The Longest War (February/March 2002 | Volume: 53, Issue: 1)

The Longest War

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Authors: Victor Davis Hanson

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February/March 2002 | Volume 53, Issue 1

ABOUT AS MANY AMERICANS WERE KILLED IN THE TERRORIST attacks of September 11 as at Lexington and Concord, at the Alamo, at Fort Sumter, on the Lusitania, and at Pearl Harbor combined, all of which precipitated Americans’ entry into major wars. Where else can we turn but to history to make sense of such carnage? Yet many facile comparisons that are being made with the past are fraught with error. They tell more of our own popular perceptions of culture than of the real lessons of history, and they misinform us about every element of the situation, from its underlying politics to the nature of the terrorism involved, the proper role of the military in our nation’s survival, the broader cultural context, and the true philosophy of war itself.

I. POLITICS

Many Americans, gazing in horror at passenger jets crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, asked themselves what the nation had done to deserve such hatred, forgetting that history teaches us that wars often break out over professed rather than authentic grievances. In a famous passage in Thucydides’ history The Peloponnesian War , the Athenians say that the source of conflict hinges on a state’s perceived sense of “honor, fear, and self-interest.”

In this classical way of thinking, irrational statesmen (Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo) often provoke conflicts over perfectly rational goals (more land, natural resources, subject peoples), by inflaming their audiences with appeals to rectify past injuries that are, in fact, nonexistent. The Japanese and Germans were not starving in 1941, but rather were proud peoples who wanted those whom they deemed inferior to serve them.

 

In truth, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban have very few legitimate grievances against the United States. We intervened in the Muslim world during the last two decades in part for our own interests, but we also saved the Afghanis from communism, the Kuwaitis from the Iraqis, Shiites and Kurds from Saddam Hussein, Somalians from hunger, and Bosnians and Kosovars from Christian Serbians. Millions of Muslims have been butchered on battlefields over the past 30 years, but their killers have been Islamic Iranians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Afghanis. If Thucydides’ exegesis on war’s causes is still relevant, bin Laden is more correctly seen as an inherently evil man who hates and envies us for our clout and our influence. He may rightly understand that America is the chief obstacle to his wish to lord over a medieval caliphate spanning a united Middle East, under a brand of thirteenth-century Islam that makes decadent Westerners cower in fear. That simple explanation seems to offer more consistent logic than do all the neo-Marxist or Freudian-inspired critiques of our foreign policy, or all the reasons bin Laden himself has proffered for his hatred of America: our military protection of Saudi oil, Israelis on Palestinian land, the hateful modernism of global democracy and capitalism, Jewish American women walking in