This post originally appeared on my political blog at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-cold-war-aka-long-peace-and-more-on.html.
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I have now finished reading "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" (pub. Harper, 2018, ISBN 978-0-06-236722-8, Amazon) by Paul Thomas Chamberlin, and am impressed and moved.
It turns out that, during the Cold War (a time also referred to as "the long peace"), deaths in violence totalled at least 21 million - 14 million of those in a series of wars and violent events in East, then South East, South, South West and West Asia.
Since the end of the Cold War, deaths in those regions have declined.
From Mr Chamberlin's book:
"Despite Huntington, Lewis, and Kaplan’s dire warnings, the world experienced an overall decrease in the level of violence after 1990. Certain places, such as the former Yugoslavia, became more violent. But even Iraq, a nation that experienced two U.S. invasions, a decade of harsh sanctions, and years of brutal civil war, suffered more casualties on a yearly basis during the Iran-Iraq War than in the quarter century following 1990. Far from restraining conflict, the superpower confrontation actually fueled greater violence around the world. With the exceptions of Yugoslavia and sub-Saharan Africa, which was devastated by the Rwandan genocide and the horrifically violent and largely ignored Second Congo War, the post–Cold War world was a more peaceful place."
Now, I consider a nuclear war, which was a distinct possibly several times during the Cold War, would have killed tens and probably hundreds of millions of people (particularly as a result of any nuclear winter) [Note 1] , so I can see the benefits of avoiding a third world war between the nuclear armed superpowers, but I also consider that the price of that should be acknowledged, and that price includes deaths, rapes, injury and wounds of various types, destruction & devastation, setbacks from ideological fixations, and the rise of new forms of violent extremism.
We avoided a catastrophe, but did not do so without damage, and this book makes that very clear.
I also consider that this book emphasises a point I wrote about (in the context of the Korean War) some time ago: the benefit of stopping.
". . . June 1982, the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), the military brass, and top Ba’ath officials held a meeting without the dictator to hammer out a cease-fire proposal. Baghdad proposed a truce in exchange for acceptance of the prewar status quo—a tacit admission that the war had been a mistake. Had Khomeini accepted the proposal, Saddam would likely have been pushed out of power. Tehran’s rejection, however, gave the Iraqi leader an opening to reassert his control."
"The
proponents of the former option could argue that Tehran had
successfully defended its territory and, in the eyes of much of the
international community, been the victim of Iraqi aggression—to continue
the war would cast the regime as the aggressor and risk further
alienating it from the wider world. Those calling for invasion could
argue, conversely, that Iran had paid a heavy price in the war and now
had an opportunity to destroy the hated Ba’athist regime and restore
access to the Shia holy sites at Najaf and Karbala, to the south of
Baghdad. While Khomeini understood the dangers of invading Iraq, he was
loath to sue for peace—tens of thousands of Iranians had died in the
fighting, and their sacrifice must be avenged. Sometime around June 20,
1982, the regime made the fateful decision to invade Iraq in a bid to
destroy Saddam’s regime."
So,
just as millions of death, untold suffering for millions more, and
devastation that secured the despot's place in Noth Korea could have
been avoided by not tit-for-tat invading North Korea in 1950, so too
could all that has happened around Hussein and his legacy have possibly been avoided, or limited, by Iran not tit-for-tat invading Iraq . . .
There are multiple opportunities to pause and reflect as one reads this book, and I recommend that all interested in world peace do so.
Notes
