When it comes to ranking specific wars for population-adjusted death toll, even by Pinker's methods, he has a hard time finding a war worse than World War II. Pinker reproduces a somewhat varied version of a chart also available online. The chart in the book ranks eight events ahead of World War II on the list of "The 20 Worst Things People Have Done to Each Other." Five of the eight are events that took place over multiple centuries, and the other three are all from centuries ago in China or Mongolia. This is where we get into backtracking on a positive trend. Pinker argues persuasively that violence, including war, has been decreasing in Europe for centuries, excepting outbursts like the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and the two world wars. Pinker calls the period since World War II "The Long Peace." This does not mean we have to stop thinking of World War II as the worst isolated thing that we (humanity) have done to ourselves, or at least as one of the top five. And if you consider the permanent war footing that World War II left behind in Washington, D.C., then the destruction wreaked by that event leaps into an easy lead.
Pinker claims that no developed country has expanded its territory by conquering another since the late 1940s. He might have added that non-recognition of conquered territory began in 1929 with the Kellogg-Briand Pact. But something else advanced in the late 1940s and has been growing ever since, namely the coating of the globe with U.S. military bases, currently numbering nearly 1,000 in some 150 countries, including places like Diego Garcia where the entire population was forcibly removed by the United Kingdom, whether or not that counts as conquest (I have a hard time seeing why it shouldn't).
One page after discussing Iraq War lies, Pinker dismisses the idea of resource wars without suspecting that we may have already seen some and that wars may have more than a single motivation. Pinker is unconcerned that global warming could lead to wars through pressure on resources or immigration. Rising economic inequality is also not a serious threat to peace in Pinker's view. Pinker is even less disturbed by nuclear proliferation. He doesn't take time to consider the number of near misses or the growing possibility that an accident or misunderstanding or fit of rage will launch a nuclear weapon. There's no mention of the depleted uranium weapons already used, the "tactical" nukes developed, and the first-strike policy adopted by the United States. Pinker acknowledges the danger only in a very glass-half-full kind of way:
"If one were to calculate the amount of destruction that nations have actually perpetrated as a proportion of how much they could perpetrate, given the destructive capacity available to them, the postwar decades would be many orders of magnitude more peaceable than any time in history."
Pinker, it turns out, is a fan of nuclear energy, even though nuclear energy facilities enable the spread of nuclear weaponry. He falsely claims that the Three Mile Island accident killed no one and that the use of nuclear power could reduce global warming, which appears to be mistaken. (Pinker also unquestioningly accepts the U.S. government's story of who caused the 2001 anthrax attacks.)
Nuclear apocalypse and global warming are dismissed by Pinker as irrelevant to his optimistic calculations. But one reason that people may believe our own times are more, rather than less, violent than the past could be our awareness of the possibility of total destruction, even though it will remain only a possibility until that moment when and if it happens.
Pinker's analysis of cultural trends rendering us less supportive of war making is powerful. But it lacks any consideration of the degree to which governments that make war represent the will of their people. Also missing is a thorough treatment of the motivations of those powerful individuals who actually choose war. While the people of the United States have been moving away from violence, our government has been continuing wars opposed by the majority of us in polls. Some of these wars have been planned for years and even marketed to us for years with skillful propaganda. It is a stretch to assume that these wars are made because the bureaucrats manipulating the country into them lack self-control, a diagnosis Pinker makes of people who tend to be violent.
So, I am inclined to agree with the prescription Pinker's book suggests, but does not make, as long as I can add to it. Yes we must educate and develop a strong democratic society. But it should be truly democratic, or at least representative. Free trade need not be corporate trade, and political campaigns need not be among its commodities. Weapons need not be its leading export, but something else could be. Pinker never quite gets around to the fact that a more successful as well as less violent alternative has been found to war in the form of nonviolent action. That is an area for investment. War can be understood as archaic in the context of its replacement. Pinker notes that ridicule was the powerful force most responsible for ending duelling. War could use some good ridicule right about now.
What should we make of the "end" of the war on Iraq? Well, the congressional authorization is being kept in place and transformed into an authorization for war anywhere forever. Drone strikes, bombing campaigns, and kidnappings may bring lower death rates, at least until there's blowback. But legally, to the extent that any of this is legal, the Iraq War is not ending. Thousands of State Department mercenaries are remaining in Iraq, and the U.S. Army has just hired mercenaries with a no-bid contract for an unknown amount to escort convoys through Iraq. Meanwhile, troops are on stand-by in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and U.A.E. So, the "ending" of the war is limited. It's also ending despite everything President Obama had it in his power to do, not because of anything he's done since taking office. And it's ending in part because the exposure by whistleblowers of what this war has been resulted in the Iraqi government refusing legal immunity from criminal prosecution to U.S. forces that stayed.
And yet, nonetheless, most of those forces have indeed left. Iraq remains a devastated nation at risk, but to a greater extent Iraqis will have the chance now to fail or succeed on their own, something a majority of them have wanted for years.
As war is transformed by robots as well as evolving cultural norms, might the Iraq War be the last war of its type, ever, as Pinker and Goldstein suggest it might be? Well, there's one other similar war still not ended. Our first step should be to stop the war on Christmas: cease fire in Afghanistan!
Beyond that, all we can say for sure, I think, is that eternal vigilance will make the end of war more likely.
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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organizations http://rootsaction.org and http://democrats.com
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