Occasionally the voting public suspects that professional soldiers like violence and killing, or at least far more than civilians do. And supposed sheep always worry about giving orders to hungry wolves. Read the sad letters of poor Cicero to see how in his arrogance he entirely and fatally misjudged the military minds of Caesar, Augustus, and Antony. Civilian overseers in France and later in Germany sought to solve emerging problems by dispatching Napoleon to Egypt or by throwing Hitler in jail, but they found that ultimately these steps were just the beginning, and not the end, of their troubles.
Democracies have other, even larger problems with their own militaries, especially the ever-present fear of militarism that permeates civilian society—that is, the ongoing worry over the cult of arms transcending the battlefield and becoming an ideology that celebrates power, rigid discipline, or fanatical devotion to a cause. Indeed, this exaggerated dimension of military life often draws the most zealous and dangerous of characters into its orbit, and these can be truly scary folks. The Spartan krypteia, the Praetorian guards, Hitler’s SS, Serbian paramilitaries—such groups in the past have often interfered with or intervened in politics under the posture of being models of rigorous asceticism for the nation.
Anti-constitutional military coups—and not the idealistic promotion of democracy and liberal values—thus seem the more logical vice of military figures when they intrude into politics. History in some sense is the record of supposedly sober soldiers intervening in times of perceived social chaos to bring society a needed dose of their own order and obedience.
That was the rationale when Caesar in 44 B.C. crossed the Rubicon and put a formal end to the Roman Republic, when Napoleon dismissed the directorate, when Hitler ended the Weimar Republic, and when the twentieth-century Latin America caudillos, Greek colonels, and Middle Eastern Baathist and Nasserite officers staged their various coups. Communist dictators in the Soviet Union and China inserted their own commissars into their militaries to ensure that they were perpetual advocates for Communist ideology and indoctrination, at home and abroad.
Military Liberalism?
BUT THERE IS another and less known tradition of what we might call military liberalism, when militaries have often given birth to, or at least facilitated, the creation of free governments and have been used in turn to promote and extend them abroad. Almost all of our successes abroad in the Second World War, Korea, and Serbia resulted in democratic advancement. Almost all of our failures such as Vietnam—the verdict is still out on Afghanistan and Iraq—were in at least partial pursuit of promoting democratic government.
America’s approach to such optional wars for democracy is apparently cyclical: a hard slog like Vietnam followed by a walkover in Grenada followed by a hard slog in Iraq. About every thirty or forty years or so, the United States in idealistic fashion sends troops abroad to promote consensual government, or at least to thwart authoritarianism in rather difficult landscapes, such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Then it finds itself bogged down in dirty fighting against nonconventional insurgents, and in discouragement finally swears that it will never again intervene in such ambiguous scenarios—until an easy success in Panama or Serbia reassures the Pentagon and White House that America indeed can use its force to effect positive change at relatively little cost.
It seems to be in our national DNA to try to use our armed forces in ways that reflect American values and political aims, and to find maverick officers who will be eager to carry out those objectives. The urge is perhaps more than just an American phenomenon. In fact, democracy has always been nearly synonymous with wars of national expression. Fifth-century B.C. Athens fought three out of four years in its greatest age of cultural achievement—usually goaded on by a vote of the assembly, often to fight some sort of oligarch state. America since the Second World War has seen its troops in combat in, or in the skies above, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Somalia, and Vietnam—all with the professed aim of restoring some sort of order by fighting oligarchs, dictators, and autocrats.
Consensual governments ratify wars, and thus rarely can the people successfully argue that they were forced into unpopular and costly fighting by kings or dictators. The historian Herodotus—noting the propensity of democracies to be fickle and ready to fight for idealistic reasons—remarked that it was easier to persuade thirty thousand fired-up Athenian citizens to send aid to the Ionia during the revolt from Persia than to convince a few reluctant Spartan oligarchs to do the same.
Democratic Crusades
IT IS HARD to think of many democracies that were not born in some manner out of war, violence, or coercion—beginning with the first example of Cleisthenic Athens in 507 B.C., and including our own revolution in 1776. The best examples are those of the twentieth century, when many of the most successful present-day constitutional governments were epiphenomena of war, imposed by the victors or coalition partners, as we have seen in the cases of Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, and more recently Grenada, Liberia, Panama, Serbia—and Afghanistan and Iraq.
Of course, democracy, as Aristotle outlined its various wide parameters in the Politics, is in some sense a relative term. Scholars still argue over its definition—and especially the weight that should be given to the criteria of voting, the degree of constitutional rights granted to the individual, and the relationship of political freedom with concurrent economic and social liberty.
But if we adopt the most expansive sense of the notion of constitutional government, then parliamentary Britain of the nineteenth century would be considered far more consensual than nearly all nations of its time. And British officers sometimes used their overwhelming military superiority to promote a classical sense of liberalism, whether in ending suttee in India or shutting down the African slave trade.
