WHY THE WEST HAS WON (and will) part 2
THE LETHAL EDGE
There was no idea of personal freedom in the Pharaoh's ranks; no Persian conception of civic militarism or civilian audit of the Great King's army; no Thracian embrace of the scientific tradition; no disciplined files of shock phalangites in Phoenicia; and no landed infantry of small property owners in ancient Scythia-and thus no military in the ancient Mediterranean like the Greeks at Thermopylae, Salamis, or Plataea. By the same token, Montezuma could not envision fighting in the Mediterranean, just as Ali Pasha would never see the Americas. There was little chance that the Aztecs, for all their rich local natural resources, on their own accord could make harquebuses, gunpowder or crossbows, the Ottomans topflight bronze cannon and the Zulus Martini-Henry rifles. Japan learned to its advantage in the nineteenth century that Europe alone could design battleships-and that battleships were superior to anything that floated in the Sea of Japan. The North Vietnamese did not fight with the tribal spears of their own past.
Western military power, however, is more than superior technology. Just as the peace movement and the constant political audit of the military in Vietnam conditioned the behavior of American armies in Southeast Asia, so Bishop Colenso and his family published critiques against the British invasion of Zululand. Bernardino de Sahagún's narrative of the Spanish conquest of Mexico sought to criticize the morality of his countrymen's army-in a way unthinkable in Aztec, Vietnamese or Zulu society. It is no accident that Themistocles, like both the victorious Cortés and Lord Chelmsford, did not die a hero in a homeland grateful to him for the slaughter of its enemies. Did such dissent weaken consistently Westerners' ability to wage war? Not always, at least not in the long term. The Western tradition of critique and audit has not only established European credibility, and so served to ensure that the written and published story of war was largely Western; it has also shown that minds outside the battlefield ultimately had a say in how their nation's treasure and manhood were spent, sometimes saving the military from itself.
Wars are fought by men who are fickle, and in real conditions that are wholly unpredictable-heat, ice and rain, tropical and near-arctic, close and far from home. Western armies in Africa, Asia and the Americas, like soldiers everywhere, were often annihilated-often led by fools and placed in the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time. But Themistocles, Alexander the Great, Cortés and the British and American officers of the last two centuries enjoyed innate advantages that over the long duration could offset imbecilic generalship, flawed tactics, strained supply lines, difficult terrain and inferior numbers-or a simple "bad day." These advantages were not the product of the genes, germs or geography of a distant past. The Zulu empire was doomed once the British decided to invade, regardless of its victory at Isandhlwana, despite the tactical lapses of Lord Chelmsford and irrespective of courageous impis.
Discussion of Western military prowess demands a precision in nomenclature. Western elections and constitutions are not the same as tribal freedom, in which much land and few people occasionally give individuals opportunity to find solitude and independence. The desire to fight as freemen is also different from the simple élan of defenders who expel tyrants and foreign powers from their homeland. Persians, Aztecs, Zulus and North Vietnamese all wished to be free of foreign troops on their native soil, but they fought for the autonomy of their culture-not as free voting citizens with rights protected by constitutions. A Zulu could roam relatively free on the plains of southern Africa, enjoying a somewhat more "free" lifestyle than a British redcoat in a stuffy barracks; but the Zulu, not the Englishman, was subject to execution by a nod of his king. Shaka proved this tens of thousands of times over. North Vietnamese communists duplicitously promised to their troops a Western-style "democratic republic"-not a communist police state or a feudal dynasty.
All armies at times engage in mass confrontations; few prefer to do so in careful rank and file, to advance head-on in shock collisions. Likewise, armies from the Persians to the Ottomans often developed sophisticated methods of mustering troops; none outside the West drafted fighters with the implicit understanding that their military service was part and parcel of their status as free citizens who determined when, how and why they were to go to war. Foot soldiers are common in every culture, but infantrymen, fighting en masse, who take and hold ground and fight face-to-face, are a uniquely Western specialty-the product of a long tradition of a middling landholding citizenry, uneasy with both landless peasants and mounted aristocrats.
