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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  A largely unarmed Europe worries over reliable supplies of oil, and desires to recycle petrodollars through arms sales. Europe also fears Islamic terrorism and the ominous presence of unassimilated Muslim minorities in its midst. Add in its envy of America the hyperpower and old anti-Semitism, and Europe, with its economic and cultural clout, often sides with anti-Western belligerents. And this fact is well known to jihadists, who simply add an Islamic touch to a preexisting well-established European anti-Americanism.

  Fourth, the antiwar movement has become more sophisticated than in the days of Vietnam. Of course, there has been dissent for Western wars from the days of Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Euripides’ Trojan Women. But today modern and postmodern ideologies question not just the wisdom or morality of particular wars, but also, as we have seen, the entire notion of war itself. Once more such doubts conspire with instantaneous media to make it arduous to fight in the Middle East on the terrorists’ turf.

  The point is not merely that Americans should not die in wars deemed “optional,” given their great distance from the United States, but also that Americans should not kill the “other.” The fallen terrorist is usually not in uniform, and pictures of his charred remains can be beamed around the globe as proof that another underprivileged civilian has been murdered by bullying American troops. Note that the media usually distinguish between civilian and military Israeli losses to suicide bombers or incoming rockets. Not so with Hezbollah or Hamas: Almost everyone who dies in Lebanon or in Gaza is portrayed as a “civilian.” Remember, also, that the anti-Western Hezbollah has a very Western media-relations department, whose director, for all his hatred of America, issues American-style business cards complete with e-mail addresses, and in times of war is in hourly contact with Western news services. Again, so strong is the tug of cultural neutrality that it trumps even the revulsion of Western progressives at the jihadist agenda, with its homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, and racism. The poor, the nonwhite other, the non-Christian, and the former colonial may seem at times illiberal to suburbanites in the West, but who would not, given prior exploitation and present-day global inequality? Westernized Hezbollah elites understand Western media and Western public opinion, and thus how to package their own “narratives” in such a way as to draw on our well-intentioned sympathies.

  But there is another unspoken challenge. The United States has usually waged war more easily with Democratic presidents—Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson—who appear as reluctant warriors forced to fight, rather than with supposedly bellicose right-wingers who “enjoy” settling issues by force. Again, note the absence of much criticism when Clinton failed in 1998 even to approach Congress or the United Nations, and instead unilaterally ordered American planes to war.

  Many of Osama bin Laden’s and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s talking points come right from the Westerners—from the myth that the Iraq War was about oil, to the evils of Halliburton, to the “war crimes” at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Bin Laden often issues not mere communiqués, but even lists of suggested readings, ranging from the works of Noam Chomsky to those of Jimmy Carter. When a U.S. senator claims that we are continuing the work of Saddam Hussein or another compares our actions to those of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, the jihadists fathom all too well that it matters little to the West that its enemies are politically incorrect—since the West at times seems happy to declare itself worse.

  Western Advantage?

  SO, IN THE future, how will a confused America—particularly under presidents who cannot posture as reluctant liberal warriors—fight well-trained terrorists and insurgents who have access to lethal weapons and who use the media to portray themselves as sympathetic victims?

  The West has always found ways of overcoming these checks on its conventional power. And its options extend beyond improvements in military technology that can lessen both its own losses and collateral damage. In an interconnected and globalized world, the example of Western consensual law and economic prosperity can, in fact, undermine insurgents by winning over the proverbial hearts and minds of their countrymen.

  For all the negative press concerning neoconservatism’s naive trust in the universal appeal of free institutions and personal liberty, it is to America’s advantage that we are now more likely to be caricatured as dreaming idealists than as cynical realists. And if in the short term, terrorists find it helpful that explosions and mayhem are aired daily on Western television, then in the long term, globalization, democratization, and international communications will undermine the parochial world of the Islamic fundamentalist and the Middle East patriarch.

  We forget as well that Western popular culture is radically egalitarian. Its video games, pop music, informal dress and manners, diction, and easy and cheap fast food all conspire to destroy hierarchies and break down traditional protocols and prerequisites. The result is a sort of undermining of tribal culture. For good or evil, Middle Easterners are more likely to wear Princeton sweatshirts and listen to iPods than Westerners are to don burqas and establish all-male coffeehouses.

  In free societies, the best weapon against those who choose not to fight an aggressive enemy is simply to tell the public—constantly and candidly—why we should fight. This is true even in ugly wars that present only bad and worse choices. Western armies always do better when a Pericles or a Franklin Roosevelt explains—rather than asserts—how difficult the task is, what the enemy is up to, and how we will, as in the past, ensure its defeat.

  For all the talk of Vietnam redux, one forgets that America has so far been quite successful in preventing another 9/11 and removing illiberal governments from Afghanistan and Iraq, and that its subsequent efforts to establish lasting democracies may yet prevail. The conventional wisdom between 2003 and 2008 was that the Iraqi quagmire had weakened Iran’s traditional Arab rival, and thus empowered the clerics in Teheran to take even greater risks. But it is countenanced somewhat by the notion that a successful democratic Iraq can be equally destabilizing to theocratic Iran across the border. By June 2009 hundreds of thousands of Muslims took to the streets, not in Baghdad to complain of American occupation, but in Teheran to demand the sort of freedoms for mostly Shiite Muslims that they had sensed were possible in Iraq.

