Fighting Wars During Peace-Time

David Aikman

Britain’s magazine The Economist once made an interesting point about democracies and fighting wars. “Democracies,” the magazine said—and I offer a paraphrase rather than quote precisely—“find it difficult to fight wars during peace-time.” The point is a subtle one. Essentially, it is that democratic societies are seldom prepared to engage in sustained war-fighting if they do not believe that their county is really at war.

Twinned Congressional votes of recent days, 246–152 in the House of Representatives and 56–34 in the Senate, rebuked the President and the Administration for its continuation of the war in Iraq. Although the resolutions in both chambers were non-binding and had no power to re-direct US government policy in Iraq, they clearly sent a loud message. Nearly four years after the initial US invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and after the deaths of some 3,100 US military personnel, Americans are very unhappy with what they are seeing in Iraq. Not only has the post-Saddam political regime—democratically elected—failed to impose order on Iraq, it has often seemed to have been indifferent to rising sectarian violence between the Shiite Muslim community (amounting to some 55 percent of the Iraqi people) and the Sunni community, which formerly provided the base of ethnic support for the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

Americans initially were in strong support of the war in Iraq. Though not everyone was convinced that Saddam was indeed harboring WMDs, and not many people were convinced of a connection between Al Qaeda and the Saddam regime, most people thought it was a good idea to replace the wicked regime over which Saddam Hussein had presided. What they surely didn’t know at the outset of the invasion and war was that it would be far more problematic securing peace in the country after regime change than it was achieving that change in the first place.

To be sure, American disillusionment with the war in Iraq has not derived solely from grief at the deaths of Americans in the war. There has been a strong sense that the Iraqi government has not only failed to quell the sectarian violence in the country, but may also have quietly encouraged it. Many of the killings of Sunnis in Baghdad neighborhoods and in other cities were carried out by people wearing official government uniforms. Americans feel, with some justice, that a regime that the US is protecting from overthrow by insurgents ought to be palpably co-operating in setting its own house in order. The Iraqi government of Al-Maliki has not been doing that.

Yet behind the Washington debates looms the shadow of the most costly and controversial military conflict in American history, the war in Vietnam. That was initially authorized by the Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964, a Congressional resolution that granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to employ military force in the Vietnam region. After domestic US opposition to the war rose dramatically in the late 1960s, President Johnson withdrew himself from consideration as the Democratic Party candidate to run in the presidential election of 1968. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was repealed in 1970 by the US Congress and replaced in 1973 by the War Powers Act, which limits any president’s ability to involve the US Armed Forces in hostilities without prior consultation with the Congress. According to the US Constitution, the power to declare war resides solely with the Congress.

The Vietnam War was a trauma for the US not only because of the loss of American lives (some 57,000) but because America’s principal opponent in the conflict, North Vietnam, in 1975 succeeded in completely defeating South Vietnam, America’s ally in the war. Dr. Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State during the war had accurately predicted when South Vietnam would collapse militarily. A journalist asked, How could he know? Because, he answered, in the spring of 1975 the South Vietnamese would run out of ammunition. The US Congress, eager to escape the bloody entanglement in South-East Asia, had refused to vote the money requested by President Nixon to supply South Vietnam with weapons and ammunition needed to continue the war. Indirectly, the US Congress ensured South Vietnam’s eventual defeat.

In spite of dire predictions by conservative critics of Congressional opposition to the Vietnam War of “dominoes” falling all over South-East Asia or the expansion of a power-hungry China, the worst fears were not realized. Though the whole of Indochina—both Vietnams, Laos, and Cambodia—fell under Communist rule (and millions of Cambodians lost their lives under the Khmer Rouge), the remainder of South-East Asia went on to become prosperous, and eventually democratic. After the death of Mao Zedong, China turned away from its radical revolutionary rhetoric and the policies of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), opened up to the rest of the world, and emerged as a major capitalist power (though still ruled by a Communist Party).

In any consideration of curtailment of US involvement in the war in Iraq, however, the same “domino” argument re-emerges. Both President Bush and other senior administration leaders have warned that, if America appears to have been defeated in Iraq and withdraws from the Middle East region in general with its tail between its legs, the consequences for the entire Arab world could be disastrous and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups would simply resume their operations on US soil. Opponents of the administration’s argument assert that the US has not applied enough diplomatic attention to the region. They complain, for example, that Washington conspicuously omitted for most of the past six years to put pressure on the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to resolve their differences and make peace. These same critics often argue that it is the apparent hiatus in American diplomatic activity that has led to a serious decline in American prestige in the Middle East and the Islamic world as a whole.

Americans in the past have shown that they do have the stomach for all-out war. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against the US that followed, there was a surge of patriotic enthusiasm to fight the war through to a conclusion that would lead to the complete defeat of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan. But the smaller wars that followed World War II were altogether more problematic. The American experiences in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, and now Iraq have shown that, while Americans are highly patriotic, in none of these “smaller” conflicts did they feel sufficiently threatened as a nation to be willing to be mobilized for all-out war. America’s actual survival, for most Americans, simply does not seem to be on the line in Iraq.

Only history will reveal whether the dire fears of advocates of continued American military pressure in Iraq will be borne out and the terrorists really will “follow us home” and bring onto American soil the horrors they have perpetrated in Iraq and elsewhere. It is argued by those who advocate the speediest possible US withdrawal from Iraq that the removal of a US military presence in the heart of the Arab world will bring greater security for the US and its allies. According to this argument, the American military presence is itself a cause for social instability in the region.

In the Congressional debates that have grown increasingly intense around the Iraq issue, one thing has become quite clear: Americans are extremely reluctant to support costly and lengthy wars overseas unless they are convinced that their own survival as a nation is at stake. So far, the administration has failed to make that case. Let us hope that history does not make it for them.  

Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Society, War and Peace, Mon 02 Apr 2007