AFTERWORD
ABOUT THREE WEEKS after the hardcover publication of Carnage and Culture, terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans on the home soil of the United States. Less than a month later, on October 7, the United States responded with an air and ground assault against the suspects: the al Qaeda terrorist network and its sympathetic host government, the Islamic fundamentalists known as the Taliban of Afghanistan. Names, peoples, and places in Carnage and Culture that had once seemed distant and theoretical—Alexander the Great, armies of Islam, unfree Easterners, and Tet— now seem to be immediate and real as we Americans read daily of Kandahar, jihad, burqas, and the so-called lessons of Vietnam.
In the epilogue of Carnage and Culture, I had suggested that the events of the last two decades—the Falklands War, the ongoing fighting in Palestine, and the Gulf War—supported the book’s thesis of some 2,500 years of general Western military superiority across time and space. The argument was not necessarily a moral one. Rather my point was that Western approaches to culture, politics, economics, and citizens’ rights and responsibilities gave European states and their offspring military power well beyond what their relatively modest populations and territories might otherwise suggest. Recent events of the past six moths have, like military conflicts of the last twenty years, again supported that thesis.
September 11, while not a battle in the classic sense of a Salamis or Lepanto where thousands of combatants fought to the death, was in its own way a landmark engagement. More Americans died on September 11, 2001, than during any assault on America in our history. The death toll in New York and Washington was far greater than at Lexington and Concord, the Alamo, Fort Sumter, Havana harbor, the seas off Ireland where the Lusitania sank, or Pearl Harbor—historic attacks that also triggered earlier American wars. More importantly, September 11 was not an aberration, but in some sense the culmination of a growing divide between the Islamic and Western worlds, and followed a series of earlier killings of Americans in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and at the World Trade Center. The sheer number of American civilian dead, the growing anger at yet another unprovoked terrorist attack, and the apparent complicity of a number of sovereign states in the terrorists’ plots all released an outpouring of unprecedented American rage and prompted a military response of an intensity not seen since the Gulf War.
In less than ten weeks, the United States military removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. The Americans were faced with the logistical nightmare of fighting in a landlocked country 6,000 miles away, against terrorists and their hosts who enjoyed both internal and foreign support, and in a climate of growing tension between the Islamic and Western worlds. Despite these difficulties they routed their enemies, installed a consensual government in their place, and proceeded to wage war with their allies against terrorist cells throughout the globe in Afghanistan, Yemen, parts of the former Soviet Union, and the Philippines.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, critics doubted that the United States could be successful either in Afghanistan or against an enemy as nebulous as the global terrorist cells. Rather than examining the lethal histories of Western armies of the past, skeptics of the present cited the harsh winters in the Asian subcontinent. They conjured up the bitter experiences of the Russians and British in Afghanistan, the ghosts of Vietnam, the ferocity of the terrorists, and the fanaticism of their Taliban supporters. Few found solace in the past success of Western nations at war, even when their traditional advantages were manifest in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.—calm assemblies of our elected officials, passengers voting to attack the hijackers and sacrifice themselves to save thousands of others, massive yet spontaneous public support for the families of the deceased, and an almost immediate muster of vast American armed forces from nearly every region of the globe. Indeed, all the themes of Chapters One through Nine in Carnage and Culture became quickly apparent in the hours following the attack.
Unlike the responses of the 1980s and 1990s to distant terrorist attacks, when America reacted haphazardly and impotently to such aggression, this time the government of the United States responded promptly and dramatically to the crisis. It increased domestic security, authorized multifaceted attacks abroad, and tended to the loss of almost 3,000 Americans, ensuing economic recession, and a general sense of uncertainty worldwide. Although civil libertarians worried about the implementation of new protocols of domestic surveillance—the terrorists had operated as “sleeper” cells designed to blend in with the general American population—the United States remained an open and free society whose liberty proved a far greater strength than a liability. “Operation Enduring Freedom” may have sounded simplistic to cynical critics, but it was, in fact, similar in tone and theme to the phrase chosen by Athenian sailors who rowed at Salamis, encouraging each other with cries of “eleutheria!”
Although Americans no longer embrace universal conscription (in a nation of 300 million people, such a draft might now entail an unnecessarily cumbersome army of 20 to 30 million youths), civic militarism was very much alive. Our pilots, Marines, and Special Forces were themselves highly motivated, disciplined, and especially lethal. Enlistees subject to military rights and responsibilities commensurate with their status as free citizens proved themselves to be more disciplined—and imaginative— than forced draftees in the armies of the Taliban. Just as Roman armies rallied after the string of defeats culminating at Cannae, so too did the United States military appear more, not less, powerful after September 11.
