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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, remarked in a recent interview, “We’re discovering that the conventional military power for which the United States is best known is most relevant to classic battlefields like the first Iraq war [in 1991], but the struggles we’re engaged in now and for the foreseeable future are anything but classic.” Haass added that battling guerrilla insurgencies and salvaging failing states such as Iraq and Afghanistan with nation-building are not skills at which the U.S. government has excelled. “So we’re finding it very hard to translate classic military superiority into stability in these struggles.”

  In summing up the pessimism that swept New York and Washington during 2007, Haass soberly concluded, “For a number of reasons, I believe we are entering an era where U.S. power and relative influence, in the Middle East especially, is reduced and the influence of others who have anything but a pro-American outlook is increasing, and that trend is likely to continue for decades to come. I predict this realignment will be enduring.”

  This gloom is now shared by thinkers as diverse as Niall Ferguson and Francis Fukuyama. Both, now, in the fumes of Iraq see only perils in promoting democratization, though they once advocated the military removal of Saddam Hussein. They accept that such idealism abroad is best in tune with our own professed values. And they concede that promoting democracy has worked after other victories in the past, and in theory could contribute to global stability. But their concern centers mostly on the practicality rather than the desirability of implanting Western constitutional governments in today’s more chaotic and globalized world, where billions simply have no experience with transferring their accustomed loyalty from a first cousin to a democratically elected parliament.

  Freed from the distortions of the Cold War, and after a decade of using our military to promote democracy through the use of arms, has the idea of “military liberalism” run aground in Iraq? Is “nation-building” the new slur? And if so, why?

  What Went Wrong?

  FIRST, THE UNITED States wishes to put the cart of postwar reconstruction ahead of the proverbial horse of defeating—and humiliating—the forces of the enemy. In this regard, in present and future wars of the twenty-first century we are faced with two mutually exclusive propositions. In an era of globalized communications and comfortable populations, it is very difficult to marshal support for a level of violence sufficient to bring wars to their full conclusions—that is, to defeat the enemy and humiliate his armed forces to such a degree that he submits to the dictates of peace.

  What moralist wishes to see on television an enemy’s power plant bombed to smithereens—when it had provided life-giving electricity not merely to a heartless regime but also to its oppressed victims? (Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baathists found ways to smuggle in cognac and caviar while the Iraqi people nearly starved under the U.N.-sponsored oil-for-food boycotts and embargoes of the 1990s.)

  And what taxpayer wants to level something when he knows that he will be stuck with the bill for rebuilding it? Yet, had Hitler abdicated in 1943, or had Tojo and his clique left Japan in 1942 to allow a negotiated armistice, it is difficult to envision Germany and Japan today as fully democratic nations at peace with their neighbors for more than six decades.

  In the present postmodern age, the carnage necessary to disabuse the enemy of continuing in his present course is often seen as counterproductive or unnecessary—or perhaps contrary to Western moral sensibility itself. In short, democracies should no longer kill off autocratic regimes to promote democracy. Most strategic thinkers thought our pullback in Fallujah, Iraq, in spring 2004 was a costly mistake—a half-measure that necessitated a belated reentry by the postelection autumn. Then later in November, after renewed fighting to take the town, which was far bloodier than the initial conflict, our soldiers found torture cells, bomb factories, and a veritable terropolis that had been constructed after our withdrawal—macabre, grotesque revelations that should have shocked the world.

  But the siege seems to have provoked almost the opposite reaction in Western popular culture, which highlighted supposed American atrocities inflicted on the insurgents in 2004 rather than real atrocities inflicted on the innocent by insurgents. Lest one think that the demonizing of the U.S. military is simply the province of the far left, consider the review of the well-publicized London play Fallujah in the supposedly evenhanded Economist, whose critic described the action as follows:

  The audience shuffles about his landscape while the action takes place around them. Soldiers push their way through, swaggering and malevolent; a roving stage light suddenly picks out two women in the audience as Iraqi aid workers. They weave gracefully through the crowd, telling their story, placing a hand gently on someone’s shoulder.

  The Economist concedes that it is an “anti-American drama,” but concludes that “Fallujah can still be applauded for casting light on a shameful chapter in a disastrous war.”

  Shameful chapter? This rather easy sermonizing of Western elites obscures two unspoken truths: Privately, no British theatergoers would prefer the world of beheading, gender apartheid, and sharia law that flourished in lawless Fallujah to the legal system and audit that governs the American military. Nor would they have wished to venture there under the earlier “secure” reign of Saddam Hussein, when the population was terrorized by undercover security police and informers.

  Yet in the present age, some elites perhaps sense that, on occasion, professional advancement, even psychological well-being and political acceptance, can derive from criticizing the U.S. Armed Forces and their efforts to stop such anti-democratic savagery. Thus to theater directors, the war to establish democracy to replace Saddam Hussein’s genocidal rule must be reduced to “swaggering” Americans threatening female “Iraqi aid workers.”