Africans and American Indians could employ European rifles, become crack shots and occasionally repair broken stocks and barrels. Yet they could not produce guns in any great number, if at all, much less craft improved models, or find in a written literature the abstract principles of ballistics and munitions, in order to conduct advanced research.
Similarly, buying and selling is a human trait; the abstract protection of private property, the institutionalization of interest and investment, and the understanding of markets are not. Capitalism is more than the sale of goods, more than the existence of money and more than the presence of the bazaar. Rather, it is a peculiar Western practice that acknowledges the self-interest of man and channels that greed to the production of vast amounts of goods and services, through free markets and institutionalized guarantees of personal profit, free exchange, deposited capital and private property.
And lastly, every army possesses men of daring, but few encourage initiative throughout the ranks and welcome rather than fear innovation-so apprehensive are they that an army of independent-thinking soldiers just might prove the same as citizens. Bickering among soldiers and disagreement among a small cadre of generals-whether Hitler's captains or Aztec lords-are universal traits. But the institutionalization of critique in the military-soldiers' subservience to political leaders, existence of law courts, uniform codes of discipline subject to review, appeal and ratification-is unknown outside the West. The freedom among citizens to criticize wars and warriors openly and profligately has no pedigree outside the European tradition.
Will-and should-this lethal heritage continue? In a series of border wars from 1947 to 1982, tiny Israel fought and decisively defeated a loose coalition of its Arab neighbors, who were supplied with sophisticated weapons by the Soviet Union, China and France. Israel's population during those decades never exceeded five million, whereas its surrounding antagonists-at various times including Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf states-numbered well over 100 million. Despite nearly indefensible borders, the outnumbered Israeli army-the creation of a brilliant generation of European émigrés-consistently fielded better-organized, -supplied and -disciplined armies, with superbly trained and individualistic soldiers. Israel itself was a democratic society of free markets, free elections and free speech. Its enemies simply were not.
In less than three months in 1982, a British expeditionary force crossed 8,000 miles of rough seas and expelled a well-entrenched Argentine army on the Falklands, which was easily supported by ships and planes from the Patagonian coast a mere two hundred miles away. At a cost of some 255 British lives-mostly seamen who perished from missile attacks on Royal Navy cruisers-the government of Margaret Thatcher won back the small islands in the South Atlantic at little human cost, despite enormous logistical problems, the excellent imported weapons of its adversary and the complete surprise of the initial Argentine invasion. Again, the democratic and capitalist society of the United Kingdom sent out better-trained and more disciplined combatants in this strange little war, soldiers far different from those fielded by the Argentine dictatorship.
On January 17, 1991, a coalition of U.S. allies defeated the veteran army of Iraq-1.2 million ground troops, 3,850 artillery pieces, 5,800 tanks, 5,100 other armored vehicles-in four days, at a loss of fewer than 150 American servicemen and -women, most of whom were killed by random missile attack, friendly fire or other accidents. Saddam Hussein's military, like the Argentines', had purchased excellent equipment. Many of his soldiers were seasoned veterans of a brutal war with Iran. They were entrenched on or adjacent to their native soil. The Iraqi army could be easily supplied by highway from Baghdad.
But the Iraqi soldiers were not merely poorly disciplined and organized. None of them were in any sense of the word free individuals. The Republican Guard turned out to be about as effective against Westerners as had been Xerxes' Immortals. Not a single soldier who was incinerated by American jets voted to invade Kuwait or fight the United States. Saddam's own military plans were not subject to review; his economy was an extension of an in-house family business. Iraq's military hardware-from poison gas to tanks and mines-was all imported. Any Iraqi journalist who questioned the wisdom of invading Kuwait was likely to end up like Pythius the Lydian on the eve of Xerxes' invasion of Greece. The Iraqi military-having no ability to invade Europe or the United States-was nearly annihilated not far from the battlefields where Xenophon's Ten Thousand and Alexander the Great had likewise routed Asian imperial armies so long ago.
