Are Governments Too Trigger-Happy – or not Enough?

June 05, 2014, 2:52 PM GMT+0

John Humphrys asks: are modern governments too quick to turn to military action?

On the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, a retired American admiral has accused modern governments of being too trigger-happy, too willing to use military force without knowing where it will lead. At the same time, others are accusing the American president, Barack Obama, of being insufficiently willing to threaten the use of force, leaving potential adversaries to engage in adventurism with impunity. Who’s right? Are the two charges less contradictory than they seem? And when and how should governments resort to the use of military power?

This week the beaches of Normandy will be host to ceremonies commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the allied invasion of northern France. The event on D-Day, 6 June 1944, saw the greatest naval invasion in history, both before and since. Its success helped to bring an end to the Second World War.

Few now would dispute the claim that the war that the Allies, including Soviet Russia, fought against Nazi Germany was a war worth fighting, notwithstanding the huge casualties it involved, not least on D-Day itself. But not all wars are so clear-cut in their necessity. The choice of whether or not to use military force is usually much more disputable. It’s for governments to make the choice and today there is much criticism, from both sides of the argument, that contemporary governments are getting the choice wrong.

Admiral Mike Mullen was the chairman of the United States’ Joint Chiefs of Staff until 2011. This week, in London, he said that governments had become too ready to use force. He said: “It’s too easy to pick up the gun first and hope the outcome is what you are seeking.” The reason for this greater readiness to fire the gun is, in his view, that the weapons themselves have become so lethal, so precise and in many cases so easy to deploy from a remote distance, that it is easier to take the decision to use them without having to think through the implications of doing so, especially the implications of their failing to achieve what is hoped. The problem, he says, has been the use of such force without having proper strategies for when and how they should be used. The result has been that those who have had resort to such force have found themselves embroiled for years in places where they thought they would be engaged only for months.

It’s not hard to think what he has in mind. When the American president, George Bush, with his British ally, Tony Blair and others, invaded Iraq in 2003, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, expected the operation to be a short-run affair during which western forces would depose Saddam Hussein, liberate the country for democracy and then get out. What actually happened was very different. The allies became bogged down in an occupation that lasted a decade and led to the deaths of tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. After the allies’ final withdrawal, Iraq, far from being at peace, seems to many now to be on the verge of a civil war.

When Britain joined America in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, the British defence secretary at the time, John Reid, expressed confidence that the intervention would be short-lived and would cost the life of not a single member of the British armed forces. Twelve years later British and American troops are only now on the verge of coming home and over four hundred British military personnel have been killed. Unknown numbers of Afghan civilians have lost their lives too. Meanwhile the Taliban, the enemy the invasion was supposed to rout, are as strong as ever and few are confident of peace after western forces leave at the end of this year.

Those who think like Admiral Mullen argue that not only is the military strategy not thought through but also that the wider consequences of ‘picking up the gun’ are insufficiently considered. In the case of both Afghanistan and Iraq, the aim was to check the Islamic terrorism that led to 9/11. But many people believe those invasions have hugely increased the scale of militant Islam with the result that we now face a bigger terrorist threat back home than we did beforehand. Some commentators argue that the West’s readiness to use force in Libya more recently is leading to the playing out of exactly the same self-defeating scenario.

So why, then, are governments so ready to pick up the gun, if, indeed, they are? One explanation is that political leaders take decisions in the shadow of what they take to be previous failures of policy. In the case of Tony Blair, for example, it is said that he was so appalled by western failure to prevent the tragedies of Bosnia and Rwanda, that he became too ready to use force so that the same failures would not be repeated elsewhere. Similarly, it is believed that David Cameron’s enthusiasm for military intervention in Libya was a reaction against its absence in Bosnia.

But if this helps to explain the trigger-happiness Admiral Mullen complains of, the consequences of using force without adequate strategy can, in turn, affect the decision-making of the next generation of political leaders in the opposite direction. That is what those who think governments are now insufficiently ready to use force believe has happened.

Here the key case is Syria. In the context of the growing violence in Syria’s civil war, President Obama threatened to use force against the Syrian regime of Bashar-al-Assad if it ‘crossed the red line’ and used chemical weapons against its civilian population. But when evidence emerged that it had done exactly that, the American president backed off. Similarly, David Cameron was thwarted in his wish to use force in Syria by a House of Commons apprehensive, after the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan, of becoming embroiled in yet another foreign adventure.

The consequence, according to those who think that western governments have become too reluctant to ‘pick up the gun’, rather than too ready to do so, is that our rivals and adversaries take the message and conclude they can act with greater freedom. That, they say, is what we are now seeing with China, flexing its muscles in south-east Asia, especially against Vietnam, and with Russia, annexing Crimea and promoting instability in Eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile in Syria, Bashar al-Assad has just got himself elected for another term as president.

In Poland this week President Obama reiterated America’s determination to come to the aid of its NATO allies should they feel under threat and he promised extra money to boost NATO defences in eastern Europe. This, his critics feel, is the least he could do but it is unlikely to worry Russia’s President Putin too much since it is now perfectly clear no one is going to ‘pick up the gun’ over Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Admiral Mullen takes the view that since picking up the gun too readily can have such awful consequences, the only alternative is diplomacy. He argues that it is essential for America and its allies to find a way of working with Russia in order to defuse outstanding conflicts, especially in Syria and over Iran. But in this case it would seem that, in Churchill’s phrase, “jaw-jawing” rather than “war-warring” can happen only if the West explicitly accepts the outcome of Russia’s adventurism in Crimea and Ukraine. Is that, though, an acceptable price?

The answer to that question brings us back to the original one: are our governments too trigger-happy, or not enough?

What’s your view? Let us know.