
John David Lewis |
Review of Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury,
War: Ends and Means. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Potomac Books,
2006. Pp. 382. ISBN 978-1-57488-610-8. |
Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury are clear about
their purpose: "This book was written to open contemporary minds to
the essential truths of war, lest those truths intrude of their own
accord" (1). Americans, residents of the "magic kingdom," know
little of war because it little impacts their lives. After 9/11,
"The inhabitants knew enough to be frightened, but not enough to
understand." This new edition of the 1989 original has been edited
by Codevilla (Seabury died in 1991) and updated with an expanded
treatment of "victory," as well as new chapters on "Indirect Warfare
and Terror," post-Cold War conflicts, and the two wars in Iraq. The
book is a valuable and comprehensive primer on basic issues in
warfare for its targeted non-professional readers. The writing is
lucid, without jargon, and can be read in sections. At every step,
War offers multiple examples to support its conclusions, while
foregrounding questions that free people must understand.
The overall architecture of the book is built
from the abstract to the concrete, in four parts: How Wars Start,
How Wars are Fought, How Wars End, and Wars of Our Time. The
Introduction lays out seventeen "basic realities" that the authors
believe the present generation needs to understand about war. The
most fundamental of the book's premises relates to the basic cause
of war, which is not, contrary to the social scientists that War
opposes, such "deterministic" factors and "generic causes" as
biology, culture, arms races, balances of power, etc. Such
categories do not separate "correlation from cause" and as a result
cannot offer reliable predictions. Nor is it true that personal
aggressiveness among citizens makes a nation more likely to go to
war: "A nation of submissive robots may be more easily led to battle
than one of aggressive individualists" (38). The best explanations,
War maintains, are "voluntaristic": wars are chosen human actions,
taken for moral purposes, and war is a clash of purposes. This
explanation views accidents and circumstances of necessity as
causally unimportant to the choice to fight or not.
War places the responsibility for war on human
beings and disavows mechanistic excuses for waging war or failing to
do so when it is necessary. There is a complex relationship between
the leadership of a nation and its population; a regime cannot fight
a war if the population is not willing to do so. But how this works
on a social and cultural level is less than clear. On the one hand,
culture is not an explanation for war; neither culture nor genes,
War maintains, changed for the Japanese after 1945 (272-3). The
culture changed slowly, but the Japanese "propensity for war"
changed quickly (37). On the other hand, "some cultures are indeed
inherently more peaceful than others" (36). War is clear that the
"causes" for which men fight--and their moral purposes--must be
defeated, by "stripping hope from the enemy's causes" (55-6). But
missing here is a firm recognition of ideology and its role in the
waging of war. History suggests that cultures dominated by certain
systems of ideas or moral goals are indeed inherently more warlike,
and can be led very quickly by an ambitious leadership to a violent
expression of the dominant ideas of a given culture.
War consistently focuses on the proper goal of a
war--to establish peace, with due emphasis on the varieties of peace,
from the peace of the grave to the peace of a dictatorship. In every
case, peace is a condition that follows from a certain
"satisfaction": "peace is kind of satisfaction or tranquility in
the order of things" (15). For example, in the nineteenth century,
the British ruled Afghanistan, "never totally but with much less
trouble than the Soviets" in the 1980s. "The explanation is simple.
The Afghans never saw the British as a threat to what they hold
dearest: Islam .... They saw the Soviet occupation as a mortal threat
to their immortal souls" (28-9). But does this not demand an
ideological explanation? Is it not the ideas of the Afghans that
allow them to value Islam as they do--and the ideas of the British
and the Soviets that motivated them to act as they did? And how
would this relate to War's derivation of the western conception of
peace from the Christian tradition, which "values peace so highly
because peace is conducive to spiritual life" (16)? Christians have
fought over their own and others' immortal souls for centuries--and
Muslims have a tradition that seeks the spiritual life. Was peace
really the "primordial goal of Christian statecraft" when Christians
came to rule the Roman state? Is not the separation of church from
statecraft a political requirement of peace?
