Forever war

Since the dawn of urban societies armies have determined the path of human history. Professional soldiers have made and unmade governments, potentates and ruling dynasties. They have ruined cities and massacred or enslaved whole populations. Paying off mercenary armies probably originated the minting of coins as a means of exchange and a store of value. After pottery, the mass production of identical items first concerned military dress, weapons and equipment. Even science and technology have been the docile servants of war. The whole of humanity has been shaped by the impact of arms, on skin, flesh and bones. People have been constantly slashed, pierced, crushed, disfigured, dismembered and vaporised. This seems so normal because the past is cluttered with murder and the present shows it as a permanent spectacle. It is as though humanity's sole purpose was to kill or main one another and all other forms of life. Not everyone is on the front line, of course, and not a few claim they reject this reality. But all are accomplices, wilfully or under constraint, and even the victims play their part.

With fire and ever more sophisticated weapons, humans became the planet's top predatory species, able to kill anything and everything. The only valid adversaries were other humans. Though developing technologies would give Europeans the upper hand and the fire-power for global conquest. Since the end of the “Pax Romana” some sixteen centuries ago, Europeans have been fighting a forever war, among themselves, crusading, and for the past five centuries all around the planet. Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian rulers relied on sheer numbers of soldiers, whereas the success of the Greek phalanx and the Roman legion was built on training, equipment and tactics. Europeans had steel and guns, when most of the world was still in the Stone Age or at the early stages of metallurgy. Europeans also had the accumulated experience of a millennium of war-making. And both advantages are linked. Perpetual war is a strong incentive for innovation, for a novelty that decides the fate of battles. Belisarius (500-565) disposed of heavy cavalry thanks to someone's invention of the stirrup and someone's breeding of bigger horses. This gave the first crusaders (1096-1099) victories in pitch battles as they progressed down the coast to Jerusalem. But it was of no use east and west of that narrow band, in the steppes of Syria, Arabia and Sinai where light cavalry and Damas steel could harass and wear down crusader incursions. In 1453 Europeans lost Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, which would be followed by Greece and the Balkans. But in 1492 the last Arab stronghold in Spain, Grenada, was overrun, and the same year Columbus crossed the Atlantic, and five years later Vasco da Gamma sailed round Africa and reached India. Except for Russia, European conquests would thenceforth be sea-born, though they never ceased fighting each other in hot and cold wars. Naval power would determine the outcome of the next four and a half centuries, culminating with the sea battles in the Pacific (1941-1945). but even then air-borne power was imposing its dominance, which it has kept to this day.

Forever war has been the driving force of human history. It has been fought for territory, plunder, slaves, personal glory, religious beliefs, and to distract popular dissent. And when the production of weapons and armour became a profession and a source of profit, producers could only encourage more fighting by producing ever more effective instruments. The union of military and industry is also a forever story, and one would be nothing without the other. War has long been presented as defence, but the best form of defence is attack. And military might must constantly prove itself by open acts of war inflicted on any form of rebellion. It must crush it opponents and discourage others. In 1945 the nuclear vaporisation of two Japanese cities was a signal to the world, as was the carpet bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia with high explosives and “Agent Orange” (1). The message was that the US and its allies would resort to mass murder to “defend” their interests. The interests of capital came before those of any nation. Even at the heart of empire, citizens had to pay for war instead of their own well-being, guns instead of butter. The forever war just went on, fuelled by plunder and ideological certainties.

