How to Know when to go to war

With war in Iraq pending, we need to stop and consider how do you decide to go to war.

Since I am an amateur historian of the post-Vietnam ilk, I put a heavy emphasis on analyzing war with a view Col. Henry Sumner’s critique, which itself has been heavily critiqued, and with a view to the well-studied work of War in the Shadows (whose author escapes me at the moment) about when to decide to go to war and how to deal with partisan warfare (a.k.a. guerilla warfare). These works are heavily practical works. They only lightly deal with the philosophical reasons to go to war.

My study of “why war? When war?” is not simple, but it is not debilitatingly complex either.

Why War?
War should be fought for a number of reasons. In the practice of law, we lawyers distinguish between “elements” and “factors.” Elements are the parts of a law that the plaintiff or prosecutor must show the court to win. When is a driver in accident liable for the other driver’s injury. The injured driver must show that a particular rule, e.g., drivers must stop for red traffic lights, was violated by the defendant driver. This showing of a rule and its violation are two elements of holding another driver liable for injuries. If one of the two is missing, no shifting of liability for injuries can occur. These are the legal versions of true-false questions.

Factors are the different questions that a judge can ask to make a decision. These tend to apply in situations where the facts are complicated and true-false questions are difficult to use to obtain meaningful answers. The example that applies in everyday business without anyone but a lawyer paying attention is a business entering into a contract – who can legally bind the company to a contract. No one set of facts is the required way to show binding authority. If you as a business owner give your business credit card to your assistant to buy office supplies and that assistant has a business card that you gave her, a court would allow the assistant to charge your credit card. You have put information out to the world through the business card that the assistant works for you and it is reasonable for an identified assistant to buy office supplies. Is the business card the only way this works? No, letterhead, phone calls, failure to correct the properly mailed invoice, signing checks for previous, similar transactions. These are all different factors that a court can use to show that you gave your assistant authority to bind your company to buy office supplies.

In the matter of deciding to go to war, this is hard to put in a true-false or elemental analysis. This seems to be a factor analysis. So what are factors that should be considered?

Here some that come to mind: a non-democratic republican government or armed militia unassociated with a nation-state (which I will collectively refer to as a regime); a regime threatening its neighbors or specifically identified persons or groups of persons by word, deed, past action, or other manifestation; a regime capable of carrying out its threat or part of its threat in a manner that would constitute a breach of the peace in criminal law; a regime that has a history of either refusing to enter into treaties, protocols, or organizations or has a history of flagrantly violating such agreements.

These factors are based on some core philosophies and past historical trends. Let’s be explicit about some of them. Democratic republics avoid war, whether scrupulously or unscrupulously (see present debate on Iraq). Militias that are outside of a democratic republic tend to be breading grounds for despotic and dictatorial thinking (see fatwahs or declarations of various Islamicist leaders). Threats need to be taken and analyzed in light of what actions a regime will take; threats need to be taken and analyzed in light of what a reasonable analysis would cause affected persons to do in taking security precautions, economic choices, and governmental organization (see previous reference to Finlandization in prior posting). A threat need not rise to a full fledge assault, but breaching the peace gives the fears of assault and Finlandization credibility that the regime will develop toward brinksmanship (consider the classic example of the Cuban missile crisis). A history of avoiding international interdependence and cooperation increases the likelihood that the regime’s anti-democratic-republican tendencies are more dangerous than a neighboring cooperative regime.


When war?

Even if all these idealistic factors and philosophies are all leading to war or armed conflict, we need to be slow done and be practical in a light taking into account the literature noted at the outset.

Even if war makes sense, we need to consider the practical factors. Here are some of the factors that need to be looked at:
What is the vision for the regional and global politics that are sought? This is a description of explicit vision. Not a description of platitudes: the development of democratic republics in the middle east by removal of the regime Finlandizing the region rather than the US seeks liberty for all persons.

How will the military know it has won? Defining war’s victory must scrupulously avoid the fallacious theory of limited war. War is not truly won unless the operational and political systems that gave rise to the reasons for war are terminated in full. This means the opposing regime, supporting governmental regime, and targeted militia-type regime are all destroyed. A true war victory must be defined as removing the problematic regime and replacing it with a democratic republic.

