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America is fighting a global civil war
By MacGregor Knox
Published: April 14 2003 20:14 | Last Updated: April 14 2003 20:14
The widespread shock and horror at the US-British attack on Iraq derive above all from a stunning and almost universal lack of historical perspective. So do the hopes and expectations of many that the US ultimately will quail at the price in blood, treasure, and reputation of a series of pre-emptive wars against the world's rogue states.
The record suggests otherwise. The US secured its continental position in wars against the British Empire and Mexico. But the country's formative conflict was the "second American revolution" of 1861-65, which destroyed slavery. The civil war cost 600,000 dead - the largest and deadliest war between industrial societies before 1914. The winning side fought for an objective more total than any in the western world since the Wars of Religion: destruction of the enemy state and "reconstruction" of its society.
Even after 1917, America remained the least military and most self- absorbed of the major industrial societies. But the rise of Adolf Hitler and Imperial Japan changed that. Hitler's conquest of France made peacetime conscription, rearmament, and aid to Britain politically acceptable. And Japan's killing of 2,408 soldiers, sailors, and civilians in a surprise attack on US soil created modern America.
Pearl Harbor committed the US to a fight to the finish. It also revived American total war - destruction followed by reconstruction. After the Italians, Germans, and Japanese had tasted the relentless overwhelming force and demand for "unconditional surrender" that Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman applied to the Confederacy, the US faced the Soviet Union.
The US aim after 1941 was to eliminate the threat of future Hitlers and Pearl Harbors. To achieve that goal in the world of the 1940s and 1950s demanded forward defence positions beyond seas that could no longer ensure US security; sizeable standing forces instead of the customary dwarf-army; and huge social engineering projects to transform the German and Japanese warrior peoples into peace-loving citizens of democracies.
The existence of the Soviet superpower forced the US to limit its two big wars of containment - Korea and Vietnam. The Vietnamese Communists also helped to constrain US power by astutely avoiding provocations similar to Hitler's attack on Poland. And Hanoi was fortunate in drawing as adversary Lyndon Baines Johnson, the least resolute war president in US history.
The warriors of militant Islam have been less astute and less fortunate. In killing more Americans - almost all of them civilians - than died at Pearl Harbor, they once again unleashed American total war. Indeed it is hard to imagine a provocation better fitted than September 11, 2001 to achieve the precise opposite of its authors' goal - universal jihad leading to Islamist world domination.
The US-licensed cinéma vérité of satellite television, the legalistic mis- givings of allies and former allies, and self-imposed humanitarian restraint have so far limited the exercise of US military means. But it is the threat to America that will ultimately determine US war aims. After the experience of September 11, the globalisation of weapons of mass destruction makes a thermonuclear arsenal in the hands of Stalin and his stolid successors seem in hindsight a modest danger indeed.
The US also possesses a far wider range of military means than in the cold war era. No Soviet tank armies pin US land and air power in northwest Europe. Nor has the relative economic decline foreseen with relish by European and Japanese pundits in the 1980s occurred. Instead, Europe and Japan have proved too rigid to lead in technological innovation, and are entering a phase of absolute population decline while America is still growing.
American innovation has produced military systems and a global reach far beyond those of any other power, or coalition. And the US president, despite a sometimes sketchy command of English grammar, has proved remarkably undeterred by objective obstacles, conventional wisdom, and diplomatic taboo. George W. Bush has not shrunk from demanding the unconditional surrender of the Taliban and Ba'ath party dictatorships. And he appears intent on improving the international deportment of a number of other regimes, or overthrowing them altogether.
A further devastating attack on the US, failure in America's apparently quixotic enterprise of founding democracy in Iraq, or some passing inspiration of the diminutive nuclear-armed psychopath in Pyongyang may interrupt Mr Bush's run of success. But at present both the president and his "global war on terrorism" enjoy unstinting support from those Americans who are neither intellectuals nor film stars.
Europeans may wish to believe that a small coterie of "neo-conservative" maniacs has hijacked US policy. They may assume that the natural order of things as they perceive it - the restraint of American power through European wisdom - will sooner or later triumph. But such expectations are delusional. Those who find militant Islam terrifying have clearly never seen a militant democracy.
The writer is Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He served in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade
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