What should South Korea do now?

Nothing. Now the highly relevant Starcraft playing cat and kthxbye.

OK, you might be wondering why I think anyone would want to do nothing when another country sinks your ships and otherwise behaves provocatively for decades.

The first part of the answer is economy - entire economy of North Korea is worth PPP $40billion. That's about as much as Alaska or Luxembourg.

Other countries which might take part in conflict - some on South Korean side, some neutral, none on North Korean - are worth:

• South Korea - 34x as much
• Russia - 54x as much
• Japan - 110x as much
• China - 200x as much
• USA - 350x as much

If everyone had similar levels of military spending as part of GDP, North Korea would be one big pile of rubble before I even had my second coffee. Now this isn't true, North Korea is the most militarized country in the world. It's hard to get good estimates, but according to some figures ratios of military budgets are:

• South Korea - 4x
  
• Japan - 8x
• Russia - 10x
• China - 13x
• USA - 125x

It shows how insane North Korea is by even trying to catch up with its neighbours - some of which are low military spenders like China, and Japan; others are high military spenders like Russia and USA (and that "high" is still lower than countries like Greece), South Korea is surprisingly sane 2.7% considering environment it is in.

So there's absolutely no way North Korea can hope to actually "win" the war, if it actually started.

War is bad for economy

These ratios don't tell the whole story. Not only is North Korea ridiculously poor - it is about as poor as it was in 1953 and not improving at all.

South Korean economy is growing rapidly. Chinese economy is growing explosively. Japanese and American economies are growing - maybe not as quickly as those, but they reliably grow. Russian grows and shrinks as commodity prices change, that's a story for another post. And what about North Korea? It was doing fine until 1973 - at which point is was still better than the South - when it hit a wall, and stopped growing for tho decades, and then collapsed hard when the entire Communist world crashed in 1991, getting worse every single year ever since.

North Koreans are desperate. With each year, their chance of not winning but even putting up a good fight is diminishing.

This, paradoxically, means that everyone else would really really want to avoid a war. If you're getting richer and richer, while your enemy is getting more and more fucked up - why speed things up? Sure, militaristic dick waving looks good on TV and can get you some extra votes - but if you're anything resembling rational you'd prefer to postpone the conflict - assuming you want one in the first place.

How empires are built

This grow-economy-and-wait approach is how empires get created. Did Brits try to engage in European Continental Wars? They mostly let the Continentals bleed each others, while they kept themselves safe with the Royal Navy, picked only easy fights, and let the stability led to explosive economic growth which eventually led to their global domination.

That's how American Empire started as well - other than the infamous 1812-1815 war with Canada Americans mostly stayed isolationist, picking up Indians and growing their population and economy - after all other empires bled themselves to death twice USA became the world superpower by default.

A quick aside - it is commonly incorrectly believed that America has seen significant fighting in two world wars, or like ever. In the First World war it was rather laughable - Americans joined when the war was nearing the end, and by the time Americans reached Europe, it was over. Even countries like Bulgaria and Romania had seen far more fighting.

That of course without civilian deaths, Spanish flu deaths, countless wars following WW1, and such. WW1 was essentially Germany+Austria vs France+Russia+Britain.

WW2 was even simpler - being basically Germany vs Soviet Union, with a second unrelated front of Japan vs China - Americans and for that matter British had very little active role in either.

And the entire Western Front? For German soldiers fighting Soviets getting sent to the Western Front was like getting sent for holidays. The only reason Western Allies even managed to land in Europe was because Nazis were forced to move everyone they could to fight the Ruskis, and there was barely anyone left to defend anything.

America didn't get its empire by winning wars - it got it by not getting involved in wars too much. Lend-Lease , the Marshall Plan, and a few successful CIA operations here and there did far more for the empire than the actual military, which is only good at bombing whoever cannot defend themselves.