While the terrorists preferred to fight an asymmetrical war of stealth, in which surprise attacks and sudden terror might enable a smaller power to neutralize the superior force of its much stronger adversary, the United States was nevertheless able to marshal its overwhelming firepower—especially laser- and satellite-guided bombs—to blast enemies in sheer rock caves high in mountain peaks. Like Alexander the Great’s quest for decisive battle at Gaugamela, the Americans believed that the surest way of defeating the enemy was first to go directly to Afhanistan and identify the Taliban and al Qaeda forces, and then through air power, allied proxy forces, and specialist advisors hit them head-on, and kill as many as possible in direct confrontations.
Much attention was given to air power and its deadly use of smart bombs, which were able to destroy indivdual houses of the terrorists without wrecking the homes of the innocent. As in the war in Kosovo, the aerial campaign over Afghanistan proved that the Americans could strike at will without incurring a single pilot casualty to enemy fire. Yet, as the events of 2002 progressed, it also became clear that American ground troops were necessary to force terrorists out of their entrenchments, and that such infantry proved themselves on every occasion superior to their adversaries in close fighting. While we are no longer, like the classical Greeks or republican Romans, an agrarian nation of small landowners, the sheer vastness of the American middle class ensured that our infantrymen would be relatively well-educated, independent, and representative of the country’s popular culture—rather than poor tribesmen, shanghaied recruits, or illiterate peasants. However simplistic it may sound, thirteen centuries after Poitiers, Western infantrymen were once again fighting warriors who identified themselves as emissaries of Islam.
Of all the West’s military advantages, technology, of course, was the most remarked upon aspect of the war against terrorism. As in the case of Cortés at Tenochtitlán, the odds were all with the Westerners. The al Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban supporters possessed nothing like the American arsenal of sophisticated planes, ships, and ground weapons. In the very first weeks of the fighting in early October, the Americans displayed an uncanny ability to kill hundreds of their enemies without themselves losing a single soldier or airman. To the degree that the terrorists and the Taliban employed sophisticated weapons at all—RPG launchers, small automatic arms, and shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles—they were all imported from abroad. Like the Aztecs, the Taliban and their terrorist allies possessed the traditions neither of secular rationalism nor disinterested research that might have permitted them to create deadly weapons on par with or superior to the Americans’.
In that regard, the terrorists, like the Ottomans at Lepanto, were entirely parasitic on Western technological culture. Everything in their arsenal—from cell phones, frequent-flyer miles, and ATM cards to automatic weapons, explosive devices, and anti-aircraft missiles—was the product of Western societies.
Likewise, an abundance of capital proved to be a significant advantage to the Americans. In the weeks after September 11, the United States was able not merely to vote for new arms expenditures through its free institution of the Congress, but also to raise the necessary money to build and supply them. In addition, a potent American weapon was its ability to deny terrorists—through the freezing of bank accounts and the blockage of electronic financial transactions—access to the Western fiscal system, which they had depended upon to acquire imported weapons and supplies.
Discipline likewise proved to be a major fault line between America and its adversaries. Thus far in the war, no American troops have surrendered; thousands of Taliban soldiers and hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists gave themselves up. Allied setbacks were exclusively among our Northern Alliance proxies during the first few days of the war. Much has been written of the suicidal devotion of the al Qaeda terrorists, but so far in the war such fanaticism has not offered any widespread advantages on the battlefield. The real dangerous killers are American soldiers—who risk their lives to retrieve the bodies of fellow fighters captured and executed by the enemy—not terrorists in caves. Group discipline, unit cohesion, and strict adherence to orders allowed the Americans to kill hundreds of the enemy for each soldier lost. There is an eerie echo of Rorke’s Drift in all this. As during the Somali incursion—made famous by the book and subsequent film Black Hawk Down—Americans found themselves in distant landscapes, amid difficult terrain, and opposed by superior numbers of enemies who desperately wished to kill them at all costs. And as in the past, the very manner in which American soldiers fought as a closely disciplined group allowed them to inflict enormous casualties upon their foes.
A distinctive individualism has also been manifest throughout the war. Frightening new weapons—whether updated versions of “Daisy-Cutters” or novel thermobaric bombs—reflect the near instantaneous ability of individual soldiers, scientists, and manufacturers to devise new responses to new challenges. Just as the damaged Yorktown was repaired and rushed back into the fight at Midway, so too, after September 11, new tactics, such as on-site direction of satellite-guided munitions, and weapons were created to be adopted, modified, or rejected by individuals as the situation on the ground mandated rather than by distant governmental decree.
