Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (21 page)

idea of Spartan expansionary policy and questioning the stability of its

very rule beyond the vale of Laconia.

About eighteen months after the battle (which occurred in July 371

BC), during December 370–369 BC, the general Epaminondas convinced

the Boeotian leadership to embark on a preemptory strike to the south.

The ostensible reason for intervention was a call for help to the Thebans

from the newly consolidated Arcadian city of Mantineia to ward off the

threat of constant Spartan invasion by King Agesilaus. Epaminondas

seems to have concluded that even after Leuctra, the Spartan army still

threatened large democratic states, and that it would only be a matter

of time until the Spartans regrouped and attempted yet another annual

incursion into Boeotia. The timely invitation from the Arcadians and

other Peloponnesians to intervene on their behalf seems to have galva-

nized Epaminondas into envisioning an even larger—and final—plan to

end the Spartan hegemony of the Peloponnese altogether.8

Epaminondas’s huge al ied army included thousands of Pelopon-

nesians who joined the invasion at various places south of the Corinthian

Isthmus, among them perhaps some of those Peloponnesians spared

The Doctrine of Preemptive War
97

over a year earlier at Leuctra. The march fol owed a nearly 200-mile

route into the heart of the Spartan state, a legendarily inviolate land-

scape said to have been untouched by enemies for some 350 years. After

ravaging the Spartan homeland and bottling the Spartan army up inside

the city across the icy Eurotas, the Boeotians failed to storm the acrop-

olis. Instead, after burning the Spartan port at Gytheion twenty-seven

miles to the south, Epaminondas’s Boeotians, along with some contin-

gents of their victorious Peloponnesian al ies, decided to head west in

midwinter across the range of Mt. Taygetos into Messenia, the historical

breadbasket of the Spartan state, where indentured serfs, known as hel-

ots, supplied foodstuffs and manpower for the Spartan state.9

The Boeotians probably descended from the uplands of Taygetos

sometime after the first of the year 369 BC, routed the Spartans from

their rich protectorate in Messenia, freed most of the helots there, and

helped to found the vast citadel of Messene. Before they departed the

following spring, Epaminondas had ensured a new autonomous and

democratic state of Messenia, its fortified capital at Messene now es-

sentially immune from Spartan reprisals. And by the time Epaminondas

had marched home, he had humiliated the Spartan state and ended its

parasitical reliance on Messenian food, a relationship essential to free-

ing up the Spartan warrior-citizen caste to focus on warfare. His dream

of an anti-Spartan axis anchored by Messene, the new fortified Man-

tineia, and the rising Megalopolis seemed to be approaching reality.10

The remarkable invasion itself was an anomaly in a variety of ways.

Early fourth-century Greek armies, even after the innovative tactics

that emerged during the Peloponnesian War (431–404), still usually

marched in late spring, preferably around the time of the grain harvest,

to ensure good weather and secure adequate rations in the field, as well

as to have a better chance at burning the ripening and drying wheat

and barley crops of the invaded. Such seasonal armies usually were

not absent for more than a few days or weeks because of their own

harvesttime obligations. As nonprofessionals, they had little ability to

provision themselves for extended stays abroad, whether judged by dis-

tance or by time away from home. Usually the target was a nearby en-

emy army or the agricultural resources of a neighboring hostile power

rather than the utter defeat of a more distant adversity and the end of

98 Hanson

its existence as an autonomous state. Total war intended to destroy a

relatively large state was rare.11

Epaminondas in remarkable fashion ignored most of such past pro-

tocol of internecine Greek warfare. He chose to leave Thebes in De-

cember, when there were no standing crops in the field, the roads were

muddy, and his one-year tenure as Boeotarch was set to expire within

days of his departure at the first of the Boeotian year. He may have

remained gone for as long as five to six months, until near late spring

harvesttime, 369. And Epaminondas faced certain trial on his return for

violating the terms of his one-year tenure of command. His aims were

not just the defeat of the Spartan military or even occupation of the

Spartan acropolis but apparently, either before or after he arrived in the

Peloponnese, a sustained effort to end the Spartan state itself.12

Clearly, there was a sense of urgency in his decision to wage such an

unprecedented preemptive war in midwinter, and that anomaly raises

a number of critical questions. Was such a preemptive strike unusual

in Greek history? What were the larger aims of Epaminondas, and did

he achieve his long-term objectives? Or did his Boeotians simply widen

an already long and costly struggle between two former allies? Was

such a preemptive war sustainable, given domestic political opposition

at home and the finite resources available for such costly and lengthy

commitments abroad? And does the Theban experience with preemp-

tive war and spreading democracy have any lessons for the present?

Before answering those questions, it should be noted again that

while the classical world considered Epaminondas among its most

preeminent heroes, we have very little information about his career,

and we know even less about the details of his great first invasion of

the Peloponnese and the founding of Messene. There are no surviv-

ing in-depth ancient speeches that reflect his plans, or much editorial-

izing on the part of historians about his intentions. Xenophon, the only

extant contemporary historian of the era who chronicled the Theban

invasions, either did not appreciate the magnitude of Epaminondas’s

achievement (Epaminondas is not mentioned by name in the
Hellenica

until his final campaign and death at Mantineia; see 7.5.4–25) or har-

bored a generic prejudice against all things Theban. Plutarch’s life of

Epaminondas is lost. As a result, we rely on bits and pieces in Diodorus,

The Doctrine of Preemptive War
99

Plutarch’s
Pelopidas
and
Agesilaus
, Pausanias, and later compilers such

as Nepos. To a large degree, the motivations and aims of Epaminondas

are difficult to recover and remain seemingly iconoclastic and not easy

to fathom.13

Preemptive and Preventive Wars

Both preemptive and preventive wars in varying degrees are justified as

defensive acts, and thus supposedly differ from wars of outright aggres-

sion or blatantly punitive strikes. No one, for example, suggests that

the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 to prevent an impending

major Hellenic attack on the Persian Empire. Nor did Alexander the

Great cross the Hellespont to stop Darius III from striking Greece first.