And this is precisely what all East Asian powers do. Why even bother spending buckets of money on armies? Japan and China have ridiculously small armies by international standards. Taiwan and South Korea are closer to world average - but considering what kind of danger they're facing close-to-world-average shows incredible levels of restraint. No, they just sit there quietly, making shoes, building iPhones, drawing tentacle porn, steadily growing their industries to catch up with the West - time is on their side.

And starting a war now? Not only your odds are worse than in foreseeable future, you risk messing up with your economic growth. There's nothing particularly Black-Swanish about it - wars take much more time and much more money than anyone predicts more often than not. Ask Americans about Afghanistan. Or Soviets about Afghanistan. Or Brits about Afghanistan. I'd like to see a list of wars which were actually won on budget - it would be a really short one I believe.

A small distraction - nukes

Every discussion of North Korea invariably gets sidetracked into an entirely irrelevant issue of nukes. Here's the only funny Subnormality strip ever:

This is highly accurate. Nuclear weapons never had any use. Manhattan Projects was a highly misguided idea of getting nukes to get long term strategic advantage over the Soviet Union - Japan never being a serious threat - and it lasted only 4 years before Soviets managed to catch up.

And as far as everyone knows, North Korea does not have nuclear weapons. Yes, they've probably managed to setup a nuclear explosion, but amount of damage a few tiny nukes without proper ICBMs can do is fairly low compared to the power of conventional artillery aimed at Seoul right now. This is the same mistake Nazis did with V2 - sure, they were cool, but they cost so ridiculously much compared to spending the same amount on conventional hardware Alies were very probably very happy about them.

Projects like North Korean nukes and V-2 are not military projects. They are half propaganda, and half massive cases of optimism bias in planning.

And even if North Koreans had large number of good nukes on good missiles, it's not at all certain they'd use them. Everyone during the Second World War - and you don't get more total war than that - had massive stocks of chemical weapons. And yet, they weren't used at all. At least against people who could retaliate in kind - Japanese had no qualms about mustard-gasing Chinese, just like Brits had no qualms about mustard-gasing Iraqis, and so on.

Demographic transition

And now we're getting to my main point - why South Korea is extremely unwilling to take part in any war. Unlike Americans, who can sit at home, eating supersized burgers, and drinking gallons of HFCS-laced soda while their missiles drop on Pyongyang, or even Japanese, Chinese, and Russians, who might get a few missiles here and there but will be mostly fine - the largest population center of South Korea is just 40km from the border. It doesn't require fancy guided ICBM to kill someone - a totally straightforward dumb howitzer can reach it just fine, and good luck evacuating a 25M people big metropolitan area in a hurry.

If war starts, there will be blood. Now you might be wondering - what happened to the world that it's so unwilling to have people die? Countries used to be totally blasé about a few thousand of their citizens here and a few thousand there dying. In some places like Afghanistan and most of Africa this is still the case. Yet - most of the world is highly unwilling to risk that. Even when wars take place - ridiculous amount of money is spent on protecting their soldiers' lives.

And the simple answer is demographic transition. In countries with high birth rates life is cheap. So what if someone dies? If your son dies, you make another - it's not terribly hard. Yes, you'd rather he didn't, but on the scale of most important things in life a small chance of child's death is not that high.

On the other hand once demographic transition happens, people have fewer children and have children later - it's all different. People spend ridiculous amount of money and effort on their children, are highly overprotective (limiting children's liberties in process, but that's another stories), and under no circumstances would they be willing to risk death or injury due to politics. And if your child dies? Not only you lose all investment you put into them, you are probably too old to have any more children, and your grandchildren aren't coming. There is probably some deep Darwinian reason why it works like that, I won't be getting into this - but the correlation between demographic transition and unwillingness to risk your lives in war is huge.

Notice this doesn't apply about lives of others - Americans don't give a shit if a few hundred thousand Iraqis here and there die; Israelis don't give a shit about bombing a Palestinian school here or a hospital there - seriously, who cares about "them" as long as "we" are fine?

