ABSTRACT
War has always been a paradox-something terrible yet glorious. Indeed, Yeats makes the point succinctly in his description of war as “a terrible beauty” in his poem “Easter 1916”. In spite of the lessons of history which is replete with examples of war’s horrors there is no indication that man has any intention of abandoning the use of military force to resolve differences between nations. While the last decade of the twentieth century may have dawned with “peace breaking out all over,” the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 vividly demonstrated that the chaos of war is never far beneath the surface of order in the world. Ironically, Iraq’s invasion has provided a situation where the United States and the Soviet Union find themselves on the same side in a war for the first time since the end of the Second World War. Even if the superpowers are successful in convincing one another that they don’t really need to maintain large military establishments, there will remain enough smaller armies, navies, and air forces around the world for war to continue as a viable option for attaining national goals.
