"War
is a violent teacher"
Thucydides
 he
paradoxes of democratic warfare, now and in the past, are exasperating.
Why must consensual societies kill, bomb, and destroy — only
to end up friends with, and actually later give recompense to —
their erstwhile enemies? In 1943 Italians were killing Americans
and British. By 1945 they were helping them to kill Germans. We
nearly leveled Germany; but then years later saved Berlin by airlifting
food and rebuilding the country through the Marshall Plan.
Did the Germans
after May 1945 suddenly change appearance, religion, or language?
Did survivors of the war begin to speak English and play baseball?
Why were we hoping German soldiers would freeze in Stalingrad in
1942 and yet four years later were counting on them to help us fight
their conquerors?
In August 1945
we used atomic weapons against the Japanese. In November we were
sending them tons of food to feed millions and lawyers to draw up
an autonomous and liberal constitution. NATO countries in 1985 were
prepared to use tactical nukes to keep Russians out of Germany;
by 1994 they scrambled to send them billions in aid — even
as our enemies in Eastern Europe became our staunchest friends,
pleading with us to join an alliance a few years earlier they had
sought to destroy. This September we saw images of Afghanis burning
our abandoned embassy in Kabul; a few weeks later these former rioters
were smiling and lining up for jobs as we moved back in.
The ironies
of conflict are not merely to be attributed to the easy idea
that war is intrinsically "bad," and senseless —
as if we might all just get along with proper counseling, and so
to our self-righteous delight declare war obsolete and unnecessary.
Or at least war is not entirely explained away by such facile assumptions.
We are increasingly learning that even states divided by religion,
custom, history and tradition can in fact, get along —
but usually only if they come to share some modicum of freedom,
religious tolerance, consensual government, and the ability to criticize
government. England and America liked Germans, but not German Nazis
— in the same manner we liked Russians, but not Soviet Communists,
and Afghanis, but not Taliban.
It is not just
the fault of a tiny few for installing tyranny over an "innocent"
and unsuspecting people. Citizens themselves are also culpable for
the thugs they receive and tolerate. There is, after all, some reason
that explains why the mullahs, not democrats, took over from the
Shah; why Saddam Hussein still rules with an iron hand; why Hitler
came to power — and why the Taliban bullied Afghanistan. And
the answers are not, as usually alleged, the easy excuses that "they"
(some foreign power like the United States, or the "Jews,"
or even the communists, or the fascists) foisted a dictator down
the throats of a guiltless populace.
The breeding
ground for autocracy is not only hunger and disease, but also national
amnesia and ignorance. The culprit is, then, a state of mind in
which millions lose their senses and in their hypnotic state allow
liars and criminals to blame others for their own largely self-inflicted
ills — or at least lack the courage to seek solutions from
within. The Germans did not want Hitler (he, in fact, received a
minority of the votes in 1932), but they did not want to face up
either to their real military defeat in 1918, or to confront the
fools and the bogus beliefs that had led them on the road to catastrophe
in 1914.
Most Southerners
did not own slaves, distrusted the plantationists, and knew the
surrounding culture of latifundia was unsustainable. But
most also went along with hotheads of secession, blaming their problems
on abolitionists rather than on their own pyramidal society and
a bankrupt system of chattel slavery. Many Muslims in the Middle
East privately concede that high rates of illiteracy, tribalism,
statism, autocracy, religious fundamentalism, lack of free speech
and dissent, and gender apartheid better explain why people starve
in Islamabad or Cairo. Yet most also know that it is far easier
to publicly say Israel is the cause of their problems. The human
propensity for self-delusion, fueled by the envy that arises out
of a sense of inferiority, is the fuel of dictators and ultimately
the breeding ground of war. A Saddam Hussein or bin Laden is usually
symptomatic, rather than causal.
Unfortunately,
most often the threat of force — or war itself — is the
only answer that can end peoples' grand delusions and knock them
back to their senses. We are friends with the Afghanis, because
the Taliban are scattered; in the same manner we do not like the
Iraqis as long as Saddam Hussein is in power. Should we bomb Baghdad
and destroy his armed forces, it is likely that Iraqis will celebrate
and protest that they hated him all along — but not enough
to overthrow his murderous cabal until they got help from the hated
Americans. Somalis cheered when American dead were dragged through
their streets; now with U.S. warships off the coast, they point
to the warlord next door and say, "He, not we, did it"
— as their politicians talk grandly of freedom. Should those
ships leave their waters, the thugs will be back in seconds, and
an American's life won't be worth a used Kalishnikov. Mr. Musharraf
is glad to be done with the Taliban he once promoted — not
because he fell for the charm of Colin Powell, but rather because
he that saw GPS-bombs were getting awfully close to his own borders.
