Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (64 page)

In these new flash points to come, can the non-West import our weaponry and military organization and doctrine apart from the cargo of their birth? Can a capitalist China, Iran, Vietnam, or Pakistan, with a scientific elite, for any sustained period really equip and organize a sophisticated army, superior to any Western military, without free citizens, individualism in command hierarchy, constant audit, and oversight of its strategy and tactics? Or do such would-be antagonists merely pick the fruit of the West which soon withers without the deep taproots of intellectual, religious, and political tolerance? Will they merely win occasional battles but not wars, or perhaps threaten us endlessly with the specter of a half dozen nuclear-tipped missiles over Los Angeles?

A military command may steal secrets daily over the Internet, but if it cannot discuss those ideas openly with its civilian and military leadership, then there is no guarantee that such information will find its optimum application to ensure parity with the West. Even should our present adversaries adopt consensual government, free speech, and market economies, would they then really remain our adversaries? Would the embrace of Western culture gradually smother centuries of religious, ethnic, cultural, and racial hostility to the West itself? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the question is not the only one of relevance, for there is no guarantee now, nor was there in the past, that the West itself is monolithic, always stable, or not prone to turn its vast arsenal upon itself. States that become thoroughly Western are less likely to attack the traditional West, but not less likely
enough
to ensure that they will
never
attack the traditional West—and each other. The horror of organized warfare throughout history has
not
been the constant fighting outside of Europe between tribal societies, or even between the West and the Other, but the far deadlier explosions inside Europe
between Westerners.
The more the world becomes thoroughly Western, it seems to me, the larger the Europeanized battlefield shall become.

We should thus take note of another general truth from these studies. Usually, the story of Westerners fighting others is a narrative of battle outside Europe and America. Except for moments of Asian, African, and Islamic intrusion into the periphery of Europe—Xerxes, Hannibal, the Mongols, Moors, and Ottomans—the core of Western culture itself has not been in danger since the breakup of the Roman Empire. Nothing on the horizon suggests that non-Westerners will fight major wars inside Europe or the United States. When battle has ravaged the interior of the West, it is the result of civil war or struggle for hegemony between Western powers. I see no reason why such a scenario will not be more likely in the century to come than invasions and attacks from those outside the Western paradigm.

THE WEST VERSUS THE WEST

With the worldwide spread of shared ideas of democracy, capitalism, free speech, individualism, and a globally connected economy, it may be that world-encompassing wars will be less likely. Yet it will also be true that when wars do break out, they will be far more lethal and draw on the full resources of a deadly military tradition. We see glimpses of that today— tribal fights in which hideous Western weapons are used by those who have not a clue how to create them.

The peril to come, however, is not just the spread of atomic weapons and F-16 fighter jets but much more so the dissemination of knowledge, rationalism, the creation of free universities, perhaps even the growth of democracy, capitalism, and individualism themselves throughout the world—the real ingredients, as we have seen in these case studies, of a most murderous brand of battle. Most see in the advance of rationalism, capitalism, democracy, and their ancillary values the seeds of perpetual peace and prosperity. Maybe, but we must remember that these ideas are also the foundations that have created the world’s deadliest armies of the past.

The real hazard for the future, as it has always been in the past, is not Western moral decline or the threat of the Other now polished with the veneer of sophisticated arms, but the age-old specter of a horrendous war inside the West itself, the old Europe and America with its full menu of Western economic, military, and political dynamism. Gettysburg in a single day took more Americans than did all the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. A small Boer force killed more British troops in six days than the Zulus did in a year. Most of the crises that have plagued the world in the twentieth century grew out of Europe’s two world wars—the status of Germany, the division and unification of Europe, the rise and collapse of the Russian empire, the spread of communism after the defeat of fascism, the mess in the Balkans, and the entry of America into the affairs of the world.

