THE VALOUR OF A PEOPLE
THE ISSUE
<<You also characterize my postings by saying that (I) have a romantic... vision of a courageous Iraqi people, united in a jihad against the United States. (I) speak of a "hive" that has been riled, of people "who bleed and sweat their lives away," of Bush's disdain for the "power and pride" of the average Iraqi... (I) stated that if a Fatwa were issued ... to kill Americans and force them from Iraq: "... it would be a bloodbath and the number of Shiites that would take up arms would be remarkable."
...
I think you have given a good account of my thinking. >>
Ed, so the issue is joined. To put it in other terms, you believe that some substantial portion of the Iraqi people are capable of a "Tet" offensive. I do not believe that; because it would requires a "spirit" that simply does not exist in a People who have been victimized in the way that the Iraqis have.
VIET MINH-NORTH VIETNAMESE
The Viet Minh and North Vietnamese were worthy opponents. Purely in terms of " valour" of a people, I would (subjectively) place them at the top, along with the Israelis, of the most valourous people in the last 50 years.
It is not well known but in 1980 the Vietnamese fought a bitter border dispute with the Communist Chinese. The Vietnamese infiltrated, surrounded, outfought and cut up the vastly superior Chinese - who suffered 30,000 casualties. It was very similar to the treatment the Finns meted out to the Russians in Stalin's first steamroller invasion push of 1939.
But the Vietnamese had the benefit of a true revolutionary movement that began in 1945. The myths of French superiority and "white" invincibility were respectively destroyed in 1940 by the Germans and the Japanese in 1941. When the French tried in 1946 to reimpose themselves, they faced nearly unaminous opposition - at the start -from all segments of Vietnamese society.
The Vietnamese also had the benefit of 15 years of American "instruction."
LYCURGIS
Lycurgus was the 9th century B.C. Greek lawgiver who revolutionized and reorganized Sparta. For 600 years the Spartans followed Lycurgus' Rhetras (laws) and in those years they never raised a city wall nor saw an enemy face in the Pelopannese. One of these rhetras was that Spartans 'should NOT make war often, or long, with the same enemy.'
Agesilaus was one of Sparta's greatest general/kings. His long career is the subject of one of Plutarch's "Lives." One of his sayings was that "valour without justice is useless." But he had a life-long prejudice against the City of Thebes, it being one of the many Greek cities that had offered tribute to Xerxes in 480 B.C before the Battle of Salamis. Beginning in 381 B.C. Agesilaus campaigned yearly in Boetia kicking butt (Theban) every time. But in 371 B.C. - for the first time ever in a set-piece battle - the Spartans were defeated by the Thebans and Agesilaus was wounded. In the aftermath, a common soldier, Antalcidas, was unkind enough to state to the
King:
"In the beginning, they (the Thebans) did not
want, nor know how to, wage war. You are very
well paid (Agesilaus), for teaching them."
Thereafter, Sparta was sacked and Thebes, lead by Epaminondas, became the new hegemon of Greece.
Simply put, we fought the Vietnamese for an overly long period.
In 1967, Robert Ardrey in his "The Territorial Imperative" boldly predicted that McNamarra's bombing campaign of North Vietnam - designed to escalate the enemy's sense of cost and pain GRADUALLY - would backfire and fail. The"animal" sense of invasion, he opined, would only enhance the powers of resistance of the defender. Sudden "shock and awe" (i.e., "blitzkrieg" warfare) carried out properly by a sufficiently powerful attacker will always work.
A valourous People, the Vietnamese. But the Iraqis are not; through no fault of their own,maybe, but valourous they are not.
I should add a qualifier. Anyone reading the 9/11 Commission Report should know for that Al Qaeda will stop at nothing, devoting every resource, to driving America from Iraq. The leaders of Al Qaeda, and many of their operatives (such as the 9/11 hijackers) are nearly all from middle-class, priviledged backgrounds. I equate them to late 19th Century anarchists/ socialists like Herzen, Engels, and Bakunin. Persons of this ilk certainly do have the valour to commit revolutionary acts.
