The Dispatches on War

The origins of war are as old as the story of human civilization itself. Warfare, throughout the ages, has mutated and it makes no sense to define the nature of war itself. The nature of war is ambiguous and sly towards any attempts at categorization. From the wars of the early humans fought over the issues of primordial hunting-gathering tribes to the wars of the states, warfare is more discernable by its application of a systemic violence. If on the other hand, an attempt is made to define the vastness of war, it must be limited to the idea that wars are collective efforts of violence aimed at attaining a collective good. This is not an ironclad definition of war or its nature and can be easily argued or disproved as being wrong and is open to debate.

There is another argument, which seeks to shed light on the nature of the war by posing an interesting question. The question is whether wars exist in the natural state or wars are merely the creation of humans themselves. This question can be further divided into a smaller set of sub-questions, which asks what is the functional rationale behind wars. The functionality of wars begs the question, whether wars define the purpose of the state or the states determine the purpose of wars. In all of these questions, there is no disagreement that war is a violent act of behavior and whether, it is learned or inherited, is another question to ponder.

In nature, animals kill out of necessity and yet, in human history, wars are often fought for reasons, which transcends the logic of necessity. Even in primitive societies war is more of a ritualistic practice than a vital tool of political, or social empowerment. In such societies, wars are limited to the point of settling an outstanding dispute and are not attempts at annihilation, as they nearly became in the wars of the last century. Hence, the question nags, where and when did war assume such a totality of intent in its destructive powers.

It seems that the lethality of war grew in commensurate pace with the advent of civilization itself and the rise of highly structured societies. Wars originated from a need to ward off predations in the early humans struggles for resources and to guard against the idea of starvation. There is an interesting point, as an aside, to the debate over the first domestication of agriculture in the history of the world. Traditionally, it is assumed that the onset of agriculture, nearly 10,000 years ago, was the result of the development of the human evolutionary process. It seems farming was created more out of dire need than anything else. As the humans began to organize more efficiently into hunting bands and as their skills and techniques to hunt became more proficient, the animal herds started to disappear and consequently, so did the food supply of the early humans.

This raises the interesting question that maybe civilization itself and the early cities were created as a fortification to preserve the food supplies, when the natural food supply itself was dwindling. There is ample credence to this suggestion, because the concept of offensive war did not exist in antiquity for a long period of time. The evidence for this hypothesis lies in the development of cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt and how their evolution was so different. The early Egyptian civilization was not build around a defensive construct unlike the cities of Mesopotamia. The reason being that Egypt was blessed with a natural defense, which made the invasion of Egypt cumbersome. To the north, the Nile delta proved a buffer of security and to the west and the east, the desert created safe zones, which insulated the Egyptians from land invasions. The first cataract of the Nile, which followed like a ribbon through the harsh landscape, limited invasions from the south. The Egyptian need for an army materialized only after the Nubians and the Hyksos invaded Egypt from the south and east.

Prior to being invaded, Egyptian rule was political and the authority of the pharaohs was limited to the distribution of harvests and the occasional divine interventions to regulate the floodwaters of the Nile. The real power rested with the priests and when the pharaoh assumed the powers of war, he combined it with his theocratic powers to create a new idea in warfare; the role of religion. In this sense, religion did not automatically translate into an ideology, because the Egyptian war making was limited to the preservation of Egyptian power and not the annexation of neighboring powers. Consequently, when the early invasions of Egypt happened, the Egyptian society was already well developed and was capable of adopting the new conquerors into the Egyptian life style.

The Mesopotamian societies, on the other hand, being more open to invasion from the nearby lands given their geographic environment, developed into a more warlike entity. This development was still not offensive in nature and was still defensive in its orientation. However, what did develop differently than the Egyptian example was the Mesopotamian need to subdue external threats by defeating and incorporating them into a larger territory. As the circle of security was extended around the city, it became clear that instead of creating stability, the opposite result was happening and the end was the familiar argument of “imperial over reach”. Imperial over reach happens due to a perception to control the scare resources and it mandates that the law of diminishing returns is preferable in the sense of endless military forays than a lack of economic sustainability.

