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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Western powers place a peaceful resolution of the crisis and a safe return of the hostages above all other considerations—even when they privately accept that public signs of humiliation and weakness will lead to further aggression and more hostage-taking. The ultimate result of the Iranian hostages crises was not better understanding between the Iranian theocracy and Western powers; rather it was increased Iranian terrorism after 1980, and, in the British case, an arrest in 2009 of British embassy employees on charges of espionage and treason.

  Yet who in the affluent West would have wished for an American president in November 1979 to issue a warning along the following lines: “If the Iranian government does not release the fifty-two captured, and illegally detained, American diplomatic and military personnel, the United States will soon begin a systematic aerial destruction of all of its military assets. If the personnel are harmed in any way, the government of the United States will further ensure the destruction of the Iranian power grid, refinery capacity, and general infrastructure”?

  On hearing such an ultimatum, the Iranians might well have released the hostages, might well have abandoned further provocative acts, and might well have so lost public face that their credibility in the radical Islamic world would have eroded and their position among Iranians at home weakened. But all those “mights” would have been predicated on two unfortunate possibilities: an American president would have had to gamble that fifty-two Americans could be executed and that in retaliation he would have had to endure Western criticism for using the vast power of the United States inordinately against a weaker, third world “revolutionary” regime.

  The past failure of both Democratic and Republican administrations to strike back hard and consistently at Osama bin Laden’s early terrorist acts against Americans abroad did not bring us respect for our forbearance, much less sympathy from jihadists for our reason and faith in the powers of adjudication. Rather, human nature being what it is, our restraint tragically invited ever more contempt and audacity on al-Qaeda’s part—and more dead as the bitter wages of a certain self-righteous morality and tragic miscalculation.

  Sparta crossed the Athenian border in spring 431 B.C. despite the majestic Parthenon, and without any concern that Aristophanes, Euripides, Pericles, Socrates, and Sophocles walked the streets of Athens. Its army advanced northward because King Archidamus calculated rightly that Athens had never before by force stopped a Spartan army from entering Attica, and certainly gave no indication of doing much about it this time—and wrongly that the ensuing Spartan attack on Attica’s agriculture would either end the war or lead ipso facto to Sparta’s own strategic advantage.

  The enemies of free speech and intolerance—German Nazis, Italian Fascists, Japanese militarists, Stalinist Communists, and Islamic fundamentalists—have just as often attacked us (when they calculated that it could be done without major losses) for what we are or will do, rather than for what we have done, inasmuch as they innately detest freedom and the liberality that is its twin as notions lethal to their own authoritarianism. Again, call the Greeks reductionist, but they did not believe the Achmaenid king Xerxes had legitimate prior grievances arising from their participation in the Ionian revolt, or that he even saw Greece as integral to the administration of the vast Persian Empire, or that he concluded that Hellenic olive trees were essential to the Persian economy. Instead, they saw the conflict as one of an arrogant autocracy, in hubristic fashion, seeking the destruction of its far smaller and free neighbor, for understandable reasons of pride, vengeance, and honor.

  Only our moral response—not our status as belligerents per se—determines whether contemporary war is just. If we butcher a weaker opponent for no good cause, as the Athenians did neutral Melians, or if we gratuitously torture our captives, then our battle against the enemy becomes tainted, and we may well not win it. But if we are trying to preserve freedom against its tyrannical aggressors, like the Greeks at Thermopylae and the G.I.s on the beaches of Normandy, then war may be the right and indeed often the only thing we can do to preserve our larger culture. The point is not that moral purpose always ensures victory. Nor should we assume even that the ethical high ground justifies the resort to arms. We can only console ourselves that democracies by their very nature usually cannot win the wars they choose to enter when their own free people are not convinced that their collective efforts have any humane foundation.

  Caught in such a tragedy—where efforts at reason and humanity had fallen on the deaf ears of killers, and where those who professed a desire to avoid war had to inflict more costs on the enemy than they themselves suffered—the United States apparently wished to send a message to its enemies after September 11, 2001. Their defeat and loss of face in the Middle East would serve as a harsh teacher—for at least a generation or two—that it is wrong and very dangerous to kill thousands of civilians in the streets of our cities. For all the domestic acrimony over Afghanistan and Iraq, for all the anger at the United States in the Middle East, for all the blunders committed in the conduct of recent wars, the terrorists for nine years have not been able to repeat the events of September 11—and the popularity of bin Laden and his tactic of suicide bombing has plummeted rather than risen in polls taken throughout the Middle East.

  Indeed, a 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Project poll of Middle East public opinion suggested the paradoxical: Bin Laden’s and suicide bombers’ popularity alike showed a marked decline. Yet attitudes toward George W. Bush’s America in many Middle East countries remained negative. Or were such results all that divergent? Many in the proverbial Arab street of public opinion might well have despised America for warring against radical Islam, but despised bin Laden and his acolytes even more for losing—and bringing disrepute and misery to all in their midst. Public opinion in Germany by winter 1945 was neither favorable to the America that had ignited German cities nor to the führer whose policies had both earned Allied attacks and failed to thwart them.

