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bombings of the last two weeks have raised a number of analogies
with wars of the past — nearly all of them false and, in fact,
dangerous.
Afghanistan
We are hectored ad nauseam about the horror of a dreaded
landlocked and rugged Afghanistan, the quagmire that has swallowed
Alexander the Great, the 19th-century British colonialists, and
Soviet Communists alike. Yet Alexander, in fact, did overrun Afghanistan
— and with fewer than 30,000 troops, despite factional rivalry
in his army and his self-destructive murders of his own top lieutenants.
Britain withdrew because of the errors of arrogance, logistics,
and tactical incompetence, the Soviets largely on account of the
gift of billions of U.S. aid and weapons to their enemies, and their
own foolhardy and evil attempt to wipe out Islam. The Russian army,
in the last decade of Communism, was not the force that stopped
Hitler in the far more difficult street-fighting at Stalingrad.
Also unlike the prior invaders, Americans are prepared to strike
with no illusions about the ease of their task and with no wish
for conquest, lucre, or obeisance. We are not arrogant or naive
as past armies were; and we have no interest in occupying the country
or in turning the people from medieval Islam to the benefits of
popular American culture. Our mission is simply to destroy the Taliban;
the tragic chaos that follows will be no worse than what exists
now. The destruction of the Taliban can be accomplished through
concerted air attacks against their conventional military installations
and terrorist camps, as counterinsurgency teams and commandos target
their leadership, and mobile ground forces, perhaps with indigenous
forces, advance on the major cities.
Vietnam
The chimaeras of Vietnam are often raised. Few conflicts are more
misunderstood. Then we were fighting a distant war against foes
supplied on their borders by our two chief nuclear rivals, China
and the Soviets. Our target list against the North was small and
it often shrank. We defined victory as creating a democratic, enlightened
culture where none had existed before. The draft ensured that our
elite youth in universities would take to the streets. Even with
all that, our military forces fought superbly. At the so-called
bloodbath at Hue, the U.S. Marines lost 147, killed over 5,000 of
the enemy, and freed the city, in the worst street-fighting since
the Korean War. The siege of Khe Sahn was an enemy failure and resulted
in 50 communist dead for each American lost. In the horrific Tet
offensive, a surprised American military inflicted 40, 000 fatalities
upon the attackers while losing fewer than 2,000.
Vietnam itself was a defeat, but this was largely due to politics.
Yet the political landscape of contemporary America is hardly comparable.
Our home soil has now been attacked; we have lost nearly as many
civilians as we did soldiers at Shiloh and Pearl Harbor combined.
Nor is the country likely to see an American war as the nexus of
racial, sexual, and cultural unrest. Instead, most Americans are
slowly accepting the grim reality that our enemies, far from apologizing
for the slaughter, wish to kill even thousands more of us at work,
in our streets, and in our beds.
Israel
Other choruses have chanted, "Israel could not wipe out terrorism,
so how could we?'" Again, the analogy is false — and should
be apparent immediately in the grim reality of the post-September
11 world: It is safer to fly on El Al than on United, and the towers
of Tel Aviv are apparently more secure than those in lower Manhattan.
Israel's collective losses from the much-feared Palestinian uprising
are far less than those inflicted against the terrorists. Indeed,
Middle Eastern fundamentalists have now killed more Americans than
all the Israelis lost to terrorism in the last three decades, and
perhaps from the inception of the Jewish state. But far more important,
in the past a tiny Israel has been isolated — with no financial,
cultural, or economic assistance in its struggle from Europe or
others in the eastern Mediterranean, states that at least could
have ostracized terrorist hosts and supporters. In contrast, we
have the power to shutdown — or, better yet, physically destroy
— banks, communications, and corporations that facilitate,
encourage, or tolerate the terrorism of our enemies.
