ABSTRACT
Introduction When John Mueller wrote in 2004 that war was becoming ‘obsolete’ he based his claim on the following reasoning: the agents of war today are not political actors – states – but instead ‘thugs’ and ‘criminals’; their activity thus cannot be war proper, but merely the ‘pathetic remnants of war’.3 For the West, declaring war is ‘unthinkable’, even ‘absurd’, after decades of normative devaluation of war spawned not least by the drafters of the United Nations Charter in 1949.4 The contemporary West, therefore, no longer indulges in war proper, Mueller tells us; faced with criminal agents, it can conduct nothing other than ‘policing wars’ – a classification he extends to cover the war in Iraq that began in 2003.5
Yet the West of course continues to be engaged in war, albeit not necessarily triumphant ones. Renowned military historian Martin Van Creveld warns us that: ‘as of the opening years of the twenty-first century, the mightiest, richest, bestequipped, best-trained armed forces that have ever existed are (. . .) looking into an abyss’.6 The abyss to which Van Creveld refers to in his recent The Changing Face of War (2006) is the prospect of regular (state) forces finding themselves in counterinsurgency wars wherein they are unable to prevail; yet at the same time the prospect of conceding defeat is unthinkable. Van Creveld is by no means alone in fearing that wars are becoming interminable: Mueller of course pointed to the same idea when he admitted that ‘wars may end, but policing never does’.7
