The End of the End of Wars
World War II was the last war to end with a bang. Actually, two giant bangs. Atomic exclamation points, the kind that ought to have led to resentment and revenge, but instead, they somehow led to prosperity and friendship. It doesn’t make sense, does it, that only one country has ever deployed a nuclear weapon against another, and now those countries are close friends? Or maybe it makes perfect sense, because World War II came to its conclusion, and when it was over, it was simply over. One side lost, and they knew it. The other side won. No extra-innings, no sudden death. There was nothing left to do but move on.
Korea was the first of the wars that didn’t end—at least, the first of our wars that didn’t end. By then, there were nuclear weapons both sides of the Iron Curtain, and no one had the stomach to use them. So the war was left unfinished, and Korea was split in two. At the time, it must have seemed like the best that we could do, and maybe it was. I suspect, though, that a lot of the 23 million people living in North Korea today wish that the world had been able to stomach a battle to a resolution back in the 1950s. When you’re caught in the moment of war, you see the atrocities of the moment, and not the atrocities to come over the next fifty years. Because we can’t know the future, we tend not to weigh it, or at least, we tend not to give it much weight.
Vietnam was a loss, I guess, which means that it ended. But if it ended without an ending. There was no exclamation mark; maybe a period; more likely a question mark, as in, “What just happened?” If the Vietnam War had been tennis, it would have been like this, and we would have been Richie Tennenbaum. It’s not exactly a decisive way to end a match. And yet, it was a resolution of sorts, unlike Korea. Even though Vietnam, like North Korea, came under communist control, it turned out differently. You’d rather live in Vietnam than North Korea today, I’m sure, and maybe that’s because Vietnam, having won, had the freedom to move along, while North Korea remained wedded to its fallacies, since shedding them would be conceding loss.
If we’d wanted to, we could have won the Vietnam War. If we’d had the stomach for it, anyway. The stomach for the draft, and the loss of lives, and the destruction, and the atrocities. Television made these things real. People can tolerate a lot of stuff if they don’t have to know about it. But seeing things, knowing they are real, shedding the bliss of ignorance—no one has the stomach for that. When did this country turn against the War in Iraq? I think it was when the people saw this. It used to be that no one ever saw these things.
I think it is possible, in a theoretical sense, that Israel could win the war in Gaza. It could destroy Hamas—all of it—the weapons and the people. But to do this would take an incomprehensible, unfathomable toll on the innocents in Gaza—more than what’s happening now. Much more. And with cell phones, and YouTube, and blogs … everything about war becomes very real. Even things that aren’t real become real. And no one has the stomach for the reality of war.
And so, where does this lead? To another half-resolved conclusion to a conflict? Half-resolved means unresolved, and that means ongoing. It means that every war and every conflict becomes like Korea. I’m not sure this is a good thing, to weigh so heavily the atrocities of the moment, and to forget, perhaps, the atrocities of the future.
Think of Japan, North Korea, and Vietnam. Rank them, as if you were choosing a place to live. I suspect you’d list them like this: (1) Japan, (2) Vietnam, (3) rather choose death, and (4) North Korea. The best outcome came where we won, while committing, it could be argued, the greatest atrocity in the history of war. The second best outcome came where we lost. But the worst outcome came where nothing was resolved. Win or lose … either way, there is value in resolution. And necessarily, there is a cost to non-resolution.
Having said all this, another conclusion could be drawn, one that I’m not quite willing to commit to. If we can’t end wars anymore, and unresolved wars are worse than losing, then maybe we’ve reached a point where all war is futile, since it can only make things worse.
