Who Are the Moralists?
Morality and military superiority meet.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
January 11, 2002 8:25 a.m.

here are two types of necessary military leaders — the organizational men, adept at marshalling forces, keeping diplomacy open as an option, and seeking alternatives to fighting; and the more blunt firebrands of history, who understand that armies are for battle, and battles the only way to settle the differences politics cannot. We need both — but not always at the same time or for the same purposes. The tactful see complications and repercussions everywhere in war, and so rightly worry about what the enemy might do to them. The more combative envision lasting clarity arising out of the chaos and know all too well what they can do to the enemy. The former seek to consolidate gains during a lull in the fighting, the latter to push on and finish the business for good.

Unfortunately, seldom do such antithetical gifts of diplomacy and war reside in the same man — a Pericles, Washington, Lincoln, or Churchill appears rarely in history. And so nations turn to one or the other, as either sobriety or audacity is needed. Most often before and after the shooting, democratic peoples appreciate the steadiness and experience of ex-generals like a proven Colin Powell, who understand the tricky nexus between state- and warcraft.

But despite the apparent present pause in Afghanistan, we are still in the midst of a deadly struggle that we did not foresee but surely must see through. Cessation of this war, even the appearance of hesitancy and conciliation, could still prove disastrous — as we learned both in the Gulf and in Somalia. The only thing worse than not retaliating to unprovoked attack is doing so in half-measures that leave aggressors wounded but not eliminated, defeated but not ruined. So it is time not to rest on our laurels, but to turn to our stable of grim generals, who must finish the job and end those who plan — then, now, and always — to destroy us.

The Athenian general Nicias, one of the richest and most restrained men at classical Athens, saw clearly that the bellicose Alcibiades's simultaneous war with Sparta, Sicily, and others of the Greek world was fraught with risks. But once that deadly gambit commenced, it was Nicias's trademark conservatism — not Alcibiades' nerve — that would prove the ruin of the Athenian armada at Syracuse.

George McClellan crafted the Army of the Potomac out of a mob through patient drilling and stern discipline — and then was unwilling to use his creation for what it was intended, and thereby nearly wrecked his cause. His manners, wit, and brilliance would make him a viable presidential candidate in November 1864. But he lost to an ascendant Lincoln when a different sort of man, William Tecumseh Sherman, stormed Atlanta before burning his way through Georgia and into the Carolinas.

Chief of Staff Henry Halleck — neither liked nor hated by many — was an effective emissary between Lincoln and his generals. But when he took command after Shiloh, his memo writing disguised as pursuit ensured that thousands of beaten Confederates would escape — and kill thousands of Northerners — the next year.

George S. Patton was a disaster as a proconsul in postwar Bavaria. Yet Eisenhower and Bradley — nicer, steadier, and more judicious men both — failed to close the Falaise Gap, unwisely restrained Patton at the Seine River and near the German border, and employed orthodoxy, not creativity, at the Battle of the Bulge. Thank God that both of them, and not Patton, later became fixtures of American government; but weep for the thousands of GIs dead because they, and not Patton, ruled the American battlefield in Europe.

Now we are on the threshold of a great decision, where this age-old dichotomy in military leadership will become ever more marked, as we ponder Iraq and beyond. There is no disagreement that Saddam Hussein stands as a peril to his neighbors, a threat to world peace, and an obstacle to our war on terrorism. After all, he invaded both Iran and Kuwait, gassed his own people, fought America, violated the tenets of the armistice, reneged on United Nation inspections, sought to assassinate former president Bush, stockpiles biological weapons and perhaps worse, and may have abetted past terrorist attacks on the United States — and have known in advance the events of September 11.

All agree on all that — and only that. The voices of the Niciases, McClellans, and Hallecks now in our State Department quite properly remind us that we have no recent pretext for war with Iraq, and that when the initial bombs drop we will be roundly condemned by every world leader from Mr. Mandela to Premier Putin. No doubt some of the specters that haunted the elder Bush and his team are with us still: Will not the Arab street blow up? Chaos ensue in the Middle East? The Intifada widen? Europeans balk? Missiles rain down on Tel Aviv? The oil fields ignite? Germs (and worse) be unleashed? Americans die in the deserts of the Middle East? Indeed, all that and more could transpire.