Here's the best test case - WW1 and WW2. In 1913 total fertility was 6.3 in Russian, 3.52 in Germany 2.93 in UK, and 2.47 in France - they were at different stages of demographic transition, but still long before the point at which lives become scarce. So who cares if a million young men die meaninglessly in trenches?

In 1938 it was very different. Russia (I wonder how gapminder draws boundaries from these times, anyway...) was at 4.74 - still in the "so who cares if a ten million of our citizens die?". Germany was in "we should put serious effort into blitzkrieg - a few deaths due to quick war are acceptable, but painful" territory with 2.25. But France and UK were already well into "surrender if you can see tanks from Paris/London" territory with 2.13 and 1.84 - the only reason UK didn't surrender was its ability to wage war remotely, protected by the Royal Navy. And just look how ridiculous was their overreaction to small amount of bombing. So 43 thousand civilians died? These numbers are a rounding error compared to what was happening on the Eastern Front or in Asia.

Likewise Japan was very Kamikaze-happy with its 3.88 fertility rate - something Americans with their 2.22 would never try.

Once fertility drops, anyone's willingness to fight does too. And that's why we have so few wars in post-demographic-transition world. You still think I'm making this up? Look at fertility rates top 10:

1.  Niger - somehow managed to get away with just a few coups, and some minor Tuareg rebellions.
2.  Guinea-Bissau - had civil war 1998-1999
3.  Afghanistan - had a war or another every year since 19th century.
4.  Burundi - had civil war 1993 to 2005. 
5.  Liberia - one civil war 1989–1996, another 1999–2003.
6.  Democratic Republic of the Congo - managed to pull one of the top 10 bloodiest wars of all times, just a few years ago; not counting minor ones.
7.  East Timor - decades of fighting against Indonesia.
8.  Mali - doing surprisingly well for the list, just some spillover conflicts from neighbouring countries and minor fights between government and Tuaregs.
9.  Sierra Leone - civil war 1991-2002.
10.  Uganda - one war, another civil war, plus participation in the Congo bloodbath on top of that.
    

And this is what the entire world looked like most almost all of human history. So who's on the other end? This is actually pretty good.

1.  Macau (PRC)
2.  Hong Kong (PRC)
3.  Singapore
4.  Republic of China (Taiwan)
5.  South Korea
6.  Japan
7.  Montserrat (UK)
8.  Lithuania
9.  Czech Republic
10.  Belarus

So other than some tiny territories - the lowest fertility and therefore least belligerent counties are exactly the most interested ones - South Korea and Japan.

By the way Czechs and Lithuanians are somewhat overstated here - they have fairly large migration to Western Europe, and many of their babies are born abroad. Their fertility is low, but not as drastically low as implied by the rank.

And no, North Korea isn't likely to be terribly trigger-happy either. Their fertility rate is 1.85 - soldiers will be difficult to replace. Not to mention they'll lose the war in a week.

Conclusions

South Korea should go to UN and get some sternly worded letter from Security Council and let it pass. Far more people could be saved by replacing a busy crossing with a roundabout than by stopping North Koreans from sinking your ships (or for that matter, stopping bin Laden from flying planes into your buildings).

Every argument shows that South Koreans win nothing by going into the war, and they will find loses unacceptable.

Now that I made Greeks and Koreans hate me, it's only 190 or so nationalities to go.

In search for Just Wars

I know people don't really read my political posts. If I wanted to be read, I'd be writing angry rants about video games, programming, and Harry Potter fan-fiction.

Here's a quick post about politics, namely about just wars, and other violence. Right wing nuts are generally pro-war, no matter who's fighting whom. What's surprising is that even left wing nuts are pro-war. Here's some Chomsky, it doesn't get much left-wing-nuttier than that:

ROBERT B. SILVERS: ... Under what conditions, if any, can violent action be said to be "legitimate"? ...

