Give War a Chance
Edward K. Luttwak
PREMATURE PEACEMAKING
AN UNPLEASANT truth often overlooked is that although war is a
great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts
and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become
exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the
fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace
only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military
success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than
further combat.
Since the establishment of the United Nations and the enshrinement
of great-power politics in its Security Council, however, wars among
lesser powers have rarely been allowed to run their natural course.
Instead, they have typically been interrupted early on, before they
could burn themselves out and establish the preconditions for a lasting
settlement. Cease-fires and armistices have frequently been imposed
under the aegis of the Security Council in order to halt fighting.
NATO'S intervention in the Kosovo crisis follows this pattern.
But a cease-fire tends to arrest war-induced exhaustion and lets
belligerents reconstitute and rearm their forces. It intensifies and
prolongs the struggle once the cease-fire ends--and it does usually
end. This was true of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49, which might
have come to closure in a matter of weeks if two cease-fires ordained
by the Security Council had not let the combatants recuperate. It has
recently been true in the Balkans. Imposed cease-fires frequently
interrupted the fighting between Serbs and Croats in Krajina, between
EDWARD N . LUTTWAK is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies.
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Give War a Chance
the forces of the rump Yugoslav federation and the Croat army, and
between the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia. Each time, the
opponents used the pause to recruit, train, and equip additional forces
for fiirther combat, prolonging the war and widening the scope of its
killing and destruction. Imposed armistices, meanwhile--again,
unless followed by negotiated peace accords--artificially freeze conflict
and perpetuate a state of war indefinitely by shielding the weaker side
from the consequences of refusing to make concessions for peace.
The Cold War provided compelling justification for such behavior
by the two superpowers, which sometimes collaborated in coercing
less-powerful belligerents to avoid being drawn into their conflicts and
clashing directly. Although imposed cease-fires ultimately did increase
the total quantity of warfare among the lesser powers, and armistices
did perpetuate states of war, both outcomes were clearly lesser evils
(from a global point of view) than the possibility of nuclear war. But
today, neither Americans nor Russians are inclined to intervene
competitivelyin the wars oflesser powers, so the unfortunate consequences
of interrupting war persist while no greater danger is averted. It might
be best for aU parties to let minor wars burn themselves out.
THE PROBLEMS OF PEACEKEEPERS
TODAY CEASE-FIRES and armistices are imposed on lesser powers
by multilateral agreement--not to avoid great-power competition
but for essentially disinterested and indeed frivolous motives, such
as television audiences' revulsion at harrowing scenes of war. But
this, perversely, can systematically prevent the transformation of war
into peace. The Dayton accords are typical of the genre: they have
condemned Bosnia to remain divided into three rival armed camps,
with combat suspended momentarily but a state of hostility prolonged
indefinitely. Since no side is threatened by defeat and loss, none has
a sufficient incentive to negotiate a lasting settlement; because no
path to peace is even visible, the dominant priority is to prepare for
future war rather than to reconstruct devastated economies and
ravaged societies. Uninterrupted war would certainly have caused
further suffering and led to an unjust outcome from one perspective
or another, but it would also have led to a more stable situation
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EdwardN. Luttwak
that would have let the postwar era truly begin. Peace takes hold
only when war is truly over.
A variety of multilateral organizations now make it their business
to intervene in other peoples' wars. The defining characteristic of
these entities is that they insert themselves in war situations while
refusing to engage in combat. In the long run this only adds to the
damage. If the United Nations helped the strong defeat the weak
faster and more decisively, it would actually enhance the peacemaking
potential ofwar. But the first priority of U.N. peacekeeping contingents
is to avoid casualties among their ovm personnel. Unit commanders
therefore habitually appease the iocaiiy stronger force, accepting its
dictates and tolerating its abuses. This appeasement is not strategically
purposeful, as siding with the stronger power overall would be; rather, it
merely reflects the determination of each U.N. unit to avoid confi-ontation.
