Can you list 10 different types of wars? Are there “good wars” for mankind?
Posted by: adonis49 on: December 16, 2011
How many kinds of wars can you differentiate among? Are there “good wars” for mankind?
The 20th century witnessed 140 armed conflicts, totaling more than 150 millions in casualties and at least 4 folds in severe injuries . More than 20 conflicts produced over one million killed. WWI generated about 9 million killed and WWII more than 60 millions. Two dozen conflicts are still on going for decades and the toll is accumulating.
Mind that in every decade, one billion die of famine and from curable diseases. The UN estimated that currently there is one billion individual earning less than a dollar per day and have no shelters: Which means, all the most downtrodden of the billion of mankind will invariably die within the decade of famine and curable diseases.
Let’s give it a try at “war taxonomy“:
1. Wars of resistance against invaders and “foreign” army occupiers
2. Wars of independence and self-autonomy against “mandated” colonial powers (which are agreed upon by a select group of UN veto colonial powers)
3. Wars of “Necessity” for defending neighboring States that are at risk of being occupied by common enemies
4. Wars of “choices” by selecting allies at wars for promoting and trading weapons technology, under abstract ideological grounds
5. Preemptive wars decided by the 1% elite classes in the superpower club of nations, abusing the surplus jobless lower middle-class citizens, for plundering other countries wealth and raw materials…
6. Tribal wars or razzias for survival under dire living conditions
7. Civil wars for maintaining or establishing a Central State government
8. Civil wars for vanquishing old classes that subjugated the entire society
9. Civil wars among sectarian feudal Lords for the primacy of one religious sect
10. Civil wars supported by foreign powers to destabilize and divide a nation
11. Wars for testing weapon systems, chemical weapons, biological weapons… and the level of training of the troops
12. Wars for displacing other colonial nations in order to resume the plundering of raw materials… For example, how would you categorize the war of the US against Spain to conquer the Philippine? The war of the US against Spain to occupying Cuba?
13. Religious wars by two countries with majority religious affiliations
14. Wars against terror, terrorists, mafia groups, “rogue State”…
15. Wars for wiping out entire civilization and their “barbarous” ways of livings
16. Wars against the pollution of the climate and water resources
17. Wars for preserving endangered species, particularly mankind
18. Wars against apartheid or racist systems…
19. Civil disobedience movements and political disobedience movements
How would you classify the wars of the US on Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea…?
What is your categorization during the “Cold War” against the Soviet Union? A war of ideology or war of global supremacy of a line of economic system, or demonstrating the more efficient method for abusing and enslaving the lower poorer classes?
Is the evolving war taking place in Pakistan, a mishandled and mismanaged targeted war or war of civilizations?
For example, Japan was negotiating capitulation in WWII, and yet the US decided to drop Two atomic bombs: How would you call this new kind of wars?
How would you describe the war of Israel on the Palestinian Gaza Strip?
What of the war of France and England on Qadhafi? Qadhafi declined the bids of France and England to purchase weapon systems two years ago and opted for exclusive Russian weapon systems…
TomDispatch.com distinguished only two kinds of wars waged by the US:
1. Wars of choice, and
2. wars of necessity.
For example, the preemptive war on Iraq was a war of choice by the elite 1% of the US richest class and arms industries. Participating in WWII was categorized as war of necessity; why?
TomDispatch posted:
“America’s wars are remote. They’re remote from us geographically, remote from us emotionally (unless you’re serving in the military or have a close relative or friend who serves), and remote from our major media outlets, which have given us no compelling narrative about them, except that they’re being fought by “America’s heroes” against foreign terrorists and evil-doers.
America’s wars are even being fought by remote control — by robotic drones “piloted” by ground-based operators from a secret network of bases located thousands of miles from the danger of the battlefield.
The remoteness (of the battlefields), which breeds detachment if not complacency at home, is no accident. Indeed, it’s a product of the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of choice, not wars of necessity. It’s a product of the fact that we’ve chosen to create a “warrior” or “war fighter” caste in this country, which we send with few concerns and fewer qualms to prosecute Washington’s foreign wars of choice.
The results have been predictably bad. The troops suffer.
Iraqi and Afghan innocent civilians suffer even more.
And yet we don’t suffer, at least not in ways that are easily noticeable, because of that very remoteness of the war sectors.
The US administration has chosen — or let others do the choosing — to remove ourselves from all the pain and horror of the wars being waged in our name. And that’s a choice we’ve made at our peril, since a state of “permanent remote war” has weakened US military, drained the treasury, and eroded the rights and freedoms of the citizens.
