John Quiggin posts on the issue of cease-fires again, expanding his focus because it appears that McCain made essentially the same argument that I did (yeah, yeah, whatever…I’m still not supporting him).
Now I’ve acknowledged that the facts on the ground (i.e. who asked for the cease fire, who has the upper hand) in Basra are too complex to submit to snap judgments such as the one I made (note that I’m not saying that ‘Maliki lost’). But Quiggin is misinterpreting the historical record and my (and McCain’s I guess) statements so profoundly that I can’t let it pass without comment.In his comments here and in his post, he confuses the issue of what happens when a side perceives itself in real time to have the advantage – and whether they are likely to offer a cease-fire and terms in that moment – with whether, with historical hindsight, they should have.
Now he does mention one case where he states the victor imposed a cease fire, India in the 1971 India-pakistan War. But a few minutes of Googling the historical record suggests that he’s wrong:
Dacca, December 14, 1971, 1250Z.
5637. Subject: Niazi Cease-Fire Proposal.
1. Lt. Gen. Niazi telephoned me at 1720 hours today to ask that I receive him urgently in my office. He appeared in company of Major General Rao Farman Ali and said that bombing of Dacca city this afternoon had convinced him that the fighting must be stopped immediately to prevent further bloodshed, even though, he said, his troops were still in good positions and were not in danger at the moment.
2. General Farman Ali had in his possession a rough draft of a proposal he wished me to transmit to New Delhi so that it could be communicated through Indian channels to the Indian field commander in East Pakistan. After some discussion, the following proposal was drawn up in the form of a letter to me, signed by General Niazi and his signature attested by General Farman Ali:
“In order to save future loss of innocent human lives which would inevitably result from further hostilities in the major cities like Dacca, I request you to arrange for an immediate cease-fire under the following conditions…
India set out a unilateral cease fire on Dec 16.
Back to Quiggin’s core point, there’s an old name we’re all familiar with for the latter, and it’s hubris – I’m sure the Mesopotamian had a name for it as well, so it antecedes the Greeks. It implies that overreach is a bad thing – in retrospect, when it has been seen to fail (Quiggin should read “Fooled by Randomness,” by Taleb, though).
Here’s Quiggin:
Even more relevant to the argument presented here are the many cases when initial success in war could have been followed by a cease fire and a peace deal on favorable terms, but was not, with disaster as the common aftermath. Two examples:
* At the end of 1792, the French revolutionary armies were everywhere victorious against the invaders of the First Coalition. Against the arguments of Robespierre and others, the government pressed on, converting a defensive war into one of unlimited expansion. When the fighting ended more than 20 years later, with the restored Bourbons replacing the Bonaparte dictatorship, the millions of dead included nearly all of those who had made the decision to go to war.
* After four months of fighting in Korea, the US/UN forces threw back the North Korean invaders. A peace at least as favorable as the status quo ante could easily have been imposed unilaterally at this point. Instead MacArthur invaded the North and brought the Chinese into the war, resulting in one of the worst defeats ever suffered by US forces (until the greater disaster of Vietnam). Three years and countless deaths later, the prewar boundary was restored.
I don’t deny that being strategically modest is a good thing; I’ll also suggest that the reality of history is that it has been made – and politics shaped – by the unreasonable and immodest.
We can shape our historicity (in Troillot’s sense) of war around the successfully unreasonable – hence overvalue heroism and aggression – or around the failures – and so overvalue prudence and surrender. Both (and neither) are true, and to flatly argue, as Quiggin does that one is simply misrepresents history.
Why does he make that mistake? Well, because he has strong feelings about war:
More importantly, the implicit analysis here, and in nearly all pro-war thinking is that of a zero-sum game, in which one side’s gains equal the other side’s losses. The reality is that war is a negative sum game. Invariably, both sides lose relative to an immediate agreement on the final peace terms. In the vast majority of cases, both sides are worse off than if the war had never been fought. With nearly equal certainty, anyone who passes up an opportunity for an early cease fire will regret it in the end.
