The Return of Total War Theory
Thomas Sowell has an interesting article up today, which I believe directly ties into my argument that bringing clarity to the Middle East via democracy is a good thing. He is talking about the fallacies of pacifism:Take the Middle East. People are calling for a cease-fire in the interests of
peace. But there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere
else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most
peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.
Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany
and Japan? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in the process.
Indeed, American prisoners of war died when we bombed Germany.
There is a reason why General Sherman said "war is hell" more than a century ago. But he helped end the Civil War with his devastating march through Georgia -- not by cease fires or bowing to "world opinion" and there were no corrupt busybodies
like the United Nations to demand replacing military force with diplomacy.
There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less
attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to
the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated.
It is worth noting that the Belmont Club has a similar observation with regards to the distinction between morale bombing and surgical strikes as war-making methodology:
The second thing to remember is that we are now seeing in Lebanon and in the
Global War on Terror in general, a replay of the old argument between precision
strikes and morale bombing. Israel the advocate of the precision strike,
Hezbollah the advocate of morale bombing; recalling that for most of history it
is the morale bombers who have won. It's worth pondering how technology changes
the rules of war.
Commentary:
With the exception of Vietnam, morale bombing has proven decisive in all of the major wars of the twentieth century. Ridiculously accurate surgical strikes, and the technology to show videos of them to the world on CNN, create false expectations of zero collateral damage in war. The UN and various pacifist organizations create an environment in which aggression is not truly punished (i.e. by annihilation of the aggressor country) and therefore deterred. This is a political tinderbox. Exhibits A and B are Iraq, and Israel's current war on Hezbollah.
How does this tie into my idea about democracy and clarity? In the current prototypical Middle Eastern autocracy, the regime and the people can legitimely be seen as two separate entities because the regime is not derived from the will of the people. If a bad regime (Saddam Hussein, for example) does bad things, and the US has to correct the problem - it is forced to attempt to topple the regime while not harming the people. The people have nothing to do with the dictator, for the most part. As such, our military faces an almost impossible task - how to topple a regime while inflicting as little damage as possible on the civilian population (and infrastructure, etc...)? Thus the "surgical strike" monster from the blogs referenced above comes to life, and our probability of decisive victory drops accordingly.
With democratic clarity, a total war can be fought and won against our enemies. If the Arab people want to elect terrorists to lead them, they can - but it will not be without severe costs. Sure it sounds bloodthirsty, but let's not forget that WW2 cost about 50 million lives around the world, and no one is arguing that beating fascism was a waste of time or resources. It is perhaps the crowning achievement of civilization in the 20th century.
Who knows - perhaps we fight a total war or two against our enemies, and our other enemies will think twice before misbehaving?
posted by JM @ 3:36 PM
<< Home