That Arab and Argentine officers were trained abroad meant little. Nor did it matter much that their armies were organized and modeled after those in Europe. Israel, Britain and the United States, often despite difficult logistics, all found victory relatively easy. What they shared was a holistic tradition that transcended howitzers and jets.
the future
of fighting
Nothing that has transpired in the last decades of the twentieth century suggests an end to Western military dominance, much less to war itself. Had the United States unleashed its full arsenal of brutal military power and fought without political restrictions, the war in Vietnam would have been over in a year or two, and may well have resembled the lopsided affair in the Gulf War. The terrorist attack on Sept. 11-accomplished through Western technology, from pilot lessons and cell phones to frequent-flyer miles and the Internet-will be answered by a degree of leathal power simply unimagined and incomprehensible in the Middle East.
There are three often-discussed military scenarios for the future: no wars, occasional wars or a single, world-ending conflict. We can dismiss the first fantasy without much discussion. War, as the Greeks teach us, seems innate to the human species, the "father of us all," Heraclitus put it. Both idealists on the left and pessimists on the right-whether Kantian utopians or gloomy Hegelians, worried over the end of history-have at times prognosticated a cessation to civilized warfare. The former hope for global peace under the aegis of international judicial bodies, most recently the United Nations and the World Court; the latter lament a spreading global atrophy, under which enervated citizens shall risk nothing if it might endanger their comfort.
Yet an often idealistic and self-proclaimed pacifistic Clinton administration called out the American military for more separate foreign deployments than any presidency in a hundred years. Contemporary wars are not merely frequent, but often brutal beyond anything in the nineteenth century. The 1991 Gulf War drew down the might of the United States to its National Guard reserves, a state of mobilization rarely reached even during the worst crises of the Cold War. A not insignificant percentage of the world's oil supply was for a time either embargoed, aflame or in peril at sea. More recently Belgrade was bombed and the Danube blocked; and there was unchecked mass murder for six years in Bosnia and Kosovo, only hours away from Rome, Athens and Berlin. Nations, clans and tribes, it seems, will continue to fight despite international threats, sanctions and the lessons of history, regardless of the intervention of the world's sole superpower and oblivious to the economic absurdity inherent in modern military arithmetic. The conduct of a war can be rational, but often its origins are not.
By the same token, despite a growing uniformity in the world's militaries-their automatic weapons, chains of command and uniforms Western to the core-there is little solace that some new global culture has ushered in perpetual peace. Those consumers of different races, religions, languages and nations, who all wear Adidas, buy Microsoft software and drink Coke, are just as likely to kill each other as before-and still watch Gilligan's Island reruns.
Gifted intellectuals of vision and character, products of this new Westernized intellectual culture, could only sigh when, during the spring of 1982 in the harsh seas of the South Atlantic, British seamen blew up Argentines and vice versa. The European-educated, Argentine Nobel Prize winner Jorge Luis Borges likened the Falklands War to "two bald men fighting over a comb." But fight they did. Thucydides, who wrote history as "a possession for all time," reminds us that states fight for "fear, self-interest and honor"-not always out of reason, economic need or survival. Honor, even in this age of decadence, still exists and will still get people killed for some time to come.
True, some key ingredients of traditional Western warfare appear to be all but gone. Mercenary armies in America and Europe are the norm. They are not necessarily entirely professional, but outlets for the disaffected, who seek economic opportunity, with the realization that those of a far different social class will determine where, when and how they will fight and die. Fewer Americans-soldier and civilian alike-are voting than ever before. Most have not a clue about the nature of their own military or its historic relationship with its government and citizenry. The rise of a huge federal government and global corporations has reduced the number of Americans who work as autonomous individuals-as family farmers, small businesspeople or owners of local shops. Freedom for many means an absence of responsibility, while the culture of the mall, video and Internet seem to breed uniformity and complacence, rather than rationalism, individualism and initiative.
Will the West always, then, possess persons of the type who fought at Midway, or who rowed for their freedom at Salamis, or who rushed to reform their battered legions in the aftermath of Cannae? Pessimists see seeds of decay in the lethargic teenagers of affluent American suburbs. But I am not so sure we are yet at the point of collapse. As long as Europe and America retain constitutional government, capitalism, freedom of religious and political association, free speech and intellectual tolerance, then history teaches us that Westerners in their hour of need can still field brave, disciplined and well-equipped soldiers, who kill like none other on the planet. Our institutions, if they do not erode entirely, can survive periods of decadence brought on by our material success, eras when the whole notion of civic militarism seems bothersome, and in which free speech is used to focus on our own imperfections without concern for the ghastly nature of our enemies. The fumes of Roman republicanism kept the empire going long after the ideal of a citizen soldier sometimes gave way to a mercenary army.
