The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (25 page)

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 their 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.

EPILOGUE

The Paradoxes of the Present

W
HAT 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

T
ODAY’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.

New restrictions on the application of Western force augment these old familiar ones. As we have also seen, the affluence and security that accrued from capitalism and consensual government often proved a mixed blessing in nasty wars against those who were far poorer, far more used to violence, often far more numerous—and usually had far less to lose. During the Peloponnesian War, if a hoplite of imperial Athens fell in the wilds of Aetolia, his death hurt the Athenian cause far more than the loss of the ten tribesmen it took to kill him harmed the cause of Aetolia.

So too it is again with the present. Western medical science not only ensures longer life, but, through the use of sophisticated pharmaceutics and artificial body parts, also promises an
enjoyable
longer life. Those advances will make it ever harder to ask a small minority of our citizens to lose their lives to ensure longer and better ones for the rest of us. Most twenty-first-century Westerners do not see death on their streets. They do not butcher the animals they eat. And they do not lose a large minority of their children to disease and hunger before the age of twelve. But they will increasingly fight those who do.

Those in the First Marine Division who outfought the Japanese, often hand to hand, in horrific places like Peleliu or Okinawa, grew up in more comfortable surroundings than did their Asian enemies—but not that much more comfortable given the ravages of the Great Depression. Today we are even richer and our enemies in comparison are even poorer, whether in Mogadishu or Kandahar. And the gap may widen even further.

Because there was a greater tendency of Western militaries to hear criticism, or to depend on some sort of consensus to ratify their musters, the European public had wider opportunity to oppose and even limit operations deemed too costly or too immoral. That antiwar tradition that started with Homer, Euripides, and Aristophanes accelerates as well. Again, the problem in securing Iraq was not the poverty of American manpower, know-how, or wealth. Instead the challenge was winning over diverse groups of free citizens, who were often not convinced that, in their cost-to-benefit calculations, losing four thousand Americans was worth the price of removing Saddam Hussein and fostering constitutional government in his place in one of the world’s most important—but volatile—regions. These skeptics were not just fringe critics, but also local, state, and national voters, organizers, pundits, donors, and lobbyists.

Contradictions, Paradoxes, and Resolutions

T
HE PRESENT AGE
experiences these age-old tensions—both globalized Western military practice and the traditional checks against it—but intensified as never before. Given human nature, there will be no perpetual peace or lasting international consensus. Instead, as in the past, we will witness cycles and trends that can favor either set battle or unconventional fighting, or something new altogether. The difference in the present age, however, is that far more diverse players are participating in Western warfare and at a far more rapid pace.

The onset of globalization, nuclear weapons, and enormous influxes of capital to the non-West has for a time tipped the scale in the favor of the those seeking to check the application of conventional Western power. True, the great slaughterhouse of civilization—Europe—is now united and quiet in loose alliance with America. Yet cross the Yalu River, bomb Hanoi, pursue over the Pakistani border—any such escalation in the last half century raised the specter that some nuclear power, deliberately posing as less predictable or concerned than an America, a Britain, or a France, might well draw nuclear red lines. The reaction to the implicit threat of a wildcard use of the bomb is to pull back rather than to roll the nuclear dice.

Given the increasing scarcity of oil, and the vast amounts of money its purchase transfers to numerous nations in the Middle East, Russia, Africa, and South America, terrorists and insurgents can easily purchase weapons comparable to those fabricated in America, France, or Sweden. To supply al-Qaeda terrorists does not require the supporting structure of industry, manufacturing, or sophisticated knowledge. Bin Laden only needs the income ultimately derived from a few dozen oil wells and a checking account. What does it matter that the petroleum was originally found and exploited by Westerners in hire to Middle East regimes—or sold and banked through Western finance?