  It would be unwise, years after 9/11, to suggest that the so-called war on terror is over—to the extent of outlawing the provocative phrase “war on terror” altogether and replacing it with the kinder, gentler “overseas contingency operations” taken in response to “man-made catastrophes.” Or to insist that we are really not at war with anything so remote as “Islamic extremism,” even as we continue to target jihadists on the Afghan border, deploy in Iraq, and execute suspected terrorists through drone missile attacks. In such a contradictory scenario, Americans would do plenty enough to incite enemies to continue their bellicosity, while at the same time assuring them that we no longer see the struggle in quite such existential terms—a strange passive-aggressive medley that could ensure a dangerous climate indeed.

  In sum, study of the Greeks in this sophisticated age of high technology, and deeply embedded sociology and psychology, is a reminder that wars—and the emotions and mentalities that fuel them—are tragically eternal. And the wisdom of the past concerning how conflict begins, is deterred, and ends is more critical now than ever, however unwelcome such lessons may be.

  The Anticlassical View

  DESPITE THE ADMONITIONS of Edward Gibbon, it was not the advent of Christianity and “turn the other cheek” that ended the classically tragic view of the constant need for military preparedness to ensure the peace, and so brought down Rome. Well before hundreds of thousands crossed the Rhine and the Danube, Christian philosophers and theologians developed the doctrine of “just war,” having realized that passivity and nonresistance could translate into suicide. Nor did the Enlightenment and its god Reason end the insanity of war—inasmuch as most philosophers soon conceded that global courts, broadly educated publics, and enlightened elites could not dissuade Frederick the Great, Napoleon, or Wellington from the use of armed force.

  More likely, it was the horror of the two world wars—Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima—that led to our own era’s questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe
that nearly destroyed itself in two devastating industrial wars within a roughly twenty-year period. Yet out of such numbing losses we may have missed the lesson of the horror. The calamity of sixty million dead was not just because nationalistic Westerners went to war in an industrial age of weaponry of mass annihilation, but rather because the liberal democracies were unwilling to make moderate sacrifices to keep the peace well before 1914 and 1939—when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism, and then Nazism without millions of the blameless perishing.

  Increased affluence, entertainment, and leisure of the past half century in the relatively quiet and postmodern West also has made it easier to pronounce a war of any type as retrograde and of no utility. It is, after all, hard to convince young people to forgo the beach for basic training. It was one thing for parents to send one of five children from the backbreaking work on the farm to serve “over there” in France in 1917, but quite another for today’s parents to risk losing an only child—the beneficiary of braces, SAT camps, and college-prep courses—on patrol in the Hindu Kush, adjudicating tribal feuds among the pro- and anti-Taliban factions.

  The legacy of the British and French Enlightenments, of course, gave birth to popular social sciences that sought to “prove” to us that war was always irrationally evil and therefore surely preventable. Indeed, during the 1986 International Year of Peace, a global commission of well-meaning academics (See “The Seville Statement on Violence, Spain, 1986”) concluded that war was innately unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike—the implication being that war itself was entirely preventable with proper thinking and global preventive medicine.

  Seeing war as “Zeus’s curse” in this age of our greatest learning and wealth—and pride—is to descend into savagery, when our more educated trust that prayer, talk, or money can prevent conflict. But if Westerners deem themselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop aggressors in this complex nuclear age, then—as Socrates and Aristotle alike remind us—they can indeed become real accomplices to evil through inaction. We forget sometimes that the philosopher Socrates—citizen of the world, critic of the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, foe of frenzied mob rule, skeptic of fashionable sophistic relativism—fought as an Athenian hoplite (a heavily armored and armed infantryman) in battle at least three times on the eve of and during the Peloponnesian War, at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis, all on foreign soil in campaigns deemed “imperial” by the enemies of Athens and “optional” by many Athenians themselves. The playwright Sophocles commanded triremes against the revolting tributary island of Samos (pitted against the Samian Eleatic philosopher Melissus) and served late in life as a commissioner in the wake of the catastrophe at Sicily—roughly the ancient equivalent of Philip Roth being appointed to a 9/11 commission or a middle-age Rick Warren being assigned to the 101st Airborne.

  Western Exceptionalism

  WAS SUCH ABSTRACT speculation about war unique in the early West? Was it uncommon elsewhere to debate wars and to ratify decisions to go to war by majority votes, as was true in the polis and Roman Republic? In large part, yes. Classics should remind us that the Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced—and enriched—at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for “democracy,” “republic,” “city-state,” “constitution,” “freedom,” “liberty,” and “free speech” have no philological equivalents in other ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well).

