Enforcing arms limits: Germany post 1919; Iraq post 1991 introduction

Key words:

• disarmament
• Germany
• Iraq

How wars originate, break out and are waged are extraordinarily well-researched fields. In contrast, as Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George observed almost a quarter-century ago, ‘students of military strategy have not given much systematic attention to the problem of terminating wars, and military planners have also traditionally neglected this problem, concentrating upon how to start wars and fight them successfully’. 2 This statement retains its force: how wars are settled, and how the succeeding international systems bedded in, continues to be a comparatively neglected field of study. Peace treaties and their (in)capacity to establish legitimate and consensual post-war orders have been recently receiving some much overdue scholarly attention. The present collection seeks to contribute to this expanding area of inquiry.3

It is a commonplace that winning a war is easier than winning the subsequent peace. But as Jean-Baptiste Duroselle reminds us: ‘The real problem posed by the end of violence is knowing if the chosen formula has any chance of lasting’. 4 One major bone of contention when the fighting stops is the re-adjustments of wealth, territory and power that characteristically ensue – the squabbles that break out as the winners all too typically fall out among themselves as to the division of the so-called ‘spoils of peace’.5 Wars can seem endless whilst they are in progress, as a great many diaries and collections of contemporary letters from 1914–18 and 1939–45 vividly testify. By contrast to these guerres qui s'éternisent, the problems of enforcing post-war peace settlements have a habit of appearing alarmingly quickly. They can and do catch out victorious coalitions that have not done enough homework for the hard test of agreeing on, and coming up with instruments for, the making of the peace which they have fought to win. This is so in the two cases considered in this collection: the treatment of Germany post 1919, and Iraq post 1991.

This collection seeks to engage afresh with fundamental questions about ending wars and preparing for peace on terms satisfying to the victors and acceptable to the vanquished. Some of the key questions are: do the victors know what they want? Do they know how to get what they want? Can they align domestic and world public opinions to make their objectives sufficiently acceptable? Can they align military and political objectives among their own elite advisers and key officials? Can unity of purpose be maintained amongst the allies? What are the juridical implications that may constrain the desired terms of victory? What plans are in place if victory comes sooner than expected? 6

These problems characteristically surface in disputes over three issues during peacemaking processes. The first is over the post-war territorial arrangements. The second concerns economic reconstruction and financial reparation. The third concerns the stuff of war itself – raw military power in the shape of trained troops, stockpiled munitions and manufacturing capacity to produce the weapons of war.

Some may say there is a fourth subject of dispute amongst victorious allies: the question of whether or not to engineer regime change in the defeated belligerent state or states. Undeniably, a plethora of cases at first sight appear to support such a claim: for example, the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars in the overthrow and exile – first to Elba and then to St Helena – of Napoleon in 1814; and the republican coup in Paris 56 years later, on 4 September 1870, which overthrew Napoleon III even as the latter was surrendering his armies to King Wilhelm of Prussia on the battlefield at Sedan. In the twentieth century, the phenomenon recurred quite commonly – witness the flight to the Netherlands and abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in November 1918, preceded a few days beforehand by the fall of the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman sultanate. In mid-century it was humiliating military failures that led to the demise of the French Third Republic in 1940 and to the ousting of the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy in 1943. Similarly destined to lose political power immediately after embarrassing military defeats were Pakistan's Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1971, as well as General Leopoldo Galtieri and the military junta that ruled Argentina in 1982.

However, closer consideration suggests that regime change is seldom a question victorious coalitions needed to be concerned with whilst actually peacemaking. This is because regime change generally occurs as a function of traumatic and decisive defeat before peace conferences ever convene. 7 If squabbles between the winners about the kind of political regime with which to leave their erstwhile opponents are less commonplace than is supposed, both the territorial and the economic and financial settlements are areas that have frequently witnessed fierce argument amongst the members of victorious coalitions. They are not, however, this special issue's particular concern.8 The third area of settlement noted at the outset – that of limiting the raw military power of the defeated party and enforcing those limits – is our business here.