From 1989 to 1991 the Western World's attention was focused on the break-up of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, effectively ending forty years of Cold War. But the preceding years had seen two nasty, bloody wars. In Afghanistan, a military dictatorship supported by Moscow was increasingly unable to suppress a traditionalist religious uprising. At the end of 1979 soviet troops occupied the country, for a savage counter-insurgency operation. The insurgents, with help from neighbouring Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the CIA, would force the soviets to leave in 1988 – by which time the USSR was on the verge of collapse anyway – and would go on fighting among themselves for another eight years. Finally in 1996, the mostly Pashtun Taliban controlled most of the country and set up a government in the ruins of Kabul. By then the world's attention was elsewhere. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the isolation of the Shia Islamic Republic, and having a large Shia population, Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein felt his Sunni backed regime was under threat. Pretexting a contested territory, and with support from the US and its European allies, he sent his troops across the border into Iran in 1980. there ensued a protracted conflict, fought in trenches and not unlike the 14-18 war in Europe, that would last to 1988. All the bloodshed in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the marshes of the Shatt al-Arab would have far reaching consequences.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dismembered in1991, Russia's constitution changed and the state-owned economy was put up for grabs. The profitable parts were taken over by “oligarchs” and foreign investors. The rest was abandoned to dereliction, a majority of Russians fell into poverty, and not a few into alcohol and drug abuse and homelessness. There was even a marked drop in population. Meanwhile, the US and Western Europe had lost their arch-enemy. The communist subversion was defunct and Russian military power was decomposing. Peace was on hand but, fortunately, Saddam Hussein came to the rescue. During the war with Iran, he had built up a huge army and did not know how to disband it, as there were no civilian jobs on offer. So, with possibly a conniving word from a top US diplomat, and because it had been part of Iraq before its creation by British imperialists, he decided to occupy Kuwait. This allowed war-making to continue with a show of new weapons, “precision” bombing, cruse missiles, “depleted” uranium and the usual “collateral” damage to life and limbs. Desert Storm was a massacre of ill-prepared and poorly equipped Iraqi soldiers, and the opportunity to install permanent military bases in the region, a permanence that would anger many faithful Muslims who saw them as a foreign occupying force. This was felt most strongly in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, and would provoke a declaration of war by a Saudi led and financed organisation, with an ultimate attack on American soil.

The hecatomb in Iraq inaugurated the post-Cold War conflicts. America and, to a lesser extent, Russia would wreck the cities of very inferior opponents. Bush Senior had done it to Baghdad, Clinton did it to Belgrade, Yeltsin and Putin did it to Grozny. The hijacking of planes and their voluntary crashing in New York and Washington by a group affiliated to Al-Qaeda (the Base) set off a new military surge. The guerilla war fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation had brought to the fore several military commanders, each with a regional and ethnic foundation, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Baloch. And, as is frequent in these circumstances, there was an International Brigade that operated in the Pashtun region. Its leader and mentor was the son of a Yemeni who had immigrated to Saudi Arabia and made a fortune in real estate. His proximity with the Pashtun was linked to the Talibes, educated in madrasas under strong Wahhabi influence. And the world network of schools financed by Saudi Arabia and teaching the Wahhabi doctrine was probably used to recruit foreign fighters for the Jihad against the Soviet infidel and to create a separate web with its base in Afghanistan. By 1996 the Taliban controlled the country and imposed their reading of the law. The fighting was over and foreign combatants were returning to their homelands, where they galvanised opposition to the new enemy, the USA and its European allies that had ruined Iraq and desecrated the land of the Prophet.

Forming a nation entails uniformity. This means a common language and culture, common laws, and even religion and appearance should not be too distinctive. When a state of vassalage becomes a nation, the necessary conformity is only achieved by violence. Vassals tend to neglect their duties and must be constantly reminded by force or the threat of force. But the system is pyramidal, where each level deals with the level below it. Whereas a nation demands compliance from every individual to the dictates of a centralised rule. Regional particularities must disappear or be reduced to nostalgic folk-law, language must comply to set rules, exchange value is regulated, a single historic tale is told and ideology is standardised. This nationalisation of all society into a unique model is accompanied by constraint and by a focus on the military as a means of enforcing it. Conscription moulds the citizen into an obedient patriot and breaks would-be rebels. General conscription supposes a large standing army and generates a temptation to put it to use. And mass armies are a boon for their suppliers and an ever growing expense for national budgets. Napoleon used that new found energy to conquer and plunder Europe, before overreaching in Russia. A century later it plunged Europe into four years of deadly, pitiless conflict on multiple fronts. And just another thirty years and most of the northern hemisphere was drawn into a much greater massacre, where millions of civilian victims far outnumbered the military death-roll. War had taken to the air, and battle fronts were no longer a protection.

