The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

by Victor Davis Hanson

  How politicians lose wars is also of interest. See especially Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis. Mark Moyar’s first volume of a proposed two-volume reexamination of Vietnam, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965, is akin to reading Euripides’ tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances. Alistair Horne’s To Lose a Battle: France 1940 is also noteworthy.

  Few historians can weave military narrative into the contemporary political and cultural landscape. James M. McPherson does in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, a volume that ushered in the most recent renaissance of Civil War history. Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August describes the first month of the First World War in riveting but excruciatingly sad detail. Two volumes by David McCullough, Truman and 1776, give fascinating inside accounts of the political will necessary to continue wars amid domestic depression and bad news from the front. So does Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939–1941. Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace warns against the dangers of appeasement, especially the lethal combination of tough rhetoric and little military preparedness, in a survey of wars from ancient Greece to the Cuban missile crisis. Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation reminds Americans that their idealism (if not self-righteousness) is nothing new, but rather it helps explain more than two centuries of intervention—wise or ill-considered—abroad.

  Any survey on military history should conclude with more abstract lessons about war. Principles of War by Clausewitz remains the cornerstone of the science. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Art of War blends realism with classical military detail. Two indispensable works, War: Ends and Means, by Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury, and Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, edited by Peter Paret, provide refreshingly honest accounts of the timeless rules and nature of war.

  * Portions of this essay originally appeared in the summer 2007 issue of City Journal.

  CHAPTER 2

  Classical Lessons and

  Post-9/11 Wars

  Peace—the Parenthesis*

  IN ADVOCATING MORE military history in the university, I first confess to an odd bias about the proper foundation for studying wars of the past. I was a Greek and Latin language professor for twenty-one years. After eight prior years of undergraduate and graduate training in the classical languages, I was indoctrinated to believe that starting at the beginning of anything is always good advice. Consequently, reading a historian of wars such as Edward Gibbon, W. H. Prescott, or Stephen Ambrose can make more sense once one has read what Thucydides or Xenophon wrote about conflict centuries earlier. Classical explanations and accounts of war take us far from the politics, noise, and fashions of the contemporary world. They allow us to think in terms of larger blueprints, abstract ideas, and age-old paradoxes about war in general that in turn elevate and enrich the modern debate about particular recent wars.

  The study of classics—the literature and history of Greece and Rome—can also offer moral insight in the post–September 11 world, as well as a superb grounding in art, literature, history, and language. By the same token, the absence of familiarity with the foundations of Western culture in part may explain many of the odder and more emotional reactions to recent wars that we have seen expressed in popular American culture.

  War in classical antiquity—and for most of the past 2,500 years of Western civilization—was seen as a tragedy. But it was one that was innate to the human condition, recurrent, and terribly familiar. Conflict was seen as a time of human plague. The historian Herodotus said of war that fathers bury sons rather than sons bury fathers. Killing humans over disagreements should not happen among civilized people, but predictably will occur.

  War, the poet Hesiod lamented, was “a curse from Zeus”—something of near divine parentage that mere men must endure. Of course, in a preindustrial world without nuclear weapons or conventional machines of mass annihilation, the Greeks’ seasonal war making did not necessarily translate into modern notions of battlefield genocide.

  More died in the siege of Stalingrad than probably perished on all sides in all theaters during the twenty-seven-year-long Peloponnesian War. The Greeks could fight seasonally for decades on end (the Athenians on average waged war three out of four years in the fifth century) and called their bloodletting, in the words of the philosopher Heraclitus, “the father, the king of us all.” We moderns, after three seasons of Hiroshimas, or four or five battles of Kursk, would know war instead as “the end of us all.”

  Nevertheless, the preindustrial Greeks are to be listened to when they warn that conflict will always break out—and very frequently so—because we are human, and thus not always rational. Even the utopian Plato agreed: “War is always existing by nature between every Greek city-state,” one of the characters in his Laws matter-of-factly remarks. How galling to us moderns that Plato, of all people, once called peace—not war—the real “parenthesis” in human affairs. Similar tragic acknowledgments can be found in the works of the historians Polybius, Thucydides, and Xenophon, who assumed wars among the city-states would always be breaking out somewhere. The Greeks, of course, wrote down unenforceable rules of war making on stone, proclaimed fifty-year truces and alliances, produced plays about the insanity of war, looked at times to strongmen to enforce a perpetual peace among squabbling city-states—and all the while usually kept right on fighting.

  Warfare could be terrifying—“a thing of fear,” as the poet Pindar summed it up—and senseless, but not therein unnatural or in every instance wholly evil. The Greeks would remind us that evil genocide in Darfur did not stop because of elevated global oratory or the impassioned pleas of nongovernment organizations. It continued because the Western public (whose militaries alone had the resources to stop the ethnic and religious bloodletting) did not wish to endanger hundreds of its pilots and tank commanders in a far distant land to save hundreds of thousands who could be more easily forgotten by switching the television channel—and thereby ensure that their children would not be trying to stop a Rwanda a year from Africa to Latin America.

