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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Many Westerners are now hesitant to condemn something like sharia law in abstract terms as an enemy of freedom, or to say Islamic suicide bombers kill barbarously for an evil cause. Some in the West don’t think jihadists necessarily pose any more of a threat than their own industrial capitalist state, abortion protesters, or right-wing militias. And some who do simply feel that they lack the knowledge, or have previously lost the moral capital, to do anything about it.

  Utopian pacifism was always innate in Western civilization, given its propensity to wage horrific wars, and in response to seek transnational legislative means to prevent the reoccurrence of such catastrophes. From classical times, there has been a strain in Western letters and thought that a natural human, freed of the burdens of an oppressive civilization, might find a blissful existence without war, hunger, injustice, or the stress of the nation-state—should he be properly educated and replace wild emotion with a certain sort of pseudo-reason that borders on romance. Elite urban Romans often romanticized shaggy Germans bathing in ice-cold, pure mountain rivers. Plato’s Republic was the beginning of a number of never-never speculations about how properly educated and trained elites could construct a society without war and poverty.

  In revulsion at the carnage of the European twentieth century, and given the respite at the end of an existential threat from a nuclear Soviet Union, these old ideas about the perfectibility of human nature through education, energized by a vast increase in national income, have again taken hold. Sometimes we see these hopes manifested in world government. Many Westerners advocate sharing some national sovereignty with the United Nations, or allowing American soldiers to be subject to edicts arising from the World Court at The Hague.

  Sometimes they are more pedagogical and more ambitious, establishing “peace studies” programs to inculcate our youth that, with proper study and counsels, war can be outlawed, as if the carnage is a result of misunderstanding rather than evil leaders knowing exactly what they want and planning how to get it. At other moments, diplomats convince themselves that controversial leaders of autocratic states—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, or Bashar Assad of Syria, or Kim Jong-Il of North Korea—either may have some understandable complaints against the West, which explains their hostility, or appear more bellicose than they really are, largely through misunderstanding and miscommunication or the efforts of Western rightist zealots. In fact, the utopian believes that such autocrats may no more wish to harm us than we do them. Such bogeymen perhaps resort to the alarmist rhetoric of armed threats largely as a legitimate reaction to the military preparedness of the United States.

  Utopian pacifism has had the effect within Western societies of defining difference down. In the present post-9/11 world, it deludes Western publics into thinking that problems with radical Islam are as much of our own making as they are a result of aggressive jihadist doctrines. In practical terms, utopianism translates into an influential segment of the public that does its best to convey the message that Western and radical Islamic cultures are roughly similar—and that any differences that arise can be adjudicated through greater understanding and dialogue. Therefore, novelists, filmmakers, journalists, or politicians who believe otherwise should not voice their sentiments out of concern for the greater ecumenical good—or at least exercise prudence by curtailing free expression, in recognition that their blunt talk may evoke a counterresponse quite injurious to the Western public in general.

  As for such moral equivalence, or the inability to discern Western and non-Western pathologies, it begins as a strain of cultural neutrality. “They do it, but we do it” thinking seeks to do away with any notion of relative magnitude in hope of achieving global ecumenicalism—and yet thereby places impossible burdens of perfection on Western societies.

  Sometimes the Western misdemeanor is defined as equivalent to another culture’s felony. Prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, for example, was rephrensible and abhorrent to any sense of decency, but no Iraqi detainees were seriously injured nor perished. Nevertheless, it was treated in popular media as the equivalent of either a Nazi stalag or Soviet gulag, or a continuation of Saddam Hussein’s torture center, where thousands were tortured or executed. Evidently, all were penal camps and therefore roughly all equivalent in ethical terms. Thus Senator Ted Kennedy fulminated, “Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management: U.S. management.”

  Context must become less important. The invasion of Iraq—approved by an elected Senate and House, argued over at the United Nations, intended to remove a genocidal dictator and leave a constitutional government in its wake—becomes not much different from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the result of a Communist dictatorship’s desire to crush an anti-Soviet neighbor, waged ruthlessly against a civilian population, and resulting in the installation of an authoritarian puppet government. When the Russians went into Georgia in summer 2008, an autocracy seeking to destroy a republic, many in America said they were emulating our example in Iraq—a democracy trying to destroy a dictatorship in order to foster a democracy.

  Standards of censure are never quite equally applied: We worry whether an errant bomb killed Iraqi civilians; silence ensues when Russians nearly obliterate Grozny and kill tens of thousands of civilians. The mishandling of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, one of the five worst natural disasters in the nation’s history, in which 1,836 Americans were killed, is singular evidence of American racism and incompetence. Yet not much later, 300,000 were lost in an Indonesian tsunami, a Burmese hurricane accounted for 100,000 dead, and a Chinese earthquake took 50,000 lives—and few remarked on either the incompetence of those governments in reacting to such a staggering loss of life or the failure of such states to provide safe and adequate housing for their populations in the first place.

  Despite the veneer of internationalism and caring, moral equivalence is predicated on a sort of condescending notion of low expectations—that an educated and affluent Western society must not err, while the “other” is apparently always expected to commit felonies. Once the doctrine of moral equivalence is adopted, it becomes again impossible to abide by any abstract standards of censure or calibration of blame.

