No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses should do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.
The Prussian well knew that the essence of war was uncertainty. He admitted that the ‘fog’ or ‘friction’ of war necessarily obscured and changed outcomes. So great were the variables of warfare that nothing could prepare the commanders to anticipate or counteract key events which shaped the course of a war. History, he thought, was as good a guide as any.
History does indeed provide a guide to those planning war, but it does not provide the lessons Clausewitz had in mind. If the unintended consequences of wars are examined, Clausewitz’s maxim concerning the utility of war to achieve political ends is turned on its head. War turns out not to be a successful continuation of existing policy; most often, it produces an entirely new policy – frequently, quite the reverse of that originally embarked upon. The unforeseen consequences are usually more long-term than the intended outcomes and work in ways that counteract the original reasons for going to war. Nowhere is this better illustrated than through an examination of the major foreign wars of the United States since its earliest days.
The proclaimed reason the American colonists gave for resorting to arms against the English in April/May 1775 was to redress grievances and to guarantee themselves the historic ‘rights of Englishmen’ – particularly the right to be ruled and taxed by representatives of their own choosing. By July 1776 this goal had been transformed into one seeking the independence of the thirteen colonies from English rule and to creating a new nation-state, ‘The United States of America’, based on the ideas of the Enlightenment and, ironically, the ‘Sacred Rights of Englishmen’. The turning point occurred in March 1776, when the English evacuated Boston and set up military headquarters on Manhattan Island, thereby hardening the resolve of those already determined to seek independence and converting those who had sought only greater freedom and political autonomy within the British empire.
There were several unexpected or unintended outcomes of the Revolutionary War, which ended in September 1783 with the Treaty of Paris after eight long years of fighting and the loss of around 25,000 American lives. The first was the extremely decentralized nature of the newly independent country. The thirteen largely autonomous and loosely federated states experienced chaos and impotence in the first years of the nation’s history. This incapacity was felt most strongly in the areas of taxation and in the conduct of foreign relations. The lack of a national army led to a crisis in security due to the country’s inability to ‘defend’ its frontier against attacks by Native Americans or to force the promised British evacuation of northwest forts. In 1787 the decentralized form of government for which the American revolutionaries had fought was discarded in favour of a centralized system. This made the president not only the head of state but the commander-in-chief of its armies, a move which granted him the right to conduct war – powers far greater than those of the ‘despotic’ British king, George III, whose rule had prompted the move for independence.
Tensions between the United States and Great Britain continued and led ultimately to the War of 1812. President James Madison told Congress that the US was fighting for ‘freedom of the seas’ against British impressments of American mariners, and British incitement of Native Americans against the US on its western frontiers. But conduct of the war suggested that the real goal was the incorporation of the English colonies in Canada into the Union, though, given the strength of British sea power this was never a real possibility.
There were desperate moments for the US in the conflict as the British burned the city of Washington and (unsuccessfully) attacked New Orleans. The turning point came in the summer and autumn of 1814, when newly arrived British forces nearly compelled the Americans to withdraw from Lake Champlain and suffer the splitting off of the New England states from the rest of the Union. Fearful that Britain would send over massive armies once Napoleon was finally defeated in Europe, the United States became anxious to get out of the war and tacitly abandoned its war aims. At the end of the conflict in 1815 there was essentially a return to the status quo ante bellum. Virtually none of the issues that had driven Madison to seek a declaration of war were resolved by almost three years of combat, some of which imperiled the very existence of the United States.
The principal unexpected geopolitical consequence of the War of 1812 appeared to be rather benign, but it had ominous overtones. Because of the war, Great Britain finally and fully accepted the US as a sovereign nation. The War of 1812 was, in other words, a second War of Independence. With British acquiescence, the US now began to assert its pre-eminence in the West Indies and the Caribbean. In 1823, inspired by the British, President James Monroe proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine, setting the stage for an unfettered hemispheric primacy that was often achieved by war.
