The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (3 page)

For a generation more familiar with Oprah and Dr. Phil than with the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William L. Shirer’s
Berlin Diary
, the problems between states—like those between spouses, friends, and co-workers—ideally, should be discussed by equally civilized and peaceful rivals and solved without resorting to violence. Thus, in a more ideal world, serial apologies for past sins by American presidents to theocratic Iran, dictatorial Russia, socialist Latin American leaders, or postmodern Europe should at least convey that the United States is not unpredictable or occasionally bellicose—and therefore reassure possible belligerents that there will be greater opportunities for lasting peace in the contemporary age.

Yet it is hard to find many wars that have resulted from miscommunications or misunderstandings. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence, or because a prior war ended without a clear resolution or without settling disagreements—in a manner of Rome’s first two wars with Carthage. Again, Margaret Atwood was empirical when she wrote in her poem, “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.”

Hitler did. So did Mussolini and Tojo—and their assumptions were mostly logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. In the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein believed, after speaking with an American diplomat, that the territorial integrity of Kuwait was not a concern of the Western governments, at least not to such a degree that would prompt a military response from them.

Osama bin Laden did not attack on September 11 because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to talk with him in the Hindu Kush. He did not think America denied its Muslim citizens the right to worship freely. He did not think his native Saudi Arabia was impoverished or short of lebensraum. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with what he would judge as insignificant reprisals. And he therefore concluded, in rather explicit and public fashion, that the supposedly decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation—and that if the United States, the “weaker horse,” ever should engage, it would withdraw as it had from Mogadishu once images of American killed and wounded blanketed our television screens.

“We also believe our war against the United States is much simpler than our war against the Soviet Union,” bin Laden boasted to a journalist in March 1997, “because some of our mujahideen who fought here in Afghanistan also participated in the operations against the Americans in Somalia—and they were surprised at the collapse of the American morale. This convinced us that the Americans are a paper tiger.” Over many years bin Laden cited dozens of concocted reasons about why he attacked the United States; the only valid one was that he attacked America because he thought—to paraphrase Margaret Atwood—with good reason, he could get away with it.

The More Wars Change …

W
ITHOUT GUIDANCE FROM
the past, it is easier now more than ever to succumb to technological determinism, the idea that science, new weaponry, and globalization have altered the very rules of war. But military history teaches us that our ability to strike a single individual from thirty thousand feet up with a global-positioning-system-guided bomb and a jihadist’s ability to have his propaganda beamed to millions in real time do not necessarily transform the conditions that determine who wins and who loses wars. Nor do they alter the thinking that prompts leaders to prompt or forgo wars.

True, the instant communications of the twenty-first century may now compress decision making in ways undreamed of in the past. Contemporary generals must be skilled at giving news conferences that can influence the views of millions worldwide. Yet these are really just new wrinkles on the old creased face of war. The improvised explosive device versus the up-armored Humvee is simply an updated take on the catapult versus the stonewall, or the harquebus versus the mailed knight. The long history of war suggests no static primacy of the defensive or the offensive. No law dictates one sort of weapon system over another, but just temporary advantages gained by particular strategies and technologies that go unanswered for a time by less adept adversaries.

So it is highly doubtful, the study of war again reminds us, that a new weapon will emerge from the Pentagon or anywhere else that will change the very nature of armed conflict—unless some sort of genetic engineering so alters man’s brain chemistry that he begins to act in unprecedented ways. We fought the 1991 Gulf War with dazzling, computer-enhanced weaponry. But lost in the technological pizzazz was the basic wisdom that generals and their overseers need to fight wars with political objectives in mind.

In contrast, the result of “defeating” Saddam in four days in 1991 was subsequent wars between 1991 and the present to rid Iraq of the Baathists and their legacy. To conclude wars decisively and achieve prewar aims, the victor must defeat, and often even humiliate militarily, an enemy and force the loser to abandon prewar behavior before offering a magnanimous peace. “Humiliate,” here, does not mean to gratuitously insult or ridicule a prostrate enemy but rather to show him that the wages of his unprovoked aggression are the end of his ability to make war on others.

In postmodern war, the word “victory” often appears in such quotation marks as a philosophical construct; it is supposedly mired in complexities and spoken only by the near savage, who insists that our intricate nuclear world is still fathomable in terms of nation-states and conventional armies. But the idea of winning will never disappear. It is an easily definable and timeless military concept of forcing an opponent to cease fighting, to abandon the real or imagined reasons for his bellicosity, and to agree to the conditions set down by those powers demonstrably able to so affect his thinking and behavior. Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.

For some reason, no American general or diplomat seemed to understand that crucial point seventeen years ago—or perhaps they felt that United Nations troops had already inflicted an inordinate amount of damage on the Baathist state. The result was that on the cessation of hostilities, Saddam Hussein’s supposedly defeated generals used their gunships to butcher Kurds and Shiites while the apparently victorious Americans looked on. And because we never quite understood or achieved the war’s proper aim—ensuring that Iraq’s dictatorship would not use its petro-wealth to destroy the peace of a globally critical region—we returned to fight a second war of NATO-enforced no-fly zones above Iraq. Then there was a third war to remove Saddam, and then again a fourth war, of counterinsurgency, to protect the fledgling Iraqi democracy.

