Giles Fraser The Guardian, Saturday 13 September 2014
The west’s military involvement in Iraq is no more than a tinkering around the edges of a massive conflagration
This week President Obama authorised airstrikes in Syria and Iraq to combat the threat of Islamic State. Photograph: AP/Saul Loeb
One word was conspicuously absent from Barack Obama’s big speech re-declaring war on Islamic terrorists: the word war itself. Of course, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. And no forest of technical-sounding euphemisms should divert us from this reality. The Israelis insisted that what they did in Gaza was an “operation”. The US tends to use the word “campaign”. Indeed, despite the fact that the UK has been involved in shooting people somewhere around the world throughout all of my lifetime, the last time we actually declared war on another country was against Siam in 1942. The US, for instance, didn’t even declare war on Vietnam. War feels old-fashioned. Since the second world war, we have got used to conflict being geographically limited and containable.
Part of the reason for this reluctance to speak of war is legal and moral: declarations of war require a high degree of political consensus, votes in Congress or parliament and the like. Following Vietnam in 1973, the US Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, limiting the power of the president to commit troops to military conflict for more than 60 days. But this legislation has never been employed to challenge a presidential decision.
Likewise, formal declarations of war inevitably invite discussions of the just war tradition. I am generally suspicious of this tradition for the simple reason that I cannot think of a single instance when this tradition has ever actually prevented a war. On the contrary, when it is convenient – i.e. when it is believed that the just war criteria legitimate war – then it is constantly invoked as justification. In other words, the just war tradition is, in practice, a one-way street.
It is no coincidence that the just war tradition was invented around the time that the Emperor Constantine decided to baptise the Roman empire as Christian. The fact that many Christians had often been pacifists was something of an embarrassment to the head of the largest war machine the world had ever known. So just war was itself created to allow the Roman army to keep on fighting. Those theologians who came up with it were no doubt well-minded, but they were little more than the “useful idiots” of the military complex.
But despite my considerable reservations, it is still useful to invoke one aspect of the just war tradition and apply it to the current conflict in the Middle East: just wars require not only proportionality but also a reasonable chance of success. And the problem with so much of the west’s military involvement in Iraq, in particular, is that it has precious little conception of what success actually looks like. Bombing Islamic State is no more than a tinkering around the edges of a massive conflagration that is now increasingly being compared in scale to the thirty years war.
The sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia, ignited first by the Iranian revolution and then deepened by the ill-advised western invasion of Iraq, is of a much greater order of magnitude than that acknowledged by Obama’s hands-off drone and air-strike approach.
We are witnessing a shift in the political tectonic plates throughout the whole of the Middle East and beyond into Africa, and the west’s apparently surgical involvement will probably do little more than generate some short-term satisfaction that we are doing something. It is not that I am morally squeamish about bombing IS fanatics. Rather, I think we ought to recognise that we are little more than bystanders to a war that is so much bigger than we ever imagined, and so much more complicated than the rhetoric of terrorism or limited conflict allows.
Since the second world war, we have got used to the idea that big war is a thing of the past. But no more. This is the third world war. And this time we are on its fringes.
