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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In short, most potential trouble abroad will be seen as far too dangerous and distant, requiring problematic American correctives that will always be deemed as marginally “optional” interventions. Any limited wars will be harder to bring to their full completion. The nature of our defeated enemies will make it far more difficult to democratize them. Western democratic publics will be far more reluctant to spend even a fraction of the blood and treasure that were needed to rebuild Europe and Japan into successful democratic societies. And the specter of massive, unprecedented American debt will loom, as our unchecked appetites have ensured an annual budget deficit for the next decade that exceeds all the money spent annually on defense.

  In response, the immediate future will be not more of Afghanistan and Iraq, but more Rwandas and Darfurs, where the rhetoric of idealistic intervention increases even as our willingness to use our military to enact desirable reform erodes.

  * A portion of this essay is based on material from an article that appeared in the June 2007 American Spectator.

  CHAPTER 13

  Who Is the Enemy?

  Fighting Ourselves*

  The Alternative to Punitive War

  THE NATURE OF American military power in our age is defined by how it is constrained—through nuclear deterrence, political realities, and cost-benefit analysis. How, then, on rare occasions, does the United States employ its overwhelming military superiority to achieve political aims, especially when even friends and neutrals often wish us to stumble—if for no other reason than to see the world’s sole superpower occasionally humbled?

  Our nuclear arsenal deters enemy states from using like weapons of mass destruction against us. In the rare cases of lunatic regimes that appear suicidal and are immune to the protocols of mutually assured destruction—or at least, like North Korea and perhaps Iran, pose as such—we try to ensure they do not get the bomb. And when they do, we will apparently rely on future missile defense.

  The more rational among our enemies know that they would lose either a nuclear or a no-holds-barred conventional struggle against the United States, so they seek to wage asymmetrical warfare. All such initiatives are based on the premise that America, in its wealth and comfort, is more concerned about suffering than inflicting losses, more worried about what others think of it than what it thinks of others.

  In the recent past, we have dealt with bothersome threats through punitive bombing. When terrorists attacked Americans or general U.S. interests abroad, we launched air attacks—the four-day bombing of Iraq in 1998; the bombing campaign against Milošević in 1998; sending cruise missiles into Afghanistan, once again, in 1998. The Clinton administration referred to this sort of occasional missile shooting and GPS-guided bombing as “keeping [the enemy] in his box.”

  The upside to these campaigns apparently is that there is usually only a monetary rather than a human cost. One does not have to be a cynic to see that the window of political support for these operations is considerable since Americans rarely perish on television. Indeed, a hostile media is often neutralized: Devastation that we inflict is seldom filmed on the ground in a targeted police state, especially given the possible proximity of reporters to falling American bombs. Journalists who did go to Saddam’s beleaguered Baghdad in 1990 or to a Belgrade under NATO air attack, either didn’t get free access or, if they did, came under the suspicion that their full coverage was censored.

  There are a few limits to punitive bombing. First, we avoid nuclear states such as North Korea and Pakistan because we don’t want to risk a dangerous nuclear regional response. Second, we try to prevent a long war that results in images of carnage broadcast back to the United States. And third, our planes are not to be shot down.

  Even when air raids are said to have gone well, the drawback, as we saw throughout the 1990s, is that the results are by definition mostly punitive, since we have no presence on the ground to affect political events in a more constructive fashion. And even the degree to which standoff bombing is successful in temporarily deterring a Saddam, a Gadhafi, or the Taliban from supporting terrorists depends on the accuracy of American bombs, the nature of the press coverage, and whether a population is restive and blames its pain on its own autocracy (e.g., Serbia) or on the American perpetrator (e.g., Iraq). Such wars can be relatively short (Libya, Operation Desert Fox) or go on for months (Serbia) or even years (the Iraqi no-fly zones).

  A riskier proposition is to employ American ground troops to change the political situation—that is, to flip a hostile government on the theory the people are desirous of freedom and would welcome liberation. Invasions to remove autocrats are easy in a small Panama or Grenada, less so in large countries in the Middle East or Asia with well-entrenched political or religious movements that can pose as nationalists uniting various groups against the Western infidel or interloper.

  Once America enters such a landscape, the clock ticks. The question of victory or quagmire is decided by whether we can defeat the insurgents and set up a local government before the enemy can erode U.S. public opinion. The enemy can accomplish this either by killing enough Americans, with footage shown on the evening news, to make us doubt the cost is worth the gambit or by suggesting that the vaunted values of Western bourgeois society have become sullied in the conflict at places like My Lai or Abu Ghraib.

  The key again in any such effort is mostly political: Can indigenous forces, with American aid and the promise of democratic government, take the lead in the fight, ensuring fewer American losses while offering their countrymen something better than the past that resonates with sympathetic Westerners—and sell all that to a deeply skeptical cadre of Westernized elite journalists?