A SLAVE'S COURAGE - THE GREEK VIEW
The classical Greeks (504 B.C. - 323 B.C.) had a simple view of "barbarian" courage: they were dismissive. They believed barbarians good only at long-distance fighting and the ambush; face-to-face and man-to-man in close-in fighting against a "Greek", the barbarian would always flinch and run - being by nature a "slave." Aristotle said it directly: that "barbarian and slave were by nature one." In short, it was the Greeks sense of belonging to a free, democratic society, a "polis", that gave them the advantage and this is reflected in nearly alltheir literature.
ATHENS: Nothing Special Before it Became The World's First Democracy
The story of how Athens became a democracy ~ 504 B.C. - by fits and starts - over an extended period of time and only by virtue of exceptional pre-conditions - is one of history's most interesting phenomena. But the point I will make is that, before it became a democracy, Athens and its People were undistinguished: they are not even mentioned by Homer, and its citizens, soldiers and culture were viewed by fellow Greeks as average at best.
ATHENS in 431 B.C.: Shining City On A Hill
Move forward 73 years: Thucydides relates the speech of the Corinthians as they attempt to persuade a reluctant Sparta to lead a coalition of Greek cities against the tyranny of the hegemonic Athenian Empire:
The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their
designs are characterized by swiftness alike in con-
ception and execution...they are adventurous beyond
their power, and daring beyond their judgment...
They are swift to follow up success, and slow to
recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend
ungrudgingly in their country's cause; their
intellect they jealously husband to be employed in
her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a
positive loss, a successful enterprise a comparative
failure...
MARATHON: 490 B.C.
The TV coverage of the Olympics spews out a lot of bad history. In 499 B.C. the brand new Athenian democracy sent aid to the Ionian Greeks who were attempting a revolt against the Great King, Darius. Marathon was merely a punitive expedition by the annoyed Darius for the temerity of the Athenians in interfering with his empire. Maybe 30,000 Persians met ~5000 Athenians and a handful of allies. It was a traditional "hoplite" battle - of the type that Athenians and Greeks had been fighting for 200 years: heavily armored spearmen in tight phalanx meeting an opponent on a flat field in a single decisive fight. The Persians were personally brave, according to Herotodus,
but could not stomach the close-in fighting. The Persians lost ~5000 fatalities vs ~150 for the Greeks.
SALAMIS 480B.C.
"When tidings of the battle that had been fought at Marathon reached the ears of King Darius, his anger against the Athenians... waxed still fiercer.." But Darius died before he could accomplish his revenge and his son, Xerxes, facing a revolt in Egypt, etc, did not start his march until 480 B.C. Herodotus gives the size of Xerxes' army, not counting the navy, at 1,700,000. While this is an undoubted exagggeration the numbers were stupendous and the news of the preparations gave the Athenians several years, at least, advance warning.
THEMISTOCLES
Salamis, arguably, was the most momentous event in human history; if Xerxes had wiped out Athenian democracy in 480 B.C., who knows when the pre-conditions for the democratic experiment would again have arisen?
But what I focus on now are not the details of the battle, nor even the fact that "Greeks" again showed their total superiority to barbarians, but on the way that the Athenians handled the approaching armaggedon.
First of all, the Athenians had an alternative to 'fight or surrender.' Xerxes was bringing with him some of the aristocrats expelled in 504. Persian rule of subject peoples was comparatively quite benign and all that would have been required was token submission of "earth and water" and the re-acceptance of the old oligarchic rule. This was decisively rejected.
Second, Themistocles convinced the People that the old strategy of hoplite warfare that had won them the battle of Marathon would no longer work. Athens had never been a naval power, but he convinced them to build a navy from scratch. (Fast, highly maneuverable "triremes" not at all like the slave-oared boats depicted in Hollywood movies.) It was this navy that was to win the battle of Salamis.