The final result is to prevent the emergence of a coherent outcome,
which requires an imbalance of strength sufficient to end the fighting.
Peacekeepers chary of violence are also unable to effectively protect
civilians who are caught up in the fighting or deliberately attacked.
At best, U.N. peacekeeping forces have been passive spectators to
outrages and massacres, as in Bosnia and Rwanda; at worst, they
collaborate with it, as Dutch U.N. troops did in the fall of Srebenica
by helping the Bosnian Serbs separate the men of military age from
the rest of the population.
The very presence of U.N. forces, meanwhile, inhibits the normal
remedy of endangered civilians, which is to escape from the combat
zone. Deluded into thinking that they will be protected, civilians in
danger remain in place until it is too late to fiee. During the 1992-94
siege of Sarajevo, appeasement interacted with the pretense of
protection in an especially perverse manner: U.N. personnel inspected
outgoing flights to prevent the escape of Sarajevo civilians in obedience
to a cease-fire agreement negotiated v^dth the locally dominant Bosnian
Serbs--^who habitually violated that deal. The more sensible, realistic
response to a raging wax would have been for the Muslims to either
^tt the city or drive the Serbs out.
Institutions such as the European Union, the Western European
Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
lack even the U.N.'s rudimentary command structure and personnel,
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AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
Playinggames: U.N.peacekeepers with refugees. Tyre, Lebanon,
yet they too now seek to intervene in warlike situations, with predictable
consequences. Bereft of forces even theoretically capable of combat,
they satisfy the interventionist urges of member states (or their own
institutional ambitions) by sending unarmed or lightly armed "observer"
missions, which have the same problems as U.N. peacekeeping missions,
only more so.
Military organizations such as NATO or the West African
Peacekeeping Force (ECOMOG, recently at work in Sierra Leone)
are capable of stopping warfare. Their interventions still have the
destructive consequence of prolonging the state of war, but they
can at least protect civilians from its consequences. Even that often fails
to happen, however, because multinational military commands
engaged in disinterested interventions tend to avoid any risk of combat,
thereby limiting their effectiveness. U.S. troops in Bosnia, for example,
repeatedly failed to arrest known war criminals passing through their
checkpoints lest this provoke confrontation.
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Edward N. Luttwak
Multinational commands, moreover, find it difficult to control
the quality and conduct of member states' troops, which can reduce the
performance of all forces involved to the lowest common denominator.
This was true of otherwise fine British troops in Bosnia and of the
Nigerian marines in Sierra Leone. The phenomenon of troop
degradation can rarely be detected by external observers, although
its consequences are abundantly visible in the litter of dead, mutilated,
raped, and tortured victims that attends such interventions. The true
state of affairs is illuminated by the rare exception, such as the vigorous
Danish tank battalion in Bosnia that replied to any attack on it by firing
back in full force, quickly stopping the fighting.
THE FIRST "POST-HEROIC" WAR
ALL PRIOR examples of disinterested warfare and its crippling
limitations, however, have been cast into shadow by NATO'S current
intervention against Serbia for the sake of Kosovo. The alliance has
relied on airpower alone to minimize the risk of NATO casualties,
bombing targets in Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo for weeks without
losing a single pilot. This seemingly miraculous immunity from
Yugoslav anti-aircraft guns and missiles was achieved by multiple layers
of precautions. First, for all the noise and imagery suggestive of a
massive operation, very few strike sorties were actually flown during
the first few weeks. That reduced the risks to pilots and aircraft but
of course also limited the scope of the bombing to a mere fraction of
NATO's potential. Second, the air campaign targeted air-defense systems
first and foremost, minimizing present and future allied casualties,
though at the price of very limited destruction and the loss of any
shock effect. Third, NATO avoided most anti-aircraft weapons by
releasing munitions not from optimal altitudes but from an ultra-safe
15,000 feet or more. Fourth, the alliance greatly restricted its operations
in less-than-perfect weather conditions. NATO officials complained
that dense clouds were impeding the bombing campaign, often
limiting nightly operations to a few cruise-missile strikes against
fixed targets of known location. In truth, what the cloud ceiling
prohibited was not all bombing--low-altitude attacks could easily
have taken place--but rather perfectly safe bombing.
