The First World War saw one million ill-equipped Doughboys deployed against the most experienced and deadly modern army the world had yet seen. But the mass drafting of one million soldiers, equipped and sent across the Atlantic in a mere year without losses to German U-boats, was acknowledged on all sides as a feat even beyond the ability of the kaiser’s general staff. It was not the newcomer United States that found itself in a hopeless two-front war in the First World War, but the sophisticated planners of Bismarck’s new Germany.
In the Second World War, lapses in our convoy system were hardly as damaging to us as Germany’s repeated mistakes at sea were to the Nazi cause—faulty German torpedoes, poor air support for submarine operations, and abject security breaches that lent the Allies almost instantaneous knowledge of the Kriegsmarine’s operations. There is no need to document the stupendous Baathist strategic and tactical blunders that led to Saddam’s ignominious defeats in both 1991 and 2003. But in his wake (and after his demise), the supposedly sophisticated jihadists have made just as many mistakes. In a self-proclaimed war of Islamic liberation that hinges on public support, al-Qaeda in Iraq has mutilated, butchered, and terrorized a once largely sympathetic population. As a result, the radical Islamists have nearly pulled off the impossible: A formerly receptive Sunni tribal community has turned against Sunni Muslim jihadists and joined with American infidels, sometimes alongside the troops of a Shiite-led government.
In past wars there was recognition of factors beyond human control—the weather; the fickleness of human nature; the role of chance; the irrational; and the inexplicable. All that lent a humility to our efforts and tolerance for unintended consequences. “Wars begin when you will,” Machiavelli reminds us, “but they do not end when you please.” The star-crossed and disastrous Dieppe raid of August 1942 did not mean that D-Day two years later had to fail. The unnecessary surrender of Wake Island in spring 1942 did not mean that Japanese amphibious forces were unstoppable.
Again, when in March 1945 maverick General Curtis LeMay sent high-altitude precision B-29 bombers carrying napalm in low over Tokyo, with little if any armament, the expected American bloodbath did not follow—thanks to a ferocious jet stream and dark, cloudy nights that meant the huge planes came in much faster and with better cover. In war not everything can be anticipated or planned for. “To a good general,” wrote the Roman historian Livy, “luck is important.” When presented with a list of generals for promotion, Napoleon purportedly sighed, “I want none of those. Go back and find me a lucky general.”
By contrast, the American media went into near hysterics during the so-called pause in the 2003 three-week victory over Saddam, when an unforeseen sandstorm temporarily stalled our preordained successful advance. Only later was it revealed that air operations with precision weapons had continued all along to decimate Saddam’s static forces. Few journalists seemed to grasp that sand and poor weather bothered both forces—but the side that had a history of better adaptation to the unforeseen might find such natural obstacles of some comparative advantage.
WMDs were not found in Iraq, it is true. Yet an earlier American generation might have consoled itself with the notion that at last we had proved (as previous intelligence had not) that Saddam no longer posed a threat, and ensured that Iraq would not again translate oil wealth into the deadly forces with which it had attacked four of its neighbors. They would have added that at least twenty of the original twenty-three congressional writs (Public Law 107–243) that authorized the war—ranging from genocide to prior violations of U.N. protocols and armistice agreements—remained valid reasons for his removal.
Our ancestors might have even sighed that the mishandling of the war had effectively raised our standard of proof from “You must prove that you don’t have WMDs” to “We must prove that you do.” In any case, Libya, for example, may well have had more WMDs in stock than Saddam did—and may well have given them up to avoid the latter’s fate. Pakistan mysteriously put its national hero and world nuclear proliferator Dr. A. Q. Khan under house arrest—just weeks after the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Selling the Iraq War on the premise that displays of American resolve would force Mu’ammar Gadhafi to give up his illicit nuclear program would have been as ill-advised as in fact were promises that removing Saddam was essential to neutralizing a sizable Iraqi biological and chemical arsenal.
Has War Changed, or Have We?
VICTORY DOES NOT require achieving all of one’s objectives, but achieving far more than an enemy does of his. Patient Northerners realized almost too late that victory required not merely warding off or defeating Confederate armies, but also invading and occupying an area as large as Western Europe in order to render an entire people incapable of waging war. That enormous effort required an “Anaconda” plan of blockading the eastern and southern coasts of the southeast quadrant of North America, controlling the entire length of the Mississippi River, invading from the northern Midwest, and sending thousands of troops into northern Virginia—simultaneously, and as part of a moral crusade to end slavery in the South, keep the border states in the Union, and maintain the western expansion and diplomatic relations overseas in the midst of a horrific Civil War. And twelve years of postwar Reconstruction had no more success in ensuring lasting racial equality in the South than did twelve years of no-fly zones of removing Saddam Hussein.
