Pseudo-Military History
American unleashed.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
September 24, 2001 1:50 p.m.

he 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.