The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (19 page)

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.”

CHAPTER 12

The Odd Couple—War
and Democracy

Why Democracies Fight, Win—and Lose—Wars.
*

Distrusting the Military

I
N 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., liberal 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

A
RMED 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.

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?

B
UT 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

I
T 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 plebiscite 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.