America and the Western Way of War

Historically Speaking · November 2001 Victor Davis Hanson America and the Western Way of War W W TF"have suffered a % ym / ^-^ great—and still %/ %/ Ë notdeter- ? ? ^^^/ mined—loss in the United States, perhaps as many killed on September 11 as at Iwo Jima, almost twice as many as the dead at Shiloh, and perhaps ten times the fatalities of the Coventry Blitz. A trillion dollars has vanished at once from our markets; forty billion dollars of Manhattan real estate was vaporized; and, more importantly, thousands of human lives were lost. But the incineration of innocent civilians in our cities is not due—pace the Taliban and Mr. Falwell—to our intrinsic weaknesses or decadence, but rather, like the Greeks in the weeks before Thermopylae, attributable to our naivete, unpreparedness, and strange ignorance of the fact.that there are some in the world who envy and hate us for who we are rather than what we have done. Yet bin Laden and the Taliban terrorists have made a fatal miscalculation. They should read Thucydides about the nature of democracies aroused, whether Athenian or Syracusan. Like all absolutists who scoff at the perceived laxity and rot of Western democracies and republics, these cowardly murderers have slapped an enormous power from its slumber, and the retribution of American democracy will shortly be both decisive and terrible, whether manifested in special operations, conventional firepower, or both. The bloody wages of this ignorance of the resilience of a free people are age-old and unmistakable— Xerxes' 60,000 washed ashore at Salamis, 80,000 of the Sultan's best floating in the waters off Lepanto, 100,000 lost in the streets ofTokyo. Over some 2,500 years of brutal warring , the real challenge for a Western power has always been another Western power—more Greeks dying in a single battle ofthe Peloponnesian War than all those who fell against the Persians, Alexander butchering more Greeks in a day than did Darius ?? in three years, the Boers killing more Englishmen in a week than the Zulus did in a year, more Americans falling at Anrietam than were killed in fifty years of frontier fighting. And in the present conflict , America is not fighting England, Germany, a westernized Japan, or even China or India, nations that so desperately seek to emulate our military organization, training, and armament. Western nations at war from the Greeks to the present are not weak, but enormously lethal—far out of proportion to their relatively small populations and territories. This frightful strength of the West is not an accident ofgeography, much less attributable to natural resources or genes. The climate of Egypt of the Pharaohs did not change under the Ptolemies, but the two were still quite different societies. Mycenaeans spoke Greek America is not only the inheritor ofthe European military tradition, hut in many ways its mostfrightful incarnation. Our multiracial and radically egalitarian society has taken the concepts offreedom and market capitalism to their theoretical limits. and raised olives, but they were a world away from the citizens ofthe city-state that later arose amid their ruins. Nor is our power merely an accident of superior technology; rather it is found in our very ideas and values. The foundations of Western culture—freedom, civic militarism , capitalism, individualism, constitutional government, secular rationalism, and natural inquiry relatively immune from political audit and religious backlash— when applied to the battlefield have always resulted in absolute carnage for their adversaries. Setbacks from Cannae to Little Big Horn led not to capitulation, but rather to study, debate, analysis—and murderous reprisals. Too few men too far away, a bad day, terrible weather, silly generals like Custer, or enemy geniuses such as Hannibal—all in the long haul can usually be trumped by a system, an approach to war that is emblematic of our very culture. For good or evil, these terrible protocols of the West at war will soon make themselves known to the ignorant in Afghanistan and beyond. Indeed, such ideals have already appeared even in the first few hours of the attack—doomed airline passengers first voting on their decision to storm the hijackers to prevent further carnage to their countrymen; the Congress freely voting...