The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (5 page)

Diplomacy and humility abroad can encourage friendship. And such good manners and deference are vital in improving our global image and lessening tensions. Yet, unfortunately, pleasantness and magnanimity are not always enough to ensure good relations with rival states and interest groups that look more to what we represent than to what we might say or do on any one occasion.

It is a tragedy of the human character that a Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran say they predicate relations with the United States on notions of goodwill, deference, mutual respect, past apologies, and benevolent diplomacy, even as they tend to interpret our outreach as weakness and treat deterrence with respect. Having a hundred-thousand-ton nuclear carrier in the Persian Gulf, more lethal than the combined militaries of most nations, probably does more to keep the calm in that region than sending a presidential video to the Iranian theocracy, no matter how artfully phrased.

Perhaps the strangest barometer of the rise of the therapeutic mind-set is the growing prevalence of old-style piracy. Criminals based in Somalia, using just a few thugs equipped with small arms, routinely hijack and commandeer large oceangoing merchant vessels. Such overt piracy is a symptom of the erosion of international order—not merely in the example of the perpetually failed state of Somalia, but more so by the general global indifference to the piratical encroachment into the world’s vital sea lanes. Likewise, the classical antidote of going ashore to demolish the homes, bases, and dockyards of the miscreants—known from the days of Pompey’s successful efforts against Cilician piracy—seems to be taboo to Western navies in the age after the American “Black Hawk Down” humiliation in Mogadishu. Instead of a military response, we are likely to run a cost-benefit analysis of the piratical threat, to consider the mitigating circumstances of poverty and oppression that turn erstwhile fishermen into seaborne criminals, and to blame the victim in wondering out loud why seagoing vessels don’t carry their own security teams or why such profit-mongering shipping companies must skirt so close to hostile coasts.

The same confusion is often true of hostage-taking, whether the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 or the Iranians’ capture of fifteen British sailors in disputed waters off Iraq in 2007. Kidnapping regimes are no longer issued ultimatums to release captured diplomatic or military personnel—or else. Instead, the detained are paraded on international television and coerced into signing affidavits admitting guilt or testifying to superb treatment from their captors—while state propaganda airs accusations of espionage, coupled with threats of trials and worse.

Western powers place a peaceful resolution of the crisis and a safe return of the hostages above all other considerations—even when they privately accept that public signs of humiliation and weakness will lead to further aggression and more hostage-taking. The ultimate result of the Iranian hostages crises was not better understanding between the Iranian theocracy and Western powers; rather it was increased Iranian terrorism after 1980, and, in the British case, an arrest in 2009 of British embassy employees on charges of espionage and treason.

Yet who in the affluent West would have wished for an American president in November 1979 to issue a warning along the following lines: “If the Iranian government does not release the fifty-two captured, and illegally detained, American diplomatic and military personnel, the United States will soon begin a systematic aerial destruction of all of its military assets. If the personnel are harmed in any way, the government of the United States will further ensure the destruction of the Iranian power grid, refinery capacity, and general infrastructure”?

On hearing such an ultimatum, the Iranians might well have released the hostages, might well have abandoned further provocative acts, and might well have so lost public face that their credibility in the radical Islamic world would have eroded and their position among Iranians at home weakened. But all those “mights” would have been predicated on two unfortunate possibilities: an American president would have had to gamble that fifty-two Americans could be executed and that in retaliation he would have had to endure Western criticism for using the vast power of the United States inordinately against a weaker, third world “revolutionary” regime.

The past failure of both Democratic and Republican administrations to strike back hard and consistently at Osama bin Laden’s early terrorist acts against Americans abroad did not bring us respect for our forbearance, much less sympathy from jihadists for our reason and faith in the powers of adjudication. Rather, human nature being what it is, our restraint tragically invited ever more contempt and audacity on al-Qaeda’s part—and more dead as the bitter wages of a certain self-righteous morality and tragic miscalculation.

Sparta crossed the Athenian border in spring 431
B.C.
despite the majestic Parthenon, and without any concern that Aristophanes, Euripides, Pericles, Socrates, and Sophocles walked the streets of Athens. Its army advanced northward because King Archidamus calculated
rightly
that Athens had never before by force stopped a Spartan army from entering Attica, and certainly gave no indication of doing much about it this time—and
wrongly
that the ensuing Spartan attack on Attica’s agriculture would either end the war or lead ipso facto to Sparta’s own strategic advantage.

The enemies of free speech and intolerance—German Nazis, Italian Fascists, Japanese militarists, Stalinist Communists, and Islamic fundamentalists—have just as often attacked us (when they calculated that it could be done without major losses) for what we are or will do, rather than for what we have done, inasmuch as they innately detest freedom and the liberality that is its twin as notions lethal to their own authoritarianism. Again, call the Greeks reductionist, but they did not believe the Achmaenid king Xerxes had legitimate prior grievances arising from their participation in the Ionian revolt, or that he even saw Greece as integral to the administration of the vast Persian Empire, or that he concluded that Hellenic olive trees were essential to the Persian economy. Instead, they saw the conflict as one of an arrogant autocracy, in hubristic fashion, seeking the destruction of its far smaller and free neighbor, for understandable reasons of pride, vengeance, and honor.

Only our moral response—not our status as belligerents per se—determines whether contemporary war is just. If we butcher a weaker opponent for no good cause, as the Athenians did neutral Melians, or if we gratuitously torture our captives, then our battle against the enemy becomes tainted, and we may well not win it. But if we are trying to preserve freedom against its tyrannical aggressors, like the Greeks at Thermopylae and the G.I.s on the beaches of Normandy, then war may be the right and indeed often the only thing we can do to preserve our larger culture. The point is not that moral purpose always ensures victory. Nor should we assume even that the ethical high ground justifies the resort to arms. We can only console ourselves that democracies by their very nature usually cannot win the wars they choose to enter when their own free people are not convinced that their collective efforts have any humane foundation.