  That an odious enemy beheads or tortures the innocent means little. Indeed, in such asymmetrical warfare, it is at times to the advantage of the terrorists to embrace barbarity—either to terrify suburban America or at least to galvanize antiwar opposition by opening a Pandora’s box of horrors that inevitably “follow” from America’s “aggression.”

  In the contemporary arithmetic of war, not only do Westerners count their own losses as a sign of misguided war making but also usually compute enemy deaths as proof of their own wrongheadedness or barbarity. In addition, even if “collateral damage” is a result of deliberate killing on the part of insurgents, or of their use of human “shields,” the generic civilian “death count” is attributed nevertheless to Western culpability for creating the overall landscape of such turmoil. In military terms, that means a Taliban jihadist or an al-Qaeda terrorist in Anbar province can blow up civilians, in expectation that responsibility for hundreds of the resulting innocent dead will be charged to the U.S. military by many in the Western media.

  Security Versus Freedom

  WHAT ABOUT THE relationship between the need for security and democracy on the domestic front? Much of the confusion in military thinking of the present day derives from the juxtaposition of traditional measures to establish security and new, expanded ideas about civil rights and personal expression. This is an old paradox in the West. The Greeks from the very beginning understood this symbiosis between security and freedom, and framed the nature of the relationship—and occasional antithesis—between these necessary poles. The historian Thucydides, for example, makes Pericles, in his famous funeral oration, talk in depth about the nature of democratic military service and sacrifice, which are the linchpins of the freedom of Athens—and how any short-term disadvantages that may harm an open society at war are more than compensated by the creativity, exuberance, and democratic zeal that free peoples bring to war.

  Because, like all democratic leaders, Pericles knew the charge that liberal peoples were prone to indiscipline and incapable of collective sacrifice in times of peril, he made the argument that consensual societies in extremis fight with as much discipline as closed, oligarchic communities, and yet still enjoy the advantages that accrue to liberal societies.

  We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts ex
clude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.

  In contrast, authors as diverse as Herodotus, Xenophon, and Aristotle remind us that the king, tyrant, and autocrat live insecure lives, since their reign is based on fear and instilled terror. Thus they dare not ever lessen their grip for an instance, lest both the people and the military turn on their despised government.

  The long history of Western civilization—the Persian War, the Punic Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II, the Cold War—often suggests that free peoples, if slow to confront enemies on the horizon, nevertheless have been able more often than not to defeat their autocratic enemies. That is why today the West is defined by consensual governments rather than something more akin to the Napoleonic, Hitlerian, or Stalinist modes of rule that combined Western science with autocracy.

  The key for Western societies in times of peril has been to calibrate the proper balance between personal freedom and collective military preparedness. Often authoritarianism has sacrificed personal liberties in preference for security concerns and militarist cultures. Yet just as often, in reaction to bloody wars, other Western societies have erred in the opposite fashion on the side of disarmament and appeasement, and lost their liberty as a consequence of not being able to provide security for their own peoples. Here one thinks of the fate of Athens in the age of Demosthenes or France of 1940.

  But the quandary is not so black and white. Abraham Lincoln, and later Andrew Johnson, suspended habeas corpus in some border states to detain pro-Confederate sympathizers, and later Ku Klux Klan organizers. In the Second World War, the United States censored news from the front, hid information about military disasters, tried and executed German saboteurs in secret military tribunals, and wiretapped without warrants the phones of suspected enemy sympathizers—and yet preserved the Constitution while fighting a global war with a military of more than twelve million. Woodrow Wilson, more so than any American wartime president, eroded many elements of the Constitution—most frighteningly with federal sponsorship of the American Protective League, a private-public joint effort to spy on and intimidate potential critics of Wilson’s wartime decisions.

  Since September 11, Western societies have struggled with this age-old tension between freedom and security concerns, and a number of dilemmas have arisen. With passage of the Patriot Act, the establishment of the Guantánamo detention center, court-approved wiretaps, military tribunals’ renditions of terrorist suspects abroad, and systematic surveillance, some Americans have often casually alleged that the Constitution has been sacrificed to unnecessary security concerns. But it is far more difficult to calibrate this supposed loss of civil liberties than it is to appreciate the absence of a post–September 11 terrorist attack.

  During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama made the argument that the Bush administration’s security protocols had perhaps unduly deprived American society of its constitutional protections. Yet after being elected commander in chief, Obama quietly kept intact the past Bush practices of wiretaps, renditions, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks in Pakistan, and large troop deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Western societies demanded that the United States shut down the Guantánamo Bay detention center, as an abhorrent place that housed those convicted of no crime. Yet by winter 2009 no countries, despite American encouragement, had come forward to extradite their own supposedly benign suspected terrorists back to their home ground for scheduled release among the general public—an act that would allow an almost immediate closure of the facility.

