An estimated 250,000 Turkish and Arab troops were killed or wounded defending Gallipoli. Australia shot Muslims to stop Germans going to Russia.
really...

Ronald Reagan:

"...but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have it in the next second -- surrender." (from the iconic 'Time for Choosing' speech)

"I think all of us are agreed that war is probably man's greatest stupidity and I think peace is the dream that lives in the heart of everyone wherever he may be in the world, but unfortunately, unlike a family quarrel, it doesn't take two to make a war. It only takes one, unless the other one is prepared to surrender at the first hint of force."

It seems we have a lot of people here who think surrender is the only option.

Let's see how it works:

Stalin could have saved all those Russian lives if only he'd surrendered to Hitler in June 1941.

Think of the all the suffering we'd have avoided if we surrendered to Japan Dec 1941.

Athens could have saved 192 citizen lives in 490BCE if only they'd surrendered to Darius. Of coarse, there'd be no western civilisaton, their young women would have been sold into various harems and their young boys castrated, but heh, avoiding war is surely worth it.

""Why not go straight to the conference table?"

More historic illiteracy. In fact most wars start AFTER the conference (and/or diplomacy) have failed.

Muslims took over Jerusalem . War. Muslims took over Jerusalem.
Germans and Normans took over Britain. War. Germans ruled Britain.

An important element in any peace process is the
international community and its mechanisms for
restraining conflict among its members.

Trade, travel, and telecommunications have made
the nations of the modern world more interdependent
than ever before. Yet today's societies entered the
nuclear age with political institutions inherited
from a previous era.

The human population is spread among a series of
sovereign independent states - and most of them with
own armed forces - and so there is a built-in
potential for warfare whenever two nations have
conflicting interests.

Before the twentieth century there were few
institutionalised ways for hostile nations to achieve
peaceful settlements. When negotiations took place
they often occurred only after a war - for the
purpose of agreeing to a peace treaty that would
specify the spoils of the victor. We now have
better prospects for helping nations to avoid war.

In a world where all nations have a common threat of
direct or indirect involvement in nuclear warfare, some
reliable method is needed to limit conflicts among
sovereign states. We have two vital elements for
international peace-making. The first is the United
Nations, which provides a forum for world opinion and a
mechanism for conflict resolution. The second is a
growing body of international law that specifies the
rights and obligations that nations have toward
one another - particularly with respect to aggression.

cont'd ...

cont'd ...

A major difficulty with international peace-making of course
is that compliance with the resolutions of the UN and the
rulings of its World Court are voluntary, for no country is
willing to surrender its sovereignty to an international
body.

The UN is most effective, in fact, when the superpowers
are able to agree on a course of action and mobilise their
blocs to support it.

Even so, the organisation provides an influential forum for
world opinion, and while it does not always prevent war, it
surely makes it less likely.