We sometimes forget that the existential global evils of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—chattel slavery, Nazism, Italian Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Stalinism—were not only eliminated by force or the threat of force, but exclusively by the might of democratically governed militaries. American armies or the threat of them ended the plantation system, the death camps, the Co-prosperity Sphere, and the gulag. American democratic militaries made possible the future of the new Atlanta, the new Rome, the new Tokyo, the new Berlin, the new Seoul, and the new Warsaw.
Even during Roman imperial times, when the first emperors succeeded in suppressing the autonomy of the senate and central assemblies, there still functioned at the local level the concept of Roman law that allowed all Roman citizens the same rights of habeas corpus, trial by a magistrate, and protections of private property. The armies of the late republic that swept the Mediterranean did not do so solely on the brilliant discipline, tactics, and technology of the legions. They also offered to the conquered the promise that Roman proconsuls and legates would use legionnaries to enforce a sense of equality under the law for indigenous tribes from Gaul to North Africa—a reality that often undermined local nationalist resistance leaders.
It is not just governments per se that democratically inspired armies protect and promote, but often the wider cultures that incubate and nurture them. And that allows armies to be more effective agents of change and custodians of more liberal values. The present-day Turkish armed forces, at last subject to elected officials and the products of military science and professional training, still adhere to the secular statutes that Kemal Atatürk established for the modern state of Turkey. The military is thus paradoxically sometimes the only guardian of liberal values in that country, the one institution that is most likely to resist the insidious imposition of sharia law or the Islamization of Turkish culture. In a July 2009 crisis, the Honduran military arrested and then deported President Zelaya—but only after it was ordered to do so by both the Honduran Parliament and Supreme Court. Both had warned Zelaya that his unconstitutional plans of holding a plebisc
ite to ensure an unlawful third presidential term would lead to his exile.
Racial integration and gender equality were much more easily achieved in the U.S. military than in civilian institutions, once reformist politicians discovered that the military’s chain of command and culture of obedience could be used much more efficiently to impose democratic agendas from on high.
The armed forces of the democracies like fifth-century B.C. Athens, fourth-century B.C. Thebes, and contemporary America all tried not just to promote abroad the values that they cherished at home, but often to replicate their very own democratic structures and institutions. Why should this be so?
Democracy and Military Self-Interest
THE ANSWER IS complex but seems to involve both practical and ethical reasons in seeing as many democracies as possible spread beyond their own shores. Athens’s so-called ochlos—the voting mob empowered by the radical democracy—felt that its own privileged position hinged on having like-minded supporters in the subject states of the Aegean. So the maritime Athenian empire was patrolled by two hundred imperial triremes with names like Free Speech and Demokratia, and powered by poor landless thete rowers who were paid a generous wage as the muscles of democracy.
The truism that democracies rarely attack each other is mostly valid in the modern era and perhaps often for antiquity as well. Although democratic Athens attacked democratic Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War, such internecine warfare among democratic polities was not the norm. Thucydides saw that the Peloponnesian War pitted the Athenians’ democratic allies and subjects mostly against the oligarchies aligned with Sparta. He also observed that Athenian forces did not fight so well against the Sicilians when it was thought that a supposedly hostile Sicily otherwise had something in common with Athenian political culture.
National security was also at least part of the catalyst for the great march of Epaminondas the Theban in 369 B.C. Then the general took a huge democratic army down into the Peloponnese to end the Spartan land empire, free the Messenian Helot serfs, and found the democratic citadels at Mantineia, Megalopolis, and Messene in order to encircle Sparta. After all that, classical Sparta never again marched north of the isthmus at Corinth—a routine occurrence before Epaminondas’s invasion.
The European Union apparently has achieved its promised anomaly of a continent of autonomous states that will not attack one another—a dream made feasible only by the institutionalization of democracy, in turn made possible by the Allied victory and democratization after the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union after its defeat in the Cold War.
Democratic militaries are also imbued with the moral logic that there is an inherent ethical inconsistency in protecting democracy at home while undermining it abroad. One of the raging controversies of the Cold War was the criticism that the United States had somehow birthed, often armed, or occasionally supported a rogue’s gallery of dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, Georgios Papadopoulos, Augusto Pinochet, the shah of Iran, and Anastasio Somoza—and that this cynicism was a betrayal of American values.
The post–Cold War hope was that the realpolitik that marked U.S. policy during that era was an aberration of sorts, owing to the emergence of the Soviet Union as a nuclear power with expansionist ambitions. The collapse of the Soviet empire thus created the conditions for a new emphasis in U.S. foreign policy. Accordingly, the American intervention in Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, the bombing of Kosovo and Serbia, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (whatever the underlying wisdom or folly of those interventions) were aimed at dictators and autocrats, with the expectation that their removal might be followed by the imposition of democratic rule.
In short, while all democracies worry about right-wing officers seizing control of civilian government, more often right-wing officers follow civilian agendas to promote, rather than to destroy, constitutional governments abroad. Politicians may go after autocracies on occasion for idealistic reasons, but officers apparently understand that the more constitutional societies arise abroad, the less dangers their own militaries face.