Straight away, in the cases of Germany in 1918–19 and Iraq in 1990–91 one sees that strategies for dealing with ceasefire or armistice terms and their practical imposition received startlingly little attention whilst the wars were still in progress, as David Stevenson shows in his contribution. Ironically, both the German leadership and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, realizing their defeats were imminent, invested much more care in disengaging from their respective predicaments than they had done in embarking on their reckless foreign adventures, with high risks of war. Before the German government accepted the Allied armistice terms it held a long meeting on 17 October 1918 to review Germany's strategic position. ‘The decision to halt the war’, David Stevenson has correctly noted, ‘was evaluated much more professionally than had been the decision to start it’. 9

It seems highly paradoxical, therefore, that the winning Allies almost blundered into the settlements in both 1919 and 1991. Even more disturbing is that things did not improve in this important respect when it came to the second war against Saddam's Iraq in 2003. As Sir Christopher Meyer, the then British ambassador in Washington, DC, has critically observed of that conflict (code-named ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’), the USA and Britain had no feasible post-invasion strategy. Yet, Meyer recognizes, ‘we should have put at least as much emphasis into planning what would happen after the war’. 10

The next point to observe in respect of both 1918 and 1991 is that the German and Iraqi defeats were partial, not comprehensive. And when defeat is not total some singular problems result. 11 Incomplete and qualified German demilitarization followed its 1918–19 military capitulation, but moral disarmament and acceptance of war guilt by the German people, military staff and governments never did. In On War, Carl von Clausewitz pointed out in his famous concept of the ‘paradoxical trinity’ how the successful conduct of war demands that a harmony or equilibrium be established between precisely these three elements – people, armed forces and state government. But Clausewitz offered less explicit guidance to peacemakers than to those planning to launch a war or charged with directing war's conduct. All the same, the trinitarian model does speak instructively to peacemakers, for in all the victors and among the vanquished, the three components of people, military professionals and state authorities must be broadly content with the reasonableness and proportionality of the peace terms if the post-war order is to be a success and possess legitimacy.

In the case of 1918, as the articles of Philip Towle and Andrew Barros in this collection demonstrate, there was no ‘moral capitulation’ or even ‘moral disarmament’ amongst the defeated Germans. To be more precise, there was nothing in 1920s Germany comparable to the acceptance of defeat and responsibility for launching aggressive war that has marked the cases of Germany and Japan since 1945. In the words of Lord David Davies (1880–1944), Liberal MP for Montgomery from 1906–29 and prominent advocate of a reformed international order after 1918, one resting on respect for law, open diplomacy, disarmament and arbitration through the League of Nations: ‘War psychology did not disappear when the Armistice was signed’. 12 Comprehensively beaten in 1945, Germany and Japan were also revealed to be morally bankrupt as the details of the Holocaust, the Japanese atrocities in China, the death railways and other horrors emerged. Yet for John Dower, eminent Harvard scholar of the US occupation, reconstruction and democratization of Japan from 1945–50, official Washington in 2003 was deaf to his warnings that successful replication of the Japanese case in Iraq would prove a feat of political engineering that even the USA would struggle to accomplish.13

History, as most historians appreciate every time they scrutinize parallels, tends to throw up loose patterns of similarities; but it seldom if ever yields up neat repetitions or presents foolproof formulae that generate incontrovertible policy advice for statesmen. Blueprints for successful arms limitation in the twenty-first century may not emerge, therefore, from the archive-based studies of Germany's treatment between 1918 and the late 1920s that are assembled here. Nonetheless, doing some serious and sceptical ‘thinking in time’ – to borrow a phrase from two other eminent Harvard scholars, Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest May, reflecting hard about changes versus continuities – may be worthwhile. Reflecting on the scope and limits of analogies and precedents can provide a reality check for any reader tempted to think that rapid reference to past ‘mistakes’ will throw up an uncontroversial guide to doing things better in the future. 14 Problems such as achieving a post-war level of armaments that all victors and vanquished alike will find satisfactory tend not to lend themselves to ‘cook book’ solutions. Contexts change. Public opinion, decision makers and coalitions – even entire countries – come and go.15

There have been, to be sure, some comparative analyses from the perspectives of international law and legitimacy. 16 But few studies approach the problems of immediate post-war eras through a comparative perspective.17 Thus comparing the 1920s with the 1990s in this collection represents our aspiration, from the historian's standpoint, to take a longer view. The contributors, and especially the editors, endeavour to distil certain broader trends as to the nature of post-war settlements, first, in respect of arms limitation provisions and, second, as regards the instruments or mechanisms for enforcing such provisions.

