War. And Peace.
I’ve been told I have an unhealthy obsession with war. If that is true, and I suppose it is possible, it would not be because I love conflict.
Not that. Never that.
It would be because I hate and fear it so.
Somewhere in her basement my mother has a black and white photograph of me. I must have been about three years old at the time. I’m standing with a gaggle of neighborhood children, hands on hips, one of my Mom’s cast off purses clutched fiercely under my arm. Blonde curls and rosy cheeks notwithstanding, I am in charge of everything; a miniature She Who Must Be Obeyed ready to take on imaginary monsters, wayward puppies and anything else that requires a gentle but firm talking to. But all my bottled up sassiness was just an act.
Because I remember, too, how much I hated it when the evening news came on. Forty five years later I still recall running from the room to hide on the stairs with my hands over my ears, because I never could bear to hear that anyone had been hurt. To this day I cannot stand to watch the news. I read newspapers, instead.
All the same, this morning I didn’t intend to write about war. I started out to write about children:
If you’ve somehow managed to miss the story—which would be quite an accomplishment at this point—CBS had 40 kids out in a New Mexico ghost town this summer to film a reality show in which the children, ages 8-15, were to build their own society, compete for prizes, bicker, befriend, and of course, be filmed.
CBS is now under fire because, due to some serious mistakes on the network’s part (and allegations that it tried to conceal those mistakes by deflecting inspectors), the production may have fallen afoul of New Mexico’s child labor laws. There were also four injuries on set. One little girl, whose mother has filed a complaint against CBS, was splashed with grease while cooking. Three other kids were treated after ingesting small amounts of bleach from an unmarked bottle. None of the injuries were serious, and they were all treated promptly.
Reading Mary Katherine’s words, my thoughts drifted back to my sons’ growing up years. They included camping trips with axes, gasoline, chainsaws, knives. In my nightstand I keep cherished photos of a long ago trip to New England. The boys built a rock lined fire pit, chopped firewood, cut down saplings and built wobbly camping structures. After a hard day’s work the Testosterone Trio sat around the fire, looking excessively manly. The paterfamilias was captured with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, his progeny clowning around with hatchet (relax, no one was injured). All three look tired, dirty, sweaty, and extremely happy. Not a single antibacterial wipe, Gameboy, or soda in sight but somehow – miraculously – everyone survived.
But this ancient rite of manliness (though it no doubt violated who knows how many misguided but well meaning child labor and safety ordinances – just think of the second-hand smoke!) pales in comparison to those practiced by less effete societies:
Men are made, not born… Unlike women, men must take actions, undergo ordeals, or pass tests in order to become men…
Culture after culture features rites of passage from boyhood to manhood. Only select men can achieve “manhood,” and it must be won individually. In many cultures’ initiation rituals, older males systematically inflict pain and injury on young ones, who must hold up without flinching, or face life-long shame. Men who fail the test become “negative examples … held up scornfully to inspire conformity.” The particulars of these rituals vary by cultural context. In fishing communities, would-be men go on dangerous expeditions into the water. In hunting cultures they risk their lives in hunting exploits. In societies with frequent warfare, young males must participate in war – and, for some, kill an enemy – before being called a man…
These practices recur in cultures worldwide that “have little else in common,” including those with frequent or infrequent war, and simple or complex social organization. In East Africa, boys endure “bloody circumcision rites by which they become true men. They must submit without so much as flinching under the agony of the knife. If a boy cries out while his flesh is being cut, if he so much as blinks an eye or turns his head, he is shamed for life as unworthy of manhood.”… Pueblo Indian boys aged 12–15 are “whipped mercilessly…[and] expected to bear up impassively under the beating to show their fortitude.”
How very odd that we in this most affluent and industrialized of nations claim to admire the naturalness and simplicity of aboriginal cultures. And yet we seem to be turning our backs on the acquired wisdom of uncounted generations of human experience – on what is an otherwise universal human practice: the ritual toughening of young men by enduring hardship; the offering of a chance to prove (or is it to learn?) that they can endure pain and suffering without complaint? And perhaps this exercise is not only intended to teach others. Perhaps it is intended to allow the participant to take his own measure, to discover the strength that lies within?
Is it really a sign of our cultural advancement that, where once we sought to toughen our children, to build character and endurance against a world that is often harsh and unforgiving, we now seek to shield them against even the most innocuous of life’s little misfortunes? With affluence and the relative absence of discord we have become hypersensitive to discomfort; so much so that we now strive not only to erase all signs of strife from our present lives, but to airbrush all mention of violence and unpleasantness from the past as well:
“If you want peace, prepare for war.” Thus counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Sun Tzu offered essentially the same advice, and it’s to him that Vegetius’s line is attributed at the beginning of a film that I saw recently at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Center. Yet the film cites this ancient wisdom only to reject it. After serving up a perverse potted history of the cold war, the thrust of which is that the peace movement brought down the Berlin Wall, the movie ends with words that turn Vegetius’s insight on its head: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.”