However, the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian spiral into organized warfare hints at something quite interesting. It suggests that the early warfare was controlled by the priests, who advised the kings and in this sense, was theocratic. The theocracy of the early wars is not the result of the influence of organized religion, but the influence of the priests in the war making councils of the antiquity. This is ironic, because it seems that humanity has come a complete circle and the wars, are once more, being more influenced by theocratic considerations as seen in the clash of the civilization’s idea. Still, the role of priests in war is acutely absent from the wars of the Mediterranean Europe. The wars of the Greeks and the Romans were as secular as warfare got, because the Romans and the Greeks fought for the resources and the denial of resources to others. The Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome and the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta were wars of imperialism.

The next major evolution in the conduct of the warfare happened due to the Rome’s classification of warfare, as an instrument of state power. The wars of Rome were fought expressively with the idea of increasing the dominion of Rome over the Italian mainland and later, to increase the empire of Rome. These political wars undertaken to extent and maintain the power of Rome and it is little wonder that Pax Romana was based on the power of the Roman armies to maintain peace in the empire. It was the Romans, who were amongst the early people, to grasp the idea that wars and politics are interlinked and are mutually supportive of each other. In politics, the state’s powers came from its ability to maintain law and order and secure the life of its citizens. It was this basic criteria by which loyalty and obedience to state’s law was extracted from its citizenry.

Likewise, the Romans realized that sovereign power of the state came from its ability to successfully wage war in the pursuit of its interests and fidelity to Rome could only be ensured by through a strength of Roman arms. Therefore, the existence of the Roman Empire was predicated on the ability of the Roman army to fight and protect its political interests and the collapse of the Roman Empire is also closely tied to the decline of the Roman army’s ability to resist the barbarian invasions of Italy in 400s AD. This fact of the Roman wars could be seen in the battle standards, which the Roman legions carried into wars and which bore the inscription “SPQR”. SPQR is the Latin abbreviation for Senatus Populusque Romanus, or in its English transliteration “the popular will of the senate of Rome”.

According to Roman laws and the structure of governmental powers, only the senate had the power to declare war and make peace. Therefore, the senate legally authorized the Roman wars and the Roman army was simply implementing the will of the senate and the people of Rome. In a modern context, two things emerged from this Roman idea of war. The first one was the subordination of the military to a civilian authority and the second one was the origins of the idea of a constitutionally just war. Since SPQR was considered as emblematic of the Roman constitution, the Romans bequeathed the idea of a just war or a constitutionally permissible war in the evolution of warfare. This idea of the Roman warfare, to subsume war to a civilian authority and a just war would be taken up by Christianity when it would replace the Pax Romana with its own unifying theme of religion and seek to unite Europe under the umbrella of Christiandom.

The end of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity saw a profound change in the legacy of warfare as understood and practiced by the Romans. There was no morality in the Roman wars and they had fought ruthlessly to extend and preserve the power of Rome, but it was Christianity that added the moral dimension to the nature of warfare. This amendment to the nature of warfare was not made possible by the tolerance taught by Christ but to mask the hypocrisy of the political wars fought for religious reasons. The Catholic Church in Europe saw itself rightfully as the successor state to Rome and it was determined to ply all the political powers of imperial Rome and that also meant the power to wage wars for its political ends. The Catholic Church’s contribution to the warfare rests on two major political decisions it made, which influenced not only Europe, but also the regions outside of Europe.

The first decision was politically motivated to guarantee its own power in Europe by restricting the wars of succession between the many-fractured European kingdoms in the early days of the European Middle Ages. The moral aspect of war came, when it was declared that it was not allowed for Christians to kill Christians and only the church and the pope had right to declare war. The idea was to limit the wars in Europe and create some political stability, which would allow the church to exercise political authority in Europe. In a more real sense, the idea was to create the power of the state, within Europe, under the tutelage of the church and since the writ of sovereignty was based on war making powers of a state/kingdom, the church arrogated to itself the right to decide the issues of individual European sovereign claims.

The second major advancement to the cause of warfare, which greatly influenced it, was the Catholic Church’s concept of a just war, or bellum jus. This concept was created in order to rationalize the contradictions betweens the church’s moral prohibitions on killing, with the church’s political needs. The occasion, when this idea was unveiled was the reasons for the First Crusade. A just war was defined as a war, which prevents more evil than the evil it causes and it was also the first war, which tried to dehumanize the enemy, in this case the Muslims, on the basis of religion, culture and human values. The First Crusade seemed to make the argument that it was perfectly fine to kill in the name of civilization in order to protect civilization itself, which was identified as Christiandom. The real reasons for the First Crusade were rich trade routes under Muslim control and the taxes imposed by the Muslims on the Christian traders traversing them and religion was used by the Catholic Church only to sanctify mass slaughter in order to dominate those trade routes and access to them.