Hmm; so if the British had offered and Hitler had accepted a cease fire shortly after Dunkirk, would the world have been better off? Was Russia better off because of the Ribbentrop Pact?
I think we can go back through history and pick apart a number of cases where an early cease-fire would have been a disaster. Quiggin’s response is likely to be that by extending the timescale enough we can show that even winners in conflicts eventually lose. But, I’ll suggest they would have lost sooner if they had not been willing to fight.
Had our species evolved in a more collegial and less conflict-laden way, we’d be better off in many ways, I’ll certainly agree. But sometimes you have to take things as they are, rather than as you hope them to be.
I think your explication of the Indian example and that of Sadr-Maliki merely shows that ceasefire announcements rarely come out of the blue. There are usually some preliminary discussions that indicate the likelihood that the declaration has a chance of working.
If anything, this merely strengthens the point as regards external observers like ourselves and McCain. The fact that party X announces a ceasefire tells us very little about who is “winning”, and so McCain’s statement is even more clearly disturbed.
Acceptance of a ceasefire does, however, tell us that both sides anticipate losing (more) if fighting goes on. Since this is is the normal case with war, we should regard a ceasefire as an indication that the parties are coming to their senses, not as a sign of victory for one or the other.
Sorry for mental typo. Please replace “disturbed” with “wrong”.
Hmm, cease fire imposed by the winner. How about the first Gulf War. It wasn’t technically a cease fire imposed by the US but that’s effectively what it became, and, as we all know, everyone agrees that was the best possible solution
Invariably, both sides lose relative to an immediate agreement on the final peace terms.
Someone needs to introduce the Professor to the concept known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. EVERY process in the universe works that way, the problem being that you cannot, of course, cut out the middle.
Second, he has serious definitional problems that indicate very fuzzy thinking. He’s calling the action in Basra a ‘war’ and saying the ‘cease fire’ is good, and applying those terms against modern western Westphalian history. The issue of course being that definitely one and arguably both sides in the conflict are not Westphalian nation states.
Sadr isn’t fighting for a separate nation inside of Iraq, he wants to control Iraq to some degree or another. Or to phrase it differently, he by definition does not recognize the legitimacy of the Maliki government. How, precisely, do you negotiate a proper cease fire between two parties both claiming to represent the same entity, and when neither recognized the legitimacy of the other? You can declare a cease fire, but how you expect it to last is quite beyond me. The two sides are in direct opposition to each other, while one exists the other cannot. Of course fighting need not be the only solution, one side can absorb or integrate another peacefully, but either way the cease fire is not the resolution, simply a tactical element.
Which brings me to my biggest problem with his analysis, and to what AL seems to be beating around the bush with, which is that Quiggen has mistaken the war for being the problem. The war was never the problem, the war is itself a proffered solution to a deeper problem.
Thus a cease fire can only be a solution if the war has already solved the underlying problem, and no more fighting is necessary. Unless you solve the deeper problems that generated the war in the first place, a cease fire or any other non conclusive war will only generate another war later.
Why else does the professor think so many wars are simply repeats of the last one? It’s because the last one wasn’t decisive, the problems remain and still need to be dealt with.
Or does he think the Romans and Carthaginians had all those Punic wars because they couldn’t get a date for Friday night?
John, do you believe that victory is possible? Or better, that it’s a historically meaningful term?
A.L.
Quiggen:
Ceasefires and stalemates, which leave the conflict unresolved, occur because neither side can proceed with advantage at that point without incurring unacceptable losses. Chess masters would agree to a draw in such a situation. But armed conflict is not a game of chess, or a game of any kind; nor is it an abstract problem that can be simply modeled, and that’s the downfall of your whole argument.
Conflicts don’t end because somebody “comes to their senses”. To call that view anti-historical is putting it far too charitably. Conflicts end because one side is unable to continue, or unwilling to continue even though that side still has the material means to do so.