The studies offered here are not the first time the disarmament efforts of the interwar era have been scrutinized as a means of shedding light on more contemporary arms races and arms-control processes, notably those of the 1970s and 1980s. During the Cold War, in particular, commentators turned to the 1920s and 1930s efforts at arms control and arms reduction as guidance for policy or analysis. 18 With the twentieth century being so war-torn, it is unsurprising that problems of arms control provided a major agenda to contemporaries after each major conflict. Peter Jackson in his contribution examines the faltering process by which French political and military leaders attempted to embrace new and more juridically based international and innovative approaches to providing security and promoting disarmament. Those problems of arms control have continued to provide a fertile ground both for the empirical work of later historians and for theory-building to better explain power and order in the international system amongst international relations scholars.19

However, the arms control and disarmament attempted via the Geneva disarmament process from 1926 (when the preparatory commission convened) and conference (from February 1932 to 1934) have either been examined entirely for their own sakes by historians or invoked as inspiration or warning by strategic studies and international relations academics. 20 The latter have turned to the interwar ‘Geneva experience’ in a quest to elucidate and better explain Cold War arms control and arms reduction efforts – notably the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (in force from 1970), the SALT 1 Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (1972), the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the failed 1979 SALT 2 negotiations, the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks of the 1970s and 1980s, and the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) negotiations.21

Yet one may be somewhat sceptical, on at least three grounds, as to the validity of these comparisons. For one thing, the Cold War negotiations were about mutual, reciprocal and, in some categories of weapons, balanced arms limitation. Second, the negotiations were a process that involved the diplomats and technical experts of two superpowers of approximate – or perceived approximate – equality. Third, neither the USA nor the USSR in the Cold War was striving to punish a defeated former belligerent power or alliance after a ‘hot war’ (Germany and its fellow Central Powers of 1914–18). Rather, both protagonists sought to reduce tensions and cooperatively regulate ideological hostility in an extended and open-ended armed peace (or Cold War). Andrew Webster in this collection examines the preparations for the world disarmament conference that finally opened at Geneva in 1932. However, other commentators use the ‘Geneva era’ of 1926–34 as a comparator with the arms limitation processes and instruments between 1963 (the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty), 1987 (the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement to scrap Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks agreements (START 1 of 1991 and START 2 of 1993). The temptation for such comparisons is appealing, but they do not compare like with like. 22

Whilst acknowledging the imperfections of all parallels and insisting on history's contingency, the articles in this collection propose an explanatory force to the comparing and contrasting of the 1920s not with Cold War arms control but with the attempts to disarm Iraq between the 1990–91 and 2003 Gulf wars. The focus settles therefore on the emergence of differences between victorious allies over:

a.	what type of arms-limitation regime to impose on defeated belligerents (who had actually upset the peace and might, if unchecked, try to do so again); and
b.	what specific instruments, tools and mechanisms to use in order to enforce that regime.

The comparison posits a number of strong similarities or links between the 1920s and the 1990s. First, both were in general terms very self-consciously experienced and understood by contemporaries as not just post-war eras but as new eras, differing radically from what had gone before. In America's Strategy in World Politics (1942), the famous Dutch–American geo-strategist Nicholas J Spykman claimed: ‘Plans for far-reaching changes in the character of international society are an intellectual by-product of all great wars’. In so much as the Cold War was a ‘great war’, both the 1920s and the 1990s were times that, to those living them, offered opportunities for fresh beginnings on a really grand scale. This was well captured by the widespread popular talk in the 1920s of the conflict just ended being ‘the war to end all wars’. It was similarly encapsulated in the hubris witnessed in many parts of the West 70 years later. One manifestation was the talk of a ‘peace dividend’ so widely expected after the fall of the Berlin Wall and democratization of east-central Europe during the autumn of 1989. The other was President George Bush senior's speech to Congress of 6 March 1991, following victory over Iraq, when he proclaimed, ‘Tonight I come to this House to speak about the world – the world after war’, and hailed the ‘very real prospect of a new world order’. 23 Another, more remarkably self-congratulatory example of this zeitgeist, was the thesis of a victory by the West's values of liberal democracy and capitalism so complete as to mark an ‘End of History’ when the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991.24

Certainly the 1920s demonstrated that. In the context of hopes that the recently concluded ‘Great War’ of 1914–18 might be humanity's last, the 1920s witnessed pressures from politicians, pacifist organizations, philosophers, writers and artists, as well as the newspapers, to go beyond the mere elimination or prohibition of specific types of armaments. For the first time, these groups and their representatives articulated a will to initiate general, comprehensive and worldwide disarmament. The scale and cost of the 1914–18 war magnified and focused doubts about the political, moral and economic justification of any recourse to war in the future – and therefore as to the possession of large-scale armaments, the tools by which war was waged.