  While for the Greeks all wars presented only bad and worse choices, and were tragic in the sense of destroying the lives of young men who in peacetime had no intrinsic reason to murder one another, conflicts could still be judged as more or less good or evil depending on their causes, the nature of the fighting, and the ultimate costs and results. Some wars then were deemed better than others, and it was not all that difficult to make the necessary distinctions.

  The Greek defense against the overwhelming Persian attack in 480 B.C., in the eyes of the playwright Aeschylus (who chose as his epitaph mention of his service at the battle of Marathon, not his masterpiece the Orestia), was “glorious.” Yet the theme of Thucydides’ history of the internecine Peloponnesian War was self-destructive folly, and sometimes senseless butchery from Corcyra and Melos to the revolting mess at the Assinarus River in Sicily. Likewise, language of freedom and liberty is associated with the Greeks’ naval victory at “divine” Salamis, but not so with the slaughter at the Battle of Gaugamela—Alexander the Great’s destruction of the Persian army in Mesopotamia that wrecked Darius III’s empire and replaced eastern despots with Macedonian autocrats.

  The Greeks tried to define plenty of just wars while establishing the basis of both legitimate and unfair war making. Those who employed missile weapons—arrows, catapults, sling bullets—at times were felt to be either uncivilized or unfair for killing randomly from afar. Others who killed Greeks rather than barbaroi (foreigners) were deemed murderous (Alexander the Great probably killed more Greeks in Asia than Xerxes ever did in Greece). Some who conscripted slaves, or hired mercenaries, or butchered civilians were relegated to the status of near murderers rather than war makers. Nonetheless, wars of all sorts went on and were judged as bad or good by their perceived conduct, results, morality, and utility.

  Indeed, in matters military, the greatest difference between our own world and the ancients’ i
s this present-day notion that war itself—rather than particular wars per se—must be inherently evil. Aristophanes’ Peace is a screed against the Peloponnesian War, as is Euripides’ Trojan Wars. Neither playwright, however, would have objected to the Persian wars and the “Marathon men” who fought them.

  The Greek mind had little in common with either “The Sermon on the Mount” or Immanuel Kant’s idealistic guidelines for how to ensure perpetual peace between nations. Few Greeks trusted in expressed good intentions or shared notions of brotherhood to keep the peace—although writers as diverse as Plato and Isocrates outlined ways in which the city-states could curtail internecine conflicts. What usually stopped wars from breaking out for a season or two was more likely the notion of an enemy’s larger phalanx, bigger fleet, or higher ramparts, which created some sort of perceived deterrence—and with it the impression that any ensuing war for an adventurous state could be too unprofitable, costly, or drawn out.

  I emphasize “more likely,” since hubris, miscalculation, greed, misplaced honor, and an array of other emotions often led strategoi (generals)—like Alcibiades, Pelopidas, Cleombrotus, and Pyrrhus—to roll the knucklebones when reason advised otherwise. Disastrous wars were common because-less-than-competent leaders often misjudged the likely outcome or felt the costs would be worth the desired benefits.

  The Roots of War

  WHILE WAR WAS innate to the ancients, and its morality more often defined by particular circumstances, fighting was not necessarily justified by prior exploitation or legitimate grievance. Fifth-century Greek historians largely introduced into the Greek vocabulary the binary prophasis and aitia—the pretext and the real cause—often to emphasize that what military leaders claimed were understandable provocations were not, or at least not believable ones.

  Nor did aggression have to arise from poverty or inequality. States, like people, the historian Thucydides demonstrates, could be envious—and unpredictable and aggressive without apparent reason. Theban oligarchs in spring 431 had no ostensible reason to attack tiny, neighboring Plataea at a time of peace, a provocation that helped to start the Peloponnesian War. I should say “no logical reason,” inasmuch as the Thebans entertained a long-standing hatred of the isolated Athenian ally, a belief that they could take the city at little cost, and, in the fashion of Mussolini in 1940, a hunch that they should stake a quick claim to spoils since a powerful ally (in this case, Sparta) was about to prevail in a far larger war.

  If megalomaniacal assailants like King Xerxes of Persia could sense there was little cost to enacting their agendas, they surely would persist in seemingly unnecessary aggression until convinced otherwise. Again, I emphasize words like “unnecessary,” in the sense that a Persia of more than twenty million had no real reason to absorb tiny, materially poor, relatively underpopulated, and distant Greece—other than to make an example of an upstart people who had humiliated the Great King during the earlier Ionian War and the disastrous Persian landing at Marathon. It certainly did not need more lebensraum for the Persian peoples.

  The Athenians in Thucydides’ history claim that they acquired and kept their empire largely out of “honor, fear, and self-interest”—more than any rational calculation of profit making or the acquisition of valuable foreign territory. Sparta preempted and attacked Athens in spring 431, Thucydides says, because of a “fear” of growing Athenian power—and apparently without a desire to annex Attic farmland, or a detailed plan to confiscate the rich Athenian silver mines at Laurium, or a plot to raise bullion by enslaving and selling off the population.