Nor is a second scenario likely either-total war brought on by a nuclear America, Europe, Russia, China or a warlike Islamic world that would incinerate the planet. Two colossal enemies-the Soviet Union and America-did not employ their huge nuclear arsenals through fifty years of the Cold War. There is no reason to think that either is more rather than less bellicose after the fall of communism. Their legacy to others is nuclear restraint, not recklessness. Strategic arsenals, both nuclear and biological, are shrinking, not growing. Defensive systems in the cosmos are already on the verge of being deployed. The ability to shield blows is a law of military history, forgotten though it has been in the last half century of threatened nuclear Armageddon. The swing is once more toward the defensive, as vast sums are allocated to missile protection, to counterinsurgency and even to body armor to deflect bullet, shrapnel and flame.
Any nation in this new century that threatens the use of the atomic bomb realizes that it is faced with two unpleasant alternatives: massive reprisal in kind, and soon the possibility that its use will be deflected or destroyed before harming its adversary. Prudence in the use of nuclear weapons, not profligacy, remains the protocol in hot and cold wars. Plague, nerve gas and new viruses not yet imagined, we are told, will some day kill us all. But military historians will answer that the forces of vigilance, keen border defense, technologies of prevention and vaccination and counterintelligence are also never static. Deterrence draws on a human, not a culturally specific, phenomenon: even democracies engage in brinkmanship to protect their self-interests. A rogue state that sponsors a terrorist with a vial in Manhattan is still cognizant that its own continued existence is measured by a 15-minute missile trajectory. Such nightmarish realities of war lurk beneath the surface of our current crisis.
If we are to have neither perpetual peace nor a single conflagration to end the species, the third option-random and even deadlier conventional wars-seems a certainty. We in the West still shudder at the carnage of World War II, largely because it took the lives of so many Westerners. We forget that in the half century since the end of Hitler's Germany, far more Koreans, Chinese, Africans, Indians and Southeast Asians have died in mostly forgotten tribal wars, at the hands of their own governments or in hot spots of the Cold War.
In this regard, the future of Western warfare looks somewhat more disturbing-so many have perished due to the diffusion of Western arms. The most obvious worry is the continual spread of Western notions of military discipline, technology, decisive battle and capitalism, without the accompanying womb of freedom, civic militarism, civilian audit and dissent. Those semi-Western autocracies now on the horizon-China, North Korea, Iran-may soon, through the purchase or the promotion of a Western-trained scientific and military elite, gain the capability nearly to match European and American weapons research and development, without any sense of affinity with-indeed, with abject hostility to-their original mentors. Just as deadly as satellite guidance systems in China is a Chinese chain of command with a flexibility and initiative modeled after that in Europe and America, and a private rather than state-owned munitions industry.
In these new flash points to come, can the non-West import our weaponry and organization and doctrine? Can a capitalist China, Iran, Vietnam or Pakistan equip and organize a sophisticated army, superior to any Western military, without free citizens, individualism in command hierarchy and constant oversight of its strategy and tactics? Or do such would-be antagonists merely pick the fruit of the West, which soon withers without the deep taproots of intellectual, religious and political tolerance? Will they win occasional battles but not wars? Or threaten us endlessly with the specter of nuclear-tipped missiles over Los Angeles?
A military command may steal secrets daily over the Internet, but if it cannot discuss those ideas openly with its civilian and military leadership, then there is no guarantee that such information will find its optimum application. And should our present adversaries adopt consensual government, free speech and market economies, would they then really remain our adversaries? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the question is not the only one of relevance, for there is no guarantee now-nor was there ever-that the West itself is always stable, not prone to turn its lethal arsenal upon itself. States that become thoroughly Western are less likely to attack the traditional West, but not less likely enough to ensure that they never will. The horror of organized warfare throughout history has not been constant fighting between tribal societies-or even, between the West and "the Other"-but the far deadlier explosions inside Europe-between Westerners. The more the world becomes thoroughly Western, the larger the Europeanized battlefield shall become.
