The Time Is Now
Some constants guide us in our present dilemma.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture.
November 22-25, 2001

hen we are finally victorious in Afghanistan, should we next confront the next nightmarish regime in Iraq — a thugocracy which we know has, now and in the past, fostered terrorism, created frightful weapons of destruction, and murdered its own and thousands of others? Or rather do we seek triumph only in Afghanistan, and then go home to delegate the "global war on terrorism" to the stealthy work of the FBI and CIA?

Does military history advise us that armies on the verge of victory should press their luck and move on to destroy utterly their crippled enemies — or cease with the triumph at hand and consolidate success? In the past, have conquering forces who failed to finish off tottering adversaries thrown away their hard-won achievements by letting wounded beasts escape — only to have them return angrier and stronger? Or was the rule that overzealous and victory-drunk armies, like the Panzers rolling on to Stalingrad ("no enemies ahead, no supplies behind"), flittered away gains by pressing their luck too far, and so found themselves overextended, outnumbered, without allies, and far from home?

The long story of war can provide examples to support either audacity or conservatism; but close examination suggests there are some constants that may guide us in our present dilemma. We can all agree, of course, that overconfident victors, without either a clear moral edge or real military superiority, often are deluded by transitory moments of battlefield triumph and so fall into false notions of invincibility.

Don't Go On?
Persia put down the Ionian revolt at the battle of Lade, destroyed Miletus (494 B.C.) — and then wrongly surmised that the Greeks across the Aegean were as weak as those in Asia Minor. When a cocky Darius went on to invade Marathon, he learned the true mettle of Athenian hoplites and shortly sailed home in defeat — in a precursor of the greater Persian catastrophe to come a decade later at Salamis and Plataea. Clearly Persians were neither stronger nor more moral than the mainland Greeks, and paid a frightful price to learn that bitter lesson, far from home and without friends.

Similarly, Athens during the murderous Peloponnesian War gathered the wrong messages from the armistice of 421-415 B.C. and foolishly interpreted reprieve as victory, and so pressed on to disaster in Sicily (415-13 B.C.) — losing 40,000 men, most of their fleet, and prompting nearly all of the Greek world, Sicily, and Persia to join Sparta in finishing off Pericles's once-grand empire.

Don't Stop Now?
Yet history has plenty of examples where timidity, not audacity, has destroyed momentum — and with it any chance of eventual victory. Historians disagree over the counterfactuals of the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.), but most concede that had Hannibal marched on Rome after the destruction of the legions at Cannae, the Republic may well have met his terms — so Maharbal's stern rebuke to his commander: "You know how to win a battle, Hannibal, but not how to use your victory." Over 100,000 legionaries had fallen at the disasters in Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae — and one final push a few more miles to Rome might have put the Carthaginians in the forum. Within 24 months, however, the relieved and ever-resilient Romans ensured that there were more legions than Carthaginian mercenaries — and that the last battle of the war at Zama would take place near Carthage, not in Italy.

Hannibal should have remembered the reply of Alexander the Great, who a century earlier at Gaugamela (331 B.C.) was offered pre-battle terms to desist and take half, not all, of Persia. "I would accept if I were you," his right-hand man Parmenio told his king. "And I too if I were Parmenio," Alexander snapped back before destroying an army five times the size of his own — and with it an empire.

After December 7, 1941, had Admiral Nagumo's Japanese fleet steamed for another two weeks off Hawaii, all the while repeatedly bombing Pearl Harbor, destroying critical fuel depots, hunting down the two sole aircraft carriers in the Pacific, and incinerating the port facilities — before moving on to the West Coast to attack San Francisco and Los Angeles — America may have been on the defensive well into 1944. Instead, Admiral Yamamoto awoke a sleeping giant and pulled back east, proving that the only thing worse than attacking an unsuspecting and militarily superior adversary is not destroying it in its lair with the first strike.

Such examples hinge mostly on questions that are purely military and thus more easily explicable: Bullies like Persia or imperial Athens often find themselves despised, outnumbered, and not as strong as they thought — even as weaker aggressive states like Carthage or Japan should have finished what they started, before their very brief window of opportunity closed for good.

