By

Ted Kinnaman

Conflict and violence have been prevailing themes in the history of human affairs. Some people have explained this as being due to the existence of evil, and its operation in human relations. Theologians have told us that conflict and violence are inherently human because of man’s fallen state, and that redemption is possible only when revelation occurs. 

Those who do not accept such an explanation demand one based on human causation. After all, war is not something that just happens, it is not like the weather. War is the result of human decisions. Often the decision makers do not fully understand the factors leading to their decisions, and often they are succumbing to irresistible pressures. Nevertheless, these decisions result from human thoughts, feelings and actions. They could have turned out differently.

The 20^th century marked a turn in human history, when death and devastation caused by wars became so horrendous that serious people began looking for reasons why mankind would perpetuate such brutalities upon itself. The optimistic hopes of the Enlightenment had obviously failed; reason was not determining relations between people and nations. Sigmund Freud was so depressed by the slaughter of World War One that he hypothesized two opposing instincts in mankind. The first he called Eros. This was an affirmative, life enhancing impulse, a drive to create. The other was a death instinct, driving man towards destruction and oblivion. What Freud would have thought of Auchwitz, Buchenwald and Hiroshima, we can only guess.

Freud’s hypothesis gained credibility as the violent century progressed. It’s broad enough to encompass most specific causes of violent conflict. What it suggests is that war and violence occur when the death instinct has overcome Eros, the life supporting instinct.

But concerning recent wars, especially those involving the United States, Freud’s death instinct alone is not a sufficient explanation. Baser motives have been at work in the process of giving substance to the death instinct.

The reasons for embarking upon most wars are usually complex. At root they generally combine emotional and economic factors. Among the emotional factors, three of the most virulent are religious zeal, racism and nationalism. Equally common are economic motives: the drive for markets, space and resources. In addition to these causes there is also the urge to dominate that appears when a nation or group sees an opportunity.

If religious zeal, racism and nationalism have been basic causes of warfare in the past century, this is due in part to political leaders and parties playing upon emotions to generate fear and hostility. Fear is the great political motivator, and politicians of all stripes have been able to manipulate it to suit their purposes.

At the end of World War Two, the United States and the USSR were the remaining superpowers. Although they were allies during the war, divisions between the two quickly developed. On source of this split was our possession of the atomic bomb, and the Soviets’ fear that it posed a threat to them. At the same time, the Soviets’ dictatorial imposition of their system on their neighboring countries created suspicion and hostility here.

It’s possible that these suspicions and fears might have been resolved by diplomatic means, had the anti-Soviet feelings here not been exacerbated by charges of communist infiltration at home, recklessly used for political gain by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy overplayed his hand and ultimately was censured by the Senate. However, the anti-communist fears he stirred up never subsided. Looked at objectively, it is difficult to understand how the most powerful nation on earth could have been gripped by such unreasoning fear of an adversary whose economic resources were obviously inferior to ours.

But such was the case, and it led to confrontations around the globe. The most serious of these, in Korea and Vietnam, resulted in catastrophic wars. It should be noted that an exception was the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which skillful diplomacy, along with a show of force, resulted in the resolution of a conflict without war.

Vietnam was the most egregious case. The Vietnamese were fighting an anti-colonial war, and in no way posed a threat to the United States. But anti-communism had become so ingrained in the thinking of American cold warriors, that the fear of success by a Vietnamese peasant movement against the corrupt regime in the South became the justification for our superpower entering the conflict. After 15 years of military involvement in south-east Asia we lost and left.

That disastrous military intervention constitutes a prime example of a war largely brought on by a nation, the United States, that had allowed its values and actions to be manipulated by fear and nationalism. Anti-communism, fueling a mind-set no longer capable of rationally assessing the national interest, made the military intervention in Vietnam somehow necessary.

One other factor was at play in the policy making that drew us into Vietnam - the fact that our military machine had become so huge that it was assumed that no other country, certainly not a third rate, third world country, could stand up to it. The possession of such overwhelming power encouraged its use. Diplomacy came into play in the Vietnam War only when it became obvious that the U.S. could not win, and we needed to find a way out.

The current war in Iraq offers a curious mixture of causes leading up to it. One cause was the deaths of more than 3000 Americans, in the violent attack of September 11^th. The perpetrators of this attack were motivated by radical religious beliefs, as well as what we could call Islamic nationalistic resentments, although they didn’t come from any one country. Our war in Afghanistan has been an attempt to punish and capture those responsible for the attack.

Beyond that point, however, our reprisals against Osama bin Laden and his followers took a strange turn. The U.S. invaded a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11, and was not associated with al Qaeda. Thus the U.S. embarked, as in Viet Nam, on another unprovoked war.

This pair of wars brings to mind Marx’s of-quoted remark that great historic facts and personages occur twice: “Once as tragedy, and again as farce.” Bin Laden and his associates made war on us out of religious and nationalist fervor, exacerbated by our support of Israel against the Palestinians. We retaliated in Afghanistan, but then invaded Iraq!

What really were our motives? Few outside the administration found that Saddam Hussein actually posed a threat to the United States. But there was clearly an economic motive. As Assistant Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz said “Iraq was awash in oil.” Paul O’Neill, the first Treasury Secretary in the G. W. Bush administration, recalled receiving memos from the Pentagon describing Iraq’s oil fields, and listing companies that might be approached to bid on them; this was in February of 2001.

There was also a more ambitious goal at work: the hope that by establishing control of Iraq the U.S. would be in a position to dominate the entire region. Here the fear elicited by 9/11 was skillfully used to pursue an old-fashioned war of imperialism. Another element has not received the attention it deserves. Peace advocates have long contended that the mere existence of large armies is an incentive to use them. Our military establishment was so massive that people with ambitious foreign policy ideas couldn’t resist the opportunity to use it. The perception of military dominance was an important factor, among others, that led to the latest debacle. Power was its own rationale!

And so, the death instinct is still in ascendance. One can only trust that somehow the life instinct will ultimately reassert itself, and that rationality will prevail over blind emotion. When Pandora opened the box releasing all the evils of man, hope was still there, left in the box.

 Ted Kinnaman was once a soldier. He's been an active advocate for peace for more than four decades.