Abstract
When George W. Bush sent his troops into battle against Iraq in 2003, then, all things considered, the decision was met with a great deal of enthusiasm in his own country.2 It caught a tide of patriotic fervor and further swelled a reaction to the September 11 attacks in which national sentiment had already been whipped up. The United States had a “mission.” Following a long tradition,3 the United States viewed the mission as its right once again to save the world by protecting its own interests: the “war on terrorism” became its constant theme. There is a parallel at the regional level to the American posture in that war, a parallel that at once precedes, accompanies, and extends it: the posture of Israel. The Lebanese war of summer 2006, as well as the Gaza intervention of late 2008, which lasted a few weeks, attest to this: wars justified by Israel in terms of the prevention of a growing—and in the long term unacceptable—threat. Specific measures of the use of force, such as “targeted killings” aimed at eliminating Palestinians seen as representing a terrorist threat, are also part of this model. Taking an overview, the United States is the central linchpin of this new international policy. It arrogates to itself the right to take the initiative, to act preventively against the dangers threatening humanity, and protect it from risk.
War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty … War is the realm of chance. No other human activity gives it greater scope: no other has such incessant and varied dealings with this intruder.1
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Notes
Carl von Clausewitz, On War (London: Everyman, 1993), p. 117 (emphasis added).
Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The US and the Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003);
Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, War and Peace: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York: Knopf, 2001).
A teleology, an expectation, a horizon. We find these different understandings in the dynamics of “democratic transition” or “transitional justice.” The expression “democracy to come” indicates the presence of expectation with respect to a desired project. It recurs constantly in Jacques Derrida’s last writings. See Marie-Louise Mallet (ed.), La Démocratie à venir autour de Jacques Derrida. Actes du colloque de Cérisy-la-Salle, juillet 2002 (Paris: Galilée, 2004).
Ward Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 68–69;
Theodor Meron, Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws: Perspectives on the Laws of War in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Clarendon Press, 1993). See especially Chapter 7, “Henry’s Challenge to the Dauphin: The Duel that Never Was and Games of Chivalry,” pp. 131–141.
The war game, in the strict sense of the term, existed then and genuinely does today. It was invented in the nineteenth century by a Prussian, Colonel von Reisswitz, adviser to the minister of war. Two players confront each other, moving counters on a map. See Saul I. Gass and Arjang A. Assad, An Annotated Timeline of Operations Research: An Informal History (New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005), p. 13;
and Garry D. Brewer and Martin Shubik, The War Game: A Critique of Military Problem Solving (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), especially Chapter 5, “A History of War Games,” pp. 45–57.
Among a plentiful literature on the counterfactual approach, see Niall Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History: Allternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador, 1997).
Jack Snyder, The Cult of the Offensive (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and “Civil—Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984,” International Security 9 (Summer 1984): 108–160.
Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
For an application to recent phenomena, see Robert Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Jonathan Renshon, Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (Westport CT, Praeger, 2006).
A significant number of positivist studies bear on the rationality of the decision to go to war. They examine the effects of the “mutual optimism” that might encourage such a choice and the “gambling for resurrection,” whereby a state that goes to war with a high probability of losing it continues to fight, since otherwise it would be overthrown by its own people. See Mark Key and Kristopher Ramsay, “Mutual Optimism and War,” draft, March 21, 2006; George W. Downs and David Rocke, “Conflict, Agency, and Gambling for Resurrection: The Principal-Agent Problem Goes to War,” American Journal of Political Science 38, no. 2 (May 1994): 362–380.
The Battle of Midway in 1942 is an interesting example. See Michael Bess, Choices under Fire. Moral Dimensions of World War Two (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 163.
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book Five, Chapter 7, § 84–116. Saddam Hussein’s decision not to comply with American demands and, in particular, his people’s decision not to oppose him on this question is interesting. It indicates the constraints imposed by political domination and its impact on the rationality of behavior when, if the reasonable objective is to minimize one’s own suffering (that of Saddam Hussein and that of his people), this decision is inappropriate (the outcome of the conflict was entirely predictable, irrespective of all this). It is possible to imagine that, if Saddam had accepted inspections of his weapons, he would not have been hanged (or at least not so quickly). This is the question of the rationalist explanation of war. See James Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 379–414.
Randall Schweller, “Domestic Structure and Preventive War. Are Democracies More Pacific?” World Politics 44, no. 2 (January 1992): 354.
The Realists are right on this point, there is nothing so good as bipolarity or multipolarity (opinions diverge on which is the best framework for stabilizing the international system). See Kenneth Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus 93, no. 3 (Summer 1964): 881–901.
Interests are thus regarded as “signposts” to action. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford/Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1999), § 198, p. 80: “What has the expression of a rule—say a sign-post—got to do with my actions? What sort of connexion is there here? Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it” (emphasis added). I am grateful to Richard Swedberg for clarifying this point.
In November 2004, George W. Bush spoke of “spending the political capital” acquired at his reelection. This was one dimension of the Iraqi gamble. The relationship between public opinion and war is a locus classicus of international studies. Among a plentiful literature, see Richard Sobel, The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy since Vietnam: Constraining the Colossus (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
According to E. H. Carr, the rules by definition facilitate the action of rulers; they are merely the reflection of state interests. See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 80–81.
Jack Gibbs, “Norms. The Problem of Definition and Classification,” The American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 5 (March 1965): 586–594.
Allan Buchanan and Robert Keohane, together with Michael Doyle, point out that the international norms in force are not adequate and advance propositions for rooting preventive action in international law. See Allan Buchanan and Robert Keohane, “The Preventive Use of Force: a Cosmopolitan Institutional Perspective,” Ethics and International Affairs 18, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 1–22;
Michael Doyle, Striking First: Preemption and Prevention in International Conflict (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2008).
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© 2013 Ariel Colonomos and Éditions Denoël
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Colonomos, A. (2013). Introduction. In: The Gamble of War. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137018953_1
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