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Give War a Chance
On the ground far beneath the high-fiying planes, small groups of
Serb soldiers and police in armored vehicles were terrorizing hundreds of
thousands ofAlbanian Kosovars. NATO has a panoply of aircraft designed
for finding and destroying such vehicles. All its major powers have antitank
helicopters, some equipped to operate without base support. But no
country offered to send them into Kosovo when the ethnic cleansing
began--after all, they might have been shot down. When U.S. Apache
helicopters based in Germany werefinallyordered to Albania, in spite of
the vast expenditure devoted to their instantaneous "readiness" over the
years, they required more than three weeks of "predeployment preparations"
to make thejourney. Sixweeks into the war, the Apaches had yet to
fiy their first mission, although two had already crashed during training.
More than mere bureaucratic foot-dragging was responsible for this inordinate
delay: the U.S. Army insisted that the Apaches could not operate
on their own, but would need the support of heavy rocket barrages to
suppress Serb anti-aircraft weapons. This created a much larger logistical
load than the Apaches alone, and an additional, evidentiywelcome delay.
Even before the Apache saga began, NATO already had aircraft
deployed on Italian bases that could have done the job just as well: U.S.
A-io "Warthogs" built around their powerfiil 30 mm antitank guns and
British Royal Air Force Harriers ideal for low-altitude bombing at close
range. Neither was employed, again because it could not be done in
perfect safety. In the calculus of the NATO democracies, the immediate
possibility ofsaving thousands ofAlbanians from massacre and hundreds
ofthousands from deportation was obviously not worth the lives of a few
pilots. That may reflect unavoidable political reality, but it demonstrates
how even a large-scale disinterested intervention can fail to achieve
its ostensibly humanitarian aim. It is worth wondering whether the
Kosovars would have been better off had NATO simply done nothing.
REFUGEE NATIONS
T H E MOST disinterested of all interventions in war--and the most
destructive--are humanitarian relief activities. The largest and
most protracted is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
(UNRWA). It was built on the model of its predecessor, the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), which operated displacedFOREIGN
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EdwardN. Luttwak
persons' camps in Europe immediately after World War II. The
UNRWA was established immediately after the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war
to feed, shelter, educate, and provide health services for Arab refugees
who had fled Israeli zones in the former territory of Palestine.
By keeping refugees alive in spartan conditions that encouraged
their rapid emigration or local resettlement, the UNRRA'S camps in
Europe had assuaged postwar resentments and helped disperse
revanchist concentrations of national groups.
Refugee camps prevent ^^^ UNRWA camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan,
. the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip provided
integration, inhibit ^^ ^he whole a higher standard ofliving than
emigration, and keep "^ost Arab villagers had previously enjoyed,
^^ n with a more varied diet, organized schooling,
resentments aiiame. ˇ j - 1 j 1 1 1 1 ˇ
superior medical care, and no backbreaking
labor in stonyfields.They had, therefore, the
opposite effect, becoming desirable homes rather than eagerly
abandoned transit camps. With the encouragement of several Arab
countries, the UNRWA turned escaping civilians into lifelong refugees
who gave birth to refugee children, who have in turn had refugee
children of their own.
During its half-century ofoperation, the UNRWA has thus perpetuated
a Palestinian refugee nation, preserving its resentments in as fresh a
condition as theywere in 1948 and keeping thefirstbloom ofrevanchist
emotion intact. By its very existence, the UNRWA dissuades integration
into local society and inhibits emigration. The concentration of
Palestinians in the camps, moreover, has facilitated the voluntary
or forced enlistment of refugee youths by armed organizations that
fight both Israel and each other. The UNRWA has contributed to a halfcentury
of Arab-Israeli violence and still retards the advent of peace.
