The Usual Suspects

August 1, 2014

Last Monday marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I, one of the two bloodiest and most horrendous conflicts in recorded history. It was known also as The Great War and more popularly as “the war to end all wars”. But it didn’t, of course. Barely more than two decades after it ended, the world would witness the start of World War II on September 1, 1939. That war would prove to be even more horrific and far more costly in human life than its predecessor, and with its end, the world would once more say, “Never again,” and give birth to multilateral institutions and worldwide treaties aimed at ensuring peace.

And yet, peace has not come. Although the “advancement” of war technology (to the detriment, one might argue, of environmental and life sciences which must vie for funds, materials and human resources with the gnashing golden teeth of the First World’s war machine) has—until now, at least—kept the major powers from again engaging in battle directly, in the years since World War II the rich and powerful have continued to foster and/or support geopolitically strategic wars among the world’s less advanced nations, which they use as their proxies and pawns—when not merely as their customers for a ready supply of guns and ammo. There have been more than 250 wars since the end of World War II. You may have missed a lot of them, simply because they weren’t of sufficient interest to the major powers to merit broad news coverage. But in human terms, their relative obscurity hardly makes them unimportant: Over 50 million people have died in them, tens of millions have been left homeless by them and countless other millions have been injured or maimed in them for life. Many are ongoing and have been for years.

As the technology of war “advances”, strategies have changed, as have the ethics and “rules of war”, to such an extent that wars no longer take place on battlefields but in the midst of human populations and the ever more massive and indiscriminate firepower being exerted leaves in its wake “collateral damage” far greater than the damage to intended combatant targets. Today, in most of the world’s major conflicts, the ratio of civilian to military casualties is nine to one. “Surgical bombing” and “surgical rocket fire”, then, would appear to be a myth invented by the traffickers and users of new weapons technology—or if not, then there can be no question that intentional crimes against humanity are taking place on a daily basis around the world.

The current human tragedy taking place in the Gaza Strip is a case in point. Israel, with the most advanced defense system its US ally can provide has managed to deflect a significant proportion of the rocket attacks launched against it from Gaza by its extremist enemy, Hamas, but in the face of the withering military response that Israel itself has mounted in seeking to disable the Hamas organization, the Gaza Strip (not just Hamas) is defenseless. If all that this meant was that Israel was thus able to punish its armed extremist enemy for attacking it with rockets (no matter how ineffectual those attacks might be, given Israel’s sophisticated imported war technology), regionally speaking, it would simply be about mutual armed military aggression between two opposing ideologies. But reputable news organizations covering that war have estimated that 70 percent of the well over 1,000 people killed in Israel’s intensive attacks on the Gaza Strip in recent weeks have been innocent civilians, including children. A similar proportion of the over 5,000 wounded are also reported to be civilians and hundreds upon hundreds of Gaza homes have been destroyed.

On this World War I centennial, and as we approach the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start of World War II, what we haven’t learned in the intervening generations about war and world peace seems clearly more noteworthy than what we have. While it is true that both world wars spawned such experiments in peace as the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations as well as such landmark world treaties as the Versailles and Geneva Conventions, it is just as true that the League of Nations failed by seeking to impose rather than build and maintain peace and that the United Nations has been debilitated by having all of its decisions rendered subject to the discretion of the handful of major powers that make up the permanent UN Security Council—the self-same powers that carved up the world after the second global conflict, the same ones that are the world’s largest traffickers of weaponry and war, the same ones that are vying today for opposing positions of power in every corner of the world where violence is rife. And it is true as well that they almost daily raise accusations against each other for violating the terms of the once sacred Geneva, Versailles and other international conventions and treaties.

