The genesis of war

It is when I am in a Wordsworthian "vacant or pensive mood" and do not, unfortunately, have the serenity of watching daffodils out of my living-room window that my mind begins to dwell on subjects, abstract at a personal level, but close enough to my heart to occupy meaningful mind-space.

One such subject is war - often glamorised by the victors (as if there are any). As Israel-Lebanon commemorate the passing of one year since the Lebanese war - and lives continue to be lost in Iraq every day - and there is not the slightest signs of any quelling of the voices of mistrust and jingoism around the globe - I return to a piece I wrote a while ago.

Normally, any writing tends to get dated and loses its relevance and sting over a period of time. It is a sad and sobering reflection of the power (if that is the right word to use) of war that it enjoys perennial currency.

So when I picked up this piece that I had written exactly a year ago (mentally troubled as I was during the Lebanese conflict), I found that, sadly, nothing much has changed. The one positive development in the last twelve months is the brokered peace in Northern Ireland - one that I hope will be sustained. The key ingredient for any brokered peace is trust, and while I am cautiously optimistic about the situation, it is early days yet.

Anyway, onto my piece - as it was written on 18th July 2006.

Since time immemorial, man has been fighting man. Over land, over religion, over women (for example, Helen of Troy and Rani Padmini of mediaeval India).

One of my ex-bosses, a cynical man if ever there was one - an Italian by origin, a Welshman by birth, an Englishman by upbringing and a Dutchman by domicile – once made one of the most startling comments I have heard about war and peace. In his inimitable style, he said “Peace is just an interlude between two wars. It is man’s biggest folly that he believes he can live in uninterrupted peace”.

He was a cynical person, so let us not take this statement too seriously. But he was also very well-read – especially on world history and politics and could discuss, in great detail, events that triggered off and occurred during the Greek, Roman, Persian wars before Christ. He could just as well analyse the Crusades, wars that happened during the “dark ages”, wars fought in Europe for the last five hundred years (almost every country fought with every other country and the map of Europe has been changing every century), wars fought in Japan and China, down to the most recent wars of the last few decades.

I was amazed at his knowledge. He would be able to analyze cause-and-effect and the spillover effects of various wars. For example, Russia pulled out of Afghanistan finally in 1989 – and immediately the Kashmir issue, which had been dormant for many years, suddenly raised its ugly head again with kidnappings and increased violence in that region. Could it be that suddenly there was a huge availability of arms in Afghanistan (most of them provided by America by the way), there was a generation whose only skill was to fight – and suddenly there was a vacuum when their primary cause for fighting died out ? So, hey, suddenly “the liberation of Kashmir” becomes a welcome cause for this passionate, restless soldier community.

I still believe he was exaggerating when he made that comment. But sometimes you have to exaggerate, for effect. He had me for sure completely shocked by his statement. That statement was made sometime in 1997 or so but it has remained etched in my memory. I have thought a lot about it in the years since.

War is a complex subject and to try to analyze it purely factually would be to do grave injustice to the many non-quantifiable factors that play their role in the creation of circumstances that lead to a war or to the war itself.

I am a simple man and I try to figure out, for my own simple mind, why people fight with each other. And I come to the following conclusions.

Greed. This is the single biggest reason why people fight with each other. Whether you are arguing with your neighbour over what exactly constitutes your fence boundary with him, or you are eyeing that weak country that you could “grab” hold of, it amounts to greed. In previous millennia, it was very common for emperors to expand their territories by marching into others’ territories and forcing submission by war if necessary. Reason : acquisition of more wealth, lands, slaves.

While the flavour of such expansionist ideas did change over the centuries, the concept continued till at least the end of the First World War. The powers of the world then (many of whom by then had whetted their appetite for political expansion) suddenly tried to appear more civil and set up the “League of Nations” – a first, rather hurried effort to try to bring “world order” into place.

Mr. Adolf Hitler, who had not only missed out on all the fun of land-grabbing but also felt that the final whistle had been blown at a wrong time for his country (Germany lost huge terrority to France when the Versailles Treaty was signed after World War I ), decided to give it one more try. It did not work for him. The biggest villain of the twentieth century was, to put it simply, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just a century or two earlier, and he would have been remembered as an inspiring leader. Now he was consigned to be remembered as the man who cost the world a few million lives.