If each European war had been attended by its own postwar
UNRWA, today's Europe would be filled with giant camps for millions
of descendants of uprooted Gallo-Romans, abandoned Vandals,
defeated Burgundians, and misplaced Visigoths--not to speak of
more recent refugee nations such as post-1945 Sudeten Germans
(three million of whom were expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945).
Such a Europe would have remained a mosaic of warring tribes,
undigested and unreconciled in their separate feeding camps. It
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Give War a Chance
might have assuaged consciences to help each one at each remove,
but it would have led to permanent instability and violence.
The UNRWA has counterparts elsewhere, such as the Cambodian
camps along the Thai border, which incidentally provided safe havens
for the mass-murdering Khmer Rouge. But because the United Nations
is limited by stingy national contributions, these camps' sabotage of
peace is at least localized.
That is not true of the proliferating, feverishly competitive nongovernmental
organizations (NGOS) that now aid war refligees. Like
any other institution, these NGOS are interested in perpetuating
themselves, which means that their first priority is to attract charitable
contributions by being seen to be active in high-visibility situations.
Only the most dramatic natural disasters attract any significant
mass-media attention, and then only briefiy; soon after an earthquake
or flood, the cameras depart. War refugees, by contrast, can win
sustained press coverage if kept concentrated in reasonably accessible
camps. Regular warfare among well-developed countries is rare and
offers few opportunities for such NGOS, SO they focus their efforts on
aiding refugees in the poorest parts of the world. This ensures that
the food, shelter, and health care offered--although abysmal by
Western standards--exceeds what is locally available to non-refiigees.
The consequences are entirely predictable. Among many examples, the
huge refiigee camps along the Democratic Republic of Congo's border
with Rwanda stand out. They sustain a Hutu nation that would otherwise
have been dispersed, making the consolidation of Rwanda
impossible and providing a base for radicals to launch more Tutsi-killing
raids across the border. Humanitarian intervention has worsened the
chances of a stable, long-term resolution of the tensions in Rwanda.
To keep refugee nations intact and preserve their resentments
forever is bad enough, but inserting material aid into ongoing
conflicts is even worse. Many NGOS that operate in an odor of sanctity
routinely supply active combatants. Defenseless, they cannot exclude
armed warriors from their feeding stations, clinics, and shelters.
Since refugees are presumptively on the losing side, the warriors
among them are usually in retreat. By intervening to help, NGOS
systematically impede the progress of their enemies toward a decisive
victory that could end the war. Sometimes NGOS, impartial to a fault,
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EdwardN. Luttwak
even help both sides, thus preventing mutual exhaustion and a resulting
settlement. And in some extreme cases, such as Somalia, NGOS even
pay protection money to local war bands, which use those funds to
buy arms. Those NGOS are therefore helping prolong the warfare
whose consequences they ostensibly seek to mitigate.
MAKE WAR TO MAKE PEACE
Too MANY wars nowadays become endemic confiicts that never end
because the transformative effects ofboth decisive victory and exhaustion
are blocked by outside intervention. Unlike the ancient problem ofwar,
however, the compounding of its evils by disinterested interventions is
a new malpractice that could be curtailed. Policy elites should actively
resist the emotional impulse to intervene in other peoples' wars--not
because they are indifferent to human suffering but precisely because
they care about it and want to facilitate the advent of peace. The
United States should dissuade multilateral interventions instead of
leading them. New rules should be established for U.N. refugee relief
activities to ensure that immediate succor is swiftly followed by repatriation,
local absorption, or emigration, ruling out the establishment of
permanent refugee camps. And although it may not be possible to
constrain interventionist NGOS, they should at least be neither officially
encouraged nor funded. Underlying these seemingly perverse measures
would be a true appreciation ofwars paradoxical logic and a commitment
to let it serve its sole usefiil function: to bring peace.
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