[lit-ideas] A decoder ring






I'm not quite sure why Lawrence treats my writing with such contempt.  I 
believe I value the meanings of words as much as anyone, and I think that my 
use of words is as legitimately and reasonably rooted in the tradition of their 
usage as anyone's.  

I do disagree with the overall position I took Lawrence to be expressing, 
specifically that it is counter to our national interest to say that war is 
futile.  I may be doing Lawrence an injustice in paraphrasing him that way, and 
if so I would be happy to be corrected on that score.

Lawrence had synopsized the end of the movie _Anzio_ and quoted Robert 
Mitchum's  character  as saying "Wars never solve anything.  History tells us 
that."  He then dismissed that assertion is clearly arrant nonsense.  The 
intent of my post was to say that I thought the assertion Mitchum's character 
makes is perfectly intelligible.  I also tried to sketch what I thought were 
considerations that reasonable people, including Lawrence, might think would 
give one pause before dismissing the Mitchum character's assertion out of hand.

Apparently I was a bit too oblique for Lawrence.  He asks that I "move more 
slowly from the definition of the key terms 'solve' and 'problem' to your word 
'position' so I can follow the bouncing ball."  

To make sense of the phrase 'wars never solve anything', I propose to start 
with the word 'problem', since that will be the object of the verb 'solve'.  
Using Lawrence's own source, conveniently available on-line, the American 
Heritage Dictionary (at www.bartleby.com) defines problem as:

1. A question to be considered. solved, or answered;
2. A situation, matter or person that presents complexity or difficulty;
3. A misgiving, objection or complaint.

The next question seems to me to be: which meaning of 'problem' might be 
relevant and in what sense might wars be thought not to provide solutions?  If 
there are reasonable choices of meaning that provide a sensible interpretation 
of the phrase which interpretation reasonable people might think expresses a 
substantive truth, then it seems to me the phrase is both meaningful (i.e. not 
nonsense) and at least potentially true.

Since definition 1 of 'problem' uses the word 'solve, I start there.  Applying 
definition 1, "wars never solve anything" would mean that there are no 
questions which wars answer.  This statement, though, is patently false.  For 
example, the war in Iraq did answer the question "will Saddam Hussein still be 
ruling Iraq in 2008?"

Unless, though, one assumes that the person making the assertion is simply 
stupid, such an obvious counterexample suggests that's not quite the way to 
interpret it.

I turn to definition 2.  Applying definition 2, "wars never solve anything" 
would mean wars do not resolve situations that present complexity or 
difficulty.  This seems a bit more productive.  

If one defines the 'situation' that presented complexity or difficulty as 
"Saddam Hussein is ruling Iraq", then one could say that the war resolved that 
situation, a counter-example to this interpretation.  

However, it is also reasonable to think a broader definition of 'situation' 
would apply to a matter of such moment as the US going to war.  For example, 
one could ask "and why is Saddam Hussein's ruling Iraq problematic?", answering 
which would open the door to a much wider array of considerations.

Defining 'situation' in that broader sense, one that includes the broader 
geopolitical context, it is not clear that the war in Iraq resolved the 
situation.  I do not advocate a conclusion about the war in Iraq here; I merely 
point out that a reasonable person could think the war in Iraq, thus far, has 
not resolved the more broadly-construed pre-war situation.

One example, and a weak one because the war in question is not yet over, does 
not make the case for a generalization.  But I am not trying to say the 
generalization is true, I am trying to explain how the generalization can be 
interpreted without contortions to be making an assertion that is not patently 
false, an assertion that is worthy of serious consideration.

So to summarize, I think it is perfectly reasonable to construe "wars never 
solve anything" as meaning that wars do not resolve the overall political 
situations in the ways their instigators would like.  I got there by using 
definition 2 of 'problem' and adjusting 'solve' in parallel with that 
definition.

Before turning briefly to the question about 'position', I pause to mention 
that I think that people Lawrence otherwise respects might reasonably make 
assertions like "war never solves anything" when their interest is to force a 
more sober consideration of the potential collateral damage from a conflict as 
compared with the value of the reasonably likely outcomes.  

Saying "wars never solve anything" in that sense, does not mean there's never 
reason to go to war.  It means, in my opinion, that war can only be 
rationalized in one of two ways:

(a) The nation's aims in going to war are very limited, the nation can be very 
certain of achieving the desired outcome, the cost (all in) to the nation of 
the outcome is worth what the nation gains, and the nation can afford the cost; 
or

(b) The nation cannot afford to lose.

There are those who would say nothing can ever meet the first set of tests 
because of the destruction of human life entailed by war.  I would not rule out 
the possibility that something might meet the first set of tests, but as a 
practical matter I think the circumstances that would meet those tests would be 
very rare.  

But even those who do believe there are limited outcomes for which war is a 
viable means still, in my view, cannot escape the questions of whether the 
desired outcomes can be achieved at an affordable cost and are worth that cost. 
 I suspect that most people experienced in war will tell you that such 
questions are harder to answer in the affirmative than they might seem.

I do think that there are real situations that meet the second test.  World War 
II did in my opinion -- the US could not have afforded to let the continued 
aggression of the Germans and Japanese go unanswered for a variety of reasons.  
I am not, however, persuaded that the war in Iraq was one of those, and I am 
quite certain it never met the first set of tests.

So to me, Lawrence's insistence that "war never solves anything" is nonsense 
seems to me equivalent to insisting that the calculation of collateral damage 
is never relevant to the decision about whether to go to war.  

That, I believe, is the worst kind of folly.  That's why I wrote in objection 
to his dismissal of Mitchum's character's assertion in the first place.

Finally, I think Lawrence completely misconstrued my unfortunately worded 
comments about the quibble on 'position'.  When I wrote "...there's a hidden 
quibble about ...  'taking a position'...", I did not mean to impute the 
quibble to the combatants in a war.  I was obliquely and probably inaccurately 
attributing the quibble to Lawrence.  My point was that the only way I saw to 
defend his rejection of "war never solves anything" was to make a quibble on 
the meaning of 'position'.

To make that explicit: among the reasons war does not resolve the geopolitical 
position favorably is that after the war is over, one's opponents interests 
generally have not materially changed from what they were before the war.  What 
happened with Germany and Japan after World War II is not the common outcome.  

The Islamists didn't suddenly find Western ways congenial just because we 
stomped Saddam Hussein.  I paraphrased that by saying to myself "their 
positions didn't change".  

But of course *physical* positions *did* change -- Saddam Hussein and the Baath 
party no longer ruled Iraq.  That's the quibble I was talking about -- wars 
*do* "solve" the question of who has *physical* control of geography and its 
associated resources -- i.e. the Baathists were no longer in the position of 
controlling Iraq -- but they do not "solve" the question of what emotional or 
intellectual position people occupy -- the Islamists (whom I do not confuse 
with the Baathists but include here because it's their murderous actions the 
war was supposed to help control) still hated the west, i.e. they retained that 
'position'.  

In any case, my point here is NOT to argue for an interpretation of the Iraq 
war, but rather to illustrate how I'd used the term 'position'.

I hope this clarified things for Lawrence and anyone else who might have been 
interested.

Regards to one and all,
Eric Dean
Washington DC

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