World War II was a war of necessity. In such a war, all Americans had a stake. Adolf Hitler and Nazism had to be defeated; so too did Japanese militarism.
Indeed, war goals were that clear and that simple to state. For that war, we relied on uncontroversial an equitable draft of citizen-soldiers to share the burdens of defense. (Do you agree on that simplistic statement?)
Contrast this with our current 1% wars. In them, 99 percent of Americans have no stake.
The 1% who do are largely ID-card-carrying members of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower so memorably called the “military-industrial complex” in 1961.
In the half-century since, that web of crony corporations, lobbyists, politicians and retired military types, who have passed through Washington’s revolving door, has grown ever more gargantuan and tangled, engorged by untold trillions devoted to a national security and intelligence complex that seemingly dominates Washington.
They are the ones who, in turn, have dispatched another 1 percent — the lone percent of Americans in our All-Volunteer Military — to repetitive tours of duty fighting endless wars abroad.
The mission behind our wars of choice is nebulous, confusing, and in constant flux. Is it a fight against terror (which, as so many have pointed out, is in any case a method, not an enemy)?
A fight for oil and other strategic resources?
A fight to spread freedom and democracy?
A fight to build nations?
A fight to show American resolve or make the world safe from al-Qaeda?
Who really knows anymore, now that Washington seldom bothers to bring up the “why” question at all, preferring simply to fight on without surcease?
In wars of choice, there are no criteria with which to measure success, let alone determine an endpoint. We could elect to leave whenever we wanted or whenever the heat got too high, as is currently the case in Iraq (even if we are leaving behind a fortress embassy the size of the Vatican with a private army of 5,000 rent-a-guns to defend it).
We could elect to leave, as we are likely to do in Afghanistan, sometime in the years after the 2012 presidential election. The choice is ours. The people without a choice are of course the Iraqis and Afghans whom we’ll leave to pick up the pieces.
Even our vaunted Global War on Terror is a war of choice. Think about it: Who has control over our own terror: us or our enemies? We can only be terrorized in the first place if we choose to give in to fear. For example, what of the “shoe bomber” in 2001 and the “underwear bomber” in 2009?
Why did the criminally inept actions of these two losers garner so much attention (and fear-mongering) in the American media?
We allowed more American treasure to be poured into technology and screening systems that may never even have caught a terrorist. We consented to be to on surveillance ever more, and consulted ever less. We chose to reaffirm our terrors every time we doffed our shoes or submitted supinely to being scoped or groped at our nation’s airports.
Our distant permanent wars, our 1% wars of choice, will remain remote from our emotions and our thinking, requiring few sacrifices except from our troops, who grow ever more remote from our polity. This is especially true of America’s young adults, between 18 and 29 years of age, who are the least likely to have family members in the military, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.
The result? An already emergent warrior-caste might grow ever more estranged from the 99%, creating tensions and encouraging grievances that quite possibly could be manipulated by that other 1 percent: the power-brokers money-makers, and string-pullers, already so eager to call out the police to bully and arrest occupy movements in numerous cities across this once-great land.
Our Military or Their Military?
As we fight wars of choice in distant lands for ever-shifting goals, what if “our troops” simply continue to grow ever more remote from us? What if they become “their” troops? Is this not the true terror we should be mobilizing as a nation to prevent? The terror of separating our military almost totally from our nation — and ourselves.
As Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it recently to Time: “In the Long term, if the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can’t tolerate.”
Behold a horrifying fate: a people that allows its wars of choice to compromise the very core of its self-image as a freedom-loving society, while letting itself be estranged from the young men and women who served in the front lines of these wars.
Here’s an American fact: the 99% are far too remote from our wars of choice and those who fight them. To reclaim the latter, we must end the former.
And that’s a war of necessity that has to be fought — and won.” End of quote
Note: You may read https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/the-manifest-destiny-of-america-and-its-long-term-consequences/
Adonis Diaries 
October 11, 2016 at 12:31 pm
Good Blog! Types of war? How about America’s involvement in Iraq’s civil war was more about awarding lucrative US military supply contracts to Corporate America than trying to secure Western access to oil reserves. Maybe it was a war of contracts. And maybe America’s corporate elite badly wanted this war to supplement consumer demand.
October 12, 2016 at 10:26 am
It is all about keeping the military industry complexes working full gear