  We of the present do not quite understand this idea of simple “fear” causing wars. Indeed, we of the post-Marxist age of materialism, wedded as we are to the supremacy of reason, often search in vain for a magic oil field or strategic concession that would explain the inexplicable wars in Vietnam or Iraq. We insist that there is a shady pipeline that must “really” account for the intervention in an otherwise impoverished Afghanistan, and that some sort of offshore treasure near the Falklands Islands made the desolate atoll of some strategic or economic value to the British navy. In truth, Greek catalysts like anger, pride, honor, fear, and perceived self-interest often better explain the desire to wage such conflicts, big and small. When asked why one-billion-person-strong China would consider invading much smaller but similarly communist Vietnam—and to the benefit the genocidal regime in Cambodia—Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping matter-of-factly said to his American hosts in January 1979, “It’s time to smack the bottom of unruly little children.”

  According to the canons of such self-acknowledged Hellenic cynicism, the Japanese and Germans in 1941 were not starving, or short of land, or unable to acquire strategic materials on the open market. Hitler received far more strategic materials through purchase from a compliant Stalin before June 1941 than he was ever as able to extract through violence from an occupied and bitterly hostile Soviet Union. Rather they were proud peoples, stung by past slights and perceived grievances, who wanted deference from those whom they deemed inferior and weak. Both countries, after all, now seem nonthreatening, and content enough with larger populations and smaller territories in peacetime than they did in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War. Both have consensual governments as well, which apparently understand the bitter wages of attacking neighbors in wars of aggrandizement.

  Does China, with trillions of dollars in foreign reserves, really need the few extra million Taiwanese as a part of its citizenry, or the rather mountainous terrain of the island of Formosa to add to its agricultural potential? Is the allure of blackmail money—or fear and a distorted sense of honor—what makes a bankrupt North Korea, whose people are often reduced to eating grass, serially threaten to annihilate South Korea, Japan, and the United States with expensive nuclear missiles? Much of the justification for the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 transcended worry about Russian speakers in Georgian-controlled South Ossetia and instead seemed to focus on Russian “dignity” and “honor”—especially the sense of exasperation that a once tiny republic of the former Soviet Union now had the audacity to consider itself an equal to, and rival of, Mother Russia herself.

  To a student of classics who gleans from a Thucydides or a Plato some notion of war, the present crisis that grew out of September 11, I think, might be interpreted in reductive fashion: The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, and with unrivaled global influence, invites envy. The success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets provokes the resentment of both weaker and less-secure theocracy and autocracy alike. Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations of our power and influence daily, from DVDs in Kabul to text-messaging ads in Yemen.

  In emblematic fashion, America stands as a protector of the global system of market capitalism and constitutional government, and of the often reckless modernist culture that threatens so much of tribal and indigenous custom and protocols. That we are therefore often to be hated by the authoritarian, the statist, and the tribalist—and periodically to be challenged by those who want to diminish our power, riches, or influence—is regrettable but nevertheless conceded.

  Diplomacy and humility abroad can encourage friendship. And such good manners and deference are vital in improving our global image and lessening tensions. Yet, unfortunately, pleasantness and magnanimity are not always enough to ensure good relations with rival states and interest groups that look more to what we represent than to what we might say or do on any one occasion.

  It is a tragedy of the human character that a Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran say they predicate relations with the United States on notions of goodwill, deference, mutual respect, past apologies, and benevolent diplomacy, even as they tend to interpret our outreach as weakness and treat deterrence with respe
ct. Having a hundred-thousand-ton nuclear carrier in the Persian Gulf, more lethal than the combined militaries of most nations, probably does more to keep the calm in that region than sending a presidential video to the Iranian theocracy, no matter how artfully phrased.

  Perhaps the strangest barometer of the rise of the therapeutic mind-set is the growing prevalence of old-style piracy. Criminals based in Somalia, using just a few thugs equipped with small arms, routinely hijack and commandeer large oceangoing merchant vessels. Such overt piracy is a symptom of the erosion of international order—not merely in the example of the perpetually failed state of Somalia, but more so by the general global indifference to the piratical encroachment into the world’s vital sea lanes. Likewise, the classical antidote of going ashore to demolish the homes, bases, and dockyards of the miscreants—known from the days of Pompey’s successful efforts against Cilician piracy—seems to be taboo to Western navies in the age after the American “Black Hawk Down” humiliation in Mogadishu. Instead of a military response, we are likely to run a cost-benefit analysis of the piratical threat, to consider the mitigating circumstances of poverty and oppression that turn erstwhile fishermen into seaborne criminals, and to blame the victim in wondering out loud why seagoing vessels don’t carry their own security teams or why such profit-mongering shipping companies must skirt so close to hostile coasts.

  The same confusion is often true of hostage-taking, whether the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 or the Iranians’ capture of fifteen British sailors in disputed waters off Iraq in 2007. Kidnapping regimes are no longer issued ultimatums to release captured diplomatic or military personnel—or else. Instead, the detained are paraded on international television and coerced into signing affidavits admitting guilt or testifying to superb treatment from their captors—while state propaganda airs accusations of espionage, coupled with threats of trials and worse.