But the voices of Pericles, Sherman, Grant, and Churchill answer back that our war now is for self-preservation, and thus restraint in battle is madness. Our way of war, tested in the Gulf, Serbia, and Afghanistan, is ready to end Mr. Hussein's repugnant reign of terror. Rarely do morality and military superiority reside in one cause, but in our present quandary they most surely do. If led by audacious leaders, once more in Baghdad we will see what we saw in Kabul — a freed people who hated their terrorist government more than its orchestrated mobs hated us, and conscripted soldiers who preferred life and freedom to annihilation in an evil cause.

Iraq is the Gordian knot of the present crisis, whose interwoven cords must be cut, not pondered. With the removal of Saddam Hussein, problems will abate, not arise. Nearby Iran will be more likely to emulate the new freedom of its neighbors than to endure the continued dread of its mullahs. Our illegitimate "friends" in the Gulf will now not have a madman as a neighbor, but may perhaps find better government on their borders than inside their own countries. We can begin a domino theory of democracy that will be our honest — though unwelcome — gift to them in exchange for their own past perfidy to us.

After the removal of Saddam Hussein, to be followed by internationally sanctioned successors, it will be difficult for Syria, Yemen, Libya, and the other thugocracies of the Middle East to claim that America is either impotent or unjust — or to welcome terrorists onto their shores. Recent history in Afghanistan teaches us that they, along with Egypt, Jordan, and other "moderates" of the region, will profess to have wanted reform and an end to terror all along, not Round Three with the United States.

Just as the confirmed capture of bin Laden will cripple his al Qaeda network both materially and psychologically, so the end of fascism in Iraq will enervate satellite sanctuaries everywhere in the region. In the same way as the death of Hitler ended the Nazi party, and the ruin of the Third Reich finished the advance of fascist power in Europe, so the defeat of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi dictatorship will erode both clandestine support for terrorists and murderous tyranny well beyond Iraq.

The armed struggle to remove Saddam Hussein is not the ideal solution — who after all, could have envisioned September 11? — but it is now the only solution. For better or worse, we are on the back of global transformation with the reins in our hands. Mr. Rumsfeld, along with his Pattons and Shermans, sees clearly that we cannot dismount, but rather must hang on and keep galloping. It is not the time to tell Sherman to stay put in Atlanta, or to shrug to Patton poised at the Siegfried Line that there is no more gas. We should not announce to the great Theban liberator Epaminondas that he is to stay out of the Peloponnese and let the helots of Sparta be — nor order Scipio to leave a wounded Hannibal well enough alone down in Carthage.

We have been lectured endlessly about consultation, sobriety, the dangers of unilateralism, and all the other diplomatic doublespeak that would have ensured that we never struck back in Afghanistan — or pressed us to seek an armistice during Ramadan, or a coalition postbellum government of "former" and "moderate" Taliban. Had such analysts had their way, we would now be witnessing an endless stream of EU diplomats, Chamberlain-like, smiling for cameras at Mullah Omar's spread in Kabul, or perhaps a UN General Assembly debate on the use of "racist" American force in the Middle East — while Ground Zero smoldered and al Qaeda still trained. Just as they are warning us now that it would be "illegal" to attack Saddam Hussein, the violator of the 1991 agreements, so they only recently once lectured that the Taliban was a really a "third party" and therefore could not be found legally culpable for September 11.

Instead it is time that we reflect on what constitutes morality, and remember that history is replete with examples of self-professedly sober and circumspect "moderates" who reassured allies and courted the media — but who also got thousands of people killed through their smug caution and cheap forbearance.

And just as we must end the glorification of the cautious, so we should stop the slander against those who seek to finish off our enemies. American leaders who want to end the terror in Iraq are not "saber-rattlers" and "hawks" out to "take out" or "get" Mr. Hussein. Rather Mr. Rumsfeld and his associates are the true moralists in a difficult crisis, who understand that real humanity lies in the often dirty business of ending, not tolerating or ignoring, evil.