What happens when we, as a nation, cease to study war?
To study history is to gain perspective, to place current events in their proper context in the larger scheme of human (and non-human) events. Without it, the daily drip-drip-drip of news stories becomes a trickle, then a current, then a raging flood that sweeps us up and carries us away, powerless to steer our course much less raise our heads from the maelstrom long enough to sense our direction. It is perhaps the crowning irony that so many of those who argue that the use of force is inherently wrong or misguided would also have us forsake the study of warfighting. Without a thorough knowledge of history – and of the history of war – we are at the mercy of any expert with an agenda. We cannot judge for ourselves, because we lack the knowledge, whether they are telling us the truth.
We mistake the counterfeit for the genuine, a John Kerry (who spent all of four months in Vietnam) for a Mack Owens. And so we are misled, to our detriment:
…opponents of the war have drawn the Vietnam analogy like a gun, seeking from the very beginning to argue that Iraq and Vietnam were analogous. Ted Kennedy famously called Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam.”
I have argued on several occasions that the parallels between the two conflicts at the operational and strategic levels of war were nonsensical. But that has never stopped the opponents of the current war from invoking the conventional Vietnam War narrative, which goes something like this: The U.S. was predestined to lose the Vietnam War because the Vietnamese Communists were too determined, the South Vietnamese too corrupt, and Americans were incapable of fighting the kind of war that would have been necessary to prevail.
…The fact is that the outcome of a war is not predetermined. Who wins and who loses are determined in the final instance by the respective actions of the combatants. Victory or defeat depends on decisions actually made and strategies actually implemented. We came close to victory in Vietnam, but then threw it away.
The 1972 Easter Offensive provided the proof that Vietnam could survive, albeit with U.S. air and naval support, at least in the short term. The Easter Offensive was the biggest North Vietnamese offensive push of the war, greater in magnitude than either the 1968 Tet offensive or the final assault of 1975. Despite inevitable failures on the part of some units, all in all, the South Vietnamese fought well. Then, having blunted the Communist thrust, they recaptured territory that had been lost to Hanoi. Finally, so effective was the eleven-day “Christmas bombing” campaign (LINEBACKER II) later that year that the British counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson exclaimed, “you had won the war. It was over.”
Three years later, despite the heroic performance of some ARVN units, South Vietnam collapsed against a much weaker, cobbled-together PAVN offensive. What happened to cause this reversal?
First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the country from Vietnam, forced South Vietnam to accept a ceasefire that permitted North Vietnamese forces to remain in South Vietnam. Then in an act that still shames the United States to this day, Congress cut off military and economic assistance to South Vietnam. Finally, President Nixon resigned over Watergate and his successor, constrained by congressional action, defaulted on promises to respond with force to North Vietnamese violations of the peace terms.
History provides invaluable context that helps refute agenda-laden spin. Contrary to the conventional wisdom rammed down our throats by an anti-war press, the historical record shows that insurgents rarely win wars: (h/t Karl’s must-read post on media miscoverage of the war)
Myths about invincible guerrillas and insurgents are a direct result of America’s collective misunderstanding of its defeat in South Vietnam. This loss is generally credited to the brilliance and military virtues of the pajama-clad Vietcong. The Vietnamese may have been tough and persistent, but they were not brilliant. Rather, they were lucky—they faced an opponent with leaders unwilling to learn from their failures: the United States. When the Vietcong went toe-to-toe with U.S. forces in the 1968 Tet Offensive, they were decimated. When South Vietnam finally fell in 1975, it did so not to the Vietcong, but to regular units of the invading North Vietnamese Army. The Vietcong insurgency contributed greatly to the erosion of the American public’s will to fight, but so did the way that President Lyndon Johnson and the American military waged the war. It was North Vietnam’s will and American failure, not skillful use of an insurgency, that were the keys to Hanoi’s victory.
Though, as Karl notes, defeating a determined insurgency generally takes 8-10 years, a recent DoD showed that insurgencies similar to the one in Iraq lose about 60% of the time. What does this all mean?
