Note: These days War and Terrorism are often spoken of in the same breath. Example: The War on Terrorism. But doing so is a big mistake. They are quite different, so I will be covering Terrorism in a separate section. That said, here's what I have to say about war.
War is the marshalling of a community's resources to engage in violence on another community. Since war is specifically about doing violence, how can it be justified? How can it ever be considered right? Lets look at the thinking that supports war.
The instinctive thinking that allows a community to conduct a war is, at its root, the same instinctive thinking that makes team sports popular, so much can be learned about how to make war popular by looking at how a community makes team sports popular.
One of the things that spoils playing a sports game is to be accused of cheating, and avoiding putting teeth into this accusation is the motivation behind conducting sports with rules and referees. The same applies to war, a just war is much more popular than a cheater's war -- one that doesn't play by the rules.
In both war and sports playing by the rules is important to keeping the home community supporting the home team. The home community likes winners and doesn't like cheaters. This is why there is a lot of effort put into the ritual of getting a war started, and why the more you can successfully convince your side that the other side is not good, the more popular a war becomes.
Being popular is just as important to a war effort as it is to running a successful sports team, and this is why there are a lot of similarities in conduct. Let's look at a few:
o Being the good guys. This is the primary motivation behind building and promoting a just cause before the war starts. The community will support a war effort for a long time as long as the community feels it's good and as long as it feels its warriors are being good as they conduct the war. This is why atrocities are so important. The amount of direct damage an atrocity does is small, but if it sullies an image, that effect is huge.
Conversely, this is why acts to terrorize the enemy community after the contest has started typically have much less influence than atrocities. A scared community tends to pull together much more than a complacent one does, so terrorizing pulls a community together to support its leaders, even if they appear to be bad leaders.
This is why the Abu Ghraib prison photos were a big blow to the US in Gulf War II, but the mass bombings of cities in World War II weren't successful at demoralizing any enemy.
o The enemy leaders are bad guys. Personifying the evil on to one person or a small collection of leaders makes a war effort more comfortable for the home team.
Let's take a look at two wars that happen to be textbook examples of well done and poorly done in terms of being popular to the home team. The two are the two Gulf Wars the US engaged in: The first in 1990 conducted by George H. W. Bush (Bush Sr.), and the second conducted in 2003 by George W. Bush (Bush Jr.). The first Gulf War was exceedingly well done, and the second was poorly done.
The first was well done for all of the following reasons:
o It was easy to be portrayed as a just war because the US was responding vigorously to a blunder made by Saddam Hussein, ruler of Iraq, when he invaded Kuwait without provocation. Among other benefits, this made Saddam easy to vilify, and the media took full advantage.
o Bush Sr. took the time to gather support from around the world before he stared being violent.
o The objectives of the violence were clear before the fighting started, and stayed clear until the violence ended.
o The US brought overwhelming force to the conflict so the violence was conducted quickly and effectively -- it was easy to play by the rules, and the US forces did.
All-in-all, it was a superb war. It was so good, it tends to be forgotten about... which is one of the best indicators of a really well-conducted war.
The second war came out quite differently. Here are a few of the problems that surrounded the second war:
o Bush Jr. used the desire for revenge for the 9-11 Disaster as the base emotion for this war. The 9-11 emotion was palpably powerful, but he couldn't strongly connect Iraq to 9-11. In the end, he justified the war not with 9-11 revenge but with Iraq having WMD's (Weapons of Mass Destruction). It was a weak justification to start with, and it turned into fiasco when no WMD's were discovered. Ouch!
o Bush Jr. was hasty. Other nations stayed out of the way because of the 9-11 emotion, but they didn't join in, and Bush Jr. didn't wait long before he started his violence. He didn't exhaust peaceful solution possibilities.
o The goal of the violence wasn't clear. It was originally expressed as desiring regime change, ie., kicking out Saddam. But that never happened cleanly, and the Bush administration put almost no thought or resource into planning or implementing what post-Saddam Iraq should be like. The result was quagmire. More Ouch!
These two are textbook examples of good and bad wars.
In conclusion, war and sports tap the same emotional roots, so the format for making both popular is similar. In both cases community support grows as the conflict is cast into the just contest format, which means playing by the rules is important to keeping popular support. Support grows as the home team is seen more and more as the good guys, who are in this contest for a good reason, and are people who play by the rules.
Calling the other side cheaters is a mixed bag because while it makes the other guys look bad, it also makes the whole contest look bad, which does not build support.
But, casting the head other guy as a bad guy is a consistently successful tactic.
Finally, trying to scare the other side rarely works well after the contest has started because fear unifies a community.
And those are my thoughts on war.