Ceasefires are not peace. The stalemates that occurred in the American and Russian civil wars killed more people than the battles did, as tens of thousands of men died from disease. Ceasefires stop soldiers from shooting at each other, but they leave the civilian hanging. War is the disruption of normal human life, and that is indeed a terrible thing. It affects the civilian far more than the soldier, and over time it can do more harm to more people than any battle can.
The conflict with Sadr is unresolved. No government or society on earth, regardless of its politics or peaceful intentions, can suffer a hostile armed rival to its authority within its own borders. There is nothing sensible about such a situation. Sadr must be disarmed. It would certainly be best if it can be done by negotiation, but if not, he must be forced. The worst solution is to let him be, and inflict years of attrition and deprivation on every Iraqi within his reach.
_Acceptance of a ceasefire does, however, tell us that both sides anticipate losing (more) if fighting goes on. Since this is is the normal case with war, we should regard a ceasefire as an indication that the parties are coming to their senses, not as a sign of victory for one or the other._
And Chamberlain anticipated that fighting would be too costly at Munich (and Britain was unprepared) and Hitler anticipated delaying hostilities was in his interest. This isn’t intended to imply that anyone is an appeaser, but it’s a clear historical example of parties agreeing not to fight when obviously they went home to sharpen their spears. The end of history did not come. The lions did not lay down with the lambs.
Cease fire, unilaterally proposed or mutually accepted, only means that one or both sides find advantage in current cessation of hostilities. It may merely mean a belief that the conditions will be more favorable in the future to resume hostilities. Other reasons:
* a low-grade, non-resolved conflict provides an advantage to one side;
* a cease fires might delay or frustrate the positive (or negative) intervention of third-parties;
* the conflict caught one side flat-footed, or time is otherwise needed to bring fuller violence to bear.
John when you say that:
“I think your explication of the Indian example and that of Sadr-Maliki merely shows that ceasefire announcements rarely come out of the blue. There are usually some preliminary discussions that indicate the likelihood that the declaration has a chance of working.
it kinda suggests that “we’ll never know” and hence makes the argument itself pretty meaningless.
I’ll suggest that discovering who floated the initial proposal is in fact meaningful, and that it does very likely correlate with the party’s perception of winning or losing – which may or may not be accurate.
I cite Shakespeare on this:
KING HENRY V
I tell thee truly, herald, I know not if the day be ours or no;
For yet a many of your horsemen peer
And gallop o’er the field.
MONTJOY
The day is yours.
KING HENRY V
Praised be God, and not our strength, for it! What is this castle call’d that stands hard by?
MONTJOY
They call it Agincourt.>
A.L.
The perception of risks and benefits usually involves uncertainty, so that while it’s true that a ceasefire reflects some sort of cost/benefit calculation, it doesn’t follow that the calculation is necessarily correct. As a general rule those who overvalue peace also overvalue the certainty of their predictions, and the analog is true of those skeptical of peace. So, it makes sense to look at the history of ceasefires, and the role it plays in an enemy’s overall strategy. The concept of a temporary “truce” is an established principle in Islam, but only to the extent that it conveys a strategic advantage. No ultimate ceasefire is possible. On the other hand, Islam may well overvalue such temporary arrangements, not because it loves peace, but because it lacks strategic vision and a sense of orchestration (as Bernard Lewis has observed). This isn’t a sign of peaceful intent. It’s just institutionalized miscalculation. However, the failure to offer truce might well be an even greater miscalculation. In fact, it probably is.
Which suggests that winning or losing doesn’t depend on whether one offers a ceasefire, but that gradualism may well result in a larger long term cost.
AL at #5: My general view is pretty much summed up by Southey on Blenheim (a critical battle in the utterly pointless War of the Spanish Succession).
“And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.”
“But what good came of it at last?”
Quoth little Peterkin.
“Why, that I cannot tell,” said he,
“But ’twas a famous victory.”