Finallly, and most amazing, by a close vote Themistocles convinced a majority of Athenians that they must voluntarily evacuate their City; allow their homes and temples to be defiled and burned. And all without a fight. Themistocles told them it had to done to allow the combined "allied" navies to meet the Persians somewhere to the south. But could these allies be trusted? Most Greek cities east of Athen had already submitted. Wouldn't the Spartans and other Pelopennesians simply husband the Athenian navy to protect their own homelands? It is my considered belief that only a democracy could have conceived, let alone carried out, Themisticles' plan.
The Aftermath
Xerxes, after watching the destruction of his navy, left immediately for home. Fearing - with reason - a coup from some member of his family when news of the disaster spread.
He left the bulk of his army in Greece. This army was defeated a year later by a coalition led by Sparta at Plataea. Although having an overwhelming numerical advantage and having enough archers to "block out the sun", the Persians simply could not stand up to the Greeks when the armies made contact.
The Stone Quarries of Sicily
In 416 B.C. the Athenians were winning their war with the Spartan led alliance. Their navy was seemingly unbeatable and they were making ocean-borne raids at will on the coasts of their enemy. Then they decided it would be nice if they controlled the wealth and power of Sicily: a huge island with more than 2 dozen free, independent, democratic, Greek city states. For awhile the project seemed to go well, but in 413 B.C. they were defeated and ~6000 surviving Athenian citizen soldiers (and some allied Greeks) were thrown into stone quarries. Most of them were to die from hunger and neglect in the next 6 months. It was the beginning of the end for Athens although the Athenians somehow struggled on for another 9 years.
But some of the Athenians were released, and survived, because they could recite from memory long passages of Euripides!! and because the Sicilian Greeks had a passion for all of the Athenian playwrights.
The lesson to take from the above has nothing to do with prodigies of memory that were common in a pre-Gutenberg age, but lies in the fact that common soldiers across the Greek world, despite political divisions, had such an intense interest in the "eternal" human issues raised by these playwrights.
THE SPREAD OF DEMOCRACY THROUGH THE GREEK WORLD
Read Herodotus and you will see that before 504 B.C., tyrannies (meaning hereditary monarchy) were the most common form of government in the hundreds of separate Greek city states. It may be that these tyrannies were not absolute in the oriental sense; also, there were some oligarchic governments that foreshadowed the later Roman model. But tyrannies were the rule.
Fast forward to 431 B.C. and the Greek world has changed dramatically. From Greece westward to Sicily and westward from there to Marseille, I do not believe one can find a single tyranny. Not one! Maybe some among the Ionian Greeks, still under Persian suzerainty, but none to the west. In virtually each Greek city, there would be a "popular" party and a party of the oligarchs; and the government would be somewhere on the spectrum between the "radical" democracy of Athens and a constitutional oligarchy with a consultative assembly like Sparta.
I take this to be a dramatic validation of the "neo-conservative doctrine." The Athenian model spread because it worked: it empowered and energized the people as a whole; it made their societies dynamic in a way that FORCED other Greek cities to emulate if they were to remain competitive. There really is no reason why it would not work equally well in the Middle East.
XENOPHON'S ANABASIS
The Peloponnesian War was like our WWI and WWII in that it eventually drew in most Greek cities. The end of this war
left thousands of Greek soldiers at loose ends having devoted their entire lives to war.
In 401 B.C.,Cyrus, a charismatic Persian claimant to the Persian throne, hired something more than 10,000 of these unemployed soldiers to help him seize that throne. With several hundred thousand of Cyrus' native followers, these Greeks marched 3000 miles across Palestine, Syria, and Iraq to Iran. then in a climatic battle, the Greeks were winning their part of the battle (easily) but in another part of the battlefield - out of vainglory- Cyrus allowed himself to be killed.
For Cyrus' native followers, his death settled everything: they instantly threw themselves on the mercy of the Great King and turned hostile to their former Greek allies. More tragedy soon occurred: all of the generals and principal leaders of the Greeks were treacherously murdered at a pretended parley.