Unending
War
A decade of war is often promised. But rarely in history
do we see such lengthy fighting. The European civil conflicts of
the Seven (1756-1763), Thirty (1618-1648), or Hundred Years' Wars
(1337-1453) were marked by cyclical rather than continual battles;
even the nightmares of the Civil War, and the two world wars of
the past century, lasted fewer than five years. The tragic fact
is that since classical times, war in Western society is truly destructive
when it pits Western power against Western power. Caesar and Pompey
and their followers killed more Romans than did Hannibal; more Greeks
were killed in single intramural battles in the Peloponnesian War
than in all the fighting against Persians at Marathon, Thermopylae,
Salamis, and Plataea combined. Alexander lost fewer than a 1,000
soldiers in three pitched battles against the Persians while destroying
an empire of 70 million. His greatest worry was not Afghani tribesmen
or Bactrian cavalry but tough Greek mercenaries.
Zealots
The much-feared Cetshwayo and his dreaded Zulu militarist state
of some 200,000 were annihilated in less than a year at a cost of
fewer than 2,000 British dead. The Mahdists, ensconced at Khartoum
and swollen with British blood, promised a jihad to end all jihads;
instead they were annihilated by Kitchener. Hernan Cortés,
despite seeing the beating hearts of his men ripped out at Tenochtitlan,
wrecked an enraged empire of millions with fewer than 2,500 Castilians.
We should not always be proud of these bloody accomplishments, but
in military terms they remind us that, for good or evil, the chief
fear of a Western army is one like itself. Yet, that horrific scenario
seems unlikely in the present conflict. Real powers that have elements
of Westernized discipline, advanced weapons, logistics, and training
— Russia, India, and China — are more likely to aid or
remain neutral than to oppose us. If anything, the United States
may find itself closer to such strong states as it distances itself
from weak and "moderate" Arab regimes.
Microbes,
Nerve Gas, and Atoms
We are told that we must worry constantly about biological or nuclear
weapons. Such caution is prudent and will remain wise advice for
the next decade. Microbes and atoms are formidable threats, which,
unlike conventional arms, leave lethal, material aftershocks that
ripple outward from their points of explosion. Yet Americans must
pause to digest fully the magnitude of their own catastrophe of
September 11 — over 6,000 dead in our cities, far more than
what terrorists' nerve gas killed in Japan, and more than the toll
of Saddam's reported use of biological agents before and after the
Gulf War. Physicists could do us a great favor by calculating the
combined destructive power of the thousands of gallons of metal
and fuel striking the towers of the World Trade Center at high speed.
Surely the magnitude of that conflagration was equivalent to two
or three kilotons of TNT — in other words comparable to the
ruin left by a small, primitive nuclear device of the type perhaps
now in terrorists' hands. We should be vigilant — and angry
— but realize that we have endured a horrible attack, and are
still more powerful, not enfeebled, for our ordeal. And because
we know that our enemies have access to biological weapons and perhaps
nuclear bombs, and indeed wish to kill our children, it should make
our resolve stronger, not weaker.
What
Is Ahead?
An annus terribilis is upon us — the most unpredictable
year since 1941, ushering in a frightening contest that we did not
seek, but now must enter and win. Yet the study of military history
should offer us more reassurance than dejection. This is the first
occasion since World War II in which we can and should use the entire
arsenal of our defense. The strategies of halting before Baghdad
and lecturing Saddam Hussein have been shown bankrupt; cruise missiles
shall bring us no comfort, much less deterrence. The world has been
turned upside down; with that upheaval, the voices of proportionality,
accommodation, and consultation are discredited and now relegated
to increasingly rare appearances on late-night television. Good
and kind men like Sandy Berger, William Cohen, and Warren Christopher
have been shown not prudent as they promised, but in fact reckless
through their past inaction.
The terrorists, in their eagerness for blood, have blundered terribly,
both in their barbarity and in their timing. It is hard to arouse
Americans, especially in the last two decades of their greatest
wealth, leisure, and license. Yet they have accomplished a radical
reversal in temperament and ideology in mere days by killing innocents
and striking both at the heart of American power and prestige and
at the very heartstrings of innate American kindness. There is a
new administration different in character from the past that in
turn now governs a changed citizenry. The next bloody months will
not be the easy police actions of Grenada and Panama. Perhaps they
will require more sacrifice than the fighting in the Balkans and
the Gulf War, whose combined American dead was comparable to a bloody
week on our freeways. But our war to come will not be Vietnam either.
And this time, if we choose to, we shall prevail. The terrorists
and their sympathetic hosts have no idea what they have unleashed.
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