Roots of War

"Wars are caused by hunger and poverty" said someone I immensely respect. But I could not agree. War is caused by the expansive and defensive masculine psyche...almost always. Hunger is the sometimes material cause of war; but it is neither a sufficient nor a necessary cause. We see poverty without war and war without poverty. Hunger is to war like wood is to fire: often enough wood is a material occasion for fire, but you can have immense areas of wood (forests) without fire and the worst fires can be chemical, nuclear, paper or just straw. Males intuitively understand war because already in the playground and locker room there are bullies: males who are impelled to domininate and demean others. Women often lack such understanding. The maternal instinct understands that little one need food and basic necessities. Unfamiliar with the dymanics of masculine aggression and competiton, they hear that the Sunnis and Shiites are fighting and instinctively think: the poor people must be hungry; let them work and eat and we will do away with war. The great warmongers of history were not hungry, except in the sense of "libido dominando"...the lust for power and domination. Think Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, Napoleon, the Japanese and Nazi empires of the 1940s, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. War is an explosion of the defensive or expansive masculine ego. A classic example: the Bush invasion of Iraq. Dick Cheny was not hungry. He was defensive. Apparently, he was terrified that we were vulnerable to another terrorist attack and he had explicitly vowed that such would not happen on his watch. Out of this paranoia, he construed questionable intelligence to ensure that he would not underestimate the threat of an attack. As Saddam Hussein resisted inspections so as to fake the Iranians into believing he had WMDs, the one who took the bait was Cheny. He fell into rash judgment, a very important sin against the seventh commandment. Contributing to this rush to error was a certain arrogance, a confidence in American might, and a Neo-conservative presumption of the ultimate superiority and appeal of capitalism and democracy. With the invasion, he imagined that we would rid the world of a threat and push forward the inexorable victory of "the American way" in the Mideast. At one and the same time, the Bush administration was flush with post-Cold-War American confidence and trembling with insecurity about our vulnerability to terrorist attack. This conbimation of cockiness and camouflaged insecurity is the makeup of every bully and every war. The only hunger involved in the Iraq invasion was that of the populace who were starving under the Clinton boycott: a hunger that was relieved by the invasion. This "humanitarian intervention" was probably the best reason for the invasion even as it was hardly a leading motivation. The worst war of my 65-year lifetime was certainly the Iran-Iraq war, waged by fabulously wealthy oil countries, which claimed a million Iranians and almost half as many Iraquis. Saddam Hussein invaded, not because he was hungry, but because he was threatened by the repurcussion of the Iran revolution among his own Shiites as he was ambitious to enstall himself as the strongman of the area. Again: the interplay of power, arrogance, and insecurity. To wage war requires power, especially in our world: it is not the recourse of the hungry and the powerless. Hitler waged war after he had revived Germany into a technological powerhouse. Hunger is the sometimes occasion of war, but more frequently war is the cause of hunger as it is an immense waste of resources. The Islamist war against women is a case in point: education of women can only improve the economy, yet the Taliban torture girls for going to schools. The roots of warfare go back to Lucifer's rebellion: it was a matter of pride, not hunger. The greatest act of war was the crucifixion: perpetuated by welll-nourished religious leaders and an imperial governor. Warfare is quintessentially a male sin. Women don't seem to get it.