It means that, despite the chorus of derision that greeted George Bush’s speech last Tuesday and has followed every pronouncement that all America needed to do to win this war was “stay the course”, it appears the President is not as stupid as his critics make him out to be. His understanding of military history is not flawed; on the contrary, it matches precisely the recollection of those, like Mack Owens and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who were actually there – on the ground – making history at the time rather than protesting the war or telling America that if we withdrew from Vietnam there would not be any bloodbath. In an issue of Foreign Policy, Melvin Laird recalls:
The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget is that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. In fact, we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory two years later when Congress cut off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to continue to fight on its own. Over the four years of Nixon’s first term, I had cautiously engineered the withdrawal of the majority of our forces while building up South Vietnam’s ability to defend itself. My colleague and friend Henry Kissinger, meanwhile, had negotiated a viable agreement between North and South Vietnam, which was signed in January 1973. It allowed for the United States to withdraw completely its few remaining troops and for the United States and the Soviet Union to continue funding their respective allies in the war at a specified level. Each superpower was permitted to pay for replacement arms and equipment. Documents released from North Vietnamese historical files in recent years have proved that the Soviets violated the treaty from the moment the ink was dry, continuing to send more than $1 billion a year to Hanoi. The United States barely stuck to the allowed amount of military aid for two years, and that was a mere fraction of the Soviet contribution.
Yet during those two years, South Vietnam held its own courageously and respectably against a better-bankrolled enemy. Peace talks continued between the North and the South until the day in 1975 when Congress cut off U.S. funding. The Communists walked out of the talks and never returned. Without U.S. funding, South Vietnam was quickly overrun. We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973.
I believed then and still believe today that given enough outside resources, South Vietnam was capable of defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do the same now. From the Tet offensive in 1968 up to the fall of Saigon in 1975, South Vietnam never lost a major battle. The Tet offensive itself was a victory for South Vietnam and devastated the North Vietnamese army, which lost 289,000 men in 1968 alone. Yet the overriding media portrayal of the Tet offensive and the war thereafter was that of defeat for the United States and the Saigon government. Just so, the overriding media portrayal of the Iraq war is one of failure and futility.
Vietnam gave the United States the reputation for not supporting its allies. The shame of Vietnam is not that we were there in the first place, but that we betrayed our ally in the end. It was Congress that turned its back on the promises of the Paris accord. The president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense must share the blame. In the end, they did not stand up for the commitments our nation had made to South Vietnam. Any president or cabinet officer who is turned down by Congress when he asks for funding for a matter of national security or defense simply has not tried hard enough. There is no excuse for that failure.
Santayana had it half right. Those who do not learn the lessons of history – or who continue to lie about them – doom others to repeat them. And as Victor Hanson so eloquently reminds us, without knowledge of our military history and traditions, how will future generations of Americans tell the counterfeit coin from the genuine? How will they know when they are being lied to, or given only half the story? How will they know, as with the American media’s misleading characterization of the Tet offensive as a defeat for our side, history is repeating itself?
Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.
It’s no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history—understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflict’s outcome and its consequences—had already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject.
This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.
…Military history reminds us of important anomalies and paradoxes. When Sparta invaded Attica in the first spring of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides recounts, it expected the Athenians to surrender after a few short seasons of ravaging. They didn’t—but a plague that broke out unexpectedly did more damage than thousands of Spartan ravagers did. Twenty-seven years later, a maritime Athens lost the war at sea to Sparta, an insular land power that started the conflict with scarcely a navy. The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted doom-and-gloom critics who predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy four-year reconstruction hasn’t evolved as anticipated into a quiet, stable democracy—to say the least.
The size of armies doesn’t guarantee battlefield success: the victors at Salamis, Issos, Mexico City, and Lepanto were all outnumbered. War’s most savage moments—the Allied summer offensive of 1918, the Russian siege of Berlin in the spring of 1945, the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima—often unfold right before hostilities cease. And democratic leaders during war—think of Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon—often leave office either disgraced or unpopular.
It would be reassuring to think that the righteousness of a cause, or the bravery of an army, or the nobility of a sacrifice ensures public support for war. But military history shows that far more often the perception of winning is what matters. Citizens turn abruptly on any leaders deemed culpable for losing. “Public sentiment is everything,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws.” Lincoln knew that lesson well. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were brilliant Union victories that by summer 1863 had restored Lincoln’s previously shaky credibility. But a year later, after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and Cold Harbor battles—Cold Harbor claimed 7,000 Union lives in 20 minutes—the public reviled him. Neither Lincoln nor his policies had changed, but the Confederate ability to kill large numbers of Union soldiers had.
Ultimately, public opinion follows the ups and downs—including the perception of the ups and downs—of the battlefield, since victory excites the most ardent pacifist and defeat silences the most zealous zealot. After the defeat of France, the losses to Bomber Command, the U-boat rampage, and the fall of Greece, Singapore, and Dunkirk, Churchill took the blame for a war as seemingly lost as, a little later, it seemed won by the brilliant prime minister after victories in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, over 70 percent of the American people backed it, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. Four years of insurgency later, Americans oppose a now-orphaned war by the same margin. General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” The American public turned on the Iraq War not because of Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore but because it felt that the battlefield news had turned uniformly bad and that the price in American lives and treasure for ensuring Iraqi reform was too dear.