  In fear of televised collateral civilian damage, in worry over causing casualties, and sensitive to antiwar sentiment at home, the American military is, not surprisingly, ambivalent about using its full arsenal against its enemies. The dragging of naked American corpses in the streets of Mogadishu ended President Clinton’s humanitarian efforts in Somalia. And with more than four thousand Americans dead in Iraq, the narrative is the improvised explosive device and the suicide vest, not the purple finger of democratic participants. The rhetoric of Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and former president Jimmy Carter reduced George Bush—whose sermons of “freedom” and “human rights” abroad could have come right out of a 1960s campus free-speech area—to a demonic figure at home during the end of his administration, and our efforts in Iraq to nothing other than a grab for oil, a proxy war for Israel, or a profit-making enterprise on behalf of Halliburton.

  The larger point is that in the face of such endemic criticism, the military apparently cannot inflict a level of hurt upon an enemy, or suffer a level of casualties, that in the past were deemed a requisite for victory and hence postwar stability and reconstruction. Saddam Hussein’s Baathist army evaporated in April 2003. Yet its shamed officers and conscripts soon learned that a good way to restore Arab pride after such televised humiliation was to go home, strip off their uniforms, and reinvent themselves as patriotic insurgents. Then the odds of safely killing, through remotely detonated IEDs, an American stringing telephone wires or painting a schoolhouse were far better than in the recent past, when meeting an American in a gun battle meant that outright war, not a CNN-televised “peace,” governed the rules of engagement.

  What worked in the Balkans in 1998, contrary to popular consensus, was not multilateralism. The vast majority of combat sorties were flown by American pilots. The Clinton administration neither asked the U.S. Congress for approval nor even approached the United Nations. It had allowed NATO forces to languish on the sidelines watching a ten-year holocaust that took a quarter million lives.

  Instead the key to eventual success was that a liberal Democratic American president was able to use the U.S. Air Force, safely thousands of feet in the sky over Serbia, to drop its new pre
cision munitions on the very capital of a right-wing Christian white European dictatorship without sacrificing a single American life—with the veneer of world support given the nominal, but well-publicized, participation of liberal European states.

  A war for democratization, it seems, will still work in the messiest of places—if thousands of civilians have first been butchered by autocrats, if it costs no American lives, if the media do not have easy access to the enemy, if it is part of a war against right-wing nationalists, if it does not involve multiethnic or multiracial fault lines, if it is conducted by a liberal American administration, and if it is sanctioned by liberal Europeans. That is a lot of ifs—especially the most critical: not costing American lives.

  But the stars seldom line up so perfectly. Our wars to come will sometimes have to be waged by conservative administrations against enemies in the former third world—sometimes of different religions and colors than many of our own—and on the ground in messy primordial failed states, far from Europe, and without scores of journalists broadcasting collateral damage and empathetic stories of misunderstood insurgents.

  Democratic What?

  ALONG WITH A war’s military concerns, another worry is the postbellum practicality of extending democracy to traditional, non-Western societies that have little or no experience with liberty, equal rights, the rule of law, or representative government. After all, the easy cases for democracy—Europe, the former British commonwealth, North America, and the prosperous Asian capitalist economies—have worked and now have all been exhausted. We are left with the more problematic states with no prior heritage of either constitutional government or free market economics—or no past humiliating defeat by the United States in a catastrophic war.

  Volumes have been written on the prerequisites—economic, social, cultural, and psychological—necessary for democratization. I argued in The Other Greeks that Athenian democracy—the West’s first—was an epiphenomenon, impossible without two centuries of prior limited consensual government that first saw the establishment of rights of property-holding and inheritance and a solid middle class (the mesoi) of freeholding Attic citizen-hoplite farmers. Then, and only then, was it possible to put into place the key attributes that we associate with Athenian democracy, such as the principle of one free male, one vote, and full political participation without regard to wealth.

  The contemporary enigma in the Middle East, however, revolves around the question of to what degree, if any, globalization—the intrusion into traditional tribal life by television, DVDs, the Internet, and cell phones, along with the large numbers of contemporary democracies in the world at large—has collapsed the period of preparation necessary for reform. And while Islam, for example, seems not incompatible with democracy per se in countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey (where more than half of the world’s Muslims live), the Arab Islamic world may prove to be a different story altogether.

  There the obstacles to democracy and Western ideals of liberty and equality seem more profound than elsewhere. These include a deeply entrenched tribal culture and endemic anger at modernity combined with a paradoxical desire for the fruits of Western progress. Feelings of pan-Arabic chauvinism are nursed on transnational solidarity. There is plenty of scapegoating of foreigners and foreign influences, and intense feelings of grievance over a grand past juxtaposed to a perceived miserable present. Dislocations brought about by the huge wealth of exporting a third of the world’s daily petroleum consumption make the community less than stable. All have combined to produce the antiliberal practices and attitudes that are prevalent in the region: fundamentalism, terrorism, and a kind of nihilistic violence against any foreign influence, however well meaning or constructive it might be.