NOAM CHOMSKY: My general feeling is that this kind of question can't be answered in a meaningful way when it's abstracted from the context of particular historical concrete circumstances. Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the consequences of such action are to eliminate a still greater evil. Now there are people of course who go much further and say that one must oppose violence in general, quite apart from any possible consequences. I think that such a person is asserting one of two things. Either he's saying that the resort to violence is illegitimate even if the consequences are to eliminate a greater evil; or he's saying that under no conceivable circumstances will the consequences ever be such as to eliminate a greater evil. The second of these is a factual assumption and it's almost certainly false. One can easily imagine and find circumstances in which violence does eliminate a greater evil. As to the first, it's a kind of irreducible moral judgment that one should not resort to violence even if it would eliminate a greater evil. And these judgments are very hard to argue. I can only say that to me it seems like an immoral judgment.

Oh, really? So, could you please point me to some examples of wars that successfully eliminated greater evils? The criteria are, you can agree that they are sane:

1. Without the war, very large number of people would have died or otherwise suffered.
2. There was no other plausible way of saving them, and all alternatives have been tried.
3. Thanks to the war, most of those people were saved.
4. Few people died or otherwise suffered in the war, especially civilians, but also participants. Some suffering is allowed, but only if it's vastly overwhelmed by suffering prevented.
5. It must have been possible to predict it advance that this success was very likely. Lucky wins don't count. And of course, it must have worked. Failed good intentions don't count.
   

I have really difficult time finding out wars that fit these criteria, even with very liberal grading.

The latest war in Iraq

The latest war in Iraq is easily not anywhere close to a just war. Saddam wasn't a nice guy, but amount of suffering he was causing recently was quite insignificant as for third world dictator standards, so it fails on count one, and automatically two and three.

According to Lancet estimates there were 1.3 million excess deaths due to it. Many other Iraqis suffered in other ways. So fail on count four.

Only fools would have expected an easy win, and being greeted with flowers, it's the Middle East after all. All claims about WMD, Saddam's connections to Al-Qaeda and so on don't count, as they were known lies, and even if Bush believed them, they would fail by count five.

Score: 0/5

The latest war in Afghanistan

This war is slightly better, as number of casualties on all sides is closer to 60 thousand, not counting another 10 thousands or so in the spill-off to Pakistan, what's most likely an underestimate in a poorly researched place like Afghanistan, but still much lower than Iraq's. And Bin Laden was in Afghanistan.

Still, it fails on all counts. There were people who died in Al-Qaeda terrorism, but other than a single well-known case, repetition of which was fairly easy to prevent, their numbers were really low. Even with 9/11 much lower than number of people who could be expected to die in the war, so count one fails.

There were plenty of plausible alternatives for getting or killing Bin Laden, and dealing with terrorism, so fail at criterion two. See IRA and ETA for good examples. Or even Clinton-style targeted killings.

Terrorism increased greatly after the war, so it fails criterion three. Count four doesn't fail that badly, assuming figures are not overly underestimated (they usually are, counting only direct deaths), but it's still pretty large number just to catch one guy. Let's be generous and count it as a point.

Anyone who expected an easy win in Afghanistan must have slept through history classes. And Afghanistan is still in chaos, terrorists still terrorize, and Bin Laden was never caught or killed, so criterion five spectacularly fails.

Score: 1/5

The Second World War

Let's move back in time to World War II, widely proclaimed to be the most just war in history, without any basis in fact.

So first, suffering. This is very likely - if everyone just gave Hitler what he wanted (mostly Central Europe to share with Stalin), millions of people would be reduced to status of second class citizens, and depending on how it would go, hundreds of thousands or even millions would die. It's not certain if large scale death camps would be implemented without the war - it seems Nazis were fine with Jews and everyone else they didn't like just getting out of their country (500,000 or so emigrated from Germany before the war, also see the famous Madagascar Plan), but let's assume they really wanted to perform massive genocide. In any case, the first criterion is quite plausible, so full point.