Military history reminds us of important anomalies and paradoxes—especially the futility of most prewar wisdom. When Sparta invaded Attica in the first spring of the Peloponnesian War (431
B.C.
), the historian Thucydides recounts, it expected the Athenians to surrender after a few short seasons of ravaging. But the Athenians had no intention of surrendering or conceding anything—and suffered little until a plague broke out and did more damage than thousands of Spartan ravagers had during five separate invasions. Twenty-seven years later, the maritime Athenians, deemed “lords of the sea,” lost the war at sea to Sparta, an insular land power that started the conflict with scarcely a navy.

William Tecumseh Sherman was removed from command in October 1861, and accused of being “crazy,” after suggesting that Union forces might need 200,000 troops to clear and hold Kentucky. Given the fact that the North had fielded some 2.5 million soldiers at Civil War’s end, Sherman appeared in retrospect to have been clairvoyant. In the heyday of Allied victory in 1918–19, Marshal Ferdinand Foch predicted that the Versailles Treaty guaranteed a war with Germany in two decades: “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years,” he said. Though he was scoffed at by utopians, he was off by only a few months. The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted the doom-and-gloom critics who had predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy six-year reconstruction has not yet ensured the anticipated quiet, stable democracy envisioned by proponents of the removal of the Baathist regime.

Other anomalies can be learned from studying military history, such as the fact that the size of an army does not always guarantee battlefield success: The victors of the landmark battles at Salamis, Issos, Mexico City, and Lepanto were all outnumbered. And war’s most savage moments—the Allied summer offensive of 1918, the Russian siege of Berlin in the spring of 1945, the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima—often unfold right before hostilities cease. Democratic leaders during war—Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, George Bush—often leave office either disgraced or unpopular. Too often we use contemporary wisdom or innate logic to try to make sense of impending conflicts, rather than look to the history of past wars, which are frequently unpredictable and nearly inexplicable.

It would be reassuring to think that the righteousness of a cause, or the bravery of an army, or the nobility of a sacrifice would ensure public support for a war. At times, these reasons have and should. But military history shows that once a conflict begins, the perception of winning becomes far more important to the public. Citizens turn abruptly on any leader deemed culpable for losing. “Public sentiment is everything,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

Lincoln knew that lesson well. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were brilliant Union victories that by summer 1863 had restored Lincoln’s previously shaky credibility and strengthened his abolitionist aims. But a year later, after the losses at Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and Cold Harbor—Cold Harbor alone claimed seven thousand Union casualties in a few hours—the public reviled him and might well have been willing to live with a slaveholding Confederate nation next door. Neither Lincoln nor his policies had changed, but the Confederate ability to kill large numbers of Union soldiers had. And had General Sherman not taken Atlanta in spectacular fashion on September 2, 1864 (“Atlanta is ours, and fairly won”), President Lincoln—for all his rhetorical skills, his moral authority, and his strategic insight—would have lost the November election to General George McClellan and his copperhead supporters.

Ultimately, public opinion follows the ups and downs, including the perception of the ups and downs, of the battlefield, since victory excites the most ardent pacifist and defeat silences the most frothing zealot. After the defeat of France, Dunkirk, the losses to the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, the U-boat rampage, and the fall of Greece, Singapore, and Tobruk, Winston Churchill took the blame for a war that was seemingly lost, until the brilliant prime minister’s victories in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy shortly after.

When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. By 2007, four years of insurgency later, Americans opposed the orphaned war by nearly the same margin. General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.”

The American public turned on the Iraq War not because of the antiwar oratory of Cindy Sheehan or the cinematographic propaganda of Michael Moore or the lack of nerve gas in Saddam’s bunkers, but because it felt that the battlefield news had become uniformly bad and that the price in American lives and treasure for ensuring Iraqi reform had become too dear. The public grew tired of seeing Americans blown up in Humvees each night on television, tired of Iraqis shouting “Death to America,” and tired of being told that our blood and treasure was worth “their” freedom. When General David Petraeus promised that a surge of American troops could salvage Iraq, critics pilloried him as “General Betray Us”; when his soldiers did just what he had promised, pundits were suddenly talking of his presidential timber.

General Douglas MacArthur’s peers initially laughed at his proposal for a daring landing at Incheon when Americans were about to be pushed off the Korean peninsula far to the south at Pusan. Then the general was deified when he pulled it off and all but won the war—only to be finally demonized for recklessly pursuing the defeated North Koreans far to the north, where rough terrain, freezing temperatures, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese ensured American catastrophe. Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur’s strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to the public.

The Morality of Military History

M
ILITARY HISTORY HAS
a moral purpose: educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. If we know nothing of Shiloh, Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosin, the crosses in our military cemeteries are reduced to just pleasant white markers on lush green lawns. The gaunt faces in the windows of the Veterans Administration hospitals become no different from the faces of those hospitalized because of illness, infirmity, and age. These sacrifices no longer serve as reminders that thousands endured pain and hardship for our right to listen to what we wish and to shop in safety—and that the departed expected future generations, links in this great chain of obligation, to do the same for those not yet born.