So the -isms
and -ologies of this present war that have infected millions can
only be shown bankrupt by their complete repudiation, which tragically
must come from either the threat of force or military defeat, humiliation
and real loss. Only that way can both adherents and the innocent
alike learn the real wages of allowing their country to be hijacked
by agents of their delusion. The enemy is never a person per se,
but the fanaticism that has taken hold of him — and war sometimes
is the only exorcist strong enough to rid the zombie host of such
deadly demons and let him be reborn. It is critical also that the
necromancers who caused such destruction — a Hitler, Tojo,
Mussolini, Mullah Omar, or bin Laden — be sent to the next
world, never left to dabble as "reformed" or "moderates"
in a subsequent government.
Georgians in
1861 had promised a century of war if need be; by 1865 such firebrands
told Sherman to hurry over to the Carolinas and burn instead those
"who started it all". When Patton crossed the Rhine, families
took down pictures of Hitler and waved at Sherman tanks, in the
manner that we see movie houses full and TVs dug up in Kabul. Yet
we must remember that Sherman would have failed utterly (and did
fail) to talk sense to recalcitrant Southerners in 1860; German
would have laughed at a Yankee peacekeeping delegation to Berlin
in 1940, and not a single American would have been safe offering
free videos in Afghanistan in 1998.
In a perfect
world, we would hope all that the liberal utopians — who deplore
the air strikes, who lecture that we are bombing only soon to be
rebuilding, and who pontificate that we "have nothing against
the Iraqi people" — could be right and that human nature
was not what it is. But alas they are wrong, quite deadly wrong.
We war to disabuse our enemies of their murderous ideas, their cheap
and easy preferences for untruths that feel good rather than the
truth that hurts and won't go away. We war because the damage we
do is not a good answer, but the only age-old answer to the false
-isms of each age — fascism, communism, nazism, totalitarianism,
militarism, and now fundamentalism — that so easily infect
men's minds when they are weak and vulnerable.
We war not
with religion, race, and custom, but with seductive authoritarian
falsehoods that get innocents killed and tragically are not abandoned
until they threaten to bring utter destruction down upon all those
who either promulgate or even tolerate such counterfeit -isms. And
so in both our ignorance and our innate humanity we destroy and
rebuild, fight and befriend — until the spirit of man himself
changes and he in his maturity seeks difficult solutions for the
unhappiness in himself, rather than cheap solutions in others.
The Palestinians
will have peace only when war or the threat of war demonstrates
to them that a corrupt government that brooks no dissent and a press
that is not free is as dangerous and self-defeating to their cause
as all the settlers on their occupied land. The only alternative
offered Sherman in Georgia was not really peace talks, but in fact
more slavery and secession. B-17s and the Third Army were not humane,
but far more humane than Dachau. Hiroshima was a nightmare, but
a nightmare on par with Nanking and Okinawa — and far less
murderous than another bloody decade of Japanese imperialism in
China and the Pacific.
A year ago
Afghani warlords would have dubbed Mr. Karazi a Western dandy —
as they hung his riddled body from a noose in the public square.
Now — thanks to daisy-cutters and the misery and defeat left
behind by the Taliban — they begrudgingly are listening to
his ideas about good government. They, not he, have changed
— and that transformation was not brought about by the
U.N., Mr. Clinton's post presidential speeches, or the wild sermons
of a Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky. Again, we all wish that these
bleak assessments of human nature were not true, but denial, not
acceptance, of such a bitter reality gets blameless and defenseless
people killed.
Of course,
we of the affluent West must bring food, education, and training
to the poor and downtrodden in the very breeding grounds of al Qaeda.
But there are also times in history when people — whether mesmerized
or cowered — under dictatorial regimes view such compassion
as timidity, such largess as weakness, and so must instead first
be defeated, next enlightened, and then at last helped — but
only in that order. Let those who cheer on bin Laden and abet the
terrorists learn from the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, who have
been there, done that.
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