the current crisis of Western military power, notably the contrast between output (force deployed and used) and outcome in terms of obtaining success. Fourth, non-Western traditions also have or had flaws, notably the cult of will (for example in imperial Japan), but they repay study in order to consider the past, present and future of warfare. Non-Western capability, moreover, is far more than a matter of the diffusion of Western weaponry and organization.

The key place of war in history emerges repeatedly in this book, which provides an up-to-date account of central themes and episodes. The major argument is for complexity-in what happened and why, and in the measure of military capability and development-and, rather than seeing this complexity and variety as a distraction from some sort of inherent core reality, they are presented as this very reality. Indeed, complexity and variety help to explain why military history is both important and fascinating. War also poses a puzzle. Bookshops groan with military titles, and, with biography, military history is the major historical topic in non-academic writing. Yet, there is not comparable academic attention and, indeed, some American military historians consider themselves an endangered species. This is paradoxical because conflict is a major theme in historical writing, while the relationships between war and statebuilding or war and society are major topics.

There are now a whole host of what could be seen as ‘nontraditional conflicts’ to which the term war is applied. These include war on drugs, war on crime, war on cancer, the battle of the sexes, generational conflict, culture wars and history wars; and that is not a complete list. Moreover, it can be expanded if other languages and cultures are considered. War, if not bellicosity, has therefore entered the language as part of an assessment of all relationships as focused on power, confrontation and force.

Warfare, however, needs to be abstracted from this language of war. Indeed, there is a need for a more precise definition in which war should be seen in functional terms as organized large-scale violence, and in cultural or ideological terms as the consequence of bellicosity. The first, at once, separates war from, say, the actions of an individual, however violent the means or consequences (one individual poisoning a water supply could kill more than died in the Anglo-Argentinean Falklands War of 1982); from non-violent action, however much it is an aspect of coercion; and from large-scale violence in which the organization is not that of war, for example football hooliganism. Each of these points and caveats can be detailed and qualified, but they also draw attention to fundamental issues of definition.

The cultural or ideological aspects of war also repay examination. They focus on the importance of arousing, channelling and legitimating violent urges, and of persuading people to fight, kill and run the risk of being killed, without which there is, and can be, no war. The willingness to kill is crucial to the causes of war and is a confiation of long-term anthropological and psychological characteristics with more specific societal and cultural situations. It is necessary to consider how far, and to what effect, these propensities to organized conflict have altered over time, an historical question, and one that emphasizes the point about bellicose drives varying by individual cultures.

The model of war as organized conflict between sovereign states, begun deliberately by a specific act of policy, is that which has been discussed most fully by theorists and historians. Thus, the grand title of Donald Kagan’s interesting On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (1995) reveals a study only of the Peloponnesian, Second Punic, First World and Second World Wars, and of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Kagan explains: I am interested in the outbreak of wars between states in an international system, such as we find in the world today. The Greeks and the Romans of the republican era lived in that kind of a world, and so has the West since the time of the Renaissance [late fifteenth century]. Most other peoples have lived either in a world without states, or in great empires where the only armed conflicts were civil wars or attempts to defend the realm against bands of invaders. (p. 10)

This overly restricted definition of wars worthy of consideration can be matched by the prominent British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who wrote of ‘the more prosaic origin of war: the precise moment when a statesman sets his name to the declaration of it’.

Such an account of war might seem to have been made redundant by shifts through time, leading to the position today when nonsovereign actors such as insurgent movements and terrorist groups, most prominently al-Qaeda, play a major role, but, instructively, the clear-cut distinction between peace and war was even inappropriate for 1815-1945, the focus of Taylor’s work and of much International Relations scholarship. It was inappropriate as an account, for example, for much of the warfare then arising from Western imperialism. More generally, any definition of war in terms of a public (governmental) monopoly of the use of force has to face both the contested nature of the public sphere and the role and resilience of ‘private’ warfare, both of which are major issues today.

Moreover, the rulers of sovereign states did not necessarily declare war on each other. In 1700, Augustus II of Saxony-Poland and Frederick IV of Denmark joined Peter the Great of Russia in attacking the Swedish empire, a war that lasted until 1721, but neither declared war. In 1726-7, the British blockaded the Spanish treasure fieet in Porto Bello and kept another fieet off Cadiz, dislocating the financial structure of the Spanish imperial system, while the Spaniards besieged British-held Gibraltar, but neither power declared war and the conflict did not spread. Indeed, the two powers became allies in 1729. Large-scale Chinese intervention in 1950 against the American-led United Nations forces in the Korean War (1950-3) did not lead to any declaration of war, and there were no hostile operations on Chinese soil.