The US soon turned its expansionist gaze to the southwest and to the Pacific Ocean. The proclaimed reason for embarking on war against Mexico in 1846 was the attack by Mexican troops on General Zachary Taylor’s troops which were, at the time, encamped in a disputed area near the Rio Grande. President James K. Polk also invoked the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the United States as justifying his desire for territories which included California, New Mexico, and the Rio Grande as the US-Mexico boundary.
The war was fought through amphibious landings in the Gulf of Mexico and Monterey on the Pacific coast, intense land battles in the northeast of Mexico, and the invasion and prolonged occupation of Mexico City by General Winfield Scott. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the war, which was signed near Mexico City in February 1848, ceded California and the present-day southwestern states and confirmed the annexation of Texas with the Rio Grande as its western boundary. However, General Scott found that his military presence in Mexico City and his use of terror to control its population did not persuade the Mexicans to surrender as much territory as Polk sought. The peninsula of Baja California remained Mexican.
The consequences of the Mexican-American War were varied. One outcome was the elevation, in the eyes of the major European nations, of the US to the rank of a formidable and ambitious second-tier power. Another was the increase of overseas commercial and maritime expansion – especially into the Pacific Ocean and the Far East. The war stimulated further westward settlement, unintentionally resulting in a nationally divisive and irreconcilable debate over the expansion of slavery into the new southwestern territories. After ten years of festering, this dispute would lead to the secession of the Confederate States of America and the subsequent outbreak of the Civil War. That domestic cataclysm resulted in unprecedented consolidation of political and military power in Washington, DC, and a growing national desire for absolutely unchallenged hemispheric hegemony, including if necessary the forcible expulsion of Spain from Cuba and Puerto Rico.
In 1898 the US embarked on war with Spain. The predominant official reason given by President McKinley and Congress for this war was the liberation of the Cuban people from historic Spanish oppression. Cuban nationalists had been seeking independence since the 1860s. Their campaign intensified in the late 1890s. US newspapers began to agitate for intervention, and in February the battleship Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana harbour. McKinley asked for war; Congress readily complied. The US Navy’s sudden annihilation of the Spanish Pacific fleet in Manila Bay in the Philippine Islands altered the strategy of the war and led to the acquisition by the US of a Pacific empire consisting of Hawaii, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines. Cuba, although politically liberated from Spain, became a virtual protectorate, and Puerto Rico was annexed by the US.
The unintended consequences of the Spanish-American war included a bloody and savage suppression of an insurrection against American occupation in the Philippines. It lasted until 1903. The US also joined briefly, in 1899, with other great powers in the decisive military repression of the Boxer Rebellion in northern China. The new American presence in the western Pacific caused serious tensions to emerge with Japan, which some Americans thought was threatening US control of the Philippines and Hawaii. Closer to home, with the acquiescence of Great Britain, the US established American hegemony in the Caribbean, but quickly found itself ensnared in a series of ‘Banana Wars’. Fought in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua, these colonial-style police actions plagued the US on and off for the remainder of the twentieth century, although they have received much less attention from historians than either the First or Second world wars.
The First World War began in August 1914, but the US remained ‘neutral’ through almost three years of unremitting bloodshed in Europe. Provoked into action in April 1917 by German submarine attacks on US vessels, President Woodrow Wilson told the nation that his goal was to ensure ‘freedom of the seas’, to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, and to form a League of Nations which would, among other things, safeguard world peace. A total of over 4.7 million US soldiers, sailors and marines served in the armed forces during the war. American fatalities – including those who died from diseases – exceeded 117,000.
Despite Washington’s rhetoric of idealism expressed prior to its entry into the war, the US did not join its own proposed League of Nations. It retreated into a policy of isolationism, leaving the European powers to their own traditional diplomatic-military devices. As a result, under the terms of the peace signed in 1919 at Versailles, Germany was reduced to economic prostration. This humiliation in turn assisted the rise of the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler who promised to restore the prosperity and honour of the German nation. The victors likewise treated the newly created Soviet Union as an outcast, leaving the way clear for Stalin to establish a brutal dictatorship. In their insecurity and fear of a resurgent Germany, the French – rebuffed by the US when they sought a mutual security pact – vainly relied for their defence on the flawed Maginot Line, while the United Kingdom was paralysed by strong anti-war sentiment. None of these consequences had been intended by Woodrow Wilson in 1917.
