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Why Study War?
By oceanguy | August 20, 2007
In the late ’70’s I was often embarrassed to admit I was a student at the United States Naval Academy… at times even ashamed. John Kerry and the anti-war left had greatly damaged the profession of arms… they redefined the way that the public perceived military professionals… and it was not very flattering. The Profession of Arms has yet to completely recover.
Military folks find themselves as low on the respect scale as you can get. That’s OK because almost all of them are people of great character who can handle the bad rap. But what is really alarming is the fact that knowledge of history in general, and specifically military history, is at an all time low among Americans. There is so little respect for the armed forces because there are so very few people with enough knowledge of military matters to understand the function of our Armed Forces let alone their actual lives. That ignorance is the cause of incidents like The New Republic publishing that Beauchamp trash. The complete ignorance of military matters, coupled with their own biases toward “humanities,” it was easy for the journalists to believe the worst of our military men and women. It was easy for them to believe, to paraphrase Evan Thomas of Newsweek, that “the narrative was right even if the facts were wrong.” Those facts need to be understood. Military history needs to be understood.
Victor Davis Hanson, in a long but worthwhile article explains why we should study war… not the study of violence, but the study of how wars begin and how they are won and lost. If more anti-war folks dropped their studies of women’s issues and diversity studies and picked up military history, we might actually develop the ability to prevent war. Yeah, I know… it’s a pipe dream, but facing an all but inevitable war with Iran and Islamic fascism on one side and America on the other, we are all but powerless to stop it because only “warmongers” have the education needed to see the parallels in history. Only “warmongers” have the insight to speculate on the damage the war will bring. Only “warmongers” see the value in confronting those with evil intent. Meanwhile those uneducated in military history see evil intent in those of us who would rather confront than appease the belligerent. As Hanson explains…
Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administration’s intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence.
Yet it’s hard to find many wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Margaret Atwood also wrote in her poem: “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.” Hitler did; so did Mussolini and Tojo—and their assumptions were logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. Bin Laden attacked on September 11 not because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to dialogue with him in the Hindu Kush. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with no meaningful reprisals, and concluded that decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation—or that, if we did, we would withdraw as we had from Mogadishu.
Appeasement leads to war, it leads to more violent wars, it does not prevent them… it never has… it never will. Appeasement leads either to war or to surrender and defeat of the appeaser. We learn that through history. Those who ignore military history learn that violence is bad… always bad… and that mutual understanding is paramount. Those who ignore history will lead us into another war, and the longer they put it off the more violent and deadly it will be. As the Protest Warrior’s posters say, “War Has Never Solved Anything… except for ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism.”
That’s not to say we should bomb or invade Iran today… Far from it. For, you see, those of us who study/have studied military history know that war IS diplomacy. War is the last resort, but there needs to be a credible threat of military action to back the diplomatic and economic actions up. Talk softly but carry a big stick. The readiness to stand up for what is right pre-supposes that one has the knowledge of what is right, and too many on the left have forgotten or completely missed that lesson.
Finally, military history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. If we know nothing of Shiloh, Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosun, the crosses in our military cemeteries are just pleasant white stones on lush green lawns. They no longer serve as reminders that thousands endured pain and hardship for our right to listen to what we wish on our iPods and to shop at Wal-Mart in safety—or that they expected future generations, links in this great chain of obligation, to do the same for those not yet born. The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, should escape that terrible knowledge.
Topics: Countdown to War |
August 20th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Indeed, as the Romans said, “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum.” Or as Scotty said, “The best diplomat that I know is a fully-loaded phaser bank.”
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:36 am
and yet you probably support the chicken hawks and far-right evangelical amerikan taliban that put us into the quagmire of Iraq and disagree with an amazing number of flag officers who counseled against it prior to its inception and continued to voice their objections not just to invasion, but also to the planning [or lack thereof] … but the most telling aspect of the post is your comment regarding “John Kerry and the anti-war left” … you’ve labeled yourself as merely a george dubya shrub clone apologist and fellow-traveler of karl turdblossom rovian
swift-boat fascist dissemblers and, based on archives released this year [or last], Kerry was absolutely correct in his testimony before Congress … and the Pentagon and Executive Department knew it.
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:09 am
USA: So you hate Bush and Rove… Thanks for sharing. If you read this blog at all you would know I was against invading Iraq as the first step in confronting the Islamic Fascists who have declared war on the US.
If you have something constructive to say, you are welcome to comment here. But if the comment above is your idea of intelligent discourse, then find someplace else to vent.
And any released archives I’ve seen in no way hint that Kerry was right. Just the opposite in fact. As ex-KGB have written, Kerry and his crowd were Communist tools… naively spouting Soviet talking points. Some will argue that in Kerry’s case it was not so naive, but I think he was just a naive idealist, over-confident in his own intellectualism… a child of privilege wanting to change the world just like most principled young people wanted during that time. But that’s just a side story, as the point of my post you find so offensive, is that the Viet Nam peace movement did great damage to the profession of arms. Agree or disagree with the movement the fact remains the movement did great damage to the public perception of the military. You probably think that is a good thing. I disagree, but I’m ready to hear why you might think it’s good that most people have no knowledge nor any interest in military history. Unfortunately your reasoning appears to be, “cuz Bushitler and turdblossom rovian are for it.” It takes a real intellectual giant to come up with that.
Again, if you can contribute something with a bit of thought and less venom, please do. Otherwise just click through to your next drive-by.
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:55 am
Very true–though quite a few people find this disturbing, the truth is that the world would have ssen more violence if not for America’s willingness to wage war to protect others and expand global security. The UN talks a lot about peace, but at the end of the day, everyone knows Turtle Bay isn’t about to act to halt genocide or crack down on belligerent dictators. And it’s true, war isn’t always necessary. Qaddafi gave up his nuclear arsenal after seeing Saddam toppled in short order.
August 25th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
What’s even worse than complete ignorance, sometimes, is the dangerous effects of the bits and bytes of knowledge people have. Vietnam = Quagmire. WWII = Good War. Stalin = our ally against Hitler in the good war. Armed with nothing more than these mantras, people forget that Vietnam was a quagmire because we made it that way and that, when we ran away, it turned into a nightmare. They forget that WWII was a good war but it needn’t have happened if the 1930s hadn’t been an age of passive isolationism. They also forget that we lost hundreds of thousands of troops during that War, and that we lost a whole lot of battles before things turned around. Heck, we didn’t even set foot in Europe until 1944. Hitler controlled the continent. As for Stalin, “Uncle Joe” took time off from killing his millions only after Hitler failed to honor their infamous pact. At War’s end, Stalin went back to killing his millions, and set the stage for millions more dead round the world. But to those historically ignorant, all those facts are as nothing next to their clever, simplistic little formulations.