The question of goals is raised when defining war in terms of intentionality (what were the combatants fighting for), but that approach also poses problems. In eighteenth-century India, military operations were sometimes related to revenue collections, often indeed dictated by the need to seize or protect revenue, but it is not easy to separate the operational aspects of wars that lead to a focus on gaining supplies from the widespread use of force to collect or seize revenue. The same point is relevant for many other societies. The treatment of enemies as beasts or as subhuman poses other issues. Such treatment can be widely seen in conflict, especially civil warfare, as for example the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe. This treatment was also a feature in the genocidal drive of ‘modern’ states, most obviously Hitler’s Germany. Indeed, the centrality of the Holocaust to Hitler’s views and, finally, goals has been increasingly emphasized in recent years, and this has helped make the Holocaust a major part of our understanding of the Second World War. As such, the totally onesided war on Jews becomes a conflict that should be considered as a war, and indeed Hitler regarded it as a meta-historical struggle. This is a point that can also be discussed in relation to other genocides. More generally, if the savage practice of warfare-killing-can, for many, pose problems for any idea of war as inherently legal, because of the fact of sovereignty, or nobility, due to the test of battle, there is also the problem of whether and how far the practice of warfare can be legitimated by discussing it in terms of a benign goal. The use of saturation bombing and the atomic bombs in the Second World War are pertinent instances. Western intentionality was far more benign than that of the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy), and the use of air power was effective, particularly against Japan in 1945, but, from the perspective of civilian victims, the situation looks less happy. There is also the need to address the issue of the relationship between war and state development. The fifth-century ce Church-father St Augustine’s comparison, in his City of God, of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, a key Classical reference point for heroism, with a company of thieves-‘in the absence of justice there is no difference between Alexander’s empire and a band [societas] of thieves’-was a moralist’s vain attempt to argue that intentionality, not scale, was the crucial issue, and that sovereignty was not a legitimator of slaughter. This point can be approached from a variety of directions, which can be grouped as ideological, legal and functional, without suggesting that this categorization is precise or uncontested. If a key issue with warfare is how it is possible to persuade people to kill, and to run a strong risk of being killed, then, for example, there was not much functional difference, in the sixteenth century, between ‘state-directed’ warfare and its ghazi (the Muslim system of perpetual raiding of
the infidel) and, indeed, piratical counterparts. Ghazi raiding was often large-scale as with al-Mansur’s campaigns in Spain in the tenth century against the Christian north, campaigns, focused on plunder and slave-raiding, which recruited jihadis and mercenaries from around the Muslim world. Spain was known as Dar Djihad, the land of jihad. Most spectacularly, the great pilgrimage destination of Santiago de Compostela was sacked in 997. The organized control, indeed killing, of humans was central to these different types of warfare, even if the objectives behind this control and killing were different. ‘States’ were inchoate, and not generally seen as enjoying the right to monopolize warfare and alone to initiate and legitimate conflict.

Today, issues of legitimacy come into play, not least with the claim to the attributes of sovereignty, including waging war, by groups not recognized as such, for example al-Qaeda, but also with the rejection of the idea that sovereign governments have a monopoly of force, and with moves toward supra-national jurisdiction through the United Nations and international courts. This question of the acceptability of conflict overlaps with the issue of the distinction between military and civilian as combatants, one that is at the heart of the legitimization of the modern Western practice of force and the legalization of Western high-technology warfare.

Furthermore, the use of force by (major) states against those they deem internal opponents or international reprobates cannot be rigidly separated from definitions and discussion of war simply because the states do not accept the legitimacy of their opponents. Turning to the past, there was a distinction between wars begun by imperial powers, such as Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, Mughal India and Ming or, later, Manchu China, with outside polities, and, on the other hand, conflict within these empires, but the latter, indeed, could be large-scale, more so than external warfare, and could be regarded by contemporaries as war. Moreover, since each of these states rested on warfulness, war and conquest, they had highly bellicose values. When I asked the Mughal specialist John Richards to explain the propensity of the Mughal rulers for war, he used the analogy of a bicyclist to describe the Mughal empire and war: if it was not fighting, it would collapse. Through fighting, however, it did in the end do so.

It is difficult to determine whether attempts to overthrow these or other states, or to deny their authority, many of which took the form of rebellions, should be regarded as functionally sufficient and intellectually different to conflicts between sovereign powers not to be classed as wars. This raises the question whether it is only outcome that earns the designation war, an aspect of history belonging to the victor. Empirically, this is a question posed by the contrast between the American War of Independence (1775-83) and the unsuccessful Irish rebellion/revolution of 1798 against British rule, and also by disagreements over whether the unsuccessful Indian Mutiny (1857-9) should be referred to as a mutiny, a rebellion or a war of independence against Britain. This question feeds directly into modern revolutionary claims about struggles as wars.

More generally, the absence of strong, or even any, police forces frequently ensured that troops were used to maintain order and control, as is also the case in many countries today. That, again, raises the question of a definition of war as the use of force, in other words through function rather than intention. Given the role of the military in many countries, for example much of Latin America, as the arm of the state, with its prime opponents being internal, this approach directs attention to civil violence, if not civil war, and the para-military policing involved, as a prime instance of war. Any working definition of war has to be pertinent for Paraguay as much as the United States, and not least because a diffusionist model of military definitions and practice (i.e. modern American definitions and practice are adopted elsewhere) is nowhere near as applicable as some might imagine.

Turning to culture, the use of the concept of bellicosity (warfulness) not only counteracts the idea that the causes of war involved rational actors and rational calculations but also, in part, overcomes the unhelpful distinction between rationality and irrationality in leading to war. Bellicosity can be regarded as both, or either, a rational and an irrational response to circumstances. To refer to bellicosity as a necessary condition for, and, even, definition of war, is not to confuse cause and effect, or to run together hostility and conflict, but to assert that, in many circumstances, the two are coterminous. Bellicosity also helps explain the continuation of wars once begun. An emphasis on bellicosity leads to a stress on the assumptions of ruling groups, assumptions that are often inherent to their existence and role.

Such an emphasis also underlines the extent to which both sides have to be ready to fight, and to continue fighting, if war is to start and last. An emphasis on will emerged clearly from the account by the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 485-425 bce) about the response to the Persian invasions of Greece in 490 and 480 bce. In the first case, he reported Miltiades the Younger outlining what was at stake for Athens, one of the leading Greek city-states: if we forbear to fight, it is likely that some great schism will rend and shake the courage of our people till they make friends of the Medes [Persians]; but if we join battle before some at Athens be infected by corruption, then let heaven but deal fairly with us, and we may well win in this fight.

Miltiades’ tactics were to bring victory at Marathon in 490 bce, with the invading Persian army charged down by rapidly advancing Athenian hoplites or heavy infantry carrying long spears and large shields, who broke the wings of the Persian force before turning in on the stronger Persian centre. Herodotus also noted a widespread reluctance in Greece to fight in 480 bce:

the great part of them had no stomach for grappling with the war, but were making haste to side with the Persian. . . . Had the Athenians been panic-struck by the threatened peril and left their own country, or had they not indeed left it but remained and surrendered themselves to Xerxes, none would have essayed to withstand the king by sea. . . . I cannot perceive what advantage could accrue from the walls built across the Isthmus [of Corinth] while the king [Xerxes] was master of the sea . . . by choosing that Hellas [Greece] should remain free, they [the Athenians] and none others roused all the rest of the Greeks who had not gone over to the Persians, and did under heaven beat the king off.

The ‘wooden walls’ of the Athenian fieet were to save Greece at the Battle of Salamis. In the face of the larger Persian fieet (about 800 ships to the Greek 300), the Greeks decided to fight the Persians in the narrows of Salamis, rather than in the open water, as they correctly anticipated that this would lessen the Persians’ numerical advantage. The Persians indeed found their ships too tightly packed, and their formation and momentum were further disrupted by a strong swell. The Greeks attacked when the Persians were clearly in difficulties, and their formation was thrown into confusion. Some ships turned back while others persisted, and this led to further chaos which the Greeks exploited. The Persians finally retreated, having lost over 200 ships to their opponent’s 40, and with the Greeks still in command of their position.

In recent decades, there has been a growing reluctance to fight in many societies, certainly in comparison to the first half of the twentieth century, although the popularity of war toys, games and films suggests that military values are still seen as valuable, indeed exemplary, by many, or at least as an aspect of masculinity. Partly thanks to growing professionalism and the abandonment of conscription in many Western states, the military there is less integrated into society, both into social structures and into concepts of society. This demilitarization of civil society leads to a decline in bellicist values: instead, they are expressed through sporting rivalries or as a response to media portrayals of violence. There has also been a ‘civilization’, ‘civilianization’ or process of civilizing of the military. It can no longer be an adjunct of society able to follow its own set of rules, but is expected to conform to societal standards of behaviour, for example, in the treatment of homosexuality.

Yet, as recent years have shown, these changes do not have to mean passivity and the absence of war. Indeed, a range of issues, including pressures and tensions latent in globalization, and the response, can readily lead to the use of force. Moreover, whatever the current of social change, democracies, once roused, can be very tenacious in war, or at least their governments can be.

The suggestion that the ‘West’ has become less bellicist might also seem ironic given its nuclear preponderance, the capacity of its weapons of mass destruction and the role of its industries in supplying weaponry to the rest of the world. Indeed, it might almost be argued that this strength is a condition for the decline of militarism. A decline in bellicosity, in so far as it has occurred, could also be seen as owing something to the prevalence and vitality of other forms of ‘aggression’, for example, economic and cultural imperialism as a substitute for war.