Many have accepted the truism that democracies do not fight democracies. Statistics seem to support this encouraging belief. But in the Western context, given the lethality of Western arms, there is little margin of error, since even a single intramural European war can bring carnage and cultural chaos in its wake. Consensual governments, in fact, have often fought other Western consensual governments. Athens wrecked its culture by invading democratic Sicily (415 B.C.). Democratic Boeotia fought democratic Athens at Mantinea (362 B.C.). Republican Rome ended the Achaean federated states of Greece and leveled Corinth (146 B.C.). Italian republics of the Renaissance were constantly at each other’s throat. Revolutionary France and parliamentary England were deadly enemies; a democratic United States fought twice against the consensual government of Britain. There was a Union and Confederate president and Senate. The Boers and the British in southern Africa each had elected representatives. Both elected prime ministers in India and Pakistan have at times threatened each other. The presence of a Palestinian parliament has not brought peace to the Middle East; and there is no assurance that should its autonomy grow, that elected body would be any less likely than Mr. Arafat to war with Israel. There was also a parliament of sorts under the kaiser. Hitler first came to power through election, not a coup. The Russian entry into Chechnya received parliamentary approval.

Democracies are more likely
not
to war against each other; but when they do—and they have—the ensuing conflict from both sides draws on the entire terrible menu of Western warfare itself. For every Nicias, there can be a democratic counterpart Hermocrates of Syracuse; for each assembly-line Venetian Arsenal, an efficient Genovese dockworks; for every citizen soldier Grant, there may well be a Lee; for each ingenious Mauser, a Colt; for every eccentric and highly trained German rocket scientist, a British radar genius. Western civil war inside Europe or America will not necessarily be such a catastrophic event simply because it shall take more lives than those lost in Mao’s China or in the fifty years of bloodletting in Africa—although such fighting might well exceed those totals. Rather, Western fratricide, as it has in the past, threatens an entire civilization, which for good or evil has given the world its present standard of living and is the source of its industrialization, technological advance, popular culture, and blueprints for political organization.

We should be apprehensive that there are once again fundamental upheavals transpiring in Europe, more so that at any time since the 1930s. The growth in influence of a unified Germany has scarcely begun. The specter of a pan-European state highlights the increasing ambiguous position of Great Britain and seems to create unity among its members by collective antagonism toward and envy of the United States. The insecurity of eastern Europe is part of a larger dilemma facing a Russia neither quite European nor Asian. The pride and fears of a Westernized Japan remain—accentuated by the rise of a capitalist China and the unpredictability of two Koreas, who themselves promise a new unified nationalist identity, perhaps fueled by South Korean capitalism and North Korean nuclear arms. Resurgent isolationism in America grows when its own intervention is at an all-time high and yet support for it is at a historic low. Waterloo, the Somme, Verdun, Dresden, and Normandy seem the far deadlier ghosts that may well haunt the world in the future.

I am not so worried about constant warring in the millennium to come between the West and non-West—more flare-ups, for example, in the Middle East and its environs, or murderous insurrections in Africa and South America—if such theaters, despite the deadly gadgetry, remain outside the Western tradition and embrace different indigenous approaches to fighting. Rather, if history is any guide to the future, has not instead the real danger to the world’s progress and civilization always arisen when a Western army turns its deadly arsenal upon itself? If so, let us pray for another half century of aberrant European and American peace, for a few more decades of rare Western behavior so at odds with its own past. Let us remember as well that the more Western the world becomes, the more likely that all its wars will be ever more Western in nature and thus ever more deadly. We may well be all Westerners in the millennium to come, and that could be a very dangerous thing indeed. Culture is not a mere construct, but when it comes to war, a very deadly reality that often determines whether thousands of mostly innocent young men and women live or die.

Western civilization has given mankind the only economic system that works, a rationalist tradition that alone allows us material and technological progress, the sole political structure that ensures the freedom of the individual, a system of ethics and a religion that brings out the best in humankind—and the most lethal practice of arms conceivable. Let us hope that we at last understand this legacy. It is a weighty and sometimes ominous heritage that we must neither deny nor feel ashamed about— but insist that our deadly manner of war serves, rather than buries, our civilization.