  We circumcise infant males, so why shouldn’t the Sudanese “circumcise” female infants? We have bombed civilians from Tokyo to Hanoi, so why shouldn’t suicide bombers do the same? Timothy McVeigh was a religious, right-wing terrorist, so why are the thousands of Islamic terrorists deserving of any special censure? Much of the effort to hold the West to an unambiguously higher standard of being near perfect to qualify as being merely good speaks well of our values and aspirations. But in times of war, such requisites can endanger the lives of those entrusted with ensuring that we the public can entertain such exalted moral ambitions.

  The aggregate result of multiculturalism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence among its cultural elites and leadership is that philosophically and ethically the Western public becomes less well-equipped to condemn antithetical ideologies and to defend itself against their aggression. In Western consensual societies this so-called political correctness likewise permeates the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. For a variety of reasons we voluntarily restrict our own free speech and expression; and we do not expect our governments to have the intellectual and moral wherewithal to protect the safety of writers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and journalists who choose to express themselves candidly and incur the wrath of radicals abroad.

  But Why Now?

  A QUESTION LOOMS: Why have these doctrines become so popular in our own era? First, in the general sense, the wealthier, freer, and more leisured a society becomes—and none is more so on all three counts than twenty-first-century America—the more its population has the leeway, the margin of error, so to speak, both to question and to feel guilty over its singular privilege.

  Abstract doctrines that allow one to vent remorse over our riches, without denying our enjoyment of them,
satisfy a psychological need to reconcile what is intrinsically irreconcilable. We see the same sort of phenomenon in early Roman imperial literature—Petronius, Juvenal, Suetonius, and Tacitus—where wealthy elites engage in a sort of nihilism or cynicism in matters concerning their own culture, as if ridiculing luxury means that they are exempt from criticism of enjoying it.

  Second, with the collapse of Communism and the rise of globalized capitalism, Marxism as a formal doctrine was formally discredited. But its underlying and more vague assumptions that the state must enforce an equality of result among all the citizenry remain attractive to many, especially once the doctrinaire baggage of the millions killed by Soviet and Maoist Communism is removed.

  One way of encouraging Western societies to redistribute their wealth both at home and abroad is to argue that it is not earned—or the result of practices not at all different from, much less better than, what is found in non-Western societies. And if non-Western societies appear to us to be more violent and unfair than our own, such perceptions need to be contextualized as legitimate responses to prior Western sins, ranging from colonialism and imperialism to unfair commercial protocols arising from globalization.

  The Western military tradition assures Western states that they could, if they so wish, become almost immune from foreign attack. Consensual governments can, in extremis, craft security legislation consistent with constitutional principles that will protect citizens without eroding their rights. But government has no remedy once citizens voluntarily begin to abandon freedom of expression out of fear or guilt—or misguided ideologies designed to deny the singularity of their civilization. More important still, as the use of military force in unconventional landscapes becomes increasingly problematic, the power of rhetoric, sloganeering, and public opinion in the conduct of wars becomes even more critical.

  Asymmetries Everywhere

  THE ENEMIES OF Western democracies grasp these contradictions in postmodern life in American and Europe perhaps better than we do ourselves. Once the jihadists understood that America was no longer content with punitive retaliation, largely by air, but would instead fight on their own turf to achieve larger political aims by winning hearts and minds, the terrorists subtly changed their tactics. So successful have they been that, after years of combat, much of Afghanistan is still not secure. And in Iraq, the U.S. military only recently was able to secure Baghdad. Saddam is gone, and our ground troops are backed by billions of dollars, the finest air force in civilization’s history, sophisticated technology, and advice from seasoned counterinsurgency veterans. Yet for years the Sunni Triangle was not safe for anyone.

  The same dilemma frustrates even Israel, that veteran of counterterrorism. We were told that, after nearly a month in Lebanon, the Israeli Defense Forces were no closer to destroying Hezbollah’s Katyusha missiles than they were to eliminating the even more primitive Kassem rockets Hamas launched from Gaza—notwithstanding the Arab fear of taking on the IDF as in the conventional wars of 1967 and 1973. It almost seems that the less the United States and Israel worry about a Syrian armored corps or an Iranian air wing, the more loath they are to fight Iraqi insurgents or Hezbollah, because of the difficulty of cleaning up terrorist enclaves and the public relations fiascos that follow in the global press.

  There are relatively easy conventional military methods of removing Iranian centrifuges and nuclear installations; there are less easy remedies in countering the resulting terrorist response that an Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Hamas, or other Islamic organizations would unleash regionally as well as globally—not to mention attacks on tankers passing through the Persian Gulf.

  Why, critics moan, can’t prosperous Western societies, sobered by September 11 and possessing superb conventional militaries and sophisticated antiterrorism forces, overwhelm this latest generation of ragtag jihadists—and convey the importance of victory to the world at large? After all, aren’t the terrorists’ arsenals limited to cobbled-together improvised explosive devices, outdated and underpowered missiles, suicide bombers, and rocket-propelled grenades?