If you treat war as a last resort, adopted only to avoid catastrophe, then “victory” may be a useful word to urge on the troops, but even a successful outcome (catastrophe avoided at bearable cost) is not really something to cheer about.
Certainly I find it hard to see what use a concept of victory could be in relation to the Iraq conflict in general, or the recent (and apparently restarting) fights with Sadr. As you have the word on your masthead, maybe you’d like to spell out your interpretation.
I used to play a WW2 strategy game called “close combat” based on Operation Market garden. The goal, as allies, was to push through as quickly as possible. The goal of Germans was to delay for reinforcements. As a German I called ceasefires all the time. Anytime I could save 4-6 hours was a strategic victory. A “peaceful” strategy on day 3 allowed me to be more vengeful on day 4.
There are plenty of examples where military defeat still accomplished a political victory: “Tet”, Saddam in “GWI”, etc. This is especially with guerrilla groups that have political & military objective. Bush I’s effort to prevent massive enemy casualties allowed Saddam to track down and eliminate guerrilla groups that were now in the open. Yes, the ceasefire prevented casualties in the short-term, but may have led to the trauma we see now.
That being said, being victorious doesn’t solve your problems either. Crushing Germany in WWI(militarily & financially) led to the growth of the NAZI nationalism movement, and thus to WW2.
Both sides (anti-war/pro-war) need to consider the greater ramifications that battlefield changes will bring. Unfortunately, politicans seem to have trouble seeing “outside the box” to strategies other than more war or more peace.
Alchemist: I agree with everything you said, but this:
bq. _That being said, being victorious doesn’t solve your problems either. Crushing Germany in WWI led to the growth of the NAZI nationalism movement, and thus to WW2._
WWI ended with Germany calling for a ceasefire, and requesting terms of settlement based upon Wilson’s peace programme. The problem with the ceasefire was the same as in your game. The ceasefire allowed more Americans to deploy to Europe, weakening Germany’s hand during settlement negotiations on what Wilson’s peace programme really meant. All the while, I think the evidence is quite clear that the Germans in charge in 1917 planned to resume hostilities once they regained some “breathing space.” In the short-term, the ceasefire favored the Allies, but in the longterm, the Germans felt that the ceasefire favored them.
I think most Americans take from this lesson (and other historical anecdotes) that a ceasefire and peace settlement that doesn’t resolve the underlying geopolitical conflict is merely war delayed. The American view of war (some say its Western or Greek) is to fight conclusively, and it really doesn’t anticipate returning over and over again to fight. Comparisons can be made with the Islamic view articulated by Demosophist.
How about the Germans in charge in 1918, when the war actually ended?
Typo, do you have a point AJL, or are you just being boring?
Speaking of mistakes, Lloyd George was concerned that accepting the armistice with Germany might lead Germany to believe they had not been beaten and the Germans might resume the war in 20 years. I was off by one year; George was off by two.
My point was that the situation on the ground was much worse for the Germans in 1918 than in 1917. The Germans were OK on the Western Front but their ally the Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing and the Turks were doing none too well, either. In context, the armistice should have been a recognition that Germany could not face its enemies, now including the United States, alone, no matter how well its own military was performing.
Lloyd George might have done better to work harder against the absurd reparations demanded by the French and Italians. I admit, I don’t know so much about that era, except that many opportunities were lost, and folly triumphed. And for the definitive quote of the age, from the beginning of the war: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Trying to live up to the high quality of the comments on this thread, I am much taken with Prof. Quiggin’s request
I was quite serious in my statement elsewhere that, with the victory-condition of a secular, democratic, pro-Israel Iraq now seen universally for the hallucination it always was (Caught the new article on the status of secular Iraqi women? Not so good as under Saddam.), war proponents are trying to establish a can’t-miss metric for their own success. Leaving Iraq is losing. Anything else, regardless of loss of life on all sides, opportunity costs, money, whatever, is “winning”. Iraq becomes pinball, all that “winning” means is you get to play again. With political progress at a standstill (how many times have the war advocates celebrated the passage of the oil revenue law that has still not been enacted?), I guess that is the best you can do.