Second, this widespread shift in the political and popular climate in favour of general disarmament was accompanied by a particular fear and loathing of the terrifying new ‘horror’ weapons. In the 1990s this took the form of a generally alarmist discourse about WMD (weapons of mass destruction), especially ‘dirty bombs’ with chemical, biological or even nuclear warheads, in the hands of so-called ‘rogue states’ or stateless and transnational terrorist groups. In the aftermath of the First World War, the horror most frequently articulated was of the way German submarines had often indiscriminately killed civilians by sinking Allied and neutral passenger ships in the 1915 and 1917–18 U-boat campaigns. But there was also a lively debate in the press and in books that focused on the attacks by bomber aircraft and dirigible airships that killed non-combatants far behind the battle lines.

For those in uniform, too, war appeared to have become nastier. Chemical weapons had been employed on both the eastern and western fronts, during military operations in Palestine in 1917–18, and on the Salonika front in the last year of the war. 25 A British estimate in May 1919, from the Royal Air Force staff, judged that chemical warfare ‘cannot now be ruled out’. It estimated that, had the fighting continued for most of 1919, ‘one shell in every four that left our lines would have been a gas shell and tanks would have been using it freely’. The RAF staff did not expect mass-scale permanent physical injury to have resulted, but they did reckon gas and chemicals as ‘almost our most formidable weapon’, a vital force-multiplier, and ventured that ‘at the critical moment of the battle large bodies of troops would have been rendered temporarily incapable of further fighting and would have fallen into our hands as prisoners’.26

As thoughts after the Armistice turned to the possible nature of future conflicts, the use of chemical munitions caused widespread international alarm, as illustrated here in the contribution by Edward Spiers, focusing on the concerns in the 1920s about gas weapons and the new perils facing civilian populations. Fears were rife as to the lethal potentialities revealed in the development by many 1914–18 belligerents of chemicals, gas and bacteriological agents. 27 Nor were apocalyptic visions of the future darkened only by the advent of chemical or even biological weapons. Deeply worrying, too, was the growing potential of tanks as an encouragement to powers minded to launch offensive or aggressive wars and invasions, calling into doubt notions of the defensive as the stronger mode of war. And then there was the new and rapidly growing capacity of bomber aircraft and submarines to strike at targets previously unattainable or regarded as ‘off limits’. The general and overall effect of the technological changes seen in the First World War, accompanied by the apparent weakening of legal and moral restraints on what constituted legitimate methods of warfare and targets, was to erode the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Altogether, many of the emergent weapons systems that were tested, or which matured, in 1914–18 seemed to embody the advent of war's ‘new barbarism’.28

As David Bederman has pointed out, the sense after 1919 that humanity urgently needed to establish more robust restraints on war made the 1920s in key respects a foundational period. Never before had such priority been attached to hammering out international conventions to control the testing, manufacture, deployment and proliferation of arms in general. 29 The 1920s also sharply highlight the politics of intelligence surrounding verification, compliance and enforcement in the arms limitation arena. And the 1920s, in the case of Germany, as much as the 1990s with Iraq, is a period that exemplifies the tendency of defeated belligerents to manipulate the process of the limitation of their existing and potential armaments. The two cases suggest the erstwhile losers do this by evasions, obstructions and duplicity of the terms not only imposed on them but also to which they appended their signatures. Bederman has pertinently highlighted this comparison, but focuses his analysis and examples principally on the non-compliance by Iraq after 1991.

This study, in contrast, places the emphasis more squarely on the earlier case of Germany. Philip Towle, and the editors, present the case for the insights that the Germany–Iraq comparison may offer those who study the past. They also believe that this comparison can help prepare for the times when international agencies, legal instruments and constabulary military force may once more have to combine to limit a warmonger's capacity to upset the peace – and enforce those limits.