The ideals of Christianity and warfare seemed to have a profound impact upon the new religion of Islam and Islam itself would alter the nature of warfare and influence it. Islam was deeply influenced by the Christian ethics of war in the sense that it was illegal for Muslims to kill Muslims. This fact would have interesting consequences. The fact that Islam made it illegal for Muslims to kill Muslims did not obviate the political necessity for wars, but the Muslims overcame this hindrance by employing armies of non-Muslims to fight their wars. In this sense, Islam’s contribution to warfare, it can be reasonably argued, was the institutionalization of concept of mercenaries and mercenary armies and mercenary warfare.

Therefore, it was not surprising for Saudi Arabia to ask for United States’ military protection against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990 and to garrison non-Muslim armies on Islam’s holiest soils. In this sense, the use of Pakistani armed personnel for the defense of Saudi Arabia makes sense, because the Arabs have traditionally employed mercenary forces to guard their interests. The Arab idea of mercenaries was later included in the armies of the Ottoman Turks in the guise of the corps of Jannarsies, who were non-Muslims and who fought for the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Another area, where Islam would be influenced by the Christian doctrine of warfare and in turn, would influence international politics, was in the realm of who had the power to declare war: the state or the individual. In the early days of Christianity, it was the pope who decided the issues of war and peace in Europe and who, through his powers as the highest Christian authority, decided the powers of the individual kingdoms. In effect, it was the pope and his powers, which determined the political powers and writ of the sovereignty for the majority of the European kings. It was this power, which was contested in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), when the Europeans nations fought the church’s power to define their own sense of political suzerainty without the church’s influence. Reformation of 1517 might be the brainchild of Martin Luther, but it was sustained politically and via military resistance by the German principalities of Mitteleuropa not on religious grounds but on the need to break the church’s political monopoly over European states symbolized in the sovereign right to declare wars.

The end of the Thirty Years War was another major yardstick in the evolution of war. In the aftermath of the Thirty Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, the powers to make war was taken away from the individual (the pope) and given to the state. The treaty of Westphalia was also the first instance of international law trying to regulate the conduct of the war and seeking to make it a dejure part of politics. The treaty of Westphalia also created the modern definition of a nation-state and rise of modern diplomacy. Since the church had assumed supremacy over the European states and the war was fought to break that supremacy, it was decided that all states would be equal in power and wars could only be fought for reasons of preserving the state’s power. It was hoped that through this, wars would be of defensive political nature only and not of an aggressive religious style.

In doing so, Europe after nearly a thousand years was reverting back to the Roman idea of fighting wars for political reasons and politically sanctioning the wars, only when there no other method of resolution left. Europe, and the major lesson it learned from the Thirty Years War, was to take away the power to make war from an individual and make it a collective responsibility of the state. The role of the newly emerging nation-states was defined by their ability to make war based on a political consensus, which in turn would be balanced by the political needs of the nation itself and not by the interests of an individual. In another sense, Europe had separated the interests of the theocracy from the interests of the state and had come to the conclusion that religion should not be given the power to make war.

This was also the result of the separation of the church and state in European politics. The Thirty Years War marked the start of secularism in European politics, as the Europeans sought to limit the power of the religion in politics and especially limit the power of religious individuals to chart state policies by their ability make wars. This is where Islam differed from the European experience, because Islam was never able to develop this distinction in conduct of making wars. As Islam sought to combine political and religious power within one person, Islam had a difficult time and a very poor record of fighting wars, since it often confused political needs with theology. The end result of this was that Islam’s wars were dysfunctional and seemed to cause more harm than good to its political interests. A good example of this confusion could be seen in the Arab-Israeli wars, which ended as disasters for the Islamic cause in international politics.

Another reason why Islamic wars have been a failure is because Islam has generally sought to fight wars on religious grounds instead of political reasons, when the Islamic nations were never threatened themselves. Religion makes for a good excuse to start and fight wars, but it makes for a poor reason to sustain the war as the Europeans learned from 1618-1648 and the Muslims seem incapable of learning. The major problem in the conduct of the Islamic wars is its inability to separate religious interests from political interests and this inability is a reason, why Islam is on the political defensive in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Also, the unity of a religious power and a political power within an individual, a leader, makes sure that it is not Islamic nations who have the power to declare wars but rather the individuals on the basis of their theocratic powers.