  The West’s GPS- and laser-guided bombing was supposed to usher in a new age of warfare in which Western arms could reach the most distant mud-brick hut in the Hindu Kush. Islamic terrorists even in faraway Afghanistan were no longer immune to missiles that could appear from nowhere and shatter their remote caves. And precision weapons allowed us to minimize civilian casualties and avoid the collateral damage of Vietnam-style bombing. On some occasions all of the above may well be true.

  But the ongoing fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon—and even NATO’s 1998 bombing campaign in Serbia—suggests otherwise. As the Americans have learned in Baghdad, and the Israelis in southern Lebanon, it is not easy to use commandos and specially trained antiterrorist forces to quickly defeat insurgents who know that time is on their side and that any death—enemy or friend, civilian or combatant—advances their cause. It is much easier to create misery than to prevent it, easier to blow up a marketplace than reconstruct it with proper wiring, plumbing, and drainage—especially when the general suffering of the people is blamed on the prosperous Western interloper and so aids the cause of the terrorist. And missiles cannot always change hearts and minds, much less distinguish on the ground between a terrorist, his ten-year-old girl, his civilian sympathizer or shield, or his principled opponent.

  In short, for a variety of reasons, many of the advantages of contemporary warfare seem to lie with the insurgents and terrorists who would challenge the postmodern West. First, it matters less than ever that the global arsenal of munitions is largely designed in the West. While all the world’s militaries are parasitic on technologies and weapons expertise that originate in Europe and the United States, it is now far easier to steal, buy, or be given weapons suitable for terrorists than to acquire those suitable for traditional armies.

  Tanks, jets, and missiles are expensive and hard to operate. True, the Syrians and Iranians may not be able to field them in such a way as to establish operational equivalence with the Americans or Israelis. But they can buy off-the-shelf surface-to-air missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, mines, and machines guns. These are all cheap, require little expertise, and, in the right urban landscape of hit-and-run attacks amid civilians, can provide a sort of parity against a Merkava tank or an Apache helicopter. As September 11 demonstrated, sometimes a few hundred thousand dollars’ investment and a score of terrorists can do more human and material damage inside the continental United States than all the deadly conventional arsenals of the Nazis, Fascists, Japanese, and Soviets put together.

  A second challenge is the widening gap between the quality of life in a successful West and that in a failed Middle East. Other than a few Gulf principalities, globalization has passed by most of the latter, whose governments resist modernity and the bounty that accrues to open societies. Oil wealth epitomizes this dilemma and ensures the worst of both worlds: Petrodollars have a way of circulating to terrorists and paying for their weapons, but they do not filter down to the Middle East street, and so create social tensions rather than alleviate the general poverty that fuels Islamic fundamentalism.

  Blaming the West for the Middle East miasma—which is actually induced by autocracy, statism, fundamentalism, and gender apartheid—lies at the heart of the radical Islamic creed. Yet we often forget the military consequences of the wide gap between our own wealth and theirs, as affluence in strictly military terms can almost become a liability, while poverty transforms into a weird sort of advantage. Rarely have the criteria of victory and defeat been so radically redefined, with the mostly secular combatants on our side having so much to lose, while the enemy dreams of an Islamic paradise of sexual pleasure and riches far more enticing than the slums of Sadr City or Jericho.

  The more leisured and affluent an America at war becomes, the less willing it is to endure the deaths of its youths seven thousand miles away, in awful places like Somalia and the Sunni Triangle, in fighting deemed not immedia
tely connected to the survival of the United States. The result is that the West assumes it need not mobilize much of its enormous military strength to crush the impoverished enemies, who in fact continue to grow as formidable as before.

  The West’s revulsion at losing lives in such distant and unfamiliar theaters is only magnified by the televised savagery of beheading and mutilation. Most Americans—already tired of high oil prices, the spiraling debt, the monotony of the fist-shaking Arab street, and the lack of sympathy from our so-called Muslim friends from Jordan to Iraq—are returning to the 1990s mood of punitive isolationism. The result is that four thousand war deaths in Iraq eroded public support for war much more quickly than did the much more numerous losses in Vietnam. The message conveyed by the terrorists to the West when dead American contractors are strung up and mutilated outside Fallujah or Israeli corpses are dismembered in Lebanon is something like, “Go back to your twenty-first-century suburbs and leave the seventh century to us.”

  Third, not since the early twentieth century has the West been more chaotic, disparate, and divided. In the present age, Hezbollah’s best chance of reining in the Israeli Defense Forces is not through a cascade of missiles, but rather through E.U. and U.N. pressure. The French foreign minister flew to Lebanon to praise Iran as a force for “stability in the region”—the very regime that has promised to wipe Israel off the map and given Hezbollah rockets to try to do just that.

  Indeed, condemnation from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan or U.N. envoy Javier Solana during the summer 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon may have ultimately harmed Israeli operations more than a dozen suicide bombers could. Wealthy cosmopolitan Israelis worry when the Westernized world shuns their country; poor and often bitter Shiite Muslims care little. An Israeli does not like stares at Frankfurt Airport when he shows his passport, a Lebanese Hezbollah operative may well not have a passport—or if he does, care little about the reaction of a German official.