  Unfortunately, the United States will probably have to fight more wars, in places and in ways it would otherwise not choose, and against ever more sophisticated terrorists. What we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq suggests not only that the battlefield has become often bizarre, but also that the home front is even more confused.

  Western militaries adapt rapidly and can prevail often in the most inhospitable landscapes. But the future challenge for beleaguered Westerners will be more at home than in the field abroad. The western Europeans—who have experienced, and are currently threatened by, terrorist attacks on their home soil—could outfight Islamic terrorists even in the distant Afghanistan borderlands. But the answer to the question of whether they can convince themselves that such concomitant sacrifice would be justified seems increasingly unambiguous: no.

  I am not worried about a twenty-first-century America losing its edge in technology, military organization, and logistics, or a loss of spirit among the ranks. The worry is instead that the public at large is becoming ever more sophisticated, nuanced, and cynical—postmodern, if you will—even as the majority of our enemies remain unapologetically uncomplicated, single-minded, and zealous, attitudes that can prove advantageous when war breaks out. War is not litigation, regulation, or adjudication; rather it’s a primitive nasty business, in which the greater force of one side prevails over the other—force often defined as much by morale and commitment as material strength.

  An increasingly prosperous United States is redefining age-old battle not as a tragic experience in which human error, primordial emotions, and chance always conspire to ensure terrible mistakes, unforeseen setbacks, and uncertain progress as requisites to ultimate victory. Instead the public and its leaders assume thei
r wars in awful places like Afghanistan and Iraq can be switched on, progress reliably, and be turned off in predictable fashion. They cannot—a fact accepted by others less fortunate, whether in post-Soviet Russia and Communist China or Islamabad and Tehran. We the people—not just the First Marine Division or an array of satellite lasers—will keep us safe. And finally that means sometimes we must wage war to defeat our enemies, even as we lament that they are our enemies and that our good enough soldiers prove to be not quite perfect.

  * This essay incorporates some ideas that first appeared in the June 2006 National Review Online and others that were delivered as the Margaret Thatcher Lecture, on June 3, 2008, at the Heritage Foundation.

  EPILOGUE

  The Paradoxes of the Present

  WHAT HAS WAR become in the present age?

  The first decades of the new millennium saw deadly wars in the non-West—and a United States divided over whether its ongoing fighting is existential or optional. Between 2000 and 2010 conflicts raged in Afghanistan, Congo, Gaza, Georgia, Iraq, Kashmir, Lebanon, Nigeria, Somalia, the Sudan, and Wazirstan. The United States itself on September 11, 2001, suffered its first major foreign attack on its continental homeland. Nearly three thousand perished at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and on passenger aircraft. North Korea exploded a nuclear bomb and threatened its neighbors; theocratic Iran seems to be gravitating in the same direction.

  The world’s potential hot spots—whether the Middle East, the 38th parallel in Korea, the Pakistani-Indian border, the republics of the former Soviet Union, Taiwan, Cyprus, or the Venezuelan-Colombian border—could erupt into fighting at any time. Such conflict could very quickly draw in either nuclear players or patrons. Unlike an Iraq or Afghanistan, both sides in any of these wars would have recourse to large conventional militaries with plentiful air or naval support.

  Yet at the same time, rarely has the majority of people on the planet been more peaceful and more prosperous. As a cause of the daily loss of human life, war’s toll pales in comparison with both age-old scourges like malaria and hunger and new worries like the AIDS virus or virulent new forms of swine or avian flu. So are we more or less violent than ever?

  True, globalization has disseminated widely the singular Western methodologies of war making. But it presents plenty of paradoxes. High technology, capitalist forms of production, and instant communications also have spread worldwide, unifying billions through common tastes and appetites. The resulting better life has reminded many from Dubai to Chile of shared interests in resolving disputes peacefully, given the new dividends of a global economy. Meanwhile, the enormous military power of the United States—so often blamed in prompting wars in the Middle East—in fact, plays a stabilizing role in discouraging state aggression well beyond the perimeter of the NATO alliance.

  Remember, most of the world’s attention over the past quarter century has been directed at wars involving Western powers. America, Britain, or the European nations—or all combined—fought in the Balkans, the Falkland Islands, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan. Yet in terms of lethality, the real carnage was elsewhere and has gone almost unnoticed. Several millions perished in the Cambodia, Congo, Chechnya, Darfur, East Timor, Rwanda, and Iran-Iraq wars, where Westerners were not involved and not really interested. This asymmetrical awareness of these wars is not new: Thanks to Livy and the science of Western historiography, we know some of the gruesome details of Rome’s Punic Wars, but we know almost nothing about roughly contemporary tribal bloodbaths throughout most of Africa and Asia where there were no historians.

