That Was a Short War...Right?
By historical standards, the Israel-Iran War was actually close to typical
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I mentioned on Monday that I might do a post about the duration and deadliness of international conflicts to provide some context for what we could expect next in the Israel-Iran(-US) War. When I said that, I didn’t expect it to be over so soon, and maybe it isn’t. But if it truly is, that would mean that the war lasted 12 days. That seems short, right?
Wrong. One thing the data makes clear is that most international conflicts are short-lived. You can see this in the figure below which I produced using the Militarized Interstate Confrontations Dataset. This is a conflict-level dataset that documents every known international conflict that has taken place between at least two countries from 1816 to 2014. For each conflict, it has the start and end date, the highest level of hostility reached, the number of participant countries, and the number of minimum and maximum estimated battle deaths — among other details. The figure I made below is called a density plot, and it summarizes how common (or dense) certain values of a variable are — in this case, the number of days between when a conflict starts and when it ends. The data clearly clusters toward the low end, and dramatically so. While there are some confrontations that last decades, 80% of the conflicts in the data last less than 214 days. The median conflict duration is 37 days. 39.8% last less than or equal to the 12 day duration of the Israel-Iran War. This should tell you that many conflicts do last longer than the Israel-Iran War, but those that last about as long or are shorter are still common and, therefore, unsurprising. Conflict, in general, tends to be short-lived.
There are some ways in which the Israel-Iran conflict is surprising though. It’s difficult to say right now, but I feel fairly confident that this conflict would be coded as a full-on war by the creators of this dataset. The label “war” is the highest hostility level given to a conflict in the data. There are three other designations a conflict might be given: use of force, display of force, or threat to use force. Uses of force short of war are the most common occurrence, with nearly 60% of all international conflicts between 1816 and 2014 receiving this designation. All-out war is rare by comparison, comprising just over 5% of all conflicts in the data, making the Israel-Iran confrontation far more intense than nearly 95% of international conflicts that took place over the last two centuries. You can see this all in the figure below.
The Israel-Iran War is also surprising given its estimated battle related deaths. It’s too early now to treat the numbers available as gospel truth, but the estimates I’ve seen so far on the ever-reliable Wikipedia suggest that there were hundreds of military deaths, with most of those suffered by Iran. As you can see in the below figure, only 6.2% of international conflicts over the last two centuries ended with at most 100 to 999 battle deaths. The vast majority, nearly 80%, end with at most less than 10 battle deaths.
In sum, the Israel-Iran War was short-lived, but not uncommonly so. Yet it was uniquely intense and deadly given its duration. For any humanitarians out there, that makes it all the more a blessing that the conflict ended swiftly.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re out of the woods quite yet. Much as President Trump would like to believe that the US strikes about a week ago delivered a death blow to Iran’s nuclear aspirations, the intelligence so far indicates that Iran’s nuclear program merely has been delayed by a matter of months. Questions now abound about what happens next. Will Iran take the hint that the US is willing to use force to keep its nuclear program at bay and come to the negotiating table? Or will it realize that its only option is to press forward and actually develop a nuclear weapon? At the moment, this is anyone’s best guess.
Code to replicate this analysis can be found here.
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