War on All Fronts
Military, diplomatic, philosophical, cultural.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
October 12, 2001 1:20 p.m.

I. Military

The general outlines of the campaign in Afghanistan are now becoming evident: air strikes on selected Taliban and terrorist leadership, along with attacks against air defense and their conventional assets, to aid indigenous forces in their motorized assaults against the cities. Our on-the-ground reconnaissance and special operations — thanks to the advances in technology of the last decade — may well make these missions far more destructive than even what we witnessed in the Gulf War, perhaps resulting in a precipitous collapse in Taliban resistance in weeks or even days, rather than the predicted months or years. We were warned of "thousands to be killed" in Iraq, and instead lost a few dozen to actual hostile fire. Pompey, under the Lex Gabinia of 67 B.C., was given an imperium for three years to rid the Mediterranean of pirates; he destroyed them in three months. Overconfidence is the supposed bane of all armies, but in fact, wise generals more often deliberately downplay their chances of success in the dawn of battle.

Tanks and artillery, we must remember, are not obsolete in Afghanistan; at some point, such American conventional forces may need to help direct and organize resistance movements that move out of the hills and onto the plains — if only to ensure that a particular local thug or warlord does not hijack the temporary unity of the resistance. While our Defense Department has been adroit at emphasizing the unconventional nature of this conflict, we are in fact seeing just how effective the symphony of conventional (planes, carriers, submarines, destroyers) and special operations forces actually is. Some traditional armored units on the ground will also be critical in guarding our smaller teams from any sudden movement from Iran, or a precipitous change in government in Pakistan — as well as readying operations for action in Iraq.

Commandos and air strikes will win the Afghani phase of the war against terrorism, but large battle groups are also critical in showing and using American muscle. We must remember that Pakistan is now neutral, and Iran wary — not out of sympathy for our dead or in moral support of our cause, but out of fear that the United States is acting unpredictably and most out of character from its behavior of the past eight years. The most visible signs of this new resolution are our ships and planes — symbols of confidence not lost on the American people themselves, who will never know the full story of our efforts at stealth and ruse on the ground. Terrorists and mullahs will fear our commandoes, but Iraq and Iran must be reminded of the conventional strength of the United States they saw in Libya rather than in Somalia. With a frightening presence in the area now, our future campaigns against other terrorist hosts may become somewhat easier. Neither Saddam, Assad, Khadafi, nor the Iranian mullahs wish to lose billions of dollars of planes, armor, and bases to sustained American air and naval strikes — or to see that followed by an arms blockade and embargo.

Comparisons with past war-making are commonplace. Perhaps we should emphasize the similarity of our present struggle with the masterful American action in the Pacific during World War II. Then, too, we had enormous logistical problems, vast and daunting landscapes, savage and often suicidal enemies, propagandists to threaten us with a vast racial war of Orient versus Occident, and few friends with any real power. Nimitz and Macarthur nevertheless saw even the first tiny steps clearly as evolutionary and ending in Tokyo, as paired boxing gloves of alternating American battle groups advanced from one island to the next. We should see Iraq and its sympathizers as our fathers saw the Gilberts, Marshalls, Mariannas, and Carolines — with one of our task forces fighting while the other, in reserve, prepares the next strike. Once our enemies understand the non-negotiable logic of our sequential strategy, they may well decide wisdom to be the better part of valor, kill or expel their terrorists, and close down their bases. In this regard, just as we learned of General Schwarzkopf in the Gulf, so too should the American people soon be introduced to our theater commanders in the Middle East.

II. Diplomatic

The vocal support of allies is, of course, critical to our success. Yet the United States finds itself militarily unsurpassed in a manner civilization has not seen since the Rome of the first to third centuries A.D. — and quite unlike even its own singular position during the two World Wars. Quite simply, there is no other friend or rival that really can help us, so great has the imbalance in the world's militaries grown in our favor. Allies, who pledge support now in the adrenaline rush of the first bombs, will bow out when the critical issue of Iraq arises in the next few weeks. We should not expect or welcome their armed assistance, but should demand, as the price of their neutrality, at least public signs of support. Again, the coalition (is there not a better name?) is a critical, but largely cosmetic entity — and a means, not the end in itself: That must remain the single-minded destruction of terrorist havens that have helped kill our women and children. We can excuse the relative inaction of the Europeans with praise of NATO, but only on the condition that they not fire up their vast cultural engines of cynical demagogy to denigrate the efforts of America. And it is one thing to entice a powerful ally like Russia with sympathy for their similar problems with fundamentalism — quite another to do much of anything to win over a suspect Iran.

