Reasons for War II

Why War?

Lecture 3
Monday January 17, 2011

PEACE ST 2BB3: Introduction to the Study of War

Dr Colin Salter, Centre for Peace Studies, McMaster University

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 Outline

• Recap
• Why do states go to war?

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 Recap

• Identity
• War (struggle) gives us meaning

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 Reasons for war

• Civil unrest • Ideology

• Resources • Fear

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wars are fought because powerful and influential
individual , usually in search of personal aggrandizement
or revenge (‘ego’) and often motivated to increase their
wealth and/or power (‘greed’), persuade, manipulate,
and/or command their compatriots (‘groups’) to pursue
their personal and national agendas (‘ideologies’) by
force of arms...
Barash and Webel (2009)

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 Next years wars?

• 33 conflicts in 2010
• Speculation on 16 new conflicts in 2011

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 ‘Imperial Grand Strategy’

• Roots
• Manifestations
• Implications

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The target of preventative war must have several
characteristics:

1. It must be virtually defenseless

2. It must be important enough to be worth the
trouble
3. There must be away to portray it as the ultimate
evil and an immanent threat to our survival.

Chomsky (2003)

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Ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy
supplies, and strategic resources.
US President Bill Clinton, in Chomsky (2003)

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 Iraq: Disaster Capitalism

• A threat (WMD)
• An opportunity

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 Summary

• Ideology
• Fear
• Capitalisation

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 Citations & further reading
Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick (1992) Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media [film],
Zeitgeist Films.

Anonymous (2010) ‘Next Years Wars’, Foreign policy, December 28

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/12/28/next_years_wars

Michael D Horvath (2008) Wikileaks.org—An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents,
or Terrorist Groups?, Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch, Army Countrintelligence Centre.
18 March.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/03/wikithreat.pdf
[http://wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf]

Noam Chomsky (2003) Hegemony or Survival: America’s quest for global dominance, New York: Holt
Paperbacks.

Kayvan Farzaneh, Andrew Swift and Peter Williams (2010) ‘Planet War’, Foreign Policy, February 22.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/22/planet_war

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) Manufacturing Consent:The Political Economy of the Mass
Media, Pantheon.

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 Citations & further reading
Michael Ignatieff (2004) ‘The Challenges of American Imperial Power’ in Brian Loveman (ed) Strategy
for Empire: U.S. Regional Security Policy in the Post-Cold War Era, Landham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Naomi Klein (2008) The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Toronto: Random House.

John Pilger (2010) The War You Don’t See [film], UK: Network.

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 Image sources
Pablo Picasso (1937) Guernica. Oil on canvas.
Unknown soldier in Iraq. Date unknown. sourced from http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2007/06/09/some-
interior-situational-sources-war-–-part-v/
Carlos Latuff (2003) War 2. Sourced from http://latuff2.deviantart.com/art/War-2-27832944
Crimethinc (undated) War on Terror/Drugs. http://www.crimethinc.com/tools/downloads/
Unknown (2003) ‘A Marine drapes an American flag over a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’, April 9. Slate
Magazine. http://www.slate.com/id/2162154/

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