Monarchs made war to enhance their kingdoms, which they could also manage by marriage. Weddings and battles drew the outlines of future nations. These began to take shape in conjunction with the sudden colossal expansion of colonial conquest. The Americas, coastal Africa and South Asia were being visited and taken by armed entrepreneurs from Spain, Portugal, Holland, England and France. These vast territories, acquired with superior weapons, built and strengthened the national sentiments of each colonial power. The nationals were above the natives they had subjected overseas. Empire gave a sense of superiority, and imposed continual fighting to prove it. England went to war with Spain, briefly with Holland and for a long time with France. Waterloo confirmed the English hegemon, Britannia ruled the waves. Russia had taken over vast territories, east to the Pacific and south to the Caspian and Black Seas, without opposition. But in the late 19^th century, three new nations reached a form of unity, Germany, Italy and Belgium were latecomers and were keen on getting their share of the global cake. There were few places left, so they contented themselves with the remaining parts of Africa. The world was divided up, and European nations had nothing more to conquer except from each other. They would fight two extreme wars, drawing most of the planet into the conflict.

Forever war is humanity's story, and nationalism intensified it. The conflicts between monarchs, or between monarchs and vassals were transformed into the confrontation of whole nations. Total war of annihilation or absolute subjection had been practised in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and it came home to roost in the first half of the 20^th century, a first round in Europe and a second one involving a large part of the Northern Hemisphere. Nuclear weapons made total war a promise of mutual destruction, but fighting went on unabated, using conventional weapons in insurgence and counter-insurgence, with large numbers of civilian deaths and mass migrations fleeing the combat zones. And so it went on throughout the Cold War and, when that ended in 1991 by default, guns were turned to the War on Terror. Now there is a switch to Asia, with China in the crosshairs. But the world has changed since 1949, and isolating China, the way the Soviet Union was back then, would create an unimaginable chaos in the global circulation of goods, services and finance. The Orwellian war games between Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania, and their sudden reversals of alliances were inspired by those that occurred just after 1945. Then the rubble of war was in London, Stalingrad, Berlin, Tokyo, etc. Today it is in Aleppo, Mosul, Gaza, etc., whereas the centres of power have been subjected to just a few retaliatory attacks. And the whole world is bound by a tight mesh of trade, transport and finance. War is as obsolete as stone axes, but so much wealth has been and continues to be invested in its propagation that it just goes on and is never seriously questioned. Over the ages it has become normality, for those who bear the brunt and especially for those able to ignore it. The cost of the world's military machines is astronomical, and the available numbers do not take into account the destruction they have caused. Just like the oil industry, the war industry prefers to ignore the price of collateral damage. Making a profit and running a private jet are far more important than the environment and human lives. Who cares about the millions fleeing the bombs and the oceans of poisonous waste, if there is a quick buck to be made.

Nationalism intensified war, and capitalism was not far behind. Precious metals and slaves have always been the plunder of war, but industrial capital also needed raw materials and foreign markets. Capital has long been closely associated with warfare, the conquest of India was primarily a commercial enterprise, the East India Company founded in 1600. But, more generally, capital supplies the military and encourages it to buy ever more, and regularly expects forceful interventions to insure and protect its investments. The national army's role is to police the planet and impose the rules and laws of profit capitalism. And, as there are always several nations in competition, the rules of one police empire must confront those of different ones. The brute force of power and wealth is given an ideological glazing of inherent superiority around the notion of nation, with a racial subtext. Capitalist greed dominates the world. It can only be satisfied by plunder and oppression, so the war machines play a central role and the fighting goes on and on, for ever.

1. A scary story going back to the 1940s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange