Governments start wars

According to Martha Gelhorn, one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century, who remained a pacifist all her life, governments start wars. In the introduction to the third edition (1986) of her book 'The Face of War, she wrote "I blame our governments, supposedly the most enlightened, experienced and powerful, for the sick and ominous pass they have brought us to. Above all I blame the Super-powers, temporary men behaving as if the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union were the most momentous episode in the long history of mankind". She would no doubt say the same about the current war on terrorism. When we consider that wars cost money and risk lives it is clear that governments are closely involved at all stages. They have to find the money and deploy the forces. Without government support there would be no war. But what has happened to all the treaties of the last century? What about the Geneva Conventions? An earlier comment on government involvement in war and the lengths to which governments will go to persuade the population to support them, was made by Mark Twain.
In 'The Mysterious Stranger' (1916) he wrote "...Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame on the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently sudy them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self- deception".

(thanks to WWW.emperors-clothes.com)
Tony Blair has elevated war to a principle of intervention to avoid a bloodbath. He praised the military action over Kosovo, in which hundreds of thousands of Albanian speakers were literally forced to flee NATO bombing in the name of humanitarian intervention. Later he said that the deaths of a million people in Rwanda in 1994 could also have been avoided by early intervention. Either from ignorance or deliberately falsifying the facts, he kept from his listeners the real truth (well documented in Linda Melvern's book 'Rwanda') which was that the UN already had a small force in that country by agreement which called for reinforcements of 5000 more UN peacekeepers. The Security Council declined to send them and genocide followed It is unfortunately untrue that democracies only go to war in self-defence or to aid another country being attacked. Now the whole panoply of treaties including the United Nations Charter, the greatest international commitment by over 180 independent states, is in danger of being made obsolete by the action of those who often illegitimately describe themselves as the 'international community'. The attacks by Britain and the US on Iraq during the ten years since the Gulf war have often been described as by the 'coalition'. This term has also been used in the Fight against Terrorism, the United States' response to September 11, backed by many countries for a variety of reasons including fear of retaliation if they are not 'with us'.
Even the description 'democracy' should be used with caution. As we have seen from the comments of Martha Gelhorn and Mark Twain those who govern with the consent of their electorate often base their actions on false hypotheses, using the support of a compliant and chauvinist media to maintain popular support for their actions. We are in danger of forgetting, while celebrating the enormous democratic gains of the 19th and 20th century, that these were achieved against strong opposition from entrenched interests. Those interests are still there; they have already reversed some of the reforms.
Many countries in both the developed and undeveloped world live with a strong democratic 'deficit' (some do not pretend to be democratic) where the interests of large corporations and more powerful states are pressed on weak governments, and where economic-self interest is still supreme. The manipulation of weak states is widespread. We celebrate the end of the cold war, but that forty-year confrontation was created by political interests which wished to maintain an economic system that cannot abide variations, especially those based on the primacy of peoples' rights. Many states were subverted in this way, leading to civil war in Nicaragua for example, supported by the United States, and to the break-up of Yugoslavia. The same forces, strongly supported by the US government, have recently been at work to destabilise the elected regime in Venezuela.
The Falklands war and the Gulf war could have been avoided. The first was a former colonial possession which was given inadequate defence support, and where by united action the UN could have forced a withdrawal of the invaders. Because the British government invoked the right of self-defence under Charter 51, the full strength of the UN Security Council was not used to force a withdrawal. The Gulf war could have been avoided by accepting the offer by Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait. The massive attack on Iraq after Saddam Hussein had offered to withdraw was another example of an unnecessary war.
After the attacks on the United States on September 11, which cannot have been unconnected with its military harassment of 46 other states since World War 2, the US government took revenge by attacking Afghanistan. It attacked a failing state on the pretext that it was pusuing Al-Queda, Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban government, allegedly sheltering them. The declaration made later which described a further three states that were part of an 'Evil Axis', was entirely consistent with earlier actions of the US government.
The War against Terrorism, initiated by the US government, is an oxymoron. The title gives moral justification to its exponents. It is like the allied propaganda of the first world war, praised by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (my struggle) This propaganda which features daily in western media continues the fiction that the war in Afghanistan is a legitimate response to September 11, although none of its perpetrators came from Afghanistan, which has suffered 22 years of civil war.

Complaining that the German government did nothing in the first world war to persuade its people that the war was worth fighting Hitler analysed the effective propaganda of the 'enemy'. "What we failed to do, the enemy did with amazing skill and really brilliant calculation". "Is propaganda a means or an end?" he asked, answering that it was a means to achieve a desired end. "To whom should propaganda be addressed, to the scientifically trained intelligentsia or the less educated masses?". His answer was "It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses". Describing how the allies succeeded in winning the allegiance of their soldiers and the civilian population, by representing the Germans as "barbarians and Huns", Hitler wrote that propaganda required a simple theme, repeated over and over, to be effective. It did not have to be true.
So wars are part of the political process. A truism, often repeated in Britain, is that war is a continuation of diplomacy by other means. If this is indeed true we need to look at that process. Unless, as with Kosovo, greatly superior power is used to achieve a quick result there is also no way of knowing how long the war will last or who
will be brought in. It is essential that one way or another the population is trained to become sceptical off government action when it involves the lives of their countrymen and women and, especially, the lives and the way of living of others. History has shown that politicians are not as benign as they would like us to believe; caveat emptor, 'let the buyer beware'.
Jim Addington June 2002