The second criterion fails. The obvious plausible alternative of letting people persecuted by Nazis emigrate to other countries, most were not terribly happy about letting them in, even through Nazis were quite glad about just kicking them out (first confiscating most of their property). Forced resettlement would suck, but it still beats getting gassed.

Now, the third one fails miserably - Nazis killed pretty much everyone they wanted to kill. Most people who would have suffered living under Nazi dictatorship, were instead forced to live under Soviet dictatorship. Approximately 70 million people have died, most of them outside territories that Nazis would have if the world decided against going to war with them. So it's spectacular failure on the counts three and four.

There could be no expectation of an easy victory - spectacular fall of France might have been unexpected, but World War I style trench warfare with millions of casualties was the primary alternative. It's not even obvious if Allies really cared about defeating Nazis - if they were serious about winning, going after them in September 1939 while they were busy in Poland seemed like the best moment, but they didn't do anything until they were attacked.

Score: 1/5

American Civil War

Here's another "glorious" war - American Civil War. It's really historically inaccurate, but let's grant the common myth that the cause of war was abolition of slavery. There were four million slaves in USA in 1860, to be freed. So a somewhat mythical point, but granted.

As for alternatives being untried, most of the world abolished already or soon after 1860, without getting into any major wars. Even countries highly dependent on slave labour, which quite smoothly transitioned into poor waged labour, with or without compensations for former slave owners. There's no reason why it wouldn't work in United States, sooner or later. No points here.

As for point three, yes, all slaves were freed, so entire point here. Sure, there was a century of discrimination ahead, but let's not get too nitpicking.

Point four utterly fails. 620 thousand soldiers were killed, plus some unspecified number of civilians. It was quite clean as far as wars go, so I wouldn't expect a huge value for civilian excess deaths. Still, that's only 6 slaves freed for one death. I'm sure most abolitionist activists had far better than this number - by collecting money, and buying off slaves' freedom, or by nagging slave-owners' conscience until they agreed to free slaves one person could surely free far more than 6 slaves with lifetime's effort.

As for point five, it was successful, and due to North massively overwhelming South in industrial capacity, military strength, and population, it could be expected to be an easy win. It wasn't all that easy, but point granted.

Score: 3/5

American War of Independence

American Revolutionary War is another big one, but I really don't see why.

First, suffering - there were some extra taxes white protestant elites weren't terribly fond of. That's zero points, or else Washington, D.C. has as much right to rebel right now.

Second, alternatives. It's automatic fail due to lack of significant suffering, but other countries like Canada successfully got as much autonomy as they wanted without armed rebellion.

Third, prevention of suffering. Also automatic fail, but notice how United States kept slavery long after the rest of British Empire abolished it. It's not at all obvious that it was more representative, or more democratic than other colonies.

Four, casualties. There were about 52 thousand soldiers killed, plus unknown number of civilians (but not too many, as it was one of the rare clean wars). Vast majority of those were from disease, most commonly scurvy, a disease that was already known to be easily preventable. Battle deaths were barely over 10 thousand. That's small by modern standards, but not trivial relative to two million people living in rebelling States back then - just about 2%. I'll grant a point, but it's just being generous.

As for point five, expecting an easy victory against British Empire at peak of its power was foolish. It was a lucky win. No points.

Score: 1/5

Cambodian–Vietnamese War

That covers the usual suspects, which I all mentioned mostly to point out how they fail at being just wars. Now let's look at some obscure wars that might actually succeed.

Cambodian–Vietnamese War is my best candidate. Khmer Rouge killed approximately 1.5 million people out of population of 7.1 million, and weren't stopping. They didn't even limit themselves to their borders, but also raided some towns in Vietnam and massacred civilians there. Overall, spectacular victory at point one.