This is also a main reason why the writ of Islamic nations is politically non-existent in international relations. This is the reason why international politics sees Islamic nations as sources of trouble and instability. Hence, the term “rouge nations” is duly warranted for Islamic states, or any state, not because of their politics per se, but due to their ability to make war for reasons which undermine the traditional concepts of diplomacy as they were created in 1648. In Islam, it is the individual authority and not the state’s authority that has the power to declare war. This idea, when taken into context with the ability of the Islamic/Muslim clerics to issues declarations of jihad, clearly explains the pariah nature of Islamic politics in the world. It is the manifestation of this reality, which has the potential for serious consequences for Islam and the world.

Another facet of diplomacy, which separated Islamic and European conduct towards wars, was the realm of accountability. Under the legalities of Westphalia, the state was made responsible for initiating, waging and ending wars. In Islam, however, this conceptual idea never took roots, because the Islamic politics had failed in its attempts to grapple with the question, whether state power should be secular or theocratic. Islam overcame this dilemma when it compromised by practicing a mixture of both secularism and theocracy in its politics. Therefore, Islam never really answered the question as to who, the state or the individual, was responsible for starting wars in Islamic/Muslim societies.

The fact that Islam started out as a conquering religion, created another contradiction between its external and internal policies. In a way, it seems that Islam has not been able to reconcile its religious beliefs, with its political aims. Islam, in its teachings taught submission to its followers, and in its wars it sought the submission of non-Muslim societies to its theocratic-political ideas. Islamic warfare was not about political ends, but about the need to proselyte its faith outside of Arabia. Maybe, this was in reaction to the political insecurity which Islam experienced as a nascent religion in Arabia, but the fact remains Islam was more than willing to allow non-Muslims to exist as long as they accepted the supremacy of Islam, both in a religious and a political sense but more importantly accepted the argument of Islam as a theocratic power. Therefore, the political idea behind Islamic warfare seems to be the physical and intellectual security of Islam as a religion and not the geographic or political defense of the Islamic kingdoms. Hence, Islamic warfare was devoted towards the attainment of intangible ideas and was never about securing tangible political goals.

Consequently, after the Treaty of Westphalia, the differences between Islam and Europe would cleave to the extent that they would become unbridgeable politically. As Europe adjusted to the new realities of state power and the role of warfare, within it, Islam seemed to reject the European notion of a nation-state. Europeans had the dismissed the idea of Christiandom after having bled economically and politically for its attainment and having seen the devastation of Mitteleuropa, modern day Germany, from thirty years warfare. Europe totally removed religion from its politics and war, but Islam still retained them, which explains why Islam still suffers politically in the conduct of its wars. Islam still attempts a marriage of religion with politics in its war aims and then fails to create a proper equilibrium between them by favoring theocracy over politics.

It would be this explanation, which would see the decline of Islam’s political power, as the political power of the Europeans would increase in the seventeenth century. Islam’s political decline can be pegged to failure of Islam to link warfare with the expansion of state power, because Islamic warfare was linked with the idea of preserving the theocratic nature of its rule. This failure of Islam, by the time of the French Revolution in 1789, would see the total eclipse of Islamic political influence in Europe and later on, in the rest of the world. Another undesired consequence of this was that since Islam ignored the modernization of its armed forces and ignored the changed nature of warfare and its political coda to state power, Islam was simply left behind by Europe in a military and a diplomatic sense.

Hence, Islam and Muslims would be too politically weak to resist Europe, when the former colonies of the Ottoman Turkish Empire were craved up by the European powers in the early 1900s. It is this political weakness of Islam, which is forcing it to adopt the means of asymmetrical warfare, commonly known as terrorism, to fight for its political aims. In this sense, Islam and the Muslims are realizing that they are a politically impotent force in international relations, because they historically chose the wrong option. While Europe and the rest of the non-Islamic world was creating the basic infrastructure of a state power and fighting wars toward that end, Islam was simply content to watch the events unfold and took no steps to stem its political decline by building a polity for itself in international affairs.

By the time of the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, when the map of Europe would be re-drawn after the Napoleonic Wars, this abyss between Islam and Europe would be too pronounced and nearly a hundred years later, Islamic power would disappear from the European political scene. However, this question would be left for a later time and addressed in other articles on the topic of war and its ever-changing nature. In the next article, the nature of warfare would be looked at the time of the French Revolution to First World War and how the transnational nature of industrialized warfare replaced the wars of the nation-states of the post-Westphalian era.