On the home front, in the years immediately following the end of the war, the US endured racial conflict and riots, the suppression of civil liberties utilizing the Espionage Act of 1917, the arrest of thousands of labour radicals and socialists, the deportation of more than 550 alleged communists, the passage of restrictive immigration legislation, and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan which brought persecution of Catholics, Jews and African Americans. In 1929 the Great Depression paralysed the economy and accentuated tendencies toward political and economic autarchy, which the best efforts of President Roosevelt could not overcome even though he favoured some kind of intervention to resist the ascent of Hitler in Europe.
The US entered the Second World War when provoked by the Japanese surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. In the Declaration by the United Nations issued on January 1st, 1942, the US, together with the other nations fighting the Axis powers, proclaimed that their united goals were to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights. President Roosevelt also sought to create an international organization, the United Nations, whose primary goal would be to maintain world peace.
At a January 1943 conference in Casablanca, President Roosevelt and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, unexpectedly demanded the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. This decision shaped all subsequent events, including the total destruction of Berlin in April and May 1945 and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. The bombings were followed by the principal unpredicted outcome of the global conflagration: the US military occupation of Germany and Japan, and the maintenance of a powerful military presence in those countries lasting for the next sixty years. These in turn led to the creation of NATO and military defence pacts with Japan as facets of the not entirely unforeseen Cold War with the Soviet Union that lasted forty-five years.
Nazism and Fascism were defeated in Western Europe, but substantial turmoil and instability continued in eastern and southern Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East in the postwar era. Nationalist movements in these regions sought with varying degrees of success to throw off their European colonial masters in wars of liberation. Many new states emerged that were often economically and politically unstable entities. Peace never really came to the areas of Asia occupied by Japan. In China, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and Burma, the Second World War morphed into several wars of national liberation spanning many years and killing hundreds of thousands. Shortly after the end of the Second World War the US was drawn militarily into the Asian maelstrom. In 1950 it chose war as its instrument of policy in Korea in order to resist expansion of the pro-Soviet North into the pro-American South, and despite an interminable stalemate in Korea it made a virtually identical choice in Vietnam a decade later.
In 1964 President Johnson decided on US military intervention to sustain independent and allegedly democratic South Vietnam against a Communist North Vietnam seeking to unify all of Vietnam under its domination. The US also sought the ‘Containment’ of expansionist and aggressive Soviet Communism in the region and hoped to avoid what was described as the ‘Domino Effect’ of other states in South East Asia falling under Communist governments. However, there was no consistent, clearly articulated, American strategy or policy throughout the Vietnam War. Largescale US military operations conducted in the eight years of warfare were fruitlessly expanded to include intensive air attacks on North Vietnam and Cambodia. Towards the end of American involvement, the US drew-down its forces, replacing them with South Vietnamese troops in what President Nixon called ‘Vietnamization’ of the war. The catastrophic conflict ended with a complete US withdrawal in 1973, followed in 1975 by the total defeat of South Vietnam, and the unification of Vietnam under the control of the North.
The unforeseen consequences of Vietnam were far reaching. The American nation was deeply divided over the conduct and policy of its military during the war, and the animosity, verging on downright hostility, that developed between civilian and military elites over who was to determine and control foreign policy lingers to this day. For almost two decades a chastened US leadership refrained from large-scale military adventures, but the predilection for war as policy reasserted itself with vehemence in 1990-91.
On August 2nd, 1990, 140,000 Iraqi troops supported by 1,800 tanks invaded Kuwait, provoking a crisis that resulted in a US-led, UN-authorized coalition attack on Iraq. It began with air strikes on January 16th, 1991. It lasted a hundred hours. ‘Operation Desert Storm’ was a spectacular demonstration of US naval and air force high technology leading to a stunning military success. The largely conscript Iraqi army offered virtually no resistance and fled Kuwait. A triumphant President George H.W. Bush declared this first Persian Gulf War, ‘The right war, at the right place, at the right time and against the right enemy’. He glowingly declared that the US had finally dispelled the Vietnam syndrome and re-established its credibility. In the aftermath of the war, on March 6th, 1991, he announced to Congress the advent of a ‘New World Order’. The President was delusionary.