  We have forgotten this ancient truth of Western exceptionalism. In the age of cultural studies, Americans have often made the common mistake of assuming that our enemies are simply different from us, rather than far different from us. Perhaps the hesitancy to appreciate the singularity of the West results from guilt over European colonialism. Or it may be laudable humility. Or it could reflect an ignorance of cultures in general and Western civilization in particular. Or we may live in an interconnected global age where all narratives are complementary rather than antithetical—no one “truth” having any absolute currency.

  Nonetheless, Athens was a democracy; Sidon was not. Farmers owned property in Greece, voted, and formed the militia of the polis; that was not the case in Persia and Egypt. King Xerxes sat on a throne at Salamis and recorded the names of brave and cowardly subjects battling in the straits below. His counterparts, the Spartan general Eurybiades and the Athenian admiral Themistocles, debated the wisdom of fighting at Salamis, led their own sailors into the sea battle, and heard their rowers shout cries of “freedom” as they rammed the enemy.

  Thucydides was able to criticize his mother polis, Greece; Persian clerks who recorded Darius’s res gestae on the walls of Persepolis could not. Such differences were not merely perceived but also real and critical, for they affected the manner in which people conducted their daily lives—whether they lived in fear or in safety, in want or in security.

  If the public today would study the classics, they might rediscover the origins of their culture—and in doing so learn that we are not even remotely culturally akin to the Taliban or the Saudis, but are, in fact, profoundly different in the manner we craft our government, treat our women, earn our living, and set the parameters of our religion. The point is not that bias, oppression, and subjugation didn’t exist during the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, or the ages of overseas conquest and imperialism in the West. But rather there was also the blueprint of personal freedom and consensual government that survived the darkest moments of Western civilization and resprouted at the most unexpected moments in classical Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Enlightenment Western Europe. It is unwise perhaps in triumphalist fashion to chest-thump in our globally connected world about past Western achievement; but in a transnational war of ideas, it is equally unwise to deny the radically different cultural attitudes toward religiously driven suicide bombing and the relationship between religion and secular government.

  Modern cultural anthropology, social linguistics, cross-cultural geography, and sociology in theory could contextualize the Taliban’s desecration of the graves of the infidel, destruction of ancient statues of Buddha, clitoridectomies of infants, torture of the accused, murder of the untried, and hounding out of the non-Islamic as something not quite “evil.” Yet a world run according to the dictates of the Taliban or its supporters, like the satrapy that Xerxes envisioned for a conquered Greece, would mean no cultural anthropology at all. There would be no real voting and scant protection from arbitrary and coercive government. Instead, theocracy, censorship, and brutality would invade every facet of daily life. Such were the stakes at Salamis. And so too is the contest with the radical worldview of Islamic fundamentalists, who are as akin to ancient absolutists as Westerners are to the Greeks.

  Such neglect of one’s own past can, I think, ultimately weaken a powerful society such as ours that must project confidence, power, humanity, and hope to those less fortunate abroad. The new species of often upscale and Internet-savvy terrorist hates America for a variety of complex reasons. (Ayman al-Zawahiri has listed dozens of grievances for al-Qaeda’s war on America that commenced on September 11, 2001—among them, our lack of campaign finance reform and the supposed presence of Jewish women in the holy city of Mecca.)

  The terrorist despises, of course, his own attraction toward our ease and liberality, explaining why some of the most virulent Islamists are precisely those, who chose to be educated in the West. Mohammed Atta, the tactician of 9/11, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, its strategic architect, studied at the Technical University of Hamburg and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, respectively.

  The terrorist recognizes that our freedom and affluence spur on his appetites more than Islam can repress them. But just as important, the al-Qaedis
t perceives that there is a sort of aristocratic guilt within a minority of influential Americans, who are too often ashamed of, or apologetic about, their culture—or have lost any ability even to articulate it. And in this hesitance, our enemies sense not merely our unfamiliarity with our own foundations but perhaps weakness as well—and at times wrongly believe that their assaults on America are simply an extreme reification of what many inside the West, in the abstract, do not like about the West.

  Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause—and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.

  To sum up the Hellenic view of war and the lessons we may learn from the Greeks: Conflict is omnipresent. It is often irrational in nature and more a result of strong emotions than of material need. Preparedness is more of a deterrent than is empathy, understanding, or demonstrations of good intentions. War is sometimes won or lost as much by confidence in one’s culture as by military assets themselves. It is often not a question of a choice between good or bad but between bad or worse. And war should be judged moral or immoral by the circumstances in which it breaks out and the conditions under which it is waged, rather than by the fact that violence is employed.

  We may not like such a bitter message, but recent events have shown the empirical Greeks of the past are still more relevant to present warfare than what passes for much of the wisdom of the contemporary age.