Coming back to my point – the biggest reason for war is, in my opinion, greed. Greed for more power, more land, more wealth.

Supply-Demand imbalance. This to me is another major reason for war. As long as there is plenty of supply of any commodity, mankind will be relatively at peace. I say “relatively” because there are still those greedy elements who, inspite of having more than their requirement, will not spare anything for the more needy. But, by and large, surplus supply of any asset is not something that one often complains about.

When there is a shortage, that is when there is definitely stress – and struggle. Whether it is a shortage of jobs, or land – tensions mount. Where there are haves and have-nots in one society, and there are extremes between these two, there is always a chance of civil war. There may be other mitigating factors for this but if the institutions of that society are not strong enough (for example, if the power is not derived through democratic means), the exposure level of that society is high. The most recent example we have of this is Nepal. One may argue that there were other reasons for the Nepalese tensions but in my simple mind, it comes down to haves and have-nots and the imbalance in the power equation.

Make no mistake - the war in the Middle East (in and around Israel) is not just a war about ideologies, although this is used very effectively to rally forces to your cause. It is also a war about limited resources, land, jobs, water – everything that you fight for in those regions. And then, the difference in religious ideologies just takes the conflict to a different level altogether.

So, would an economically developed Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon be able to live in peace together ? I would love to say yes but that is where I would be very naïve in not recognizing that third demon of all wars – religion.

Many are the wars that have been fought over religion. This is very ironic considering every faith professes peace as one of its primary teachings. But, whether it is the Crusades fought over centuries, or wars fought in Bosnia and Chechnya, they have had religious differences as their driving force.

There are other reasons for war too. Anything that divides people can cause war if the circumstances build up to such a flashpoint. In Rwanda and Burundi, the war between Hutus and Tutsis in the 1990s which killed millions, was one fought on ethnic differences. If you delve deeper, you will find that even here, the root cause is the more dominant ones – supply/demand imbalance and to some extent, greed for power. The Hutus were the original settlers in Rwanda and tilled the land. The Tutsis were a nomadic tribe whose main occupation was cattle-herding. As they got more economically dominant to the soil-tilling Hutus, they began ruling the Hutus, though they were in a minority. The Hutus began losing more and more of their land, though they outnumbered the Tutsis. The stage for a grand civil war was set and it was a disaster just waiting to happen. The world could only watch as the atrocities mounted every day and people died by the millions.

A rather perverse reason for war, and one that is not realized very often, is the sheer availability of means. We keep talking about motive – but any good detective story will tell you that motive and means are both required for a successful murder to be committed. All the above reasons are about motive – but if there are no means for war at all, there is a chance that a disagreement will not blow up into a full-scale war. But if the means are also readily available – as in my earlier example about the situation in Afghanistan after the Russian retreat – then the situation gets that much more explosive.

As I said earlier, war is a complex subject. There is rarely just one reason for it, often one reason feeds another. Greed for power or land, often creates a supply-demand imbalance.

So, now that I have had my theoretical say on what I believe is the genesis of war, do I have solutions ? At least theoretical ones ? I daresay I do.

As with my holistic approach to try to explain to myself why people go to war, my solutions too are only holistic. Unless one side in a war is so overwhelmingly dominant as to completely exterminate the other side and its ideology – that too, for generations to come, I fear that violence will only serve up more violence. Unfortunately, modern weapons of warfare are not confined to just one side in a war and that makes the likelihood, scale and duration of a war far more frightening than ever before.

But, if my assessment of the root causes of war is even reasonably accurate, would it not help to at least try to mitigate conditions that create war-like circumstances ? For one, reduce the supply-demand imbalance. Share more resources instead of the “I want it all” approach.

I know that a suggestion to reduce means will directly hit at the supply capability of the not insignificant global armaments industry. After all, in peacetime, production goes on and stockpile only accumulates dust. I have always been a bit wary of sincerity in various “arms reduction treaties” between warring factions – but where there is a will for warfare – and a means - there is, frighteningly enough, almost always a way.

So work on the will AND on the means – and you will working on the root causes of war.

And hopefully, my erudite ex-boss, for all his knowledge of every war that has ever been fought by humanity, will be proven wrong about that “war and peace” observation.

I know, for all his wisdom and ego, he would love to be wrong on this one.