  Instead the worry about free speech in these chaotic times of conflict abroad may not be so much that our government has trampled the Constitution, but rather that we, the people, are insidiously self-censoring our own speech—as a result of Western public opinion that itself is willing to sacrifice unfettered expression out of good intentions—or is it sheer fear? In this regard, pose a few rhetorical questions about the nature of freedom and security in the public realm. Take a variety of contemporary genres of Western expression:

  Film—Is it now safer for a Westerner moviemaker—not just in career terms but also as a matter of life and death—to produce a controversial feature-length film attacking the former president of the United States (as in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 or Gabriel Range’s prizewinning Death of a President, which offered a dramatic version of an assassination of George W. Bush) or a short clip questioning radical Islam, such as Geert Wilders’s Fitna or Theo van Gogh’s Submission?

  Literature—Is a Western writer more in danger for writing a novel contemplating the assassination of a former sitting American president (such as Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint) or one, in allegorical fashion, caricaturing Islam (such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses)? And would a publisher worry more about publishing a book critical of Islam or one envisioning the murder of George Bush? The recent decision by Yale University Press not to publish cartoon caricatures of Muhammad in a book devoted to the Danish cartoon crisis revealed that the university and editorial board were far more worried about safety concerns than the freedom of expression of one of their authors.

  Journalism—Is a Westerner more constrained from hating in print a former sitting American president (such as Jonathan Chait in his 2004 New Republic article “The Case for Bush Hatred,” whose first sentence is “I hate President George W. Bush”) or drawing editorial cartoons mocking Muhammad (such as those initially published in 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten)?

  Religious expression—Is a Western religious figure more in danger after damning the United States (such as Reverend Jeremiah Wright calling the United States “the USKKK of A,” urging his congregation to “Goddamn America,” and suggesting that the United States deserved the September 11 attacks) or after referencing the historic relations between Islam and Christianity (such as Pope Benedict’s quotation from a fourteenth-century Byzantine treatise about a letter from Manuel II Paleologus to leaders of the Ottoman Empire)?

  Public dissent and expression—Would a citizen of London or Amsterdam feel more secure in violent public protest of Israeli foreign policy or in peacefully criticizing Islamic sharia law and its contributions to terror abroad and repression at home? Note again in this regard how the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet ignored Israeli protests and published a controversial blood libel article alleging that Israelis harvest the organs of Palestinian dead, but it would not publish the incendiary Muhammad caricatures.

  Each age has its demons of either laxity or authoritarianism. But our era in the West has fostered a peculiar form of self-censorship that far exceeds anything dreamed up by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, or the Pentagon. The only mystery about our reluctance to speak honestly and freely about particular issues is why we are so eager to give up on free expression, especially when it comes to radical Islam, which fuels much of the world’s terrorism in the post–September 11 landscape?

  The New –isms

  OTHER THAN FEAR of bodily harm, one reason for curbing criticism of radical Islam surely is contemporary postmodern ideologies such as multiculturalism (the notion that the West is just one of many cultures, no better or worse than any other); utopian pacifism (wars can be eliminated through diplomacy and the teaching of nonviolent arbitration); and moral equivalence (those with power and influence in the West, given its own sins, cannot legitimately calibrate, much less condemn, the distasteful practices of other cultures).

  What these notions have in common are particular views of radical egalitarianism and Western culpability for the inability to achieve equality on a global scale. Multiculturalism—whether found in Edward Said’s Orientalism, or “black
liberation theory,” or various indictments of European colonialism of Africa and the Americas—grew up in an age of postwar affluence. It perhaps was fueled by Western guilt over past colonialism, imperialism, and global exploitation. And it argues that the sins of humankind—slavery, sexism, racism, and imperialism—are to be more emphasized as Western-inspired rather than equally innate to all cultures. Therefore, we could hardly use our own arbitrary standards of freedom or equality to judge other cultures, a practice that in the past had led to the subjugation and oppression of others under dishonest banners such as “civilization.”

  In its most radical manifestation, the idea that all cultures are de facto of equal pedigree and moral thought would mean that Westerners could not arbitrarily define what distinguishes the methodology of a contemporary Islamic terrorist from, say, the revolutionary generation of 1776 or a B-17 bombardier over Dresden or an American G.I. at Hue. Or more broadly, the multiculturalist alleges that the West has neither the moral capital nor the intellectual deftness to condemn foreign practices such as suicide bombing, religious intolerance, female circumcision, and honor killings, and so must allow that these endemic practices and customs are merely different rather than necessarily repugnant across time and space.

  The practical consequence is that millions in the West have been taught not to believe in Western exceptionalism, and thus insidiously convey that message to millions of immigrants who seek to enjoy the benefits of European and American life, but who feel no pressing need to fully assimilate into it, and in some cases, thrive on being antithetical to it, albeit without forfeiting the undeniable material benefits that residency within Western borders conveys.