The unintended consequences of the first Gulf War soon revealed that the ‘New World Order’ was an empty slogan. The Iraqis had been expelled from Kuwait, but Saddam Hussein was left in power in Baghdad with an army powerful enough for him to govern with dictatorial fervour. One of the first casualties of the war was Bush himself. For his neglect of domestic issues, he was defeated by Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential elections.
In Iraq, Saddam brutally suppressed Shi’ite and Kurdish rebellions. He refused to disclose whether or not Iraq possessed or planned to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The truth remained opaque despite UN weapons inspections, a UN-sanctioned international embargo, and constant surveillance by US and UK flights over Iraqi ‘no-fly zones’. Ultimately, frustrated by ten years of Iraqi intransigence, the administration of George W. Bush decided to eliminate Saddam Hussein. The shock of the unexpected Islamic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Towers in New York City and against the Pentagon in Washington on September 11th, 2001 added urgency and immediacy to this resolve.
The US unleashed its aerial campaign of ‘shock and awe’ in late March 2003, and almost simultaneously began a motorized sweep across the desert toward Baghdad, conceived as a Clausewitzian centre of gravity whose collapse would end the war. The American strategists’ optimism proved unfounded. Evidently as faulty as his father in judging the consequences of applying American high-tech military prowess, George W. Bush flew aboard the aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln on May 1st, 2003, to proclaim that ‘Major combat operations in Iraq have ended’. More than four years’ later the world is still waiting for validation of the presidential proposition, and while it waits the unintended consequences of the attack on Saddam Hussein continue to mount in number and in horror.
The outcome of the war has not been what Washington had in mind. The list of unanticipated consequences is almost endless. Washington planners did not anticipate that US casualties after the ‘military phase’ would be more than ten times the number of US forces killed during the war – more than 3,000 since May 2003 in contrast to 109 during the war – or that global crude oil prices would reach more than $60 a barrel a year after the downfall of Saddam. They did not expect to be bogged down in a guerrilla, sectarian civil war of indefinite duration.
Washington planners had foreseen the overthrow of a sadistic dictator followed by the discovery of weapons of mass destruction and the embrace of democracy by a grateful Iraqi population. They anticipated the war resulting in a substantial reduction in the threat of international terrorism, an increase and stabilization in the region’s oil production, and the extension of American influence throughout the Middle East. Instead, they have experienced a more unstable Middle East, an increased danger from terrorist attacks world-wide, a more unpredictable oil supply, widespread mistrust of US motives throughout the world, and a nation ever more accustomed to terror alerts and infringements of personal liberty at home. Perhaps more disturbing, the vast majority of Arabs regard the military operations of the US and its allies in Iraq as terrorist acts, while a significant percentage see al-Qaeda as a ‘legitimate resistance movement’.
The turning point in shaping the outcome of the war came shortly after the US Marines symbolically toppled the great statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Fardus Square on April 9th, 2003. The US administrator in charge, Jay M. Garner, made no effort to secure government buildings, to establish law and order through the use of existing police and armed forces, or to retain the existing institutional financial, health and educational infrastructure. Instead, the breakup of institutions and looting and lawlessness was permitted, if not encouraged.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s response to the deteriorating situation was: ‘Stuff happens’. Ignoring at least a century-and-a-half of America at war, he blithely stated, ‘We do not do nation-building’. By the time steps were taken to restore order, it was too late. What the Rumsfeld war had unleashed might never be ameliorated by statesmanship and diplomacy. His blindness to history – and that of his ‘neoconservative’ colleagues in the Bush administration – has condemned the United States and its people to a future where the only certainty is more chaos. This may not be the ultimate unintended consequence of US wars, but it should be sufficient to cause policymakers and strategists to reject war as a rational continuation of policy.