|
Volume CXXXII, Number 19 |
 |
Despite our most humane objections, this is still war
CHRISTIAN POTHOLM
FACULTY CONTRIBUTOR
Bowdoin students, staff, professors and other readers of the Orient might well profit from viewing the current Gulf War through the prism of Karl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz was one of those towering intellects of the 19th century - such as Darwin, Freud, Marx and Hegel - who added so much to our understanding of the human condition.
Published in 1832, Vom Kriege, (On War), is Clausewitz's magnus opus. For Clausewitz, the essence of war remains a simple contest of wills. While horrible, bloody and revolting, at base, war is still a game, a struggle of wills. For him, there is always the primordial imperative of "I want, you want," which ultimately depends on the will of the combatants for its outcome. It is will which drives national leaders to war and which sustains them and explains why Saddam Hussein relishes the rate of civilian causalities and George Bush says protesters do not influence his resolve.
Thus in the present situation, whatever the religious, geo-political, strategic, tactical, personal and ethical elements involved in the war and its prosecution, its essence remains that struggle of wills. George Bush wants to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Saddam Hussein does not want to be removed. The "why's" of each man's position are much less important to the outcome than the strength of their respective wills. Both cannot prevail.
In today's game theory parlance, this Gulf War is thus a zero-sum game. One leader and his side must win and one must lose. There is no middle ground. There can be no compromise, no negotiated fall-back or negotiating positions. One must lose and one must win because the removal or maintenance of Hussein's regime cannot have a middle ground in terms of outcome.
As the war goes forward, it is important to keep this firmly in mind. Whatever one thinks about how and why the war started - or even whether it should have started at all - this essential dichotomy is now operative and must prevail.
The stark choice at this point is simply: should George Bush or Saddam Hussein win? Whose will will crack first? Only one side can win. It doesn't matter how we got to this point, at this juncture only one side can win. "Whom do you want to win?" is thus the most significant of questions asked. Do you want George W. Bush and his regime or Saddam Hussein and his regime to win?
Now for those of us living in Brunswick and at Bowdoin, this choice seems ridiculously primitive and stark, and so at variance with the way we try to live out lives and interact with our fellows, as to be readily dismissible. Yet Mars is a most jealous god and the way war works almost always overrides our human sense of how a community (even a world community) should operate. The durability of this dichotomy illustrates the true genius of Clausewitz.
He has many other observations and concepts about war that help us understand
its internal imperatives. There are his fog of war, now almost a cliché,
and the very important "friction of war."
As for the friction of war, Clausewitz points out that everything in war
is at base very simple. Each piece, each action, each portion is simplicity
itself. But every thing, even the most simple, is very hard to accomplish.
War takes place, he says, in a resisting medium. Tanks break down. Troops
fire on their fellows. People get in the way of combatants (either by
default or design) and make activities difficult. Bombs fall where they
aren't supposed to. Plans always go awry. War is a very hard thing to
do and it is especially hard to do according to a plan. War simply has
an internal logic and power all of its own.
Clausewitz would, of course, be astonished at our current ability to see things happening in real time at the squad level (10-12 soldiers) in so many places at one time. But he would have us remember that everything is magnified at the squad level. The fire is more intense, the danger greater, the horror more profound, the perspective constricted, the anxiety heightened. It is almost guaranteed that we lose sight of any larger strategic picture in of the newscasts driven by "breaking" stories. And the talking heads and reporters (from all points of views and in all cultures) are often incredibly wrong in the implications of their first hand observations simply because they too are responding to this local intensity.
Any reporter of today, standing on the beaches of Normandy on June 6th, 1944 would probably have concluded that the Allies had irrevocably lost the war. And, as they waded through the thousands of dead American bodies floating with the tide, the majority would certainly have concluded that the goals of the conflict, however laudatory, were simply not worth it.
So too is the horror of our current war magnified by the immediate pictures of the dead, the dying, the mutilated and the wounded, especially those of civilians. The more "humane" we are, the harder it is for us to accept some of the iron priorities of warfare. This horror often overrides our rational thought. It seems so de-humanizing and awful that we want to end it by any means to stop the images of human suffering
Yet for Clausewitz, this view of human suffering can mislead us in our efforts to understand the nature of war and how wars end. The easiest way to end a war, of course, is to lose it by giving up. Ironically the greater suffering, the greater pain to the greater number is almost always caused by lesser measures over time than by the maximum application of force.
This terrifying imperative, which states that you must be truly cruel in order to be kind, to end the war sooner by applying more force, not less; now, rather than over an extended period, and thus save lives is perhaps the most difficult of his arguments to accept in the post-Enlightenment world.
Yet it may ultimately be the most profound.
For in Clausewitzian terms, Ulysses S. Grant was a much better general than Robert E. Lee. He and Sherman and Sheridan knew they must be cruel in order to be kind. They ended the Civil War not by applying less pressure but more. They believed in a "hard war and a soft peace."
The present conflict is so disturbing to us because we thought we were beyond all of the implications of warfare. But Mars remains a jealous mistress if not a god, or as Leon Trotsky was fond of saying, "You may have forgotten war but war has not forgotten you."
In the weeks and months ahead, it will be very illuminating to keep the
basic principles of Clausewitz in mind as we all examine the unfolding
war in all its dimensions.
|
FastCounter by bCentral |