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Today, war is inseparable from profiteering

Wars of ancient times can be broadly categorised as conquests of land by rulers to enhance power, prestige and prosperity of their people, but wars of the Occident during the past four centuries have diversified into multidimensional sectors, with the principal theme from the late 19th century being to turn the conflict into ‘war as a racket’.
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Undoubtedly, the most enduring factor and feature of human civilisation is war, irrespective of the era, geography or stage of evolution. The fundamental questions are: who initiates war, why and what for? To achieve what? There’s simply no single answer to these questions except to state that war has several connotations and myriad factors to fall back on to initiate, defend or justify it. It depends on who’s on which side, both before and after the war. So much so that it would be pertinent to ask why there have been 40 major land invasions of Indian territory resulting in skirmishes, conflicts and wars in South Asia, culminating in Indians fighting each other on their own land in 1947. The implication is simple: war includes civil war as 11 broad types of conflict are identified by the universally accepted Black’s Law Dictionary.

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Thus, war stands generally for a hostile conflict by means of armed forces; ‘civil war’ (American Civil War, 1861-65); ‘imperfect war’ (an inter-country conflict limited in terms of places or people, akin to Pakistan-Afghan borderland conflict); ‘irregular war’ (that doesn’t meet the requisites of a regular war (insurgencies in the Third World); ‘just war’ or bellum justum (war that the proponent considers morally and legally justifiable, such as the war against the aggressive, totalitarian regime of Pakistan in 1971); ‘mixed war’ (armed groups versus nations in South Asia); ‘perfect war’ (war involving an entire country against another: 19th and 20th-century Franco-German conflicts over Alsace and Lorraine); ‘private war’ (conflicts of warlords); ‘regular war’ (starting with a declaration, such as the First and Second World Wars); ‘revolutionary war’ (post-French Revolution violence and post-Bolshevik Revolution foreign invasions); and ‘war of aggression’ (Pakistani aggression of 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999, and Chinese invasion of 1962 and ceaseless violation of Indian territory from 1950s to the present times).

In the Indian context, whatever the reasons or provocations, the primary trigger for the start of the eighth-century foreign invasions, leading to war with a variety of indigenous rulers, turned out to be ‘war for water’. The invaders from barren/sterile lands faced chronic water scarcity. Hence, the Sindh region — through which flowed the mighty Sindhu (Indus) — was a marvel for the Arabian invader king because to this day the giant geography of Arabia doesn’t have any permanent river.

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Hence, for any person who’s never seen a vast water body like Sindhu, winding its way through 1,500 miles from snow to sea, cannot be blamed for being attracted to fertile soil, abundant water and consequential comfortable lives of the folks. Will it, therefore, be wrong to suggest that wars against the people of India stood out as a monumental clash between a water-centric civilisation and a desert civilisation?

Be that as it may, let’s be clear that whereas wars of ancient times could broadly be categorised as conquests of land by rulers to enhance power, prestige and prosperity of their people, wars of the Occident during the past four centuries have diversified into multidimensional sectors, with the principal theme from the late 19th century being turning the conflict into ‘war as a racket’. A land war for business, cash and profit through all means.

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“War is a racket,” wrote US Major General Smedley Butler in 1935 in a 51-page monograph, narrating his career experience. Butler saw through the accrual of business profits from warfare during his deployment to the tiny Haiti in the Caribbean Sea as the Commander of the US occupation force. He abhorred subsidisation of industrialists through public funding, leading to profiteering at the altar of slaughtered men, women and children.

He questioned the ‘war racket’. Who makes profit? Who pays the bill? How to smash the racket and “to hell with war” as its “profits are reckoned in dollars and losses in lives.” In an astounding self-confession of his role in the suppression of a tiny island by a giant (the US), Butler lamented that he made Mexico safe for US oil interests; helped make Haiti and Cuba ‘decent’ places for National City Bank to generate healthy revenue and ensured the plunder of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of the Wall Street. “I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of the Brown Brothers and brought light to Dominican Republic for American sugar interests,” he added.

By now, it’s clear as to what modern war is, and how things happen. To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s memorable words during the 1940 Battle of Britain, one sees through the murderous war machine thus: Never before in the history of world warfare were so much profits made by so few at the expense of so many millions, dead or alive.

After the Occident, let’s go to the Orient which, too, creates all-round chaos through Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz’s theory of ‘war by other means’ in which the method may look different, but the steadfast motive and end result remain the same — profit.

There, however, is a big problem facing the Dragon, not yet being used to a series of outstation wars of the Occident across the globe. Thus, China’s economic growth may very well stultify and crash in case it imitates the West’s war pattern to establish its hegemony in the East.

As rightly put by historian AJP Taylor: “Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a great war, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one (or to fight it on a limited scale).” But, will the warmongers of the East and the West, craving for wealth creation for a few, listen to such wise counsel? Never.

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