It's hard to tell what alternatives could be tried, but none are obvious, and due to massive urgent suffering we cannot blame the Vietnamese for not looking too hard. A second point.

Pol Pot was successfully overthrown. Guerrilla lasted for another decade, but it was on much smaller scale. Full point.

Point four is not entirely successful, as China attacked Vietnam to stop their Cambodian operation, with wide variety of estimated, but something of order of 100,000 soldiers and civilians killed. Still, that's far less than number of Khmer Rouge casualties, so point granted.

War could be expected to be easy - huge, well equipped, and experienced Vietnamese army could and did easily overwhelm Khmer army, and it did so successfully. Full point.

Score: 5/5

Most other wars of independence

Cambodian-Vietnamese War proves a just war is possible, even if really rare. Let's go back to other wars for a moment. One very popular kind are all independence/liberation wars, and uprisings against dictatorships.

They usually fail on suffering front - most colonial powers don't engage in massive killing, so the suffering is mostly widespread discrimination, and lack of representative democracy.

They fail on the second front, as countless countries succeeded in getting significant autonomy, or independence, by political action. It worked even against the Soviets, so it doesn't depend on the colonial power being "nice".

As for the third point, most governments that get into power after such wars are dominated by military, or otherwise very far from democratic ideal, and hardly much better than previous colonial powers. You might be lucky sometimes, but I wouldn't count on it.

Fourth - there's usually plenty of civilian casualties. Independence wars, unless the colonial power simply decides to give up early, tend to be really dirty. No points.

Fifth - by balance of power, it's really naive to expect a victory here. Yes, sometimes it happens, not that rarely even, but lucky wins don't count. And there's even lower chance of the new government being much better than the one being replaced. No points.

Related reading: From Dictatorship To Democracy.

Score: usually 0/5, occasionally higher score.

Terrorism

If we go even further from guerrilla uprisings to terrorism, it gets even worse.

Now occasionally like in Palestine the suffering is real, so point granted. In many places like Basque Country it's fairly insignificant.

As for alternatives, political methods not involving violence have been quite successful in countless cases. So zero points.

One interesting thing about terrorism, is that is pretty much always fails. Of very long list of organizations employing terrorism, the only totally successful case is Hezbollah, which kicked Israelis out of Lebanon. Tamil Tigers - who had semi-independent state in North Sri Lanka for quite a long time before being defeated recently, and Hamas and other Palestinian groups, which fought out some very limited autonomy for Palestinians, can be counted as partially successful. Everything else was a spectacular failure. Notice how the successful cases are really guerrillas employing some limited terrorism against mostly military targets as a small side activity, so they shouldn't even count as primarily terrorist organizations. Zero points here.

As for random unrelated casualties, they're present by design. Usually they're not terribly numerous compared to a proper war, so actually we could grant half a point here, but that would be stretching it. And that would only count if it worked, what not a single case of terrorism so far did.

As for chances of success - well, so far they're 0 successes in far too many tries, so no points.

Score: 0/5

Bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Let's look at operations like bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

First, suffering. Over 100,000 people died in the war, about half of them civilians, so it was a pretty good cause. Plus millions displaced, usual looting, rape, and what you usually see in dirty wars. Full point.

Second, alternatives. Some effort was taken, and out of three fighting parties, UN managed to get two to agree to stop. There were also attempts to limit civilian casualties by creating safe zones (openly abused for military advantage, but that's a completely different issues). You could argue about lack of fairness by UN, and if really everything that was possible was tried, but I'll grant the full point. Also military action was quite limited, aimed at getting quick political solution, not full annihilation of Serbian military capacity.

Third, prevention of further suffering - that's an easy point, operation was fully successful.

Fourth, no extra casualties - bombing is estimated to kill over 100 Serbian soldiers, a trivial number, and many more of just Serbian soldiers would have died if the fighting continued. Full point.

As for estimating chances of victory... well, wars are rarely won by just dropping a few bombs, but NATO was overwhelmingly stronger than any of the fighting parties in Bosnia, and it was successful, so full point.

