The Clausewitz Collection (merged thread)

[Bob's World]

OK, so the Southern Secessionists in the Civil War had a point? Lincoln failed them?

Agreed. Warfare has to involve the promotion of a political aim, by violence and has to be of scale where it can reasonably effect policy.

Why should I seek to make peace with or in anyway ameliorate the agendas of those I dislike to the point of violence? Once they use violence against me, why should I listen?
- so don't build badly!

1. OF COURSE Southern Seccessionists had a point! Would their point have destroyed America and led to a Europe-like cluster of small countries in North America? Certainly. They felt that States rights were being inappropriately curtailed by National rights, and voted as states to succeed from the Union. This wasn't insurgency, it was divorce. This was not the failure of a single man, it was, however a failure to appreciate the dire consequences of forcing a significant, and geographically united, segement of ones populace to adopt a course that they saw so counter to both their rights as citizens and to their livlihoods. Growing pains of a young nation experimenting with new forms of popular government.

2. As to your next to last point, I never said you should make peace with those who act illegally to oppose the government in insurgency. I simply said that it isn't war (in a Clauswitzian sense), and that if a true insurgency it is happening for a reason that you must deal with as the COIN government with every bit as much dilligence as you deal with the illegal actors. I would just caution constraint, becuase governments who employ organized violence against their own populaces too freely or injustly (as perceived by the populace, not as rationalized by the government) are on a slippery slope.

3. Your last point is a shot at the US Declaration of Independence. I don't need to remind you what happened to the last Brit to take that document lightly...