III. Philosophical

Our public pronouncements so far have been both judicious and politic, especially in the repeated emphasis that ours is no war against either Islam or the Arab world in general. But just as critical, here and abroad, must be the constant refrain of our poor dead. Only that way will our allies fathom our single-mindedness, and our enemies at last realize that Americans are not merely a just, but also an angry and avenging power. Rumors that a B-52 had its nose cone painted with "NYPD" are a good start. There must be much more.

In every great struggle, proclamations of intent, purpose, and values emerge when even the mere hint of victory is in the air — whether they be Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation or Roosevelt's declaration of the formation of the United Nations. Within the year, President Bush should establish a formal American doctrine of military principle. The Bush Doctrine should supplant the Powell manifesto, and thus state unequivocally that a terrorist attack on the citizens or the shores of the United States is defined as an act of war, and will bring immediate retaliation of all our forces, without qualification, against any state that hosts, aids, or comforts the perpetrators. This is no small commitment, and may in the future raise real risks, involving nuclear rogue states like North Korea or perhaps even changed governments in Pakistan or South Africa. But the Bush Doctrine will warn the world — and Americans here at home — of the seriousness of the present danger and the audacity of our response. Only that way can our children some day sleep in peace.

At the same time, our president must also craft something more recognizably humane and visionary — akin to Roosevelt's enunciation of the Four Freedoms, even as it is less utopian than Wilson's Fourteen Points — a creed that will send a strong message of American purpose to "moderate" Arab governments in the aftermath of this crisis. The United States should declare that it supports the right of all Islamic peoples to self-determination through consensual government; and, indeed, we shall work for the gradual evolution of democracy in countries where the impoverished have no voice or freedom. Failing to do so in Kuwait may have been as critical an error as stopping before Baghdad.

Such unsophisticated idealism also offers real peril: Fundamentalists may well be elected and replace autocrats professedly sympathetic to America. But such reform offers the only chance to avoid repetitions of the present disaster in which corrupt Westernized strongmen buy off indigenous criticism, by allowing their fundamentalists to vent popular outrage against us rather than them. These illegitimate governments have a free press only in the sense that they are free to damn America.

In this regard, we must recognize that much of America's energy policy is a concern of the Department of Defense. Can we at last realize that cheap imported oil from corrupt Saudi fundamentalists is not really cheap at all, but rather the real fuel funding the killers of our innocent? So many moral anomalies arise from our shortsighted energy policies! Our Defense and State Departments lecture us ad nauseam on the "special relationship" we have with Saudi Arabia; yet no government — through its autocracy, hypocrisy, and misogyny — is more inherently repugnant to the American people. Rarely in our history has a foreign country enjoyed so little popular, yet so much official, American support.

IV. Cultural

Our visionaries must be far clearer and more eloquent about the nature of our struggle. In their understandable efforts to say what we are not doing — fighting Islam or provoking Arab peoples — they have failed utterly to voice what we are doing: preserving Western civilization and its uniquely tolerant and humane traditions of freedom, consensual government, disinterested inquiry, and religious and political tolerance. In this regard, we must especially distinguish, in the manner of Roosevelt and Churchill, the historic ties between Great Britain and America — something either ridiculed or forgotten in the current fashions of multiculturalism.

Our institutions are shaped by the British inheritance of the classical tradition. The English Enlightenment, far more so than the French, tempers and moderates our ongoing evolution toward greater equality. And had it not been for British resistance from 1939 through 1941, the United States may have well lost millions in World War II. It is time our leaders explained these intellectual bonds and shared sacrifices to a new generation of largely ignorant Americans, who are perhaps either dumbfounded by or else completely oblivious to the singular loyalty of Great Britain.

Finally, Americans must answer the Islamic world bluntly, and with pride rather than reticence, about why we support and always will protect the Israelis. Our sympathy is not attributable to some mythical Jewish lobby, a CIA plot to put down Islam, or a worldwide conspiracy of Zionists; it is simply because they are the Middle-Eastern state most like ourselves in their commitment to a free society based on the rule of law and the consent of the governed. Our special relationship with Israel is open equally to any Islamic country that accepts the idea of democracy and the essence of freedom. We must, as a nation, cease the apologetic tone we have developed with the Arab world, and make it clear that their ministers who hector us are not legitimate without elections, their spokesmen are not journalists without a free press, and their intellectuals are not credible without liberty. The right to admonish Americans on questions of morality in not an entitlement, but something earned only through a shared commitment to constitutional government.

This war really is on all fronts, as we are told. Our leaders need to remind friends and enemies alike that we are as confident in our values and ideas as we are in our carriers and commandos.