AFTERWORD

Carnage and Culture
after September 11, 2001

ABOUT THREE WEEKS after the hardcover publication of
Carnage and
Culture,
terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans on the home soil of the United States. Less than a month later, on October 7, the United States responded with an air and ground assault against the suspects: the al Qaeda terrorist network and its sympathetic host government, the Islamic fundamentalists known as the Taliban of Afghanistan. Names, peoples, and places in
Carnage and Culture
that had once seemed distant and theoretical—Alexander the Great, armies of Islam, unfree Easterners, and Tet— now seem to be immediate and real as we Americans read daily of Kandahar,
jihad, burqas,
and the so-called lessons of Vietnam.

In the epilogue of
Carnage and Culture,
I had suggested that the events of the last two decades—the Falklands War, the ongoing fighting in Palestine, and the Gulf War—supported the book’s thesis of some 2,500 years of general Western military superiority across time and space. The argument was not necessarily a moral one. Rather my point was that Western approaches to culture, politics, economics, and citizens’ rights and responsibilities gave European states and their offspring military power well beyond what their relatively modest populations and territories might otherwise suggest. Recent events of the past six moths have, like military conflicts of the last twenty years, again supported that thesis.

September 11, while not a battle in the classic sense of a Salamis or Lepanto where thousands of combatants fought to the death, was in its own way a landmark engagement. More Americans died on September 11, 2001, than during any assault on America in our history. The death toll in New York and Washington was far greater than at Lexington and Concord, the Alamo, Fort Sumter, Havana harbor, the seas off Ireland where the
Lusitania
sank, or Pearl Harbor—historic attacks that also triggered earlier American wars. More importantly, September 11 was not an aberration, but in some sense the culmination of a growing divide between the Islamic and Western worlds, and followed a series of earlier killings of Americans in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and at the World Trade Center. The sheer number of American civilian dead, the growing anger at yet another unprovoked terrorist attack, and the apparent complicity of a number of sovereign states in the terrorists’ plots all released an outpouring of unprecedented American rage and prompted a military response of an intensity not seen since the Gulf War.

In less than ten weeks, the United States military removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. The Americans were faced with the logistical nightmare of fighting in a landlocked country 6,000 miles away, against terrorists and their hosts who enjoyed both internal and foreign support, and in a climate of growing tension between the Islamic and Western worlds. Despite these difficulties they routed their enemies, installed a consensual government in their place, and proceeded to wage war with their allies against terrorist cells throughout the globe in Afghanistan, Yemen, parts of the former Soviet Union, and the Philippines.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, critics doubted that the United States could be successful either in Afghanistan or against an enemy as nebulous as the global terrorist cells. Rather than examining the lethal histories of Western armies of the past, skeptics of the present cited the harsh winters in the Asian subcontinent. They conjured up the bitter experiences of the Russians and British in Afghanistan, the ghosts of Vietnam, the ferocity of the terrorists, and the fanaticism of their Taliban supporters. Few found solace in the past success of Western nations at war, even when their traditional advantages were manifest in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.—calm assemblies of our elected officials, passengers voting to attack the hijackers and sacrifice themselves to save thousands of others, massive yet spontaneous public support for the families of the deceased, and an almost immediate muster of vast American armed forces from nearly every region of the globe. Indeed, all the themes of Chapters One through Nine in
Carnage and
Culture
became quickly apparent in the hours following the attack.

Unlike the responses of the 1980s and 1990s to distant terrorist attacks, when America reacted haphazardly and impotently to such aggression, this time the government of the United States responded promptly and dramatically to the crisis. It increased domestic security, authorized multifaceted attacks abroad, and tended to the loss of almost 3,000 Americans, ensuing economic recession, and a general sense of uncertainty worldwide. Although civil libertarians worried about the implementation of new protocols of domestic surveillance—the terrorists had operated as “sleeper” cells designed to blend in with the general American population—the United States remained an open and free society whose liberty proved a far greater strength than a liability. “Operation Enduring Freedom” may have sounded simplistic to cynical critics, but it was, in fact, similar in tone and theme to the phrase chosen by Athenian sailors who rowed at Salamis, encouraging each other with cries of “
eleutheria!
”

Although Americans no longer embrace universal conscription (in a nation of 300 million people, such a draft might now entail an unnecessarily cumbersome army of 20 to 30 million youths), civic militarism was very much alive. Our pilots, Marines, and Special Forces were themselves highly motivated, disciplined, and especially lethal. Enlistees subject to military rights and responsibilities commensurate with their status as free citizens proved themselves to be more disciplined—and imaginative— than forced draftees in the armies of the Taliban. Just as Roman armies rallied after the string of defeats culminating at Cannae, so too did the United States military appear more, not less, powerful after September 11.

While the terrorists preferred to fight an asymmetrical war of stealth, in which surprise attacks and sudden terror might enable a smaller power to neutralize the superior force of its much stronger adversary, the United States was nevertheless able to marshal its overwhelming firepower—especially laser- and satellite-guided bombs—to blast enemies in sheer rock caves high in mountain peaks. Like Alexander the Great’s quest for decisive battle at Gaugamela, the Americans believed that the surest way of defeating the enemy was first to go directly to Afhanistan and identify the Taliban and al Qaeda forces, and then through air power, allied proxy forces, and specialist advisors hit them head-on, and kill as many as possible in direct confrontations.

Much attention was given to air power and its deadly use of smart bombs, which were able to destroy indivdual houses of the terrorists without wrecking the homes of the innocent. As in the war in Kosovo, the aerial campaign over Afghanistan proved that the Americans could strike at will without incurring a single pilot casualty to enemy fire. Yet, as the events of 2002 progressed, it also became clear that American ground troops were necessary to force terrorists out of their entrenchments, and that such infantry proved themselves on every occasion superior to their adversaries in close fighting. While we are no longer, like the classical Greeks or republican Romans, an agrarian nation of small landowners, the sheer vastness of the American middle class ensured that our infantrymen would be relatively well-educated, independent, and representative of the country’s popular culture—rather than poor tribesmen, shanghaied recruits, or illiterate peasants. However simplistic it may sound, thirteen centuries after Poitiers, Western infantrymen were once again fighting warriors who identified themselves as emissaries of Islam.

Of all the West’s military advantages, technology, of course, was the most remarked upon aspect of the war against terrorism. As in the case of Cortés at Tenochtitlán, the odds were all with the Westerners. The al Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban supporters possessed nothing like the American arsenal of sophisticated planes, ships, and ground weapons. In the very first weeks of the fighting in early October, the Americans displayed an uncanny ability to kill hundreds of their enemies without themselves losing a single soldier or airman. To the degree that the terrorists and the Taliban employed sophisticated weapons at all—RPG launchers, small automatic arms, and shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles—they were all imported from abroad. Like the Aztecs, the Taliban and their terrorist allies possessed the traditions neither of secular rationalism nor disinterested research that might have permitted them to create deadly weapons on par with or superior to the Americans’.

In that regard, the terrorists, like the Ottomans at Lepanto, were entirely parasitic on Western technological culture. Everything in their arsenal—from cell phones, frequent-flyer miles, and ATM cards to automatic weapons, explosive devices, and anti-aircraft missiles—was the product of Western societies.

Likewise, an abundance of capital proved to be a significant advantage to the Americans. In the weeks after September 11, the United States was able not merely to vote for new arms expenditures through its free institution of the Congress, but also to raise the necessary money to build and supply them. In addition, a potent American weapon was its ability to deny terrorists—through the freezing of bank accounts and the blockage of electronic financial transactions—access to the Western fiscal system, which they had depended upon to acquire imported weapons and supplies.

Discipline likewise proved to be a major fault line between America and its adversaries. Thus far in the war, no American troops have surrendered; thousands of Taliban soldiers and hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists gave themselves up. Allied setbacks were exclusively among our Northern Alliance proxies during the first few days of the war. Much has been written of the suicidal devotion of the al Qaeda terrorists, but so far in the war such fanaticism has not offered any widespread advantages on the battlefield. The real dangerous killers are American soldiers—who risk their lives to retrieve the bodies of fellow fighters captured and executed by the enemy—not terrorists in caves. Group discipline, unit cohesion, and strict adherence to orders allowed the Americans to kill hundreds of the enemy for each soldier lost. There is an eerie echo of Rorke’s Drift in all this. As during the Somali incursion—made famous by the book and subsequent film
Black Hawk Down
—Americans found themselves in distant landscapes, amid difficult terrain, and opposed by superior numbers of enemies who desperately wished to kill them at all costs. And as in the past, the very manner in which American soldiers fought as a closely disciplined group allowed them to inflict enormous casualties upon their foes.

A distinctive individualism has also been manifest throughout the war. Frightening new weapons—whether updated versions of “Daisy-Cutters” or novel thermobaric bombs—reflect the near instantaneous ability of individual soldiers, scientists, and manufacturers to devise new responses to new challenges. Just as the damaged
Yorktown
was repaired and rushed back into the fight at Midway, so too, after September 11, new tactics, such as on-site direction of satellite-guided munitions, and weapons were created to be adopted, modified, or rejected by individuals as the situation on the ground mandated rather than by distant governmental decree.

Domestic dissent was evident immediately after September 11, whether on the extreme fringe that suggested that America’s world role might have warranted attack or in more moderate criticism over the wisdom and practicality of fighting such an elusive enemy, one that had adeptly identified itself with the aspirations of one billion Muslims. In the midst of the war, vocal dissidents on campus and in the media complained openly about an array of issues—the morality of a military response itself, collateral bomb damage, the detention of Middle Easterners in the United States, treatment of detainees in Cuba, and the President’s identification of an “axis of evil” in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. So far even the most virulent criticism of the American government has not hampered military operations in the field. If such open public audit of, and disagreement over, military action have not always directly aided our soldiers, that critique is likely to have at least forced our armed services to be aware that every aspect of their operations will be subject to well-publicized scrutiny. Some Republicans label Democratic critics as unpatriotic; in turn, some Democrats call Republicans saber-rattlers with a lust for unending war; and out of that conundrum eventually arises a consensus in the middle, the beneficiary of both patriotic zeal and principled dissent. In the long run, I believe that this heated debate will do far more good than harm.

Carnage and Culture
was reviewed in a wide variety of newspapers, journals, and magazines, and discussed often on television and radio, here and abroad. The tragic events of September 11 gave the book a contemporary relevance, which might well have not occurred otherwise. The book’s thesis of cultural rather than environmental factors at once set it at odds, for example, with Jared Diamond’s recent
Guns, Germs, and Steel,
and the two of us subsequently debated on National Public Radio the rise and dominance of the West. Clearly I do not believe that we are waging a successful war against terrorism either because of America’s own favorable physical environment or the ancient Greeks’ past natural advantages over their neighbors.

In general the critical reaction to the book has been very positive— despite the occasional uneasiness by professors with the rather sweeping claim that history shows that Westerners fight and kill their adversaries more effectively than those drawing on other cultural traditions. Academics, of course, are by nature wary about such grand claims. And in the case of
Carnage and Culture,
specialists in fields as diverse as ancient history, medieval studies, the Spanish Conquest, the Renaissance Mediterranean, British imperial studies, and American history were surprised to see their own fields tied directly with practices of other diverse locales and eras. Military historians—such as John Keegan, Geoffrey Parker, and Dennis Showalter—wrote enthusiastically about the book; and a number of magazines and newspapers—the
Wall Street Journal,
Military History Quarterly, American Heritage, National Review
—often requested that I periodically amplify the book’s views in the context of the current war.