  In other words, it is redundant now to advocate democratization in the regions of the world where it is easiest to promote or is already under way—eastern Europe or a prosperous capitalistic Asia especially. When we talk of nation-building in the future, it will frequently be in the context of the Middle East, where there is uniform autocracy, plenty of petroleum, radical Islamism, terrorism, promises to annihilate Israel, and soon, nuclear-tipped missiles—in other words, a complete mess.

  A Future for Nation-Building?

  SO WHERE DOES all this leave us?

  We need no more lectures about the truth we all know: Mere plebiscites are not democracy; such desirable government emerges ideally in concert with some sort of institutionalization of human rights, transparency, a free press, and an independent judiciary; and war and democratization should not be preemptory but rather the last resorts, taken only when such idealism is subservient to our national interest and survival.

  We all know that there are simply too many Miloševićs, Saddams, Talibans, Chávezes, Castros, Gadhafis, and Kim Jong-Ils to remove, both practically and politically, and a reluctance to spend much American blood and treasure on those who may be more prone to criticize than praise our sacrifice. We all know that “supporting democracy” should not result in a “one vote/one time” coercive plebiscite that brings thugs like Hamas to power in Gaza. And we also know that in some cases such “wisdom” doesn’t offer much guidance in a world not of our own choosing.

  Yet the future for the West at war will be often one of just these poor choices. The worst may be to allow anti-Western dictators to commit genocide at will as they divert national wealth into alliances and weapons that threaten the postwar global order; the bad alternative is to try to remove them and in their places encourage democratic reforms under nearly impossible conditions.

  But it will not be quite so easy to close the book on “democratization” and resurrect George W. Bush’s 2000 pre-Iraq campaign promise not to use the American military for nation-building. The problem will not be refuting the argument for nation-building but finding the requisite resources and will among an exhausted American people—who wish to do the right thing abroad but, increasingly and for a variety of reasons, will be convinced they cannot.

  First, we must remember that realism—whether close ties with the House of Saud or offering encouragement to former Pakistani “president” Musharraf—has been tried before and did little to circumvent either the attacks of September 11 or nuclear proliferation. Both autocracies have plenty of grandees—Saudi and Pakistani—who stealthily continue to either fund or offer sanctuary to al-Qaeda terrorists.

  Nor did appeasement prove successful—as we are reminded by those often-cited two-decades-long serial assaults from the 1979 Tehran hostage-taking to the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole. For more than three decades, the Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations have reached out—both overtly and covertly—to the Iranian theocracy, with offers of economic assistance, weaponry, restored relations, private live-and-let-live deals, and serial apologies.

  But by 2009 the clerics were as anti-American as they were in 1979. And they were still rounding up, killing, and torturing dissidents in the same manner that they had consolidated power after the fall of the shah. In 1983 the theocrats began sponsoring those who were killing Americans abroad in terrorist operations, and they were doing the same thing in 2003 in Iraq. What separates the contemporary Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from the founder Ayatollah Khomeini is that the former, through the acquisition of nuclear weapons, may at last realize their long-shared desire to see Israel’s end.

  Second, supporting nation-building does not mean, at a time of record American debt, supporting all nation-building. Several truths are evident about the controversial but atypical Afghanistan and Iraq endeavors: The Taliban were directly responsible for harboring the architects of September 11, and they had turned a ruined Afghanistan into a Neanderthal-like ruined terrorist state. Saddam Hussein was not just the average Middle East thug in the Assad or Gadhafi mold. Rather he had attacked four neighboring states, had slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his own, had subsidized a variety of terrorists, and had fought the United States in a variety of theaters from 1991 to 2003.


  In other words, the United States did not embark on a serial neoconservative crusade to remake the Middle East by arms, but limited its military efforts at removing just two odious dictatorships.

  What has evolved for the present is not so much our policies or goals. Instead, in the cauldron of Iraq and Afghanistan, it is we ourselves of the present generation who have changed to the point that we have lost the confidence to enact positive reform abroad at a price in blood and treasure deemed worth the objectives.

  It matters little that our present aspirations are far less grandiose in Iraq, and our losses far fewer, than were those in democratizing Germany, Italy, Japan, or Korea. The key, instead, is our current perceptions of what constitutes a foreign endeavor that is too costly or painful to endure. In our postmodern, globalized present, the challenge is not so much to use the American military to thwart autocracies and help foster constitutional government in their place, as it is to convince the American people that in some instances we have little long-term choice—and that we have done so in the past with success, and can do so again in the future.

  During the dark days in Iraq between 2006 and 2007, many Americans grumbled that we had taken our eyes off the “good” war in Afghanistan—once home to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden—for an optional “bad” war to remove Saddam Hussein. But when Iraq quieted down after the 2007–8 surge, while Afghanistan unexpectedly flared up in 2009, suddenly there were renewed calls to exit Afghanistan, while little opposition remained over the now largely peacekeeping effort in Iraq. The common theme: In the place where Americans are dying, the war is probably misguided and unnecessary.