The Worth of a Man

[rowyn]

Lut and I have been reading (or in his cases, re-reading) Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan novels. We were in the car and discussing Vorkosigan and interplanetary-politics. Lut noted that one of the characters in one novel had overestimated the importance of another. "A nation is not going to start a war over just one man."

"I don't know. It depends on the man, and the circumstances under which he's imperiled."

"Not when the person is in trouble as the result of a botched unauthorized military adventure -- "

"Yes, granted, not under those circumstances. But if you kidnapped the right man, or the wrong one -- "

"Governments turn a blind eye to kidnappings all the time."

"Yeah, but if, say, President Bush were kidnapped by a foreign country, do you think the US wouldn't go to war over that?"

Lut looked skeptical. "How many lives is one man worth?"

"It's not a matter of his importance, it's a matter of principle. Of showing that you don't get away with assaulting the most important political figures*, that you've got more strength that that. We'd go to war over President Bush being kidnapped, if it were necessary and obvious that it was the act of a foreign nation and not a group of individuals acting privately. And even the most ardent liberals would agree that was the appropriate response, no matter how much they might hate the man," I argued.

Then I started to laugh. "And the reason even radical liberals would agree we need to get President Bush back is that otherwise we'd have Dick Cheney for president."

Lut chuckled. "It's sad when you pick his running mate such that people will want to insure that you stay healthy so he won't get in office."

"Yeah. That was his father's strategy, too. 'And I promise not to die'."

* Lut points out now, as I'm writing this, "I'd rather prefer a style of war where the leaders got killed instead of their masses of followers, in fact." I gotta admit there's appeal in that.

Comments

actually....

[ex-strangess744.livejournal.com]

there have been a couple cases at minimum of wars starting over one person. Now, arguably, in some cases, you could say the nation was planning a war _anyway_ and this was a pretext...but...

-Charles "Chinese" Gordon in the 1880's was a British governor in Sudan charged with stamping out the slave trade and strengthening the Khedive of Egypt's government in this lawless territory. Surprisingly, he had done a fairly good job considering he was sent with no money or staff and just a letter confirming his authority. Gordon was a very exceptional man.

There was an Islamic fundamentalist uprising claiming that the Mahdi had come and they were going to start by conquering the Sudan and then moving on to Egypt. Their goal was to basically revitalize Islam in a reformist (by their standards) wave of conquest similiar to the one which establish Islam.

The British had a "wait and see" attitude, and doubted the Mahdi would be able to organize and supply his followers to march across the vast wilderness between where he had started and where the heart of Egyptian settlement on the Nile was.

Gordon, on the other hand, seeing the essentially anti-modern and anti-Western characteristic of the uprising knew his pro-government locals whom he had co-opted and urged into forming his government in the Sudan were all marked for death, and had no way of leaving.

He had been ordered to leave himself; but rather than abandon his subordinates to death, he organized the defense of the capital, Khartoum, and sent a message to England saying "come save your loyal servants or live with the guilt of having let us die for the Empire".

Gladstone, the PM, was not amused. He had issued an order, and it was disobeyed. However, Gordon was a hero in the eyes of the people already for his earlier work in ending the Chinese Civil War as well as having vastly curbed the slave trade as he had been charged. So Gladstone was forced to send a military expedition to Khartoum to try and break the siege and put down the uprising.

As it turned out, they got there three days late. The city had been sacked and Gordon and his subordinates were dead. However, the expedition was quite well provisioned and manned and put down the uprising in short order.


Another case was "the War of Jenkin's Ear", one of the many short two-power wars in Western Europe in the age of absolutism; the British went to war because one of their privateer captains had been captured and maimed (I believe the severed ear was sent as an emphatic punctuation mark to the "stop this or else" message that followed Jenkin's capture. But that was one of those "would have happened anyway....though it's hard to say how long it would have taken.

A much older case was when a war was averted _because_ one person did something. Namely, Hannibal killed himself rather than have the Romans declare war on the Kingdom of Bythnia where he had retired to in order to get to him. It's hard to say if he overestimated his value, but certainly, the Romans were the types to do that sort of thing if some prominent Senator(s) took it as their cause.

Oh, and of course, there is the death of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, which did lead to a general war that might well have been delayed years (or indefinitely) (with vast effects on the conduct of that war) if he had not been attacked. (Darn Princip's luck)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

*crosses fingers that reading the Vorkosigan books inspires you* };)