Finally, military history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. If we know nothing of Shiloh, Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosun, the crosses in our military cemeteries are just pleasant white stones on lush green lawns. They no longer serve as reminders that thousands endured pain and hardship for our right to listen to what we wish on our iPods and to shop at Wal-Mart in safety—or that they expected future generations, links in this great chain of obligation, to do the same for those not yet born. The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, should escape that terrible knowledge.
He is right. No future generation should. But this generation is, and has. And future generations are learning even less than we did. And the price, the terrible price, is becoming evident in the charlatans who masquerade as lovers of peace, but who are really nothing more than appeasers and apologists for tyranny. They will sell our children into slavery, and we will be in no position to lift a finger:
For the Peace Racket, to kill innocents in cold blood is to buy the right to dialogue, negotiation, concessions—and power. So students learn to identify “insurgent” or “militant” groups with the populations they purport to represent. A few years ago, a peace organization called Transcend equated the demands of the Basque terrorist group ETA with “the desires of the Basque people”—as if a “people” were a monolithic group for whom a band of murderous thugs could presume to speak. The complaints that Transcend made about the Spanish government’s “blockade positions”—its refusal to cave to terrorist demands—and the Spanish media’s lack of “objectivity”—their refusal to take a middle position between Spanish society and ETA terrorists—are standard Peace Racket fare. Similarly, during Saddam’s dictatorship, “peace scholars” wrote as if Iraq were equivalent to Saddam and the Baath party, entirely removing from the picture the Shiites and Kurds whom Saddam’s regime subjugated, tortured, and slaughtered.
The recipes for peace that flow from such thinking seem designed not only to buttress oppression but to create more of it. For if democracies consistently followed the Peace Racket’s recommendations, what they’d eventually reap would be the kind of peace found today in Havana or Pyongyang.
…Warblogger Frank Martin described his visit to the military cemetery at Arnhem, in the Netherlands, where a teenage guide said that the Allied soldiers “were fighting for bridges; how silly that they would all fight for something like that.” Martin was outraged: “I tried to explain that they weren’t fighting for bridges, but for his and his families’ freedom.” That teenager articulated precisely the kind of thinking that peace professors seek to instill in their students—that freedom is at best an overvalued asset that can hinder peacemaking, and at worst a lie, and that those who harp on it are either American propagandists or dupes who’ve fallen for the propaganda. In March, Yusra Moshtat, an associate of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, and Jan Oberg, director of the foundation, wrote that “words like democracy and freedom are deceptive, cover-ups or Unspeak.” And in a 1997 speech at a Texas peace foundation, Oscar Arias, ex-president of Costa Rica and founder of his own peace foundation, described the American preoccupation with freedom versus tyranny as “obsolete,” “oversimplified,” and above all “dangerous,” because it could lead to war. In other words, if you want to ensure peace, worry less about freedom. Appease tyranny, accept it, embrace it—and there’ll be no more war.
Time and technology may change, but human nature is one thing we can be reasonably sure will remain disappointingly constant. In fact, advances in technology makes the defects in human nature even harder to deal with as they lessen the protective effects of borders, distances between unfriendly nations, and even the most stringent of security measures. Add to this the fluid nature of travel and immigration, which bring people of increasingly disparate cultures and beliefs into close contact, and you increase – not decrease – the potential for violent conflict.
Why, then, do some people persist in the naive belief that we can talk our way out of conflicts with people who resolve their political differences by strapping bombs to suicidal maniacs? Is it really logical to think we can avoid war by burying our heads in the sand and pretending violent people don’t exist? Do we avoid crime by dispensing with police and ignoring (or engaging in dialog with) criminals?
Of course we don’t.
No one wants war, least of all the men and women who volunteer to fight it. In fact, if you don’t support this war, you may be surprised to know that some of us who do hate war just as much as you do. But we don’t want our children to have to fight. And having read history, knowing the lessons of Vietnam – not the lessons of a man who only spent 4 months of a 12 month tour there and to this day tells people no massive bloodbath occurred after we left, but the lessons of men who stayed long enough to see what was really going on – we are saddened, and grateful, and angry as hell. And we don’t ever want to make that mistake again.
No, not the one you think. The mistake of asking too many men to die for a cause that America ends up turning her back on. Because that is just too much to ask of our armed forces. When we ask them to fight and die, they need to believe that it will accomplish something. They need to believe their sacrifice was for a reason.
They don’t need to be told, after they’ve lost an arm or a leg,
“Nevermind. We weren’t serious, after all. We can’t afford this.” When America goes to war, we had damned well better mean it.
Topics: Uncategorized
Posted by Cassandra at 9:48 am Comments (0) on Friday, August 31, 2007
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