For all the talk of “the brotherhood of man,” he was bent on aggres-

sion, plunder, and conquest, under the banner of paying the Persians

back for more than a century of meddling in Greek affairs.

Despite the Athenian rhetoric of 415, on the eve of the disastrous Si-

cilian Expedition, about past grievances and future dangers emanating

from the West, such as Alcibiades’s warning that “Men do not rest con-

tent with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow

to prevent the attack being made,” few Athenians probably believed the

pretense that the expedition against Syracuse anticipated, either in the

short or the long term, a Sicilian attack on the Athenian Empire. In-

stead, this too was a clear case of imperial aggression, aimed at finding

strategic advantage during a hiatus in the Peloponnesian War. The list

of such unambiguously aggressive wars could easily be expanded in the

Greek world and would include such episodes as the Persian invasions

of Greek territory in 492 and 490, Agesilaus’s attack on Asia Minor in

396 to liberate the Greek city-states of Ionia, and Philip’s descent into

Greece in 338, which culminated in the Greek defeat at Chaeronea.14

In contrast, among the so-called defensive wars, preemption is usu-

ally distinguished from preventive war by the apparent perception—or

at least claim—of a credibly imminent threat. The reality of that as-

sertion determines whether an attack is generally accepted as genu-

inely defensive. When a state—often one considered the traditionally

weaker side—preempts and strikes first, it is supposedly convinced that

100 Hanson

otherwise an existentially hostile target itself will surely soon attack,

and will do so with much greater advantage. Again, this initial aggres-

sion of preemptive wars is usually framed as defensive in nature, if the

presence of a looming danger is generally recognized. And the argu-

ment is strengthened further if there is a past history of conflict be-

tween the two belligerents.15

Truly preventive wars, on the other hand, such as the Iraq War

of 2003 or the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, are

much more controversial. The attacker—now usually assumed to be

the stronger power—claims that time will increasingly favor the geo-

political status of an innately aggressive and strengthening adversary

that sooner or later might strike and change the status quo. Thus the

instigator believes that its own inevitably declining position vis-à-vis a

belligerent rival can be aborted by weakening or eliminating a potential

threat before such an action proves less promising or impossible in the

future. But because the imminence of danger is usually far less likely to

be universally recognized than is true in cases of preemption, and since

the initiator is usually the currently more militarily powerful, preven-

tive wars are far more often easily criticized as wars of aggression.

The Japanese, for example, convinced no one that their “preventive”

Pearl Harbor strike of December 7, 1941, was aimed at weakening an

enemy that otherwise would only have one day become stronger in an

inevitable American-Japanese war to come. Most felt it was the first step

in a westward expansion across the Pacific to augment the preexisting

Japanese-led Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In turn, the United States did

not seek to strike Japan first, out of fear that such an attack might
not

be seen as an understandable
preemptive
war to ward off an imminent

Japanese aggression but rather at best as a more controversial
preven-

tive
war that would be denounced by many isolationist Americans as

optional, bellicose, and imperial rather than defensive and necessary.

A beleaguered Israel, to general world approval, preempted by mere

hours its Arab enemies during the Six-Day War of June 1967 by striking

Egyptian airfields before its neighbors were expected to invade Israel.

But in contrast, any contemporary strike on Iranian nuclear facilities by

a stronger Israeli military, in the manner of its 1981 bombing of the Iraqi

reactor at Osirak, would be widely criticized. It would be interpreted

The Doctrine of Preemptive War
101

as the first act of a more dubiously preventive war, undertaken on the

more controversial premise not that Iran was planning an immediate

launch against Israel but that Teheran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon,

coupled with its much publicized promises to end the Jewish state,

would someday mean a dramatic threat to Israeli security and a future

weakening of its unquestioned military superiority in the region.

Of course, the fine distinction between the rare preventive war and

the more common preemptive war is not always clear. What consti-

tutes an imminent threat is always in dispute and in the eye of the be-

holder. Nearly every state that initiates actual hostilities denies that it

is acting offensively and claims that it is simply forced to go to war for

its own self-defense, the initial details of the hostility soon becoming

largely irrelevant. When the Bush administration chose to focus just

on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction threat to justify the preventive

invasion of Iraq, despite the U.S. Congress in October 2002 authoriz-

ing twenty-three writs for the removal of the Hussein regime in Iraq,

world opinion and soon American public opinion turned against the

controversial war. The subsequent absence of stockpiles of dangerous

weapons meant the most publicized official justification for a war to re-

move a genocidal tyrant had proven false. Yet even after such stockpiles

were not found, criticism largely mounted only in summer 2003, when

the administration could not maintain peace after a brilliant three-

week victory over the Baathist regime once a terrorist insurgency had