The Anabasis is the true story of how these 10,000 Greeks - from more than 2 dozen free Greek cities - fought their way home, 3000 miles away, enemies on every side, with no solace but their own solidarity and courage.
One incident in the book illustrates the differences between Greeks and barbarians. When a Greek hireling of the Great King demanded that the mercenaries lay down their arms and beg for whatever terms they might, a common soldier, Theopompous, responded as follows:
"Phalinus," he said, "at this instant as you yourself
can see, we have nothing but our arms and our valour.
If we keep the former we can make use of the latter;
but if we deliver up our arms we shall presently be
robbed of our lives. Do not suppose then that we
are giving up to you the only good things which we
possess. We prefer to keep them; and by their help
we will do battle with you for the good things which
are yours."
ALEXANDER
Alexander the Great invaded the Persian Empire in 334 B.C. The Great King, Darius, having had many years advance notice, unsuccessfully tried to buy Alexander off. But the important point is that the Persians had had 146 years notice (since Marathon)of the power and efficacy of Greek methods of fighting. They had TRIED over those years to put Greek arms and armor on Persians and to train these Persians in Greek tactics. But it never worked: it just wasn't the same; it was the man in the armor that made the difference.
When Darius met Alexander in 334 B.C. on the Granicus, he had virtually unlimited wealth and manpower, but his main line of defense was an army of 30,000 Greek mercenaries!
Later, when Alexander had had himself crowned in place of Darius, and after he had forced his generals to marry into the Persian nobility, he too tried to train Persian "cadets" in Macedonian arms and tactics. It didn't work for him either.
SOUND AND FURY ....SIGNIFYING NOTHING
When the Spartans marched into battle, they did so to the music of a flute! No horns or drums or trumpets. Nor did they enter battle shouting insults or boasts. Plutarch reports that seeing Spartans going into battle "was at once a terrible and magnificent sight.... without any disorder in their ranks, any discomposure in their minds, or change in their countenances.." The Spartans believed that there actually was an inverse relationship between true valour and vainglorious word and deed.
The conduct of the North Vietnamese in that war comports well with the Spartans described above: quiet, patient, never boastfull.
But contrast that to the behavior of the "angry" Iraqis we see almost daily: firing of weapons, loud boasts and threats, broad demonstrative gestures, etc. When you think about it, it seems clear that much of this Iraqi behavior is empty.
THE ROMANS
Until Marius' reforms of ~80 B.C., the Romans enrolled into their legions ONLY citizens from the higher propertied classes. Like the "First Emperor" who unified China for the first time in 221 B.C., the Romans found that free peasant propreitors made the best soldiers. With this system of recruiting ONLY citizen soldiers with property, the Roman Republic conquered the known world. Augustus and the emperors who came after him merely consolidated and held onto what the Republic had first won.
Slaves
Both during the Republic, and the Principate that followed , it was accepted wisdom that "slaves" made unacceptably poor soldiers. The rationale: just like animals who have been abused early in life, a slave by definition has a spirit that has been broken; no rehabilitation can ever change the servile, spiritless behavior that is inimical to good soldiering.
Recruitment of Barbarians By the Principate
It happened gradually. Even before the Civil War and Caesar's death (44 B.C.) few, if any, legionary recruits were coming from the City of Rome, or even central Italy. Most recruiting was in the provinces and although, technically, recruitment was still of "citizens", this category had increased so much as to make the term almost meaningless and few recruits were of the original Roman or Latin stock.
By the accession of Tiberius (14 A. D.) recruitment officers no longer were making even a pretense of requiring citizenship. It was becoming increasingly obvious that urban dwellers generally made poor soldiers 'Circuses and bread' had so debased the empire's population that only wild barbarians - imported from across the frontiers - made acceptable soldiers.
<< It is now late Sunday night, I am tired, and no longer know if my writing is coherent. If anyone is still interested, I'll continue later.>>
Bruce |