Score: 5/5

Kosovo and other operations

While bombing of Bosnia was really successful, other peace enforcement campaigns like one in Kosovo much less so.

There were around 2000 casualties of the war between Serbian military and police and KLA, but no massive genocide ongoing. The best example of war crimes found was Račak massacre of about 40-45 people, and even that isn't really terribly solid. There was killing due to fighting, and large scale displacement, but that's rather underwhelming, so just half point this time.

Alternatives were under-explored. There was some attempt at negotiating, but it's not really obvious if NATO seriously wanted a solution that would be acceptable to both parties, as opposed to just getting some cover. No pressure was put on KLA, even though they would be fairly easy to press. And during the negotiations all sides issued a joint statement agreeing to "substantial autonomy for Kosovo", and "invited international civilian and military presence in Kosovo", so it's not really obvious what the subsequent fighting was about. No points.

Prevention of suffering was also quite unsuccessful, the war erupted even more strongly after bombing started, with some proper massacres this time. 80% of people killed, and 90% of people displaced happened after the bombing started. 250 thousand Serbian refugees never returned to Kosovo. No points.

Bombing as such didn't kill terribly many people, around 500 civilians, but due to massive increase in fighting on the ground huge number of people died. There was also a later spill-over of fighting into Macedonia, but it wasn't that severe. No points again.

I'm undecided if the last point should be granted or not - previous successes like Bosnia suggested that it would be an easy victory, but it worked only so-so, and large scale ground fighting caused a lot more suffering that was prevented. Half point.

Score: 1/5

Summary

According to criteria of successfully and reliably preventing significant suffering, the only good wars I could find where overwhelming force is used to stop already happening war or other large scale atrocities, and they limit themselves to minimalist goals instead of trying major political restructuring.

All wars where one side is not overwhelming, like WW2, and American Civil War, tend to cause massive suffering, comparable or worse than whatever can be prevented, even if one of the sides is clearly doing a lot of evil.

"Wars to End All Wars" are as old as known history, and include not only WW1, and WW2, but events as ancient as civil wars of late Roman Empire, and probably many before it. Success rate - 0%. Using this argument to support any war is just ridiculous.

All fighting from position of weakness - anywhere from terrorism to full scare insurgency - tend to cause massive suffering, and have even few successes at preventing major suffering.

If you know of any other wars that score very high according to my criteria, or have problems with my rating system (ratings are quite subjective, but it's hard to come up with anything much better), post it in comments.

Chomsky is a total idiot

Which all means that Chomsky is a total idiot, as he is a big fan of the kind of unsuccessful wars from position of weakness like Tamils in Sri Lanka (80 thousand or more people killed with nothing to show for it), and a big critic of successful wars like Bosnia (apparently Srebrenica was "not really a massacre" with only 8,000 or so people killed).

Yes, American government engages in many stupid wars, and causes a lot of suffering. But that doesn't mean that everyone who happens to criticize American government is automatically right and entitled to the high moral ground. Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, as my favourite philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky says.

Iraq War scorecard

The Iraq War isn't over yet. Wars in the Middle East have nasty tendency of being long, bloody, and reigniting long after everybody thought they're done. However I would be really surprised if anyone moved between the losers and winners part of the scorecard. So let's go.