A hard lesson for any secondary school student to understand is how an apparently isolated incident like the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the crown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, could have sparked a world conflict in which some 70 million troops and officers would take part and in which 9 million of them would die. But that’s because it is a lesson taken out of context, just as today the public at large is too often led to believe that the more than 30 wars currently being waged worldwide are internal or regional and are thus merely “local tragedies” that have no bearing on world peace. The fact is that it is hard to imagine a war that has no international consequences whatsoever, and the major ones being waged today have already fostered a resurgence of the kind of—as yet—cold war between East and West, which many dared hope and believe had ended forever with the fall of the Berlin Wall a quarter-century ago. The murder of Franz Ferdinand was merely the spark that lit the fuse to the explosion of the First World War, which only took weeks to develop into full-scale warfare throughout Europe and other parts of the planet. As usual, an event was justified as an excuse (indeed, a battle cry) for the waging of a war that was really about the resurgence of imperialism and the struggle for power and economic resources. And as happens in every such power struggle, countries in one region and another, and in the next region beyond, and in the one after that choose sides among the major powers according to their convenience. This was precisely what happened in Europe and in Europe’s worldwide sphere of influence in both World War I and World War II, to the extent that the assassination of an Austrian-Hungarian royal set the world on fire, as did Hitler’s invasion of Poland less than a quarter of a century later.

Closely following the turn of world events over the last few years—and, indeed, over the last few months and weeks—makes it almost impossible not to conclude that a world that appeared to be considerably more hopeful and committed to peace and cooperation following the fall of the Berlin Wall is now teetering on the brink of a very dangerous situation.   And it is a situation that presents far too many parallels with those witnessed at the start of both world wars. Raging regional conflicts—i.e., in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel and the Gaza Strip—are being closely observed or directly manipulated by the major powers (Western Europe and the US on one side and Russia and its allies on the other), and threaten to spill over into the rest of the Middle East.  Meanwhile, something unthinkable just a few months ago is happening in Europe, as political upheaval and a major political policy shift in Ukraine has not only led to a shooting war between pro-Russian rebels and a West-leaning government in Kiev, but also to the unmasking of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s previously low-key aim of winning back Russia’s lost power from the Soviet era.

Chilling parallels can be struck between Putin’s aims and tactics and those of the expansionist Soviet Union or even those of Adolf Hitler’s own expansionism in the months leading up to the Second World War. Like Hitler, who claimed Germany was only protecting and incorporating three million ethnic Germans living in the border region between the two countries when he took over parts of Czechoslovakia, Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula providing the same justification, protection of ethnic Russians living there after Kiev aligned with the West. And just as Hitler formally vowed to expand no further but then reneged and invaded Poland, Putin has materially aided pro-Russian separatists in other border areas of Ukraine and is now understood to be contemplating an actual invasion of the Ukrainian east and south. Like Germany after World War I, where the rise of Hitler was buoyed by nationalist sentiments born of both his lust for vengeance and the humiliation that the country suffered as a result of Allied sanctions, Putin currently has an 80 percent approval rating thanks to the vast improvement of the Russian economy on his watch after the cruel transition the country and its people suffered following the fall of the Soviet Union and during the unipolar rise of the United States to sole empire status in its wake. Power plays almost always appeal to nationalist sentiment, and Putin’s is no exception.

The West has so far wisely opted for progressively introducing economic sanctions against Russia so as to gradually bring pressure to bear against Putin both at home and abroad as well as to isolate the country and its leader at a diplomatic level. This has been largely thanks to the insistence of US President Barack Obama on taking this strong diplomatic tack while ruling out any sort of military confrontation among major world powers. While the Obama administration has done its share in recent years to underscore the renewed confrontational relationship between Moscow and Washington—to a level of hostility not seen since the Cold War days and using conflicts in smaller countries as geopolitical chess pieces—falling short of responding to Putin’s devil-may-care attitude toward bellicose aggression with anything other than calm but firm diplomatic measures demonstrates clear-minded leadership in the face of the prospect of global war.

Be that as it may, the US far right is ruthlessly attacking Obama for not taking a clearly hawkish stance against Putin’s saber-rattling. It can only be concluded that, unlike Obama, his critics have forgotten the lessons of both world wars. Hopefully the US president will continue to pay no heed to calls for direct military threats or reprisals, since if we’ve learned anything about global conflicts, it is that their devastating effects increase exponentially when combined with advances in technology.

When asked what weapons he thought would be used if there were ever a third world war, Albert Einstein famously said: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Those advocating a military face-off between Russia and the West anywhere in the world would do well to remember these wise words.