{"id":1701,"date":"2008-04-06T21:03:08","date_gmt":"2008-04-06T21:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2008-04-06T21:04:18","modified_gmt":"2008-04-06T21:04:18","slug":"peace_is_for_pr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1701","title":{"rendered":"Peace Is For Professors"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Quiggin posts<\/a> on the issue of cease-fires again, expanding his focus because it appears that McCain made essentially the same argument<\/a> that I did (yeah, yeah, whatever…I’m still not supporting him).<\/p>\n

Now I’ve acknowledged<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a> suggests that he’s wrong:<\/p>\n

Dacca, December 14, 1971, 1250Z.<\/p>\n

\n5637. Subject: Niazi Cease-Fire Proposal.<\/p>\n

\n1. 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.<\/p>\n

\n2. 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:<\/p>\n

\n“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…<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

India set out a unilateral cease fire on Dec 16<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back to Quiggin’s core point, there’s an old name we’re all familiar with for the latter, and it’s hubris<\/i> – 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).<\/p>\n

Here’s Quiggin:<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\n* 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.<\/p>\n

\n* 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><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Why does he make that mistake? Well, because he has strong feelings about war:<\/p>\n

More importantly, the implicit analysis here, and in nearly all pro-war thinking is that of a zero-sum game, in which one side\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gains equal the other side\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another round in the discussion on cease-fires with John Quiggin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}