A Different Paradigm
Yet, more relevant to our present war are instances where democratic armies, with a moral cause and overwhelmingly superior force, faced a reeling foe. Quite simply, the history of aroused militaries of consensual governments make up a different sort of category altogether — and suggests that we must press on to the bitter end to Iraq and beyond. After Sherman's swath through Georgia, an exuberant Grant asked his subordinate to bring his army by sea to join him in Virginia. Lincoln too was relieved that Sherman had reached Savannah in safety, and had no desire to see 65,000 precious Union troops continue to tramp incommunicado through the heart of the Confederacy. But Sherman? He saw Georgia only as "a beginning," realizing that once he had created a marvelous army, a new way of war, and was nearer to, not more distant from, the heart of secession, it made no sense to quit. So he took his Army of the West on an even more difficult trek through the Carolinas, ruining Confederate morale and closing in on the rear of Lee's desperate forces. The South surrendered at about the time Sherman neared Virginia — to the relief of millions of Confederates who had seen his fearful army at work. Had Sherman ceased at Savannah, the war might have dragged on for another year, the Confederacy interpreting his respite on the coast as much-needed sanctuary for a tired and exhausted army, rather than a lull before the storm to come.

After the sea victory of Lepanto, the victorious combined armadas of Spain and the Italian states awoke on October 8, 1571, to gaze out at a wrecked Ottoman fleet, the Mediterranean entirely empty of enemy ships, and Greece and eastern Europe ready for liberation. Instead, timid Western admirals, thankful for a miraculous victory, and seeing their triumph due to God's will rather than innate strength, rowed home. Within two years, Christian unity was lost for good. The republic of Venice, Spain, and the Papal States returned to their intrigue and squabbling. New Ottoman galleys were launched on the seas, and the iron hand of Turkish retaliation ensured a Muslim Balkans for another 25 decades. The sultan was not wrong when he sighed in relief that his beard "had only been trimmed, not cut off."

Patton, a firebrand at the head of a huge democratic army of vengeance, shared a fate sometimes more like that of the captains at Lepanto than that of the uncontrollable Sherman. At the Falaise gap in August, 1944, he begged his superiors to close the salient and exterminate the tens of thousands of trapped Panzers. A confused Omar Bradley (purportedly preferring a "soft shoulder to a broken neck"), fearful of German pressure, let entire enemy divisions escape the tightening noose — some of them Nazis who would go east, be reequipped on the other side of the Rhine, and reappear at the Battle of the Bulge to help kill thousands of Americans.

Nor was such hesitance only a question of tactical catastrophe. In April, 1945, Patton rolled into eastern Europe, at the head of the largest and most lethal army in American history, bent on liberating Prague and perhaps all of Czechoslovakia from crumbling German armies. Instead, he was ordered to halt. Prague fell to the Russians; and a half-century of Communist misery followed. As Patton put it: A war that had begun to free eastern Europe from totalitarianism had ended with totalitarianism amid the ruins that Hitler evacuated.

Such decisions to press on are never easy. An unrestrained Patton might have caused "incidents" with the Russians, incurred "unneeded" dead from fanatical German resistance, and "offended" diplomats who had sketched out zones of occupation. Yet the ultimate verdict of his cessation was unmistakable: a militarily superior force, in an effort to save millions from fascism, had allowed millions to fall to Communism — in the process sending a message to the Russians that we were accommodating and reasonable rather than idealistic, unpredictable, and overwhelmingly powerful.

Lessons of the Gulf War
Over three years ago in The Soul of Battle I wrote, of the American decision not to end the reign of terror of Saddam Hussein in January, 1991, that "the cessation of the American advance in the Gulf War and the negotiated armistice that followed were the greatest American military blunders since Viet Nam." Nothing that has transpired in the nearly four years since has altered my views. We had the clear momentum and a preponderance of force. We enjoyed moral purpose; and we possessed commanders and soldiers on the ground who had the desire and ability to storm Baghdad. Yet fearful of postbellum power vacuums, jittery allies, regional instability, further costs in treasure and lives — of every fear other than absolute victory — we, like republican Venice, let a bleeding enemy limp away to nurse its wounds and grudges, and a fraudulent government to return to Kuwait. And so we are still paying dearly for our ignorance of history.

