Source: The Nation

By Yasmin Aftab Ali

It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward, to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path”. Excerpt from speech in Cairo, June 2009 by Obama.
In the first week of September 2013, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee considered Syria strikes at the Capitol Hill. The Committee approved a resolution authorizing limited U.S. military intervention in Syria, setting the stage for a contentious debate in the full Senate the following week on the use of force. While presenting the point of view of the White House, John Kerry made a rather interesting statement. “President Obama is not asking America to go to war,” the secretary of state and a former chairman of the committee John Kerry stated, who denied that strikes would prelude deeper US involvement. “If Assad is arrogant enough, and I would say foolish enough, to retaliate to the consequences of his own criminal activity, the US and its allies have ample ways [of responding] … without going to war.” (The Guardian, September 3, 2013). Military strikes apparently, are not within the ambit of war according to this rhetoric. Since no boots on ground were requested by Obama in his present request to the Congress, therefore US was not going to another war. Not against Syria anyways.
This uniquely misdirected approach struck me as an extremely interesting way of defining a war. I decided therefore to look up the definition of war. John Keegan in his “History of Warfare”, states; war is a universal phenomenon whose form and scope is defined by the society that wages it. War is also defined as an armed conflict between nations or factions within a nation; warfare. It is also explained as; to be in a state of hostility or rivalry. Even a definitive outcome of the war may not decide upon the reason for the conflict.
War begins where diplomacy ends. In the earlier times, countries fought a war with massive standing armies. The armies of nations at conflict, met in battleground. The combat decided the fate of the outcome of the war. Modern day warfare is not just fought with standing armies. The modern day warfare has many other battlegrounds where the war is fought. Some of the grounds may be economic, trade, psychological, media, sectarian, religious and ideological. Proxy war is another well-practised method of fighting on foreign soil without “boots on ground”. For Clausewitz; (Prussian soldier and scholar) in current military conflicts raging around the globe, diplomacy, fighting, and reconstruction all go on simultaneously. Clearly, warfare is now between groups, not just states, and our terminology defining warfare must reflect this.

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