Notes

¹The editors express their gratitude to Professor Emily O. Goldman of the University of California, Davis, who offered comment on four of the essays in this collection in their initial guise as papers to the March 2004 meeting of the International Studies Association, and who generously allowed us to draw from her remarks when formulating this introduction.

²Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft. Diplomatic Problems of Our Time (New York: Oxford UP 1983), 220; see also Fred C. Iklé, Every War Must End (New York: Columbia UP 1971); and Michael I. Handel, ‘The Study of War Termination’, Journal of Strategic Studies 1/1 (1978), 51–75.

³See Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: OUP 2005); and David J. Bederman, ‘Collective Security, Demilitarization and “Pariah States”’, European Journal of International Law 13/1 (2002), 121–38.

⁴Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Tout empire périra. Une vision théorique des relations internationales (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne 1981), 269; Duroselle establishes a typology of war ends, pp.268–9.

⁵See Ian Clark, The Post-Cold War Order. The Spoils of Peace (Oxford: OUP 2001).

⁶Many of these questions are raised in Alan Sharp, ‘A Comment’, in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds), The Treaty of Versailles. A Reassessment after Seventy-Five Years (Cambridge: CUP 1998), 131–2.

⁷Although it is the fate of militarized and autocratic regimes to crumble if the myth of their military power and invincibility is swept away, it can also happen to peaceable status quo democracies. The Tsarist autocracy had already fallen, as had the subsequent liberal-reformist Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky (and the Tsar and his immediate family murdered in January 1918), before the signature of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 between Germany and the Bolshevik regime that had seized control of the successor state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Ironically, an exception that proves the rule was the defeat of Iraq in 1991, which was not followed by the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime.

⁸They are, however, prominent in the contributions to a special issue of the journal Diplomacy & Statecraft (16/3, Sept. 2005), devoted to Versailles and its enforcement, and guest-edited by Professor Alan Sharp of the University of Ulster and Professor Conan Fischer of the University of Strathclyde.

⁹David Stevenson, 1914–18. The History of the First World War (London: Allen Lane 2004), 386.

¹⁰Meyer interview with Jasper Gerrard, ‘A Most Diplomatic Skewering of Blair’, The Sunday Times, 13 Nov. 2005, 5; Meyer's memoirs appeared just as this special issue went to press, under the title D.C. Confidential (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005).

¹¹Paul Kecskemeti, Strategic Surrender (Stanford: SUP 1958), which illustrates how defeated nations retain residual bargaining power.

¹²Lord Davies, Force (London: Constable 1934), 17. It is clear from this text that Davies was not writing only of the mood or mindset in the defeated Central Powers. In 1919, Davies provided an endowment to establish the Woodrow Wilson Chair and form, around it, the world's first Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. On his career, see J. Graham Jones, ‘The Peacemonger: The Life and Career of David Davies, the First Baron Davies of Llandinam (1880–1944)’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History 29 (Winter 2000), 16–23; and Michael Pugh, ‘Policing the World: Lord Davies and the Quest for Order in the 1930s’, International Relations 16/1 (2002), 95–113.

¹³See John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat. Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton 1999); and John W. Dower, ‘Why Iraq is not Japan’, San José Mercury News, 27 Apr. 2003, available at <http://hnn.us/articles/1429.html>, accessed 4 Aug. 2005. In 2003, advisers around President George W. Bush were insufficiently historically aware, deluding themselves that Iraq could be politically remade by an American-led occupation and administration, according to a blue-print loosely based on what had worked for Germany and Japan in the utterly different circumstances of 1945. In any case, new work is casting growing doubt on how law-abiding or effective were US de-Nazification and democratization policies in post-Hitler Germany. See John Willoughby, Remaking the Conquering Heroes. The Postwar American Occupation of Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2001).

¹⁴See Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time. The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press 1986), a work which, it should be acknowledged, did not alight on 1920s disarmament initiatives as analogues for the arms control dialogues with the USSR that faced the US policy makers and advisers at whom the book was targeted. See also Eliot A. Cohen, ‘The Historical Mind and Military Strategy’, Orbis (Fall 2005), 575–88; and Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History. Munich, Vietnam and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press 2002).

¹⁵Craig and George note this very point in respect of both the ‘players’ at the peacemaking in Paris in 1919 and those excluded from it, remarking correctly that ‘the conflict that had just come to an end had not been contained and completed by the powers that began it, nor did some of them survive the fighting of it’. Craig and George, Force and Statecraft (3rd edn 1995), 43 (emphasis added).

¹⁶Philip Towle, Enforced Disarmament: From the Napoleonic Campaigns to the Gulf War (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997).

¹⁷An exception – albeit not one concerned with the military settlements – is the collection of essays, based on a conference held at Keele University (31 Mar.–2 Apr. 1995), edited by Carl Levy and Mark Roseman, Three Postwar Eras in Comparison. Western Europe, 1918–1945–1989 (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan 2002).

¹⁸See, for example, Philip Towle, ‘From Geneva, a Whiff of the Trenches?’, The Times, 10 Feb. 1987, 10.

¹⁹International relations references here would begin with F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace. Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge: CUP 1967); Martin Wight (Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter, eds.), International Theory and the Three Traditions (New York: Holmes and Meier for the Royal Institute of International Affairs 1992); and Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society. A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan 1977).

²⁰For treatments by historians, see Dick Richardson, The Evolution of British Disarmament Policy in the 1920s (London: Frances Pinter 1989); Carolyn J. Kitching, Britain and the Problem of International Disarmament, 1919–1934 (London: Routledge 1999); Carolyn J. Kitching, Britain and the Geneva Disarmament Conference. A Study in International History (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan 2002); Patrick Kyba, Covenants Without the Sword. Public Opinion and British Defence Policy, 1931–1935 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP 1983); and Gerard Silverlock, ‘British Disarmament Policy and the Rome Naval Conference, 1924’, War in History 10/2 (Apr. 2003), 184–205.

²¹Perceptive strategic studies approaches that take seriously the historical record on its own terms and take care to avoid glib or anachronistic analogies include Colin S. Gray, House of Cards. Why Arms Control Must Fail (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1992); and Emily O. Goldman, Sunken Treaties. Naval Arms Control between the Wars (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP 1994).

²²The INF Treaty actually scrapped an existing class of nuclear weapons. It was signed between US President Ronald Reagan and USSR General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in Washington, DC on 8 Dec. 1987; it was ratified by the US Senate the following May and took effect on 1 June 1988.

²³<http://www.al-bab.com/arab/docs/pal/pal10.htm>, accessed 1 Dec. 2005; quoted in Brian Urquhart, ‘Looking for the Sheriff’, New York Review of Books, 16 July 1998.

²⁴The part of Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis that stressed democratization seems foretold in 1934 by Lord Davies, writing in optimistically Whiggish mode (spiced by a dash of Kantian ‘Democratic Peace’ convictions): ‘The democratic State is part of the process of evolution. In the long run it is bound to triumph … because it is the only system which has solved the problem of the right use of force … Democracy, therefore, is not an end in itself. It is the dynamic and peaceful instrument for securing the liberty, happiness and advancement of humanity.’ Davies, Force, 31–2.

²⁵See Albert Palazzo, Seeking Victory on the Western Front. The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 2000); Yigal Sheffy, ‘The Chemical Dimension of the Gallipoli Campaign: Introducing Chemical Warfare to the Middle East’, War in History 12/3 (July 2005), 278–317; Martin K. Gordon, Barry R. Sude and Ruth Ann Overbeck, ‘Chemical Testing in the Great War. The American University Experiment Station’, Washington History. The Magazine of The Historical Society of Washington, DC 6/1 (spring/summer 1994), 29–45, 106–7 (endnotes); and Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing. The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare (London: Chatto and Windus 1982) Chs 1 and 2.

²⁶Air staff memo (22 May 1919), quoted extensively in Robin Young, ‘When Churchill Championed the Use of Poison Gas’, The Times, 3 Jan. 1997, 6.

²⁷Ibid.; and see Tim Cook, ‘Against God-inspired Conscience: The Perception of Gas Warfare as a Weapon of Mass Destruction, 1915–1939’, in War & Society 18/1 (2000), 49–69.

²⁸See Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber. The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932–39 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer for the Royal Historical Society 1980); Geoffrey Best, Humanity in War. The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Methuen 1983); and Edward Spiers, Chemical Warfare (London: Macmillan 1986), 1–5, 13–53.

²⁹Bederman, ‘Collective Security, Demilitarization and “Pariah States”’.