Dreams and Realities After the Cold War
WHEN GEORGE H. W. BUSH did not push reform on Iraq or the region as a whole after the defeat of Saddam Hussein in 1991, critics at home alleged that such realism was no longer appropriate in the post–Cold War world. The public, it seemed, was appalled at Secretary of State James Baker’s declaration that the war in the oil-rich area was to be fought solely over “jobs, jobs, jobs”—and, later, that a successful war to liberate Kuwait had only led to years of no-fly zones to prevent continual butchery of the Shiites and Kurds. Baker’s quip that we “had no dog in that fight” about the Balkans struck many in America as an unwillingness to use moral and military power to thwart the genocide in Bosnia.
Indeed, one of the ironies of the round of attacks on George W. Bush’s Iraqi War—too much emphasis on democracy, not enough troops in Iraq, too much confidence in Iraqi reformers, too little fear of Iran, an international coalition that was too small—is that it was advanced by authors and writers like Michael Gordon, Thomas Ricks, Bernard Trainor, Bob Woodward, and others who in the 1990s had critiqued the first Gulf War in books and articles on nearly opposite grounds: that Americans had fought without sufficient idealism, that too many troops were unnecessarily deployed, that too little confidence was placed in Shiite and Kurdish reformers, that the fighting coalition was too large and unwieldy, that the realpolitik strategists had excessive fear of Iran.
Democracies that profess egalitarianism and the freedom of the individual are especially sensitive to charges of cynicism and hypocrisy when their foreign policies do not reflect their own values. At worst in its past, the United States fought its covert, dirty wars on the basis of economic or strategic pragmatism, which meant that it was quite willing to install compliant thugs whom it felt might be better than the alternative, and might in time evolve into something more liberal. But in its more conventional conflicts, which were closely covered by the press and followed by the public on a daily basis (World Wars I and II, Korea, and the contemporary Middle East conflicts), U.S. administrations generally sought to implant those who promised constitutional governments in postwar landscapes.
To the degree that our military has an active consultative role in picking and choosing America’s fights, it would not be against, but might indeed support, the concept of promoting democracy as an expression of the national interest. Nor does the broader public oppose such a role for our military. Even in controversial cases like Iraq and Afghanistan, the public is strongly supportive of military efforts, after the fighting has stopped, to nurture consensual government in the wake of the removal of dictators, notwithstanding the difficulties of doing so.
Most Americans understand that the alternative—restoring order by imposing a friendly strongman—would only sharpen the charge of cynical colonialism, imperialism, and corporatism. If it is true that the spread of democracy around the world will make wars less likely and less frequent, then the military might see democratization as a means of reducing the likelihood of its own deployment in dangerous foreign wars to come.
The New Slur of Nation-Building
FOR A FULL generation now, the all-volunteer American military has trained an entire cadre of officers who have received advanced degrees in our finest academic institutions and thus possess proconsul skills that far exceed those necessary to command men in battle. “Winning hearts and minds” is now deemed just as important to the training of military officers as mastering GPS-guided bombing techniques or the proper uses of the Abrams tank.
In far-off diverse areas such as Colombia, Mongolia, and the Philippines, the U.S. military is not only conducting counterinsurgency warfare (what Robert Kaplan has called fighting in “Injun Country”), but it is also training local troops to operate under constitutional government. Special Forces officers administer to the social and economic needs of local constituents for the purpose of stabilizing local governments, so that they will no
t exploit discontent or use oil or drug revenues to destabilize the global order that has grown up since the Second World War. The United States, obviously, has a vital interest in defending and expanding this order, which promises to extend the sphere of prosperity and democracy.
In the furor over the war in Iraq, however, the entire notion of nation-building, both in small backwaters and at the conclusion of major military interventions—which was relatively unquestioned after Panama, the Balkans, and Afghanistan—is now under intense scrutiny and reexamination. The post-Iraq foreign policy of the United States, to the extent it is not isolationist, will probably see calls for the return of a posture of realism. In other words, we should accept the fact that we have to make arrangements with the world as it is, rather than trying to change it in our own image. By June 2009, the Obama administration had already gone on record that it would not “meddle” by voicing encouragement to Iranian reformers protesting in the streets against Iranian theocracy.
Reactions against nation-building might devolve into the acceptance of an attitude of “more rubble, less trouble,” leading to a strategy of standoff bombing to deal with trouble spots in the world. Or yet again, future administrations might accept de facto appeasement of those who threaten our security in the hope that they will go away or their anger will thereby be assuaged. This we have already seen in the past policy that terrorism warrants only an occasional cruise missile or, as a criminal justice matter, a federal indictment.
All these approaches might be tried as alternatives to nation-building or democratization. If the realist right will talk about “American self-interest” as a reason of not getting involved in efforts to stop genocide or remove horrific dictators, the well-intended in the West will struggle with the paradox that most of its idealism about human rights butts up against the very anti-human-rights policies of the likes of Hugo Chávez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Non-judgmentalism may trump abstract support for democracy, inasmuch as most of the transgressors of civil liberties today are not so-called whites, are not native English speakers, and do not reside in the so-called West. President Obama himself has hinted that democracy may not be the best litmus test of foreign governments’ success, but rather the degree of freedom among the population from hunger and illness.
The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern Page 19