Is there a realistic strategy for military movement, action, and holding that allows the military to win and replace the opposing regime permanently? If the strategy will leave a substantial risk of guerilla warfare, this strategy is questionable by definition. This guerilla risk may be possible to avoid through heavy use and reliance on what is traditionally called propaganda, but in today’s world would be handled differently with a mix of psychological operations against the opposing force and honest, free press infiltration of the population’s media. Old-line propaganda must be avoided. The Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force should be used wherever practical, but it should not be used to avoid an immediately threatening regime: this would be a breach of the democracies’ leadership to protect and defend their populations from threats, foreign and domestic.

Is there a realistic means of military tactics that can be accomplished leading to the results sought. This is area that would focus on the military hardware and personnel available with the American and its allies’ collective arsenal.

Is there a logistical means of positioning for accomplishment of the tactics and strategies sought. This leads to many political questions of foreign and domestic governments. This is one of the key points that I can emphasize. The choice to go to war in an academic sense should already be made, the definition of victory determined, and the strategies envisioned before the concern about where airplanes would be allowed to fly, where tanks travel, and where airbases are located. If the war is just, the vision sound, the definition of victory usable, and strategy effective, only then is setting the pieces in place meaningful. In a more practical sense, this is a reiterative process. The process must be done from top down until a snag is hit. If the strategy is set for attacking Iraq from two fronts, the second coming out of Turkey, failing to have Turkey accept troops and tanks prevents the logistics from being accomplished. The tactical adjustment requires a strategic adjustment. But that does not change the definition of victory.


Past application

Here is where the first Gulf War became catastrophic in short term success. We agreed to too many limitations on the vision for the region and the definition of victory because of the logistical requirements of removing Saddam not from Baghdad but from Kuwait.

We turned too heavily to the UN’s approval to allow a complete visionary success. And yet, it was probably inevitable. I do not see that we would have been successful by pushing the vision too soon. While the Clinton appeasement led to the current scenario, we could have been more successful in allowing Saddam to fall with only a minor increase of military and political directness.

Even so, this Pandora’s Box was probably more dangerous that it is today. A dozen years of weakened and restricted Saddam gave Iraqi exiles and internal dissenters a chance to develop toward more consensus. This has not been easy and is likely only developed to the current extent because of the mini-war in Afghanistan. There was a vision of what American involvement could do. This vision was lacking before. It was not concrete.


Current application

Saddam’s regime is a threat by all measures. Its past actions do Finlandize their neighbors. He does have a history of breaching the peace. He is not willing to be constrained by international agreements that he has signed, including the 1991 cease fire agreement. He does limit the growth of democratic republics in the region. A definition of victory of removing his government is easy to accomplish. In the desert, many strategies are available. The tactics are plentiful. The logistics are not readily in place. The logistics have not hampered the vision and definition of victory.

While these factors do not cover all scenarios, they do cover many without any reference to the underlying cultures, religions, or other xenophobic aspects.

This analysis is based on the premise that peace is not absence of war. Peace is a lack of threats, lack of Finlandization, lack of international assault. Any argument premised on peace as absence of war will not accept any aspect of this analysis, and I have no ability to understand why any person would allow his fellow man to be brutalized to serve the premise that war is never acceptable. War is not the last option. Defensive wars are always the last option (France, the Rhineland, and Bliztkrieg). Wars of liberation are never the last option.


I would invite anyone to layout their own analysis to support how a threat as any member of the Axis of Evil should under no circumstance feel the pain of war. If that is too strong, I invite that person to describe when war is acceptable even if peace is absence of war and war is always the last option. I will happy to publish such a peace with the only requirement being that no basic fallacies of logic are involved (e.g., personal attacks a.k.a ad hominem attacks, everyone else is doing it a.k.a. bandwagon fallacy, 20-20 hindsight more strictly post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after the fact, therefore because of the fact”), etc.).