AJL – the victory condition for the U.S., its Gulf allies, and even Iran was an Iraq that was no longer threatening to its neighbors (re: Kuwait, the Iran-Iraq war). The sanctions achieved a portion of that, but were flawed from the start and were also in the process of collapsing by the time of the ’03 invasion, with no feasible alternative in sight. Whatever other hopes were stated for the post-Saddam period, that victory condition was achieved.
Not being able to meet a Nirvana-like goalpost does not automatically mean that we should flip to the equally unrealistic viewpoint that everything is hopeless and needs to be abandoned (to chaos, presumably). Given the decline in violence under the surge, even with the recent militia clashes, there has been some progress made compared to pre-surge conditions. If the Iraqis in the end do not decide to seize the opportunity presented, that will be their choice; the book is still very much open on how that will go.
I’d also say, if the Iraqi people have decided that at this point in time that security concerns need to trump women’s rights, it is difficult to judge them too harshly for prioritizing that way. After all, in “Maslow’s heirarchy of needs”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirarchy_of_needs , safety comes before esteem and self-actualization.
I don’t if this thread can get bogged down in WWI trivia. I find the Great War interesting because the actions of the major actors make sense based upon (1) the information believed to be true at the time and (2) the interests of the states. In hindsight, based upon what we now know, none of it makes sense.
As to the issue of ceasefires, the Germans sought a ceasefire and ultimately made concessions beyond their initial expectations in the belief that they would restart the war. The Allies accepted the ceasefire and imposed draconian concessions to preclude Germany from restarting the war. None of the history suggests that the parties at the time actually “regard[ed] a ceasefire as an indication that the parties are coming to their senses.” The ceasefire was a tool to achieve victory by other means. The war was not resolved in a manner that concluded the underlying problems that had led to war in the first place.
I think this is largely what is going on in Iraq today. We want to leave Iraq under conditions which don’t have us back fighting Persian Gulf III or WWIV in 10-20 years.
I had a feeling that WWI analogy might get ripped up somewhat. Moving on…
PD shaw: The question becomes, what can we do to prevent war from breaking out in the future? Right now, keeping troops in is preventing chaos. And preventing chaos is allowing some government mediation to occur. But this mediation is happening very, very slowly. This not shocking, considering the recent history of Iraq.
Right now, being “at war” is helping to restore “some peace”. However, we can’t keep Iraq out of war forever. Eventually (sooner rather than later) Iraq -isn’t- is going to have to take care of itself. If it doesn’t, there’s nothing else we can do. If both sides want war, both sides are going to get it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
This reminds me of the Bosnian movie “No man’s land”, which demonstrates the irrationality of two sides more willing to kill each other than to accept that their side might be wrong.
BTW: did anyone watch Frontline’s “Bad Voodoo’s war” about a marine plattoon on convoy duty. They basically gave the soldiers cameras and let the film everything themselves. You can watch it free on the internet.
[Corrected sense of Para 3, Sentence 3. –NM]
I’ve been studiously avoiding this thread, but for anyone interested the book “Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought by Michael Handel” has a master work on the concept of continuity.
I won’t even attempt to summarize, its too detailed. Enough to say Handel meticulously breaks down the difference between the ideal and the practical and a significant chunk of the book is dedicated to the subject of when pursuit of an enemy turns into overextention – or when retreat turns into counterattck and pursuit (continuity). Particulary attention givent to Clauswitz (more to say on the subject of political settelment than many would suppose), Sun Tzu, and Mao (who may be the most apt ‘bad’ analogy to draw to the Sadr issue, if i were playing devils advocate).
“Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/Masters-War-Classical-Strategic-Thought/dp/0714681326/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207679257&sr=8-2