WESt on WEST
With the worldwide spread of democracy, capitalism, free speech, individualism and a globally connected economy, it may be that world-encompassing wars will be less likely. Yet it will also be true that when wars do break out, they will be far more lethal, and draw on the full resources of a deadly military tradition. We see glimpses of that today-tribal fights in which hideous Western weapons are used by those who have not a clue how to create them.
The peril to come, however, is not just the spread of atomic weapons and F-16 fighters but much more so the dissemination of rationalism and knowledge-the real ingredients of a most murderous brand of battle. Most see in the advance of capitalism, democracy and their ancillary values the seeds of perpetual peace and prosperity. Maybe, but we must remember that these ideas have also been the foundations for the world's deadliest armies.
The real hazard, as it has always been, is not Western moral decline or the threat of the Other-now polished with the veneer of sophisticated arms. It is the age-old specter of horrendous war inside the West itself. Gettysburg in a single day took more Americans than did all the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. A small Boer force killed more British troops in six days than the Zulus did in a year. Most of the crises that have plagued the world in the twentieth century grew out of Europe's two world wars-the status of Germany, the division and unification of Europe, the rise and collapse of the Russian empire, the spread of communism after the defeat of fascism, the mess in the Balkans.
Many have accepted the truism that democracies do not fight democracies. Statistics seem to support this encouraging belief. But there is little margin of error, given the carnage and cultural chaos even a single intramural European war can bring. Consensual governments, in fact, have often fought other Western consensual governments. Athens wrecked its culture by invading democratic Sicily, in 415 B.C. A century later, Democratic Boeotia fought democratic Athens at Mantinea. Italian republics of the Renaissance were constantly at each other's throat. Revolutionary France and parliamentary England were deadly enemies; a democratic United States fought twice against the consensual government of Britain. There was a Union and a Confederate president and Senate. The Boers and the British in southern Africa each elected representatives. Elected prime ministers have not pacified India and Pakistan. The presence of a Palestinian parliament has not brought peace to the Middle East. The Russian entry into Chechnya received parliamentary approval.
Western fratricide, as it has in the past, threatens an entire civilization, which for good or evil has given the world industrialization, technological advance, popular culture and blueprints for political organization. We should be apprehensive that there are once again fundamental upheavals transpiring in Europe, more so that at any time since the 1930s. The growth in influence of a unified Germany has scarcely begun. The specter of a pan-European state highlights the increasing ambiguous position of Great Britain, and seems to create unity among its members by collective antagonism toward and envy of the United States. The insecurity of eastern Europe is part of a larger dilemma facing a Russia neither quite European nor Asian. The pride and fears of a Westernized Japan remain, accentuated by the rise of a capitalist China and the unpredictability of the two Koreas, who themselves promise a new unified nationalist identity-perhaps fueled by South Korean capitalism and North Korean nuclear arms.
I worry less for the millennium to come about constant warring between the West and non-West. Has not the real danger to progress and civilization always arisen when the West turns its deadly arsenal upon itself? If so, let us pray for another half century of aberrant European and American peace, for a few more decades of good behavior, so at odds with the West's own past. But let us remember as well that the more Western the world becomes, the more likely that its wars will be ever more Western in nature, and thus ever more deadly. We may well be all Westerners in the millennium to come, and that could be a very dangerous thing indeed. Culture is not a mere construct, but when it comes to war, a very deadly reality that often determines whether thousands of mostly innocent young men and women live or die.
Western civilization has given mankind the only economic system that works; a rationalist tradition that alone allows us material and technological progress; the sole political structure that ensures the freedom of the individual; a system of ethics and a religion that brings out the best in humankind; and the most lethal practice of arms conceivable. Let us hope that we at last understand this legacy. It is a weighty and sometimes ominous heritage that we must neither deny nor feel ashamed about-but insist that our deadly manner of war serves, rather than buries, our civilization.
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Farmer, classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson is the author of Carnage and Culture, from which this is adapted. Copyright 2002 Doubleday Publishers
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