Caught in such a tragedy—where efforts at reason and humanity had fallen on the deaf ears of killers, and where those who professed a desire to avoid war had to inflict more costs on the enemy than they themselves suffered—the United States apparently wished to send a message to its enemies after September 11, 2001. Their defeat and loss of face in the Middle East would serve as a harsh teacher—for at least a generation or two—that it is wrong and very dangerous to kill thousands of civilians in the streets of our cities. For all the domestic acrimony over Afghanistan and Iraq, for all the anger at the United States in the Middle East, for all the blunders committed in the conduct of recent wars, the terrorists for nine years have not been able to repeat the events of September 11—and the popularity of bin Laden and his tactic of suicide bombing has plummeted rather than risen in polls taken throughout the Middle East.

Indeed, a 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Project poll of Middle East public opinion suggested the paradoxical: Bin Laden’s and suicide bombers’ popularity alike showed a marked decline. Yet attitudes toward George W. Bush’s America in many Middle East countries remained negative. Or were such results all that divergent? Many in the proverbial Arab street of public opinion might well have despised America for warring against radical Islam, but despised bin Laden and his acolytes even more for losing—and bringing disrepute and misery to all in their midst. Public opinion in Germany by winter 1945 was neither favorable to the America that had ignited German cities nor to the führer whose policies had both earned Allied attacks and failed to thwart them.

It would be unwise, years after 9/11, to suggest that the so-called war on terror is over—to the extent of outlawing the provocative phrase “war on terror” altogether and replacing it with the kinder, gentler “overseas contingency operations” taken in response to “man-made catastrophes.” Or to insist that we are really not at war with anything so remote as “Islamic extremism,” even as we continue to target jihadists on the Afghan border, deploy in Iraq, and execute suspected terrorists through drone missile attacks. In such a contradictory scenario, Americans would do plenty enough to incite enemies to continue their bellicosity, while at the same time assuring them that we no longer see the struggle in quite such existential terms—a strange passive-aggressive medley that could ensure a dangerous climate indeed.

In sum, study of the Greeks in this sophisticated age of high technology, and deeply embedded sociology and psychology, is a reminder that wars—and the emotions and mentalities that fuel them—are tragically eternal. And the wisdom of the past concerning how conflict begins, is deterred, and ends is more critical now than ever, however unwelcome such lessons may be.

The Anticlassical View

D
ESPITE THE ADMONITIONS
of Edward Gibbon, it was not the advent of Christianity and “turn the other cheek” that ended the classically tragic view of the constant need for military preparedness to ensure the peace, and so brought down Rome. Well before hundreds of thousands crossed the Rhine and the Danube, Christian philosophers and theologians developed the doctrine of “just war,” having realized that passivity and nonresistance could translate into suicide. Nor did the Enlightenment and its god Reason end the insanity of war—inasmuch as most philosophers soon conceded that global courts, broadly educated publics, and enlightened elites could not dissuade Frederick the Great, Napoleon, or Wellington from the use of armed force.

More likely, it was the horror of the two world wars—Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima—that led to our own era’s questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe that nearly destroyed itself in two devastating industrial wars within a roughly twenty-year period. Yet out of such numbing losses we may have missed the lesson of the horror. The calamity of sixty million dead was not just because nationalistic Westerners went to war in an industrial age of weaponry of mass annihilation, but rather because the liberal democracies were unwilling to make moderate sacrifices to keep the peace well before 1914 and 1939—when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism, and then Nazism without millions of the blameless perishing.

Increased affluence, entertainment, and leisure of the past half century in the relatively quiet and postmodern West also has made it easier to pronounce a war of any type as retrograde and of no utility. It is, after all, hard to convince young people to forgo the beach for basic training. It was one thing for parents to send one of five children from the backbreaking work on the farm to serve “over there” in France in 1917, but quite another for today’s parents to risk losing an only child—the beneficiary of braces, SAT camps, and college-prep courses—on patrol in the Hindu Kush, adjudicating tribal feuds among the pro- and anti-Taliban factions.

The legacy of the British and French Enlightenments, of course, gave birth to popular social sciences that sought to “prove” to us that war was always irrationally evil and therefore surely preventable. Indeed, during the 1986 International Year of Peace, a global commission of well-meaning academics (See “The Seville Statement on Violence, Spain, 1986”) concluded that war was innately unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike—the implication being that war itself was entirely preventable with proper thinking and global preventive medicine.

Seeing war as “Zeus’s curse” in this age of our greatest learning and wealth—and pride—is to descend into savagery, when our more educated trust that prayer, talk, or money can prevent conflict. But if Westerners deem themselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop aggressors in this complex nuclear age, then—as Socrates and Aristotle alike remind us—they can indeed become real accomplices to evil through inaction. We forget sometimes that the philosopher Socrates—citizen of the world, critic of the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, foe of frenzied mob rule, skeptic of fashionable sophistic relativism—fought as an Athenian hoplite (a heavily armored and armed infantryman) in battle at least three times on the eve of and during the Peloponnesian War, at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis, all on foreign soil in campaigns deemed “imperial” by the enemies of Athens and “optional” by many Athenians themselves. The playwright Sophocles commanded triremes against the revolting tributary island of Samos (pitted against the Samian Eleatic philosopher Melissus) and served late in life as a commissioner in the wake of the catastrophe at Sicily—roughly the ancient equivalent of Philip Roth being appointed to a 9/11 commission or a middle-age Rick Warren being assigned to the 101st Airborne.