There are multiple issues at stake here. War
maintains, for instance, that because deterministic explanations
have failed to distinguish correlation from cause, they have failed
to predict any war or peace (36). Yet War also affirms that the very
attempt to make predictions is flawed: "history's clearest teaching
about war is its utter unpredictability" (11). Part of the problem
is that War does not offer an adequate alternative to the
"deterministic" explanations it rejects. It substitutes "regimes" as
the difficulty: people of all sorts "are animated by particular
regimes that call forth certain human qualities and suppress others"
(37). The regime is more than the government: it is "the persons who
set society's tone, its habits, who enjoy its best fruits, and who
make it what it is" (332). For Iraq under Saddam Hussein, this was
"the ruling Ba'ath Party, which was coterminous with the elite of
the country's Sunni Muslim majority--a bare minimum of some two
thousand people" (332). But why did the majority accept this regime
and allow it to set the society's "tone"? What exactly are the
"qualities" that regimes elicit in some cultures and not others, and
why don't people necessarily embrace peace when a regime is removed?
One of the sharpest conclusions in this book is
that victory is the sine qua non of peace. Indeed, but why? If the
problem of just war is "a problem of regimes" (247), then why didn't
replacing a regime necessarily alter a nation's "propensity to war"?
Why did Germany, whose regime was replaced in 1918, launch a new war
twenty years later, while Japan, whose emperor (and many of its
politicians) remained in place after 1945, did not? Japan's culture,
War maintains, has been the same after as it had been before the
war; it was "turned" to commerce by MacArthur in a "cultural
conquest" because he induced the Japanese to "want" this (272-3).
But why do they now "want" this? If it is "impossible to define
peace" because it is a "kind of satisfaction or tranquility in the
order of things" (15, 274-5), then why are the Japanese now
satisfied? How did Allied victories in 1945 end the ideologies--and
the claims to territory, vengeance, and the like--that had brought
about a continental war between France and Germany? The authors omit
to discuss the ideas that led the Germans and the Japanese to make
war in the 1930s and to reject it for two generations since.
War is explicit about the need to specify
objectives as the only way to pierce the "fog of war": "Anyone
entering the fog is best advised to fix his eye on the only reliable
compass, victory" (70). The "only reliable guide through the fog of
war is an understanding of one's own purposes" (304-5); the "fog" is
itself "the result of the unpredictable interaction of incalculable
human factors" (63). "Purpose is the very essence of war" (43), and
only with reference to a purpose can we derive and understand our
objectives. Because war is a clash of purposes, it is necessarily
unpredictable, and a battle is "uncontrollable chaos" (59). Precise
planning, akin to Robert McNamara's counting of the number of
howitzers the United States would need in the next war, is the wrong
approach (68). The only way to pierce the fog, War maintains, is to
focus on victory, based on knowledge of the enemy, with a firm
understanding of the ends to be achieved. Granted, such a focus is
crucially important, but, paradoxically, War also complicates any
understanding of the causes and goals that should motivate nations.
It is surely easier to say that we should focus on victory as our
purpose than to determine which regimes we should target and why,
and what we should do after they fall.
War's analyses of events in our own time--the
Soviet Empire, the Balkan wars, Somalia, and America's two forays
into Iraq--should be required reading. In particular, the discussion
of how ill-defined or undefined American purposes led to failure in
Iraq in 1991--precisely because it was impossible to derive proper
objectives without those purposes--connects the book's theoretical
conclusions with the practice of war. "In short, the U.S. government
never formulated a set of objectives that, if achieved, would have
satisfied the purposes for which it entered the war" (307). As a
result, the American army "killed thousands of people who meant
little or nothing to the issue of the war," the Iraqi faceless
soldiers, while leaving alive "the one man who meant everything,"
Saddam Hussein (317). Since America had "no political or military
weaknesses, Saddam could rely only on the muddleheaded thinking of
its leaders" (310).