Losers

• Saddam Hussein and Baath Party - before the war they had a safe grip on a failed country. If they could somehow get the world to add enough loopholes to the sanctions that would be plenty of money and power. Now they're all dead or broke and powerless.
• American economy - war spending so far has been $550 billion, with new $12 billion being spent every month. That's not even close to the total cost, as the war is fought on borrowed money. According to study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz total cost of war in Iraq together with interest is around $3 trillion. That's $10,000 per person or over four Wall Street bailouts. This massive debt was undoubtedly one of the main triggers of financial system collapse and global recession, and is massively larger than subprime mortgages and other small failures. It wasn't the first war that bankrupted a country, and it won't be the last one.
• George Bush and Republican Party - before failures in Iraq and economic collapse caused by this and other economic failures (massive deficits, irresponsible deregulation, procyclical monetary policy) nothing even suggested they were heading towards their greatest electoral failure ever. In spite of four years of Bush 2004 elections were a huge success and Democratic Party wasn't able to offer any attractive alternative to the voters. If it wasn't for failures in Iraq and resulting economic collapse Republican Party would most likely still be in power.
• People of Iraq - political rights improved, as Iraqis can now vote (along tribal and religious lines) and have access to independent media, but that's small conciliation for death of 650,000 - 1,200,000 people, 4,700,000 people losing their homes, religious persecution of minorities, gays, women, people from the wrong tribe, and everybody with bad luck.
• United States of America - the war crushed their economy, proved their military completely incapable of running a successful occupation (but very capable of destroying conventional army in a conventional war), and completely ruined their reputation and international standing. Americans don't understand the soft power, but EU managed to annex Central Europe this way, and Chinese are going to use it to build their global dominance.

Winners

All enemies of America were big winners of the war.

• Iran - it's always nice to see your two biggest enemies - Saddam Hussein and USA - butchering each other. Religious Shiite government of Iraq is rather friendly towards Iran, and after USA got burned they lost a lot of power and influence in the Middle East. Other world powers like EU, China, India and Russia are much more friendly to Iran than USA was, so multipolar world is definitely in Iranian best interest. It's quite likely now that the new American administration will pursue normalization.
• China - they never had any interest in Middle East, but weakening American economy is essential to them if they want to take over as the global superpower. According to IMF Chinese economy is about half as big as American economy. That's less than a decade at their current growth rate. Most modern empires started this way - economy and soft power first, military to back it up later.
• Russia - was in truly dismal shape before the war. It was uplifted primarily by drastically higher prices of oil and other commodities, but it would never get the balls to invade a sovereign country allied with USA if American power wasn't as completely broken as it is now.
• Islamists - secular Baathist government of Iraq was very hostile towards religion, now Islamists dictate how people live in Iraq. They're also been a resurgence of Islamism in other countries in the region, like Lebanon and Pakistan. Not much, but it reverses past trend of secularization, and from purely demographic perspective if secularists cannot convince religious people to join them, they're going to lose big.
• Taliban - they almost collapsed after invasion of Afghanistan, but then somehow American focus got split, and crushing defeat turned into a lasting guerilla warfare in two countries. It's not a Taliban victory yet, but they might very well at least get into a power sharing agreement with current Afghani government, and get control over Sharia courts in exchange for leaving politics to others or something like that.
• North Korea - they got a fucking nuke while Americans were busy. That's a country with economic power (PPP) similar to Luxembourg (city of less than half million people). Only part of it can be blamed on Iraqi War, but it certainly didn't help.

Mixed

• Europe - Europeans participated in the war half-heartedly out of goodwill left from the Clinton era, sending some troops to the safest regions and trying to avoid casualties. Not only did they suffer military loses and financial costs, Americans proved they cannot even be relied as allies when they failed to protect Georgia against Russian aggression. On the other hand their loses were rather minor.
• Israeli government - one the one hand they got rid of Saddam Hussein without paying the price. On the other hand the price was paid by their main ally USA which in future might be much less willing and able to intervene in Israeli interests. During this time Israel also lost a war against Hezbollah big way, resulting in major humiliation but no lasting damage and their PR in the region has never been good anyway.

Thinking about what various sides actually got out of the war is much more meaningful than babbling about military victories and propaganda political goals. The best example is the Second World War which was won by Stalin big way in spite of tens of millions deaths, and British Empire was a bankrupted loser in spite of not suffering too much in human or military terms. I also haven't listed Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, because on global scale they're about as relevant as trolls from /b/.