Blunders were seen as inevitable once an unarmed United States decided to fight Germany, Italy, and Japan all at once in a war to be conducted far away across wide oceans, against enemies that had a long head start in rearmament. We had disastrous intelligence failures in the Second World War, but we also broke most of the German and Japanese codes in a fashion our enemies could neither fathom nor emulate. Somehow this generation forgets that going into the heart of the ancient caliphate, taking out a dictator in three weeks, and then staying on to foster a constitutional republic amid a sea of enemies like Iran and Syria and duplicitous friends like Jordan and Saudi Arabia—and tragically losing four thousand Americans in the six-year enterprise—was beyond the ability of any of our friends or enemies, and perhaps past generations of Americans as well.
But perhaps the American public, not the timeless nature of war, has changed. Present generations of unprecedented leisure, affluence, and technology no longer so easily accept human imperfections. We seem to care less about correcting problems than assessing blame—in postmodern America it is defeat that has a thousand fathers, while the notion of victory is an orphan. We fail to realize that the enemy makes as many mistakes but probably addresses them less skillfully. We do not acknowledge the role of fate and chance in war, which sometimes upsets our best endeavors. Rarely are we fixed on victory as the only acceptable outcome.
What are the causes of this radically different attitude toward military culpability?
A sophisticated society takes for granted the ability to select from five hundred cable channels; so too, contemporary Americans, spurred on by “greeted as liberators” assurances by our naive leaders, almost expect Saddam instantly gone, Jeffersonian democracy up and running reliably, and the Iraqi economy growing like Dubai’s in a few seasons. If not at all so, then someone must be blamed for ignorance, malfeasance, or inhumanity. If one believes that the administration was successful in downplaying real risks while assuring unrealistic and rosy prognoses, why were the public and media so open to such guarantees? It is as though we expect contemporary war to be waged in accordance with warranties, lawsuits, and product recalls, and adjudicated by judges and lawyers in stale courtrooms rather than won or lost by often emotional youths in the filth, confusion, and barbarity of the battlefield. Stopping lunatic regimes like those in Iran and North Korea from acquiring—and using—nuclear weapons is nearly impossible, and yet we blame both liberal and conservative administrations for either being too stern or too lax for allowing proliferation to continue.
Vietnam’s legacy was to suggest that if American aims and conduct were less than perfect, then they
could not be good at all, as if a Stalinist police state in the north of Vietnam were comparable—or superior—to a flawed quasi-democratic autocracy in the south, with the potential to evolve in the manner of a South Korea. The Vietnam War was not only the first modern American defeat; it was also the last, and so its evocation turns hysterical precisely because its outcome was so unusual. Yet later victories in Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, and the Balkans persuaded Americans that war could be redefined, at the end of history, as something in which the use of force ends quickly, is welcomed by locals, costs little, and easily thwarts tyranny. When all that proved less than true in Somali, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the public proved ill-equipped to accept that walkover victories like Grenada were military history’s exceptions rather than its rule, and that temporary setbacks hardly equated to Vietnam-like quagmires.
We also live in an age of instant communications increasingly contingent on genre and ideology. The New York Times, CBS News, National Public Radio, and Reuters—the so-called mainstream media skeptical of the American military’s morality and its ability to enact change abroad—instill national despair by conveying graphic scenes of destruction in Iraq without, however, providing much context or explaining how such information is gathered and selected for release.
In turn, Fox News, conservative bloggers, and talk radio hear from their own sources that we are not doing nearly so badly and try to offer real-time, wildly optimistic alternative narratives to the conventional newspapers and major networks. The result is that the war is fought and refought in twenty-four-hour news cycles among diverse genres with their own particular audiences, in which the common denominator is that sensationalism brings in ad revenue or enhances individual careers. Rarely is there any sober, reasoned analysis that examines American conduct over periods of six months or a year—not when the “shocking” stories about Jessica Lynch or Abu Ghraib or by fabulist Scott Beauchamp make and sell better copy.
Sensationalism was always the stuff of war reporting, but today it is with us in real time, 24-7, offered up by often anonymous sources, and filtered in a matter of hours or minutes by nameless editors and producers. Those relentless news alerts—tucked in between apparently more important exposés about Paris Hilton, Michael Jackson, and Anna Nicole Smith—ultimately impart a sense of confusion and bewilderment about what war has become. The result is a strange schizophrenia in which the American public is too insecure to believe that we can rectify our mistakes, but too arrogant to admit that our generation should make any in the first place.
What can be done about our impatience, historical amnesia, and utopian demands for perfection? American statesmen need to provide constant explanations to a public not well versed in history—not mere assertions—of what misfortunes to expect when and if they take the nation to war, and of both the costs and benefits of not striking at a known enemy. The more a president evokes history’s tragic lessons, the better, reminding the public that our forefathers usually endured and overcame far worse against the British, Germans, Italians, Japanese, Russians, Chinese, and Koreans.