War takes a particularly contentious position on
the issue of terror today, downplaying the importance of ideas and
claiming Islamic fundamentalism has little effect: "Political
circumstances more than religion were responsible for the rise of
religious terrorism against both locals and westerners" (189). The
unification of anti-western political movements with
Islamists--including attempts by secular regimes to "put on an
Islamic face--has both strengthened these movements and watered-down
their religious essence. The claim that Islamic fundamentalism is
the cause of terrorism is a "fallacious conclusion" (192) that has
led us to chase Osama bin Laden through the mountains rather than
ending the regimes that threaten us.
But the question remains: why did those regimes
"put on an Islamic face," including scathing anti-American rhetoric,
if not to appeal to the religious beliefs of their populations? War
is certainly right to observe that the U.S. policy of targeting
individual terrorists while allowing regimes to escape is wrong and
that the fall of bad regimes--in Berlin and Moscow--was the sine qua
non of peace (343). But the fall of those regimes was accompanied by
an identification of the evil ideologies--Nazism and Communism--that
underlay them. If history is any guide, until and unless the
ideology behind Islamist terrorism is identified, the fall of any
particular regime will only lead to a new one--as the fall of one
Kaiser in 1918 led to a new Kaiser in 1933.
From the political and material conditions of
war, to the differences between land, sea, and air battle, to
propaganda, intelligence, and political warfare, a wealth of issues
here bear upon present-day war making. To take just one example, War
does a superb job of de-mystifying nuclear weapons. Contrary to
popular understanding, nuclear warfare would not have been a matter
of pushing a button and annihilating the world. To stop a Soviet
land invasion of Europe, thousands of weapons would be needed, with
varying levels of power and with different applications. The purpose
of nuclear testing is not to make bigger bombs, but to make them
smaller and more precise. "Between the 1960s and the 1990s," the
U.S. Army had some four thousand nuclear artillery rounds in Europe
alone, and nuclear land mines made the Soviet-Turkish border the
safest part of NATO defenses. Such weapons restored the advantage to
the defense in ground combat, which also offered an "enormous
incentive to shoot first" (134-6). As in many areas touched on in
this book, experts will find these issues familiar, but most
Americans will not; the authors have done a valuable service by
collecting them in a single volume.
This book is by no means a militaristic treatise:
it condemns, for instance, certain Allied actions in World War II,
in some cases stretching the evidence. Japan, it is claimed, was
"asking to surrender since April 1945" (132), an (undocumented)
assertion not born out by statements of Japanese leaders at the
time. Strategic bombing "meant the outright murder of millions" and
was pursued by the Roosevelt administration because it was "overcome
by hate, and irrational and unjust desire to punish rather than to
win" (236-7). Scrutiny of FDR's relationship with Stalin is welcome,
and War rightly challenges its impact on the conduct of the war, but
leaves open certain question of ends and means, and why these
murderous methods led to long-term peace. The book integrates the
moral and the practical here--the military goal of killing those
"most likely to stop the killing" is both ethically responsible and
practical. But why were the practical results of such actions in
World War II as good as they were? Perhaps it was necessary--despite
the horror--to inflict such pain on the population that had elected
Hitler, and built his gas chambers, in order to crush the desire for
war.
The comprehensiveness of this book spurs such
questions, and readers should take my criticisms as constructively
intended. One hates to interject a problem with the final production
of such a book, but it is necessary. The index has been neither
properly compiled nor checked. As the book progresses, page
references in the index go increasingly askew: for example, "Japan,
intentions of, 231-32" is actually at 233-4. There is no entry for
Hiroshima, which appears on pages 11, 132, 236, and perhaps
elsewhere, although there is one for Dresden (listed at 235,
actually 237). Carthage, listed at 267 (actually 269), is unlisted
at page 11. The Introduction has not been properly indexed. One
hopes for correction of such blemishes in subsequent printings of
this important book. Social Philosophy and Policy Center
Bowling Green State University
classicalideals@yahoo.com |