Democratic President Harry S. Truman once said in his speech to the people of the United States of America on the deployment of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.” The U.S. had a clear objective in mind with the elimination of the military might of the Empire of Japan: to end Hirohito’s dictatorial rule in Japan, end Hirohito’s military objective to colonize the Asian continent by increasing the military strength of the Imperial Japanese armed forces, and to institute a new, liberal, democratic Japanese government.
Washington rewrote Tokyo’s constitution such that the country respected the dignity and freedom of its people. The U.S. justification for invading Japan originated from the Japanese invasion of the Philippines (formerly a U.S. puppet state), the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the physical tormenting of innocent citizens in Asia and American prisoners of war. The Allied Powers’ bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese people, with 350,000 innocent lives lost in Hiroshima alone. Today, the maintenance of a state’s internal stability, its economic and financial strength, as well as the dissemination of its authority and jurisdiction beyond its territory are prerequisites for a nation to be both a dominant military and a political force acting in the realm of international relations.
Many modern-day states, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Republic of Turkey, seek warfare with other nations. However, they are unwilling to sacrifice their active-duty military personnel or their economy, as war is expensive. Twenty-two years ago, four coordinated bombings by al-Qaeda, led by Saudi dissenter Osama bin Laden, dismantled both the Twin Towers and the World Trade Center. Following the attack, U.S. President George W. Bush commenced the Global War on Terror (GWOT). NATO also partook in the GWOT, as it was financially supported by 196 countries. The United States declared war on the Republic of Iraq, which was then governed by Sadam Hussein, and on the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, governed by the Taliban insurgency organization. Although the Global War on Terror was justifiable in response to one of the most tragic and hostile events in American history, well over four and a half million lives were lost in the GWOT, many of whom were civilians, and an estimated 38 million people were displaced.
The U.S. waged a 13-year war in Afghanistan, known as Operation Enduring Freedom. American airstrikes struck Kandahar and Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, following the Taliban’s refusal to disband their terrorist locations and extradite Osama bin Laden to American jurisdiction.
The objective behind Bush’s War on Terror was to exile the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and to institute a pro-Western democratic regime in its place. One may also argue that within his ambition of instituting a new Afghan government, the United States of America would be able to more effectively project its power into Iran, Central Asia, as well as into China. However, 2,324 U.S. soldiers were killed after being deployed to Afghanistan, and more than 70,000 innocent Afghans and Pakistanis were killed in the ensuing warfare. Concerning the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, President Bush sought to confiscate weapons of mass destruction and to end Hussein’s Baathist dictatorship, allowing the U.S. to eradicate any and all insurgency groups operating in the Middle East. U.S., Australian, and British military units commenced a sequence of air raids over Iraq, with U.S. ground forces in Iraq and Kuwait advancing throughout the country. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq caused a casualty number between 280,771 and 315,190, with 7,299 Iraqi civilians killed by airstrikes. Consequently, both the United States’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to millions of lives being lost, with innocent civilians being killed either directly or indirectly due to environmental issues that resulted from warfare.
Therefore, what society can derive from the destructive nature of warfare is that firstly, one can interpret war as one in which a state responds to another state’s encroachment on its human rights or national safety, since in the modern age, the United Nations exists to preserve worldly peace and states cannot simply declare wars without having a defensible justification. We can also look at war as a manner by which a state renders itself a transcontinental power by sometimes invading other countries and reshaping their politics and governments into puppet states, an indirect imperialism. Regardless of which degree or manner you perceive warfare and the objective behind it, one issue is established: civilians are caught in the crossfires and are killed as a result of battling between rival armed forces. There are certainly many codes of conduct and rules of engagement that soldiers of all nations must abide by; nevertheless, the lives of innocent citizens will be lost, either directly or indirectly, due to war between countries.