That reluctance to topple a dictator was seen by Iraq not as magnanimity but as timidity. Allies of the regions professed relief in public at our sobriety, gnashing their teeth in private at our naiveté. We were told in the short run that we were saving lives and money, but not advised in the long duration that far greater costs must be paid of both. Professing worry not about oil, but rather about morality, our forbearance caused far more Shiite and Kurdish blood to be spilled than what was saved in Kuwait. Pictures of the "Highway of Death" where Iraqi killers were killed shocked a nation — even as scenes of far more numerous butchered and starving innocent civilians in the weeks that followed went largely unnoticed. Such are the sad and immoral wages of leniency when what is moral and doable is left undone.

The Intersection of History
In the months ahead, the same questions that obsessed Hannibal, Don Juan, Sherman, Patton, and Schwartzkopf and their superiors shall haunt us once more. At first glance, the voices of moderation will argue for caution. Indeed, we can anticipate their judicious reasoning in advance: The Europeans will turn on us; the Muslim world may explode; nuclear and biological terror may be unleashed; the world's oil may light up; our campuses may seethe; a glib press may snarl and third-guess; our treasury may go broke; our youth may be killed; and our forces be surely overstretched.

Yes, we know them all, and they all must be ignored. Mr. Powell, a decent and experienced man — who wrongly cautioned restraint after the Marine disaster in Lebanon; advised more negotiations with Serbia; tragically urged cessation, rather than an advance to Baghdad; and most recently suggested a governing coalition to include ex-Taliban mullahs and a pan-Islamic force of occupation — will be eloquent about what we cannot and must not do. But if history is any guide to the present, we should remember that we are unusually strong and clearly in the right, that our enemies in Iraq are evil, in the wrong, and inherently weak — and that victory, if we press on, will be seen as a catalyst of good, our tentativeness dubbed weakness and worse.

If we wish to end terror, in the coming months we should turn to Iraq. If we turn to Iraq, we should be resigned to go it alone. If we go in alone, we should seek absolute victory; if we obtain victory, we should institute a constitutional government; if we promote legitimacy, we will see a gradual end to terror. Great forces of change are now on the move that may well reinvent the world as we have known it. We did not ask for such a revolution, but we are now the riders of this apocalypse — and have so discovered that we can be agents for, not obstacles to, this renaissance of freedom in the making that could turn millions of enemies into friends, both in and outside of the Muslim world. We must see this perilous mission through to its ultimate end — if for no other reason than to ensure that those in the World Trade Center and Pentagon did not die in vain.

The removal of fascism in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the implementation of legitimate governments in its wake — a far easier task than the metamorphosis of Russia and eastern Europe — will require sacrifice, coupled with military skill and brilliant diplomacy. And so Mr. Powell, ironically of all Americans, now has the best opportunity to ignore the tired voices of orthodoxy and consensus, and instead in a quite new role to use his abilities at war and peace to engineer a revolutionary course — one that will place him and his country on the vortex of history. As was true of Germany and Japan in 1946, overwhelming military victories in both Afghanistan and Iraq could turn havens of terror into allies, where millions in the streets of Kabul and Baghdad will see us more as honest brokers of democratic reform than cynical purveyors of self-interest. If they wish then to elect themselves into the slavery of Islamic republics, so be it — but at least we can say that we fought for legitimacy-and that they, not us, ruined their countries. And after the sorry record of Iran and the Taliban, it is just as likely that they will not willingly vote those nightmares upon themselves.

A freed and democratic Iraq will help clean out the rotting tentacles of terrorism that thrash about still, but also fire an even more ominous and unexpected shot across the bow to our corrupt and illegitimate "friends" in the Gulf, Egypt, and the Middle East — who, we are learning, were never really our friends at all. In an otherwise brilliant campaign in 1990-91, we made two tragic mistakes — stopping before Baghdad and allowing a medieval and repressive Kuwaiti government to return to power. At the eleventh hour, we now can still do much to correct both by ending fascism, promoting democracy, and proving to the world that we are as highly principled as we are downright scary.