The Costing of Conquest

THE COSTING OF CONQUEST

Not long ago I heard John Bolton (who had lately resigned his post as US representative designate to the United Nations) saying how outrageously evil it was of the Syrians to (allegedly) assassinate certain Lebanese politicians who were thought to be obstructing Syria’s ambition to gain political control of Lebanon. If true, that is certainly a despicable thing to do, definitely not the sort of behaviour we expect from a member of the community of nations.

Then, later, I heard that Condoleezza Rice, (the US Secretary of State) has affirmed that the US expenditure of materials and human lives on a war intended to obtain political control of Iraq and so bring to it US style democracy, has been and still is, as she put it, ‘a worthwhile investment’.
Comparing these two projects in purely arithmetical terms, one can see that, although basically similar in purpose, the (alleged) Syrian investment is far more economical in outlay than the US one, in that only one or two lives were lost and little physical damage occurred, as compared with the half-million or so lives that are thought to have been lost in the massive destruction that the invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies has so far unleashed.

Also, it is worth noting that neither of the projects can really be said to have been cost-effective. Syria has not obtained political control of Lebanon, and, if it has ever had political control of Iraq, the US has long since lost it.

Arithmetic aside, we have to ask what has happened to the human race that either of these appalling projects should ever have been considered in the first place. The first key lies, I suspect, in the plastic weasel-phrase: “Régime-change”.

When one nation adopts the policy of military conquest, (which is now legitimated by being called ‘régime-change’), it is implicitly arrogating to itself the right to remove by force the government of another nation, just because it, itself, doesn’t happen to approve of what that nation does. However apparently virtuous and necessary that action may be seen to be at the time, the nation which chooses that policy has, by so doing, created a precedent which any other nation or group, however vile its intent, can legitimately consider itself entitled to emulate.

So, ‘sauce for the goose being sauce for the gander’ it follows that now anybody and everybody can follow suit and have a go at the régime-change of their choice, and, while the world stands aghast at the piecemeal proliferation of random murder-projects that are destroying the once-civilized nation of Iraq, there is nothing anybody can do to stop it because it is all being done, legitimated by the US example, in the name of ‘régime-change’, or in this case perhaps ‘régime-destruction’.

Also, in the case of Iraq, the policy cannot by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as having been cost-effective. The fact that Saddam Hussein was a complete despot does not alter the fact that to go to war and stamp on Iraq in order to get rid of him and so ‘save its people’, was and is a failure, because today, life for the surviving Iraqis is rarely better, often far worse and always infinitely more dangerous than it was in Saddam Hussein’s time.

What has happened to conquest?

There is nothing new about war and conquering and international threat-based power-politics. When people quarrel, they fight. When other people or nations have something they want, they fight them for it. The Roman Empire was built on programmes of forced régime-change. So was the British Empire. So why can’t the American Empire manage it?

There are probably many reasons, but the underlying one is, I think, technical. Old-style conquering has got out of hand and just doesn’t work any more. The sacred Arms Industry has bountifully delivered the goods and now the natives don’t have spears, they have Kalashnikovs and rocket-grenades. The world is now so awash with munitions that the amount of ‘collateral’ death and destruction that military-type action causes, and the consequent misery hatred and compulsion to revenge that it engenders must far outweigh any benefit that it might once have been intended to achieve. The old adage that “war breeds war” is now being constantly and amply demonstrated.

Furthermore the process of conquering is no longer practical. This was shown by the text-book efficiency of the US invasion of Iraq. The Abrams tank can sweep across the land and apparently conquer it, but, once the tank has arrived there, the soldiers inside it can’t get out, except in heavily-armed sorties from pre-fortified compounds. The invaders may have destroyed the infrastructure of the country and have disbanded its social systems, its police, its public services, but they can’t replace them because they are constantly, literally, under fire, not only from the people of the country, but from anybody in neighbouring countries who doesn’t happen to want the conquerors to be there, doesn’t want them to succeed in any of their purposes, and sees, in the maintenance of chaos by random destruction, a way to keep them bogged down and leave the world open for their own particular infiltrative brand of régime destruction.

God knows when or how that festering sore can be salved. The process cannot begin until the initial mistake is fully acknowledged and the outraged dragons of vengeance are no longer being nourished by brave gung-ho lies and glib pretences.

What has happened to civilization?

What indeed? Why do we go on doing these things? What has happened to the human race that after thousands of years of civilization we are still unable to live in peace with our neighbours?
As individuals, in this country, we can, up to a point, manage to do this. In the square where I lived there were people of many types and colours living in different houses. If we didn’t like them we didn’t have a lot to do with them, but we didn’t shoot them, and certainly we didn’t get an anti-tank gun and blow them up, house and family, and then take possession of their property. We put up with it or, as a last resort, we complained to the council or called the police, who dealt with it impersonally according to the law.

So why does this not happen in the big round square where the nations live? The obvious reason is, and has always been: because there isn’t any council with a real police-force backed by impersonal law. This lack has been obvious for many decades. I have seen both the League of Nations and later the United Nations rise in hope and strength, and watched them wither away in impotence and disdain, as the nations which had created the organisation and placed it in authority, shrugged it aside because they could not impose their will on it.

It has become fashionable to dismiss the United Nations as a complete waste of time and money, because it is so cumbersome, slow to act and poorly supported, but the simple reason why it is like that is that it has been, and is being, deliberately obstructed and sidelined by its own creators.

Today, now that it has been so clearly demonstrated that international violence by individual nations or partisan groups of nations is an essentially self-destructive rather than a cost-effective option, the only hope for survival for the human race is for its nations to do as individuals have done, create, respect and empower a proper United Nations, a supra-national body with fully independent dedicated members, one which is armed and empowered to act impersonally in the interests of the world as a whole, according to international law, rather than on behalf of any particular faction.

This solution has been proposed so often that to suggest it again may seem naïve and unrealistic. This may have been the case in the past, but today things are different.
Now that the human race is about to encounter the appalling disasters of progressive climate change, we have to ask ourselves a simple question:

Do we let our rulers go on and grab what they can for us, the nations fighting and dying in a holocaust of hi-tech. mutual destruction as they scrabble like hyenas for the remains of our once-green planet, or do we demand that they come together in a common authority which will allow them to behave with care, compassion and common-sense, and so, perhaps, allow the human race to survive?

It is, as always, up to us to decide.

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