Domestic dissent was evident immediately after September 11, whether on the extreme fringe that suggested that America’s world role might have warranted attack or in more moderate criticism over the wisdom and practicality of fighting such an elusive enemy, one that had adeptly identified itself with the aspirations of one billion Muslims. In the midst of the war, vocal dissidents on campus and in the media complained openly about an array of issues—the morality of a military response itself, collateral bomb damage, the detention of Middle Easterners in the United States, treatment of detainees in Cuba, and the President’s identification of an “axis of evil” in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. So far even the most virulent criticism of the American government has not hampered military operations in the field. If such open public audit of, and disagreement over, military action have not always directly aided our soldiers, that critique is likely to have at least forced our armed services to be aware that every aspect of their operations will be subject to well-publicized scrutiny. Some Republicans label Democratic critics as unpatriotic; in turn, some Democrats call Republicans saber-rattlers with a lust for unending war; and out of that conundrum eventually arises a consensus in the middle, the beneficiary of both patriotic zeal and principled dissent. In the long run, I believe that this heated debate will do far more good than harm.
Carnage and Culture was reviewed in a wide variety of newspapers, journals, and magazines, and discussed often on television and radio, here and abroad. The tragic events of September 11 gave the book a contemporary relevance, which might well have not occurred otherwise. The book’s thesis of cultural rather than environmental factors at once set it at odds, for example, with Jared Diamond’s recent Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the two of us subsequently debated on National Public Radio the rise and dominance of the West. Clearly I do not believe that we are waging a successful war against terrorism either because of America’s own favorable physical environment or the ancient Greeks’ past natural advantages over their neighbors.
In general the critical reaction to the book has been very positive— despite the occasional uneasiness by professors with the rather sweeping claim that history shows that Westerners fight and kill their adversaries more effectively than those drawing on other cultural traditions. Academics, of course, are by nature wary about such grand claims. And in the case of Carnage and Culture, specialists in fields as diverse as ancient history, medieval studies, the Spanish Conquest, the Renaissance Mediterranean, British imperial studies, and American history were surprised to see their own fields tied directly with practices of other diverse locales and eras. Military historians—such as John Keegan, Geoffrey Parker, and Dennis Showalter—wrote enthusiastically about the book; and a number of magazines and newspapers—the Wall Street Journal, Military History Quarterly, American Heritage, National Review—often requested that I periodically amplify the book’s views in the context of the current war.
The only real skepticism voiced about the book’s conclusions was from an entirely unexpected source. In the United Kingdom, Carnage and Culture was published under the title Why the West Has Won, thereby incurring the wrath of a number of journalists and historians writing in progressive magazines and newspapers such as the New Statesman, Independent, and Manchester Guardian, who felt my conclusions reflected a peculiarly American attempt to gloat over the contemporary military superiority of the United States. One peeved reviewer wrote that the book was a “WASP” apology—even though Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, and Italians were neither Anglo-Saxons nor Protestants, and a third of the book’s case histories involved the pre-Christian world of the southern Mediterranean.
So I have learned that the book is often seen as controversial in the present crisis, at least if hundreds of letters and electronic communications from both the scholarly community and the public at large are any indication. Some have expressed relief after reaching the book’s conclusion of continued Western prowess. As one reader put it, “I am convinced now that we can really win this present war.” Privately, a number of scholars have written and spoken to me about the book’s premise of Western military superiority along lines of something like the following, “Of course, it is true, but you know that we are not supposed to say that.” Others simply send me a flood of minutiae, with references to obscure battles and weapons that would substantiate, modify, or reject my thesis—as if nine representative battles from some 2,500 years of military history could in any way be exhaustive in matters of detail.
As I write, rumors of wars to come in Iraq, Somalia, and Iran circulate, as the American assault against terrorists continues. All such potential conflicts—fought, as they will be, far from home—involve frightening logistical problems, an array of enemies, and unsure support from our NATO allies. Yet it is my belief that if the United States chooses to fight a war felt necessary by its leadership and supported by its populace, then it is very likely that it will win and win decisively. History teaches us that the chief fear of a Western power is another Western power, and on the immediate horizon I see little chance that the United States will be fighting Europe or a westernized Russia or Japan in the next few months.
Yet one recurring reaction from readers stays with me, one also wholly unforseen. Both scholars and the reading public have a general sense that the book is persuasive about conclusions it draws from the past, both in its argument and research, but nevertheless express a sense of unease about the future. Few seem to grasp that the military situation for the West is far brighter now than what once faced Themistocles in the bay of Salamis or poor Don Juan on the deck of the La Reale. It is almost as if with greater power comes greater Western insecurity; at a time of unprecedented global influence, Americans appear to express less confidence in their culture’s morality and capabilities than did Greeks, Romans, and Italians at the point of near extinction. If that ignorance about our contemporary strength is as widespread as it seems, then the final premise of Carnage and Culture—that the chief danger of Western militaries is not their weakness, but their unmatched power to kill—remains the most germane and yet most unrecognized lesson of our current conflict.
VDH
Selma, California
March 10, 2002