The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (20 page)

The armed forces of the democracies like fifth-century
B.C.
Athens, fourth-century
B.C.
Thebes, and contemporary America all tried not just to promote abroad the values that they cherished at home, but often to replicate their very own democratic structures and institutions. Why should this be so?

Democracy and Military Self-Interest

T
HE ANSWER IS
complex but seems to involve both practical and ethical reasons in seeing as many democracies as possible spread beyond their own shores. Athens’s so-called
ochlos
—the voting mob empowered by the radical democracy—felt that its own privileged position hinged on having like-minded supporters in the subject states of the Aegean. So the maritime Athenian empire was patrolled by two hundred imperial triremes with names like
Free Speech
and
Demokratia
, and powered by poor landless
thete
rowers who were paid a generous wage as the muscles of democracy.

The truism that democracies rarely attack each other is mostly valid in the modern era and perhaps often for antiquity as well. Although democratic Athens attacked democratic Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War, such internecine warfare among democratic polities was not the norm. Thucydides saw that the Peloponnesian War pitted the Athenians’ democratic allies and subjects mostly against the oligarchies aligned with Sparta. He also observed that Athenian forces did not fight so well against the Sicilians when it was thought that a supposedly hostile Sicily otherwise had something in common with Athenian political culture.

National security was also at least part of the catalyst for the great march of Epaminondas the Theban in 369
B.C.
Then the general took a huge democratic army down into the Peloponnese to end the Spartan land empire, free the Messenian Helot serfs, and found the democratic citadels at Mantineia, Megalopolis, and Messene in order to encircle Sparta. After all that, classical Sparta never again marched north of the isthmus at Corinth—a routine occurrence before Epaminondas’s invasion.

The European Union apparently has achieved its promised anomaly of a continent of autonomous states that will not attack one another—a dream made feasible only by the institutionalization of democracy, in turn made possible by the Allied victory and democratization after the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union after its defeat in the Cold War.

Democratic militaries are also imbued with the moral logic that there is an inherent ethical inconsistency in protecting democracy at home while undermining it abroad. One of the raging controversies of the Cold War was the criticism that the United States had somehow birthed, often armed, or occasionally supported a rogue’s gallery of dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, Georgios Papadopoulos, Augusto Pinochet, the shah of Iran, and Anastasio Somoza—and that this cynicism was a betrayal of American values.

The post–Cold War hope was that the realpolitik that marked U.S. policy during that era was an aberration of sorts, owing to the emergence of the Soviet Union as a nuclear power with expansionist ambitions. The collapse of the Soviet empire thus created the conditions for a new emphasis in U.S. foreign policy. Accordingly, the American intervention in Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, the bombing of Kosovo and Serbia, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (whatever the underlying wisdom or folly of those interventions) were aimed at dictators and autocrats, with the expectation that their removal might be followed by the imposition of democratic rule.

In short, while all democracies worry about right-wing officers seizing control of civilian government, more often right-wing officers follow civilian agendas to promote, rather than to destroy, constitutional governments abroad. Politicians may go after autocracies on occasion for idealistic reasons, but officers apparently understand that the more constitutional societies arise abroad, the less dangers their own militaries face.

Dreams and Realities After the Cold War

W
HEN GEORGE H. W.
BUSH
did not push reform on Iraq or the region as a whole after the defeat of Saddam Hussein in 1991, critics at home alleged that such realism was no longer appropriate in the post–Cold War world. The public, it seemed, was appalled at Secretary of State James Baker’s declaration that the war in the oil-rich area was to be fought solely over “jobs, jobs, jobs”—and, later, that a successful war to liberate Kuwait had only led to years of no-fly zones to prevent continual butchery of the Shiites and Kurds. Baker’s quip that we “had no dog in that fight” about the Balkans struck many in America as an unwillingness to use moral and military power to thwart the genocide in Bosnia.

Indeed, one of the ironies of the round of attacks on George W. Bush’s Iraqi War—too much emphasis on democracy, not enough troops in Iraq, too much confidence in Iraqi reformers, too little fear of Iran, an international coalition that was too small—is that it was advanced by authors and writers like Michael Gordon, Thomas Ricks, Bernard Trainor, Bob Woodward, and others who in the 1990s had critiqued the first Gulf War in books and articles on nearly opposite grounds: that Americans had fought without sufficient idealism, that too many troops were unnecessarily deployed, that too little confidence was placed in Shiite and Kurdish reformers, that the fighting coalition was too large and unwieldy, that the realpolitik strategists had excessive fear of Iran.