Americans should be told at the start of every conflict that the generals who begin the fighting may not finish it; that what is reported in the first twenty-four hours may not be true after a week’s retrospection; and that the alternative to the bad choice is rarely the good one, but usually only the far worse. They should be apprised that our morale is as important as our material advantages—and that our will power is predicated on inevitable mistakes being learned from and rectified far more competently and quickly than the enemy will learn from his. What is remarkable about Pericles’ prewar speeches, as recorded in the first and second books of Thucydides’ history, is not his morale-boosting exhortations to fellow Athenians or demonization of the Spartan enemy, but rather his sober assessments of the dangers in fighting the Spartans—and Athenian countermeasures that would offer some hope of success.
If the United States is to fight future wars, our national wartime objective should be victory, a goal that brings with it the acceptance of tragic errors as well as the appreciation of heroic and brilliant conduct. Yet if as a nation we instead believe that we cannot abide error, or that we cannot win because of necessary military, moral, humanitarian, financial, or geopolitical constraints, then we should not ask our young soldiers to continue to try.
As in Vietnam, where we were obsessed with recriminations rather than learning from our shortcomings, we should simply accept defeat and with it the ensuing humiliating consequences. But it would be far preferable for Americans undertaking a necessary war to remember these words from Churchill, in his 1930 prewar memoir: “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.”
* Parts of this essay originally appeared in the winter 2007 Claremont Review.
CHAPTER 12
The Odd Couple—War
and Democracy
Why Democracies Fight, Win—and Lose—Wars.*
Distrusting the Military
IN PREVIOUS CHAPTERS we have seen the paradox of a nation that is a ferocious war maker, but yet has little confidence in its ability to wage modern wars, or harness its military to moral objectives. The somewhat ill-defined relationship between the military establishment and constitutional government is also a related subject that has made many Americans uncomfortable—especially in the modern era when the United States has assumed a leadership role in world affairs. American Cold War–era culture, after all, cautioned us about the intrinsic anti-democratic nature of top-ranking military officers. We all recall the cinematic portrayals like Seven Days in May or Doctor Strangelove or the very real politicking of retired generals like George McClellan, Douglas MacArthur, Curtis LeMay, or Edwin Walker.
In reaction to these Cold War–and Vietnam-era fears, scholars such as Samuel P. Huntington (The Soldier and the State) and, more recently, Eliot Cohen (Supreme Command) have written insightfully about the proper relationship between civilian and military authorities in a constitutional democracy like ours. The delicate balance was sometimes upset in our past wars when politicians did not have much knowledge about military affairs. Sometimes, out of insecurity, they blustered and bullied officers. At other times, in recognition of their own ignorance, civilian leaders ceded too much control to the Pentagon.
Under the Clinton administration it was felt that an increasingly alienated military exercised too much autonomy, whether in lecturing civilian authorities that gays simply would not work as fully accepted members of the armed forces or in voicing strong initial opposition to the prospect of humanitarian intervention in the Balkans. (See General Colin Powell’s “We do deserts. We don’t do mountains.”)
Militaries, for their part, understand that during “peacekeeping” exercises the rules of engagement change, the cameras intrude, and they are asked to assume civilian roles where their target profile increases, while their ability to fight back without restrictions is checked.
During the past Bush presidency, by contrast, the charge was often just the opposite: A compliant Pentagon had been bullied by its civilian overseers into keeping quiet about doubts over the feasibility of neoconservative nation-building. In fact, in 2006, we witnessed a “revolt of the generals” against civilian leadership of the Pentagon—again, something we had not quite seen since the similar “revolt of the admirals” in 1949, when furious naval officers went on the offensive against Defense Secretary Louis Johnson.
Top brass came forward out of recent retirement to lambaste Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over the entire civilian conduct in the Iraq War. They complained that there had been too much micromanaging. Too many policy demands, they alleged, were placed on a military that was stretched too thin to carry such burdens, and too much utopian ideology guided the conduct of the war, at the expense of realistic judgments of what in fact was tactically possible. In the topsy-turvy politics of Washington, D.C., libera
l critics of the Iraq War applauded the officers as genuine patriots willing to take on errant civilian overseers; many pro-military conservatives saw an ominous breach of defense protocol, and a danger to civilian control of the military.
Why do democratic societies perennially worry about their own military’s periodic objections to civilian oversight and larger liberal values? Why, often in response, do military leaders conclude that they are either misunderstood or manipulated by civilian authorities whom they regard as naive or ignorant about military affairs?
Antithetical Cultures
ARMED FORCES ARE inherently hierarchical organizations based on rank and the chain of command. They can serve democracies, but by their very nature are antithetical to democracy. There is no opportunity in military units for decision by majority vote when war begins. Once bullets fly, soldiers can ill afford to debate the wisdom of assaulting the next hill. They cannot worry about the “fairness” of a brilliant private having no influence in the decisions taken by an obtuse or blockheaded commanding officer.
Impatience, resolve, audacity—these necessary military traits are not necessarily those that democratic legislators and bureaucrats prize. Most politicians loathe a loudmouth like George S. Patton in peacetime as much as they relish his swashbuckling style in time of war. What Curtis LeMay said about war during the air assault over Japan reassured Americans that we would break the Japanese; when he voiced the same bellicosity during the Cold War, it scared some to the death.
The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern Page 18