  What, then, are to we to make of the chaos of contemporary conflict? Perhaps it is best summarized as a tension between the globalized spread of Western-inspired affluence, and the simultaneous proliferation of Western arms. And what a dilemma these two developments present: Globalization creates new wealth that lifts millions out of poverty and thereby mitigates conflict—but it does so in inequitable fashion, encouraging unfairness, resentments, and reactionary envy, the age-old catalysts for war.

  The practice of Western warfare is not only more lethal but also increasingly protective and defensive. Tens of thousands of soldiers have been saved—through the use of drones, armor, defensive weapons, instant communications, and advanced medicine—who just a few years ago would have been doomed. Yet as NATO troops go to war enhanced by Predators, Kevlar, robots, computers, and IV drips, so too their enemies have graduated from AK-47s to sophisticated roadside bombs, along with Internet mustering sites. In short, the best way to sort out the confusion of present-day war is to fathom how its Western strain is evolving and mutating—and yet also remaining predictably reflective of its origins.

  The Old in the New

  TODAY’S CONVENTIONAL MILITARIES are not only equipped with Western-designed weaponry and organized along Western lines, but they even look uniformly Western—if we can judge by Chinese boots, Egyptian camouflaged tanks, and Venezuelan officer caps. Apparently there is universal consensus that the best way to marshal manpower and material for conventional war is to emulate the system that originated on the killing fields of Greece and Rome.

  Indeed, for some 2,500 years the piecemeal application of Western notions like consensual government, capitalism, personal freedom, and secular rationalism to the battlefield has led to dynamic militaries. Their successes were not explicable by the relative population, territory, or natural resources of Europe or North America. Most nations know that, and now believe that they can adopt mostly the military fruits of Western culture rather than emulate all of its bothersome political, economic, and social roots. While they agree Western war is unsurpassed, they are not so convinced about the larger system that created it. The result in military terms is that there is no “West” and “non-West” anymore, but more often a “sort of West.”

  As we have seen, Western military successes never progressed in linear or predetermined fashion. There was always some recourse to check Western military power, at least for a while. That has been especially true given the propensity of Westerners to fight far from home in optional wars of questionable public support. The present Afghan conflict is not the first time an outnumbered Western army, thousands of miles from its home bases, has battled over Kabul in a fashion and on terms not to its liking. What is new, however, is that someone who trained in a cave in Afghanistan ended up at the controls of a sophisticated airliner, ramming it into America’s best-known skyscrapers, with a kiloton’s worth of destructive force.

  From the Greeks’ efforts to curb missile weapons to the current protocols of mutually assured destruction, there have been efforts—both legal and de facto—to limit the unbridled expressions of Western warfare. We presently witness the absurd situation in which a lunatic Iranian regime uses its oil wealth to spin thousands of imported centrifuges to enrich uranium, while peaceful, democratic Germany, where nuclear physics originated, could well be soon blackmailed by the threat of losing a Munich or Hamburg—despite its ability to build within a year hundreds of fusion bombs as predictably lethal as a BMW or Mercedes is reliable. And Germans, whose soldiers once inflicted on the world such destruction, now peacefully and lawfully follow the protocols of global nonproliferation. Those far more eager to make war usually do not care much for either international laws or public opinion.

  Military traditions that gave us both Napoleon and Rommel now worry whether their troops should fight at night, or should kill terrorists when in theory they might better be captured. These are optional self-constraints that reflect a variety of historical and contemporary considerations about the appropriateness of conflict itself—and yet they are completely unshared by our armies’ likely enemies. Westerners now talk of a new, but often baffling, concept of “proportionality” in wartime. Their statesmen worry not so much about the supposedly obsolete notion of victory, but rather about the appearance of evenhandedness in the court of elite international opinion—of not hurting an aggressive enemy any more than it has harmed them.


  We should also not assume that there has always been a monolithic West. The world’s most lethal wars have been fought in Europe between Europeans. For nearly the past five hundred years, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism trisected the West, as we see from the religious wars of the sixteenth-century to fighting in the Balkans at the turn of the millennium. The rise of the Ottoman Empire is explained not just by Islamic zealotry, but also by European division—and by direct help to Istanbul in its wars with other European rivals. The best way to call off a Western powerhouse is to get a more powerful Western powerhouse on your side.

  The toll climbs considerably in West-on-West fights. A Union victory at Antietam or a French win at Verdun were far more costly than the infamous American loss at Little Big Horn or the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu. Currently the crux of defeating radical Islamists abroad is not an absence of manpower or material resources, but winning ratification from NATO members, ensuring moral support from the European Union, and using both shame and rhetoric to chastise those who wish to profit by selling nuclear or biological expertise to unsavory actors.

  It is relatively easy today for non-Westerners to obtain a sort of military parity, either through theft, purchase, or emulation of European arms. And while using a weapon is not the same as designing, fabricating, or repairing it, at critical moments on the battlefield such considerations would appear more abstract than real to those obliterated by Turkish cannons at Vienna. It matters little, after all, to Americans in Anbar that none of al-Qaeda’s killers could design the improvised explosive materials of a suicide vest—just as it mattered little to the British soldiers who were shot by Indian mutineers with British Enfield rifles during the Sepoy revolt.