Democracies that profess egalitarianism and the freedom of the individual are especially sensitive to charges of cynicism and hypocrisy when their foreign policies do not reflect their own values. At worst in its past, the United States fought its covert, dirty wars on the basis of economic or strategic pragmatism, which meant that it was quite willing to install compliant thugs whom it felt might be better than the alternative, and might in time evolve into something more liberal. But in its more conventional conflicts, which were closely covered by the press and followed by the public on a daily basis (World Wars I and II, Korea, and the contemporary Middle East conflicts), U.S. administrations generally sought to implant those who promised constitutional governments in postwar landscapes.

To the degree that our military has an active consultative role in picking and choosing America’s fights, it would not be against, but might indeed support, the concept of promoting democracy as an expression of the national interest. Nor does the broader public oppose such a role for our military. Even in controversial cases like Iraq and Afghanistan, the public is strongly supportive of military efforts, after the fighting has stopped, to nurture consensual government in the wake of the removal of dictators, notwithstanding the difficulties of doing so.

Most Americans understand that the alternative—restoring order by imposing a friendly strongman—would only sharpen the charge of cynical colonialism, imperialism, and corporatism. If it is true that the spread of democracy around the world will make wars less likely and less frequent, then the military might see democratization as a means of reducing the likelihood of its own deployment in dangerous foreign wars to come.

The New Slur of Nation-Building

F
OR A FULL
generation now, the all-volunteer American military has trained an entire cadre of officers who have received advanced degrees in our finest academic institutions and thus possess proconsul skills that far exceed those necessary to command men in battle. “Winning hearts and minds” is now deemed just as important to the training of military officers as mastering GPS-guided bombing techniques or the proper uses of the Abrams tank.

In far-off diverse areas such as Colombia, Mongolia, and the Philippines, the U.S. military is not only conducting counterinsurgency warfare (what Robert Kaplan has called fighting in “Injun Country”), but it is also training local troops to operate under constitutional government. Special Forces officers administer to the social and economic needs of local constituents for the purpose of stabilizing local governments, so that they will not exploit discontent or use oil or drug revenues to destabilize the global order that has grown up since the Second World War. The United States, obviously, has a vital interest in defending and expanding this order, which promises to extend the sphere of prosperity and democracy.

In the furor over the war in Iraq, however, the entire notion of nation-building, both in small backwaters and at the conclusion of major military interventions—which was relatively unquestioned after Panama, the Balkans, and Afghanistan—is now under intense scrutiny and reexamination. The post-Iraq foreign policy of the United States, to the extent it is not isolationist, will probably see calls for the return of a posture of realism. In other words, we should accept the fact that we have to make arrangements with the world as it is, rather than trying to change it in our own image. By June 2009, the Obama administration had already gone on record that it would not “meddle” by voicing encouragement to Iranian reformers protesting in the streets against Iranian theocracy.

Reactions against nation-building might devolve into the acceptance of an attitude of “more rubble, less trouble,” leading to a strategy of standoff bombing to deal with trouble spots in the world. Or yet again, future administrations might accept de facto appeasement of those who threaten our security in the hope that they will go away or their anger will thereby be assuaged. This we have already seen in the past policy that terrorism warrants only an occasional cruise missile or, as a criminal justice matter, a federal indictment.

All these approaches might be tried as alternatives to nation-building or democratization. If the realist right will talk about “American self-interest” as a reason of not getting involved in efforts to stop genocide or remove horrific dictators, the well-intended in the West will struggle with the paradox that most of its idealism about human rights butts up against the very anti-human-rights policies of the likes of Hugo Chávez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Non-judgmentalism may trump abstract support for democracy, inasmuch as most of the transgressors of civil liberties today are not so-called whites, are not native English speakers, and do not reside in the so-called West. President Obama himself has hinted that democracy may not be the best litmus test of foreign governments’ success, but rather the degree of freedom among the population from hunger and illness.

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?

F
IRST, 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.