An emphasis on the cultural contexts within which war is condemned by many but also understood, even welcomed, by others as an instrument of policy, and as a means and product of social, ethnic or political cohesion, is, also, in part, a reminder of the role of choice. As such, this approach is a qualification of the apparent determinism of some systemic models. A denial of determinism also opens up the possibility of suggesting that the multiple and contested interpretations of war by contemporaries, both today and in the past, are valuable, which underlines the importance of integrating these interpretations into explanatory models.

As far as intentionality is concerned, bellicosity leads to war, not so much through misunderstandings that produce inaccurate calculations of interest and response, the war by accident approach, but, rather, from an acceptance of different interests, and a conviction that they can be best resolved through the use of force. As such, war can be the resort of both satisfied and unsatisfied powers. The resort for war is also a choice for unpredictability, which is not simply the uncertain nature of battle, but an inherent characteristic of the very nature of war. The acceptance that risk is involved in warfare, and the willingness to confront it, are both culturally conditioned, not to mention the cultural role of rage leading to war.

This book seeks to show not only that military history is important, but also that a short military history of the world does not have to dispense with scholarly topics and debate. Instead, there is an introduction to key issues, notably the value of the idea of military revolutions, the extent to which it is valid to write of a Western way of war and the question of where the emphasis should be placed in the coverage of military history. These issues are introduced not only because they are significant but also because they serve to underline the extent to which the subject is an active one, with important controversies that are of direct relevance for the world today.

Source: Jeremy Black, War: A Short History, Continuum UK, London, 2009

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

The opportunity to write a short history of war is particularly welcome because of the importance of the topic if we are to understand past, present and future. The major themes of the book are all pertinent today: the variety of military environments, systems and methods of warmaking, and thus the need for caution in assessing capability. Rather than assuming, in any specific period, the global effectiveness of a particular army, the theme here is the extent to which a number of effective forces co-exist as they display best practice in specific contexts. The chronological divisions used in the book are designed to focus on ‘world-scale’ issues. In Chapter 3, the West does not have the dominant role it enjoys in Chapter 5, while in Chapter 6 the West faces greater problems projecting its power irrespective of its strength.

With space at a premium, it would be all too easy to present a clear account of readily apparent developments joined in an easy narrative. That would be to insult the reader. Clarity emerges, if at all, from an understanding of complexity, and war, its definition, causes, development and consequences, is highly complex. The Introduction introduces this theme, not least in the case of the definition of war, and complexity repeatedly emerges thereafter, underlining the extent to which discussion today about the nature of war has a long history.

Writing about war can seem to be overly distant from the grisly realities of combat and warfare. Such distance is not the intention here, and for much of human history there has been little attempt to hide the brutality involved. Indeed, the devastation was often celebrated. Weni of Abydos (c. 2375-2305 bce), an Egyptian general who campaigned in Canaan (Israel) in c. 2350-2330 bce, recorded in his triumph poem that his army had ravaged and flattened the ‘Sand-dwellers’ land’: ‘It had cut down its figs, its vines// It had thrown fire in all its dwellings// It had slain its troops by many ten-thousands’. Horror, rather than celebration, was often evident. In 1791 ce a British participant in a victory over the powerful Indian ruler Tipu, Sultan of Mysore, noted: ‘some of the poor fellows [Indians] had ghastly wounds …. Some wretches had half their faces cut off, some their hands lying by their sides; and two bodies I particularly marked which had their hands severed clean off by a single stroke, and lay at a distance from the trunks’.

I have profited from opportunities provided by lectures to develop my ideas. I am particularly grateful for opportunities to speak at the 2008 University of Virginia Summer School at Oxford, the 2006 and 2008 Rothenberg Seminars the Joint War Fighting Center of the US Joint Forces Command, the University of North Texas, High Point University, Union University, Adelphi University, the University of Texas, San Antonio, and Texas A and M University. I would like to thank Ian Beckett, Jan Glete, Wayne Lee, Jürgen Luh, Anthony Saunders, Patrick Speelman and David Stone for their comments on an earlier draft, Robin Baird-Smith for being a most supportive publisher and Sue Cope for her key role in the production process. None is responsible for any errors that remain. It is a great pleasure to dedicate this book to a good friend whose fine intellect matches his companionship.

NOTE ON DATING

ce (Common Era) and bce (Before Common Era) are used. Those not familiar with these terms may read them as ad and bc.

Source: Jeremy Black, War: A Short History, Continuum UK, London, 2009

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

By Jeremy Black

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1 Until the ‘Barbarian’ Invasions

2 From the Creation of the Islamic World to the Start of European Transoceanic Expansion, 630-1490

3 The Gunpowder Empires of the Early-Modern World, 1490-1630

4 From the Mid-Seventeenth Century Crisis to the Age of Revolutions, 1630-1800

5 The World of the European Empires, 1800-1950

6 To the Present, 1950-

7 Conclusions: Assessing War

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis