AMERIKA'S POLICY OF TOTAL WAR
A lengthy article but well worth the read for its comprehensive
discussion of the origins of the present mindset of the holy psychotic
warriors in Washington. War and Perle's "total war" is nothing new for
Amerika. Considering the origins of the US, built as it is on the
genocide of the original inhabitants, the robbery of half Mexico and
the sweat of its enslaved black population is it any wonder that the
history of that "great" land is strewn with the corpses of Afghanis,
Iraqis,Koreans, Vietnamese, Mexicans, South Americans of every sort
and just about every country that you can think of? Indeed the only
thing surprising is that anybody anywhere has anything good to say
about this godless greed machine that is more intent than ever on
consuming this planet and whatever it can attain beyond this planet in
its megalomanicac reach for the stars.
T Dillon
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Strategies of Annihilation: Total War in US History
by Joseph R. Stromberg
According to Russell F. Weigley's The American Way of War (1977), the
United States' approach to military strategy has long rested on what
is called total war. In a nutshell, total warriors make war on an
enemy's entire society -- what the anthropologists might call its
material culture -- that is, on the enemy's resources, food and other
economic production, and on anything which might sustain the enemy's
ability to keep military forces in the field. Such war is not
exclusively modern, but looks backward towards ancient warfare, which
often entailed the slaughter of all enemy males, enslavement of enemy
women and children, and eradication of the enemy's whole existence as
an independent political society. Rome's triumph over Carthage comes
to mind.
Over the centuries -- from St. Augustine forward -- many Christian
churchmen and writers sought to lessen the horrors of war by means of
Just War theory. Their goal was to leave society in general, that is,
civilians, as untouched as possible by conflicts set off by the
quarrels of the political classes. This aim was not always realized.
According to historian John U. Nef, it was the prosperous bourgeois
city-states of Renaissance Italy which implemented the practice of
limited warfare, which came fairly close to the just war model.
The rise of large territorial monarchies, from the late 1400s onward,
broadened the scale of warfare, and the costly and bitter wars
following upon the Reformation were a setback for the notion of
"civilized warfare." It may indeed have been the sheer destructiveness
of the so-called wars of religion, which led, over time, to greater
acceptance
of limits on war-making. Wars were "bad for business," and
the growing importance of bourgeois enterprise in Europe gave added
weight to arguments against large-scale war. The 18th and 19th
centuries saw increased adherence to a code of civilized war.
It is true enough that rules were not followed very strictly in wars
involving different civilizations or cultures. There is little to
recommend the conduct of European powers in their overseas empires.
But in Europe at least, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues in Democracy: The
God That Failed, territorial monarchs had institutional incentives
both to limit the causes over which they fought their rivals and to
restrict the costs and scope of such wars. In British North America,
colonial frontier wars, or "Indian" wars, often took on the character
of wars for survival. Weigley believes that such wars gave American
war-making an early push towards the psychology of total war.
Likewise, Americans tended to conceive of the French presence in North
America as a total problem. Here an inherited English anti-Catholicism
played its role, as it did later with regard to the Spanish Empire, or
its successor states like Mexico.
In the American Revolution, destruction of British political control
was the key to victory. In regions with numerous "Tories" the war
resembled civil war and, accordingly, did approach total war. Still,
partisan warfare by local forces seeking to drive out invaders need
not become total war, if only because the enemy did not bring his own
civilians with him to serve as targets. The Americans prevailed on the
basis of a protracted war but without developing a doctrine of total
war.
The French Precedent
The wars set off by the French Revolution provided a long-run threat
to the persistence of civilized, rule-bound warfare. Able to conscript
hundreds of thousands of ideologically motivated republican citizens,
the new French state put colossal armies in the field. Napoleon
Bonaparte, an evil genius of sorts, showed how to use such mass
armies, and other powers struggled to catch up. In Prussia, Karl von
Clausewitz sought to draw theoretical lessons from these developments
in On War (Vom Kriege).
Wars had become colossal exercises in logistics and maneuver, drawing
more and more of a nation's population into their maw. In the early
20th century, the German strategic writer Hans Delbr�¼ck attempted to
sum up matters thus far. He held that there were at bottom two kinds
of war strategy: that of Niederwerfung, "suppression," and that of
Ermattung, "attrition." It should be added that these kinds of war
could conceivably obtain between actual combatants, leaving society
relatively unscathed. The steady upward ratcheting of the scale and
costs of wars had farther to go before unalloyed total war could stand
forth in fullness.
The Union-Savers' Expedients
It was in North America that the new model was first perfected. The
old union faltered in 1861. The ensuing war presented serious problems
to those who wished to "save" the union. Under the existing rules of
warfare, the defending Confederate States had a number of natural
advantages. To counter those, total war entered into Union strategy
from at least 1862. The old-school generals sacked for being
"ineffective" were precisely those who drew back from the new
philosophy of war put into practice by Generals like Pope, Sherman,
and Sheridan.
Northern policy-makers soon theorized their practice. Here Francis
Lieber has pride of place. Lieber, a German immigrant who had fought
in the wars against Napoleon, was -- out of some combination of
liberalism, romanticism, and nationalism - extremely sentimental about
the state (which Nietzsche, by contrast, called the coldest of cold
monsters). Thus Lieber could write in 1838 that "the state stands
incalculably above the individual, is worthy of every sacrifice, of
life, and goods, of wife and children, for it is the society of
societies, the sacred union by which the creator leads man to
civilization, the bond, the pacifier, the humanizer, of men, the
protector of all undertakings...."
Out of this pseudo-Hegelian waffle comes the notion that freedom can
be realized only within the modern abstract state; in the US, this
meant the allegedly indestructible union. Along with this perilous
modification of liberalism came, in practice, a legal-positivist
approach to the laws of war, embodied in General Orders No. 100, which
Lieber wrote for Lincoln's War Department.
Section 15 of these Orders reads: "Military necessity admits of all
direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and other persons
whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of
war....." Naturally, the decision as to which persons it was "whose
destruction is incidentally unavoidable" was best left to commanders
in the field, or their superiors.
A cynic might well say that this "code" allowed for the after-the-fact
justification of anything a commander might claim had been "necessary"
to achieve military objectives. One such cynic was James Seddon,
Confederate Secretary of War, who commented: "[I]n this code of
military necessity... the acts of atrocity and violence which have
been committed by the officers of the United States and have shocked
the moral sense of civilized nations are to find an apology and
defense." Further, "a military commander under this code may pursue a
line of conduct in accordance with principles of justice, faith, and
honor, or he may justify conduct correspondent with the warfare of the
barbarous hordes who overran the Roman Empire...."
In 1915, historian John Bigelow characterized the war thus:
"Depredation and spoliation, especially in the latter part of the war
were the general policy of Lincoln's government; and as a matter of
fact Eastern Virginia and other parts of the South were swept clearer
than the Shenandoah Valley of everything useful to man and beast." And
historian Charles Royster observed in 1991 that the "Civil War, as
practiced by the belligerents and characterized by Sherman,
implemented two propositions which later wars took much further: that
the nation and the nation's professed ideals admit no necessary limit
in their fight to prevail; that the methods of waging war do not
differ categorically if at all between the belligerent whose cause is
labeled just and the belligerent whose cause is labeled unjust.
Neither of these propositions commands universal assent, yet modern
belligerents have acted as if they were true."
Given the assumption of a right to win, the property and even the
lives of enemy civilians began to weigh much less than they had in the
older rules of war. Faced with such matters, Lincoln apologists
typically resort to what historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel calls the
Hitler-Stalin-Mao test. Clearly, Sherman's March falls far short of
that.
For one such historian, the fact that Northern soldiers did not
directly shoot civilians is a sufficient proof of the humanity of the
war. This is all well and good, but one would like an explanation for
the roughly 50,000 missing Southern civilians of all colors and
creeds. They seem to have perished from causes attendant on the war,
once it became a war against property and economic resources.
In July 1862, Lincoln rather typically told Southern unionists, who
were complaining of Northern seizures of property that "broken eggs
cannot be mended" -- a statement which puts him directly in the line
of Jacobin-Bolshevik political ruthlessness. As a result of all this,
Lincoln has become "famed for his compassion," in historian James M.
McPherson's words. It would appear that Lincoln's myth has long since
outrun the facts.
So why dwell on that war? One dwells there precisely because that war
became the template, the ideological framework, within which policies
were made and within which all respectable discussions took place ever
after. To be very brief, General Grant showed what could be done with
grand Napoleonic battles of annihilation (or "combats" in Weigley's
terms) undertaken with cheap conscripts. Confederate commanders
obliged him by doing much the same. This was very costly in manpower,
and more importantly, politically. Northern war weariness threatened
to bring about peace before salvation of the union had been achieved.
The Southern States had only to remain unconquered.
To break out of this box, the Northern leadership turned Sherman,
Sheridan, and others loose on Southern society as such. By living off
the resources of the enemy, Sherman could ignore problems of supply
while "making Georgia howl," as he delicately put it. Of $100 million
dollars in property damage inflicted on his famous march, Sherman
bragged that just $20 million had a real military purpose and the
remaining $80 million was "simple waste and destruction."
Thus the preferred strategy became one of making war on the enemy's
society generally, to undermine his armies in the field. Having led to
victory, Lincoln's policies are now taken as sacred text, precedent,
and proof that all later actions of a like kind are rightful and just,
without anyone ever offering proof that the original acts were
rightful and just. For the moment, we may chalk this up to an
ineradicable American pragmatism, and go on. After all, Lincoln's
generals won, and this carries great moral weight in some circles.
A military technician, ignoring questions raised by old-fashioned
morality, could easily consider Sherman's strategy a brilliant
shortcut. Such was the judgment, for example, of Captain B. H.
Liddell-Hart, British military theorist and historian. Defenders of
total war make much of the way in which it allegedly "saves lives" by
shortening the war. It seems likely that total war distributes deaths
differently between the belligerents than would otherwise happen --
and at higher total numbers.
Plains Indians
Before drawing any conclusions, we must continue our cook's tour of US
wars. The connection between total war and Indian Wars has already
been mooted. It is probably no accident that General Sherman had seen
service in the Second Seminole War in the early 1840s. He hated being
attacked by mobile opponents able to disappear, and called for total
eradication of the Seminole people.
As for General Sheridan, he told his subordinates about to engage
western Indians, "I want you to be bold, enterprising, and at all
times full of energy, when you begin, let it be a campaign of
annihilation, obliteration and complete destruction...." In these
little wars, wanton destruction of buffalo herds was aimed at
eliminating the enemy's food source. Pained by criticism of his total
war tactics against Indians, Sheridan - in a letter to his old comrade
Sherman -- asked rhetorically, "Did we cease to throw shells into
Vicksburg or Atlanta because women and children were there?" Of course
they had not.
Present at Prussian Headquarters as an observer during the
Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Sheridan espoused the gospel of total
war. "The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over
the war," he told the Prussians. The New World thus enlightened the
Old.
Spanish-American War and Philippine "Insurrection"
The Spanish-American War (1898) was too brief to offer much in the way
of advances in total war. It is mainly interesting as the beginning of
US overseas empire, formal and informal. What is interesting is the
sequel, the so-called Philippine Insurrection (1899-1902).
To make good the real estate deal with Spain, which brought the
Philippine Islands under US sovereignty, a costly counter-insurgency
was fought. General Orders No. 100 were allegedly still in force, but
proved flexible enough to permit the deaths of some 200,000 Filipinos,
mostly non-combatants, before the US was able to claim victory and
begin administering its new-found "India."
Historians keen on finding ironies might turn their attention from the
American South for a few minutes and savor these: The US, having
denounced Spanish "atrocities" in Cuba from 1895-1898, adopted the
same tactics to subdue the Filipinos. The US was simply more
effective. By a wonderful coincidence, Britain was in these same years
waging a counter-insurgency in South Africa against the Afrikaner
people. The Anglo-American relationship thrived on the shared
experience, and the two governments conspicuously refrained from
criticizing one another's tactics in dealing with "rebels."
World War I
World War I took the Napoleonic model of colossal combats, which
sacrificed big mobs of conscripted cannon fodder, to new heights.
Millions could take part. Now, Europeans experienced the costly sort
of war undertaken by Grant and Lee. In an effort to find a way out,
short of calling the damned thing off (that would never do), the
powers looked around for previously unlawful means of punishing the
enemy's society.
Britain undertook a starvation blockade of Germany. Germany responded
with submarine warfare against neutral shipping. The latter helped
bring the US into the war with a mixed bag of sordid mercantilist
goals and high idealism.
All across the board, the old rules of war gave way - in the direction
of total war. The most that can be said is that the settlement was in
some ways worse than the war itself, setting the stage for the next
European civil war as well as for the present excitement in the Middle
East. Finally, interesting experiments with aircraft seemed to herald
even better ways of making war on the enemy's entire society.
Air Power Bids Fair to Solve All Technical Problems
In the wake of World War I, Italian General Guido Douhet theorized
that aerial bombardment would be the key to winning future wars.
Intimidation of civilian populations would cause them to make their
governments yield to an enemy's will. It was British and American
strategists who took up the theme and tailored their air forces to the
task of saturation bombing, unlike such powers as Germany and Soviet
Russia.
In 1925, Captain Elbridge Colby, US Army, helped formulate the US
attitude towards air power as an instrument of total war. He wrote
that a "belligerent will not wish to risk his planes and pilots,
expend his gasoline, or waste his munitions, on any objectives except
those of military importance." This was already problematic, given the
US tradition of defining "military targets" rather broadly.
Colby went on to say that everyone knows that bombing is highly
inaccurate. "Innocent people are bound to be struck," he says, even if
the bomber's intention is to strike a genuinely military target [my
italics]. He surveyed standing legal doctrine and concluded, rather
predictably, that since adherence to the rules would virtually outlaw
bombing, it was the rules, not the bombing, which must yield. No one,
he said, could possibly be expected to forego wielding such a
convenient and useful weapon. Interestingly, he cites British bombing
of Afghanistan in May 1919 as telling precedent.
World War II and the Fulfilment of Total War
World War II was the apotheosis of total war. This may explain its
lasting popularity with proponents of political management of human
life. Deliberate carpet-bombing of cities to kill civilians as such
came into its own. The most that one can say is that in Europe it was
mainly the British who insisted on targeting cities per se, while the
Americans stuck to targets of military significance, albeit under
their rather broad and careless definitions. In the Far East, US air
forces firebombed Japanese cities and civilians with great abandon.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in both theatres.
Historian David M. Kennedy writes: "[T]he great nuclear blast that
obliterated Hiroshima hardly represented a moral novelty by this date
in the conflict. The moral rules that had long stayed the warriors'
hands from taking up weapons of mass destruction against civilian
populations had long since been violently breached…."
Of the bombings of Japan, General Curtis LeMay said: "You've got to
kill people, and when you've killed enough, they stop fighting." This
goes beyond even General Sherman's wildest rhetoric -- and action --
but states a proposition widely accepted as self-evident truth by
contemporary Americans. Nuclear bombs fulfilled the total warrior's
dream, but had the odd side-effect of making major wars so potentially
costly as to be unthinkable for the foreseeable future.
Hot Wars within the Cold War: Korea and Vietnam
In the Korean War, the US doctrine of total war and hysterically broad
use of overwhelming firepower got further exercise. General Emmett
O'Donnell commented: "I would say that the entire, almost the entire,
Korean peninsula, is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed.
There is nothing standing worthy of the name.... Just before the
Chinese came in we were grounded. There were no more targets in
Korea."
Even Churchill, never bomb-shy when it came to Germany, objected to US
use of napalm in Korea. (2,300 gallons were used in one attack on
Pyongyang.) To quote the jovial Curtis LeMay again: "We burned down
just about every city in North and South Korea both.... We killed off
over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from
their homes." Given such a mode of waging war, one might think that
even those allegedly being "protected" by these exercises would begin
to have their doubts.
Of Vietnam, I shall say very little. Only those who have been asleep
will be unaware that civilian deaths in Southeast Asia resulting from
the US mode of warfare match, or exceed those in Korea, especially
when other parts of Indo-China are taken into account. It does not
change such facts to point at other ruthless forces, such as the Khmer
Rouge. In any case, consistency on the part of those doing the
pointing would require them to explain why such a public enemy as Pol
Pot could later be the recipient of US support after his colorful
career as murderer "of his own people."
Perhaps the only novelty in Vietnam was the high-flown social
scientific theorizing attached to the bombing campaign. This was an
interesting application of behaviorist rat-psychology, which, however,
cast more doubt on the methodology than on the putative rats. As in
World War II, bombing did not have the desired and predicted effect on
enemy popular morale. Such unhappy outcomes have never made believers
in air power lose heart.
We must note, in passing, extensive US bombing of irrigation dams in
North Vietnam in late 1972, intended to destroy rice crops on which
the population depended. This was a real Nuremburg War Crimes Trial
item, but no one ever appeared in court. Noam Chomsky heroically
brought these matters, both theory and practice, to public attention
many years ago, which may account for his skepticism about subsequent
US crusades. For this well-earned scepticism he is currently being
pilloried by the neo-conservatives.
Total War With A Human Face?
In the post-Cold War period, we have begun to see a re-packaging of US
public doctrine into a new system of discourse or representations of
how wars are actually conducted. Bombs and rockets are now much
friendlier. Civilians are no longer harmed "unnecessarily," given the
unspeakable accuracy and precision of the new, improved weaponry.
The spin is that no one who knows the deep moral rectitude of US
statesmen could now dream that civilians are ever targeted on purpose.
Naturally, there is some slippage in warfare, they say, but one has to
expect that. Even so, the deaths of some 600 Iraqi civilians in the
Amiriya bomb shelter during the Gulf War did require some fancy
footwork from the spokespersons, even granting the generous US notion
of "target."
But what were the "targets" in Iraq? They were precisely what applied
total war doctrine says they should be: everything that supports the
enemy's society -- water systems, electrical production, bridges,
roads, - but the point is made. If these things can be destroyed
without directly killing large numbers of civilians, so much the
better in the new, kindlier total war.
The PR flacks may reinvent total war all they wish, with ribbons and
bows, but the old concerns still peek out. Thus, an essay in the
Marine Corps Gazette (October 1989), written by five officers,
sketches out a theory of "fourth generation" warfare to deal with
changing conditions abroad. In this brave new world, "tactical and
strategic levels will blend as the opponent's political infrastructure
and civilian society become battlefield [!] targets" [my italics].
Elsewhere, this gets a friendlier face as "a goal of collapsing the
enemy internally rather than physically destroying him [a distinction
with not much of a difference?]. Targets will include such things as
the population's support for the war and the enemy's culture [my
italics]. Correct identification of enemy strategic centers of gravity
will be highly important."
This sounds pretty total to me. Of course they also warn that we must
watch out for reprisals on American soil. Yes, one might wish to allow
for that.
The public attention span is short. If a half million Iraqi civilians
(or more) die from lack of civilized infrastructure, combined with a
blockade poorly hidden behind the weasel word "sanctions," the public
may never notice. This is the sheer genius of the present
transformation of total war. The new total war is indirect and subtle
and, therefore, less likely to arouse concerns about its costs, much
less its morality. Hence the effort to disguise each new effort --
Iraq, Kosovo, or the present ill-defined "war' -- with the fig leaf of
the UN, NATO, or some other coalition of the Good against the Bad.
What we see is an effort to achieve global hegemony on the cheap. It
is especially important that it be cheap politically -- at home. If it
costs a large amount of money, that can be discounted as imperial
overhead, particularly if costs can be shifted onto some of the
overseas provinces. As self-licensed counterfeiters to the world, US
leaders can achieve some of this through routine monetary inflation.
And why should allied foreign power elites get a free ride, anyway?
The State of Play at the Beginning of the Third Millennium
Of collateral damage, i.e., dead civilians, in the present campaign
against the Fuzzy Wuzzies, British Secretary of State for Defense
Geoff Hoon has lately opined: "There is always going to be a risk that
cannot be avoided." Not for him, one imagines. This suggests that even
having an air force adds up to an intention to commit war crimes. Time
was when one could tell a power's air strategy by the kinds of
aircraft built. US total warriors have ruined even this test by
turning fighter jets into virtual bombers by means of those much
advertised rockets.
But consider the phrase, "collateral damage." It has almost become an
embarrassment because of overuse during the Gulf War. Nonetheless, it
is organically linked to the doctrine of Good Intentions. The US never
intends to harm civilians. Therefore, any actual harming of civilians
is unintentional, accidental, and morally neutral. The mere fact that,
empirically, a broad notion of targeting and seemingly endless
munitions lead to rather sloppy results is not felt as refutation of
the foregoing. One might ask the several hundred Panamanians --
citizens of a friendly nation with whom the US was not at war --
killed during the comic opera "arrest" of Manuel Noriega, about that.
By now, we are back to Lincoln and the classic doctrine. As it now
stands, US total war doctrine holds that as long as one's heart is
pure, one's goals - however impossible -- are "humanitarian," and
one's domestic political system is democratic, one may do literally
anything to defeat a proclaimed enemy society. This represents a
projection of the trauma of 1861-1865, as experienced by the Northern
leadership, onto the entire globe. Glory, glory, hallelujah, untruths
go marching on. This is why Lincoln is so heavily drawn on, in these
moments, as precedent, justification, and inspirational (if
depressive) genius and patron saint of all US wars.
There have been many examples of the "if Lincoln did it, it must be
right" genre lately. Every leftist, liberal, centrist, and
neo-conservative defender of empire has weighed in just such terms,
mainly in aid of increased surveillance and new inroads on civil
liberties. In his useful book, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Gulf
War (1993), Rick Atkinson played this card to rationalize the famous
"turkey shoot," i.e., the mass slaughter by US-coalition forces of
tens of thousands of retreating Iraqi conscripts. Those defeated
forces in no way endangered allied forces, unless the US coalition
really intended to occupy and reinvent Iraq. Nonetheless, allied
forces simply massacred them because it was in their power to do so.
Little of the warrior ethic was on display there.
But Atkinson brings the ultimate argument to bear: "The law of war -
the orders signed by Abraham Lincoln before Gettysburg were an example
- permitted an attack on enemy combatants, whether advancing,
retreating, or standing still." Further: "The prevalent American
military philosophy since the Civil War had embraced a 'strategy of
annihilation,' the relentless bludgeoning of an enemy to destroy his
armed forces and ability to wage war."
It is time, then, for a discussion of ends and means in relation to
war and peace. Clever fellows like Jonah Goldberg like to deconstruct
the popular saying, "The end doesn't justify the means." Quite so.
Means do justify ends. The question is whether or not particular ends
hallow any and every old means one could come up with.
The total warriors have had their say about this for nearly a century
and a half. Their later theorizings, most notably during the High Cold
War at the hands of such worthies as Hermann Kahn, Henry Kissinger,
and the like, amounted to a gross distortion of Just War theory. They
sought to focus all attention on jus ad bellum, i.e., whether or not a
particular cause was just. It cannot be said that they did a
strikingly good job on this front or that their efforts had much to do
with actually existing US foreign policy.
Of jus in bello, i.e., what means were morally supportable in war,
they said rather little. The Good Intentions took care of that. This
goodness radiated outwards, enveloping all US military practices --
and indeed all conceivable US military practices -- with the all the
finality of a newly discovered 14th Amendment "penumbra" wiping out a
longstanding constitutional interpretation. The Good could do no Bad.
Conversely, the Bad could do no Good. No weapon, however massively
destructive, was immoral or frightening in the hands of the Good, just
as no weapon, however modest or plausibly related to self-defense,
could be suffered in the hands of the Bad.
Under this genial doctrine, there are entirely good nations, whose
every act, of whatever kind, against certified entirely bad nations
must needs be rightful and true. Doubters are told to gird themselves
up with a pseudo-Stoicism which holds that "broken eggs cannot be
mended." Things just happen, you know, when just crusades are afoot.
One begins to wonder if this construction is not as crazy and
unlimited, in its own way, as Soviet Marxism-Leninism ever was. A look
at the recent rash of neo-conservative writings on the present crisis
suggests that only an explanation in terms of mistaken theology will
suffice. This brings us to the decayed Puritanism of the "savers" and
re-founders of the Union (the Founders having been mainly
Southerners). Historian William Appleman Williams writes of the New
England Puritans that their externalization of evil onto their
opponents "not only distorted the Puritans' own doctrine, it inclined
them toward a solution which involved the extension of their system
over others." Q. E. D.
This world outlook, decayed or otherwise, still partly animates the
ongoing US crusade. Matters are even worse in that US leaders have the
resources to pursue their post-Protestant "vision of omnipotence" (to
quote Williams again), since the American economy still functions
fairly well, in contrast to the late Soviet economy. They have in hand
the means to pursue their Faustian dream. And yet, despite all the
expensive "defense" they provide us with, we seem increasingly unsafe.
What Might Be the Alternative?
But let us return to the strategic front. Weigley observes that
already in 1926, a writer in the Naval Institute Proceedings, William
Howard Gardner, had spotted a flaw in the US leaders' ambitions:
"There is great importance in the fact that in a war between the
United States and an Asiatic power the latter's aims would seem
distinctly 'limited' to many Americans, whereas, in order to maintain
our position in Asiatic affairs, we might have to aim at 'unlimited'
reduction of the enemy's country, though not necessarily by invasion
in force. In other words, the geographic distribution of interests is
such that the inauguration of a 'limited' war by an Asiatic power
would be likely to compel us to carry through an 'unlimited' war to
victory as the only alternative to accepting defeat. Consequently, the
enemy's combativeness would be aroused to the utmost while some among
us probably would rather yield than continue the war."
It is interesting that Weigley refers to this as "the American
problem" [my italics]. It certainly is that, provided US leaders
insist on world hegemony. One has to believe in quite a lot of
high-flown and farfetched world-land theory in the tradition of
Mackinder and Haushofer to buy that project. I shall soon undertake a
web search to see if Zbigniew Brzezinksi, an architect of our
"successful" Afghan caper of the 1980s, has written much on whether or
not the moon is made of ice.
Our only hope of deliverance from our pending transformation into an
ersatz British Empire lies in adopting a different conception of
American foreign policy. This would mean giving up Lincoln's idea of
America as the "last best hope" of mankind, and his successors'
program of exporting our blessings by force. This would mean a final,
fond farewell to the civic religion forged in the fires of Atlanta and
Columbia.
While Russell Weigley has been a good guide to the United States'
philosophy of war, he has said little about the necessity or merits of
those wars. For this, we turn to Williams, whose work was a
single-minded, radical critique of the US Empire and its Open Door
ideology. To this we add the free market economics of Murray Rothbard,
which shows us how to disaggregate, or unpack, the ideological
categories of the prevailing system.
In those quasi-Hegelian categories, the empire is the only possible
"realm of freedom." Freedom is, in fact, precisely that which the
empire allows or commands. All else is anarchy or oppression. Rothbard
starts with the simplest lesson of all: the state is not the nation,
the state is not the people, and the state is not society. See
especially, Murray N. Rothbard, "War, Peace, and the State" in
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (2000), pp.
115-132, for the wide-ranging consequences of this simple insight.
I have no space here to dwell on how war invariably strengthens the
state. I take that as given. With empire, we have far too many
opportunities for war, and therefore for state aggrandizement.
Americans need to decide whether they wish to regain their freedoms.
If they do not, they can sign up for the "national greatness" and
imperialism offered by the neo-conservatives.
One of the burdens Americans will bear, if they choose the latter
path, will be the costs -- in life, liberty, property, and social
morality -- of total war. The point of this essay has not been to make
anyone feel guilty about the methods used in past wars. I know no one,
personally, who burned Atlanta or bombed Dresden. It is just that,
given the track record of the strategists we have had, if we stay on
the imperial highway, sooner or later some of us will be asked to
undertake, or acquiesce in, the inglorious deeds of total war, however
sanitized and repackaged they may be. I don't know if we should really
want that for our children or our grandchildren.
What is needed is an historically formed understanding of the pattern
of US wars; how certain kinds of challenge, and not others, call forth
an armed response; how pretended "negotiations" always break down,
systematically; how loveable, local revolutionary "allies" are always
shoved to one side while the US appropriates their cause, from 1898
on; how war immediately becomes total war; how the proper authorities
always demand Unconditional Surrender, as if such a demand were
normal; how widespread destruction gives way, after victory, to
sentimental but profitable "reconstruction" of the chastened foe. In
short, what we need is the historical vision we never got in high
school.
A Final Observation
In his exhaustive account of US military practice, Weigley remarks
that America has produced only one gifted practitioner of the war of
attrition (partisan war), General Nathaniel Greene. I ask, Why might
that be? I answer that it is because the Revolution was in most
respects a just war of defense, and not a war for empire. It has been
a long time since we fought a war which was clearly of that character.
October 25, 2001
Joseph R. Stromberg [send him mail] is the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian
in Residence at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for
Antiwar.com.
Created By: Tony Dillon