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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Sat Jun 7, 2003 11:24 am
Subject: The Modern View of War

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=62443

http://www.sixgunner.com/guests/classics_and_war.htm

Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of Classics at California State
University, Fresno, received his B.A. at the University of California
at Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 1991 he was
given the Award for Teaching Excellence by the American Philological
Association -- an annual citation given to the top undergraduate
teachers of Classics. He is the author or editor of several books on
military and ancient history, including The Wars of the Ancient
Greeks (Cassell, 1999), The Soul of Battle (Free Press, 1999), and
Carnage and Culture (Doubleday, 2001). He has also written about
traditional agrarian and rural life and contemporary culture wars.
His books History Book Club and Book of the Month Club selections and
have been translated into several foreign languages. His articles and
reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times,
The Washington Times, American Heritage, The Weekly Standard, and The
Wilson Quarterly, and has been featured on National Public Radio and
the Jim Lehrer News Hour. He currently writes a bi-weekly column on
the war against terrorism for National Review Online. Dr. Hanson
lives with his wife and three children on the farm where he was born
in Selma, California.

=====================

The Modern View of War

This depressing view of human nature and conflict is rarely any
longer with us. It was not the advent of Christianity that ended it;
Christian philosophers and theologians long ago developed the
doctrine of "just war," having realized that nonresistance meant
suicide. More likely, the 20th Century and the horror of the two
World Wars -- Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima -- put an end to the
tragic view of war. Yet out of such numbing losses -- and our
arrogance -- we missed the lesson of the World Wars. The calamity of
60 million dead was not only because we went to war, but rather
because we were naive and deemed weak by our enemies well before 1914
and 1939 -- at a time when real resolve could have stopped Prussian
militarism and Nazism before millions of blameless perished.

The deviant offspring of the Enlightenment -- Marxists and Freudians -
- gave birth to even more pernicious social sciences that sought
to 'prove' to us that war was always evil and therefore -- with help
from Ph.D.s -- surely preventable. Indeed, during the International
Year of Peace in 1986, a global commission of experts concluded that
war was unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike! Unfortunately,
innocent people get killed because of that kind of thinking. Many,
especially in our universities, now are convinced that war always
results from real, rather than perceived, grievances, such as the
poverty arising out of the usual list of sins: colonialism,
imperialism, racism and sexism. In response, dialogue and mediation
have been elevated to the grand science of "conflict resolution
theory," a sort of marriage counseling or small claims court taken to
the global level.

Rich and conceited Westerners simply could not accept the idea that
more people in the twentieth century were killed by Hitler, Stalin,
and Mao off the battlefield than on it. How depressing to suggest
that the Khmer Rouge, the Hutus, and the Serbians went on killing
when left alone -- and quit only when either satiated or stopped!

In the new moral calculus of the American university, bin Laden
figures to be no Xerxes or Tojo. He is not even an inherently evil
man who hates us for our clout and our influence. Far too few in the
university understand that bin Laden wishes to strut over a united
Middle Eastern caliphate under his brand of Medieval Islam, and to
make decadent Westerners cower in fear. Instead, they insist that he
is either confused (call in Freud) or has legitimate grievances (read
Marx), and so we must find answers within us for what he does.
Western importation of Arab oil? Stolen land from the Palestinians?
Decadent democracy and capitalism? Jewish-American women walking in
the land of Mecca? Puppet Arab governments? Take your pick -- bin
Laden has cited them all.

To stop the evil of Islamic fundamentalism, the tragic Greeks would
make ready the 101st Airborne and the Rangers, while too many in
academia would rather that we chit-chat with him, fathom him, or
accommodate him as did the Clinton State Department. Seeing war
as "Zeus's curse" in this age of our greatest learning and wealth --
and pride -- is to descend into "savagery," when our sophisticated
elite promise that prayer, talk, or money can yet prevail. But if we
deem ourselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop killers,
then -- as Socrates and Pericles alike remind us -- we have become
real accomplices to evil through inaction. Generations slaughtered in
Europe, incinerated Jews, massacred Russians and Chinese, and the
bleached bones of Cambodians are proof enough of what the Greeks once
warned us.

================================

Morality vis a vis Military Strategic Objectives

- Sitaram

http://www.geocities.com/tulsidas_ramayan/page375.htm

<a
href="http://www.geocities.com/tulsidas_ramayan/page375.htm">Military
Strategic Objectives</a>

War is never moral; it is at best unavoidable and expedient.

When a nation, or an alliance of nations, perceives some threat to
their sovereignty, and when strategic targets or measures have been
defined, whether it is of the scale of surgically precise missile
strikes at bases or plants, in which a few dozen lives are lost, or
whether it is of the scale of the landing at Normandy in which
thousands of lives are lost, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in which millions of lives are lost, the fact remains that there is a
price to be paid in terms of human life, both for the enemy and for
the invading forces, and the magnitude of loss is defined and deemed
reasonable and necessary. That price is in terms of human lives lost,
on both sides. Casualty and death is an unavoidable aspect of
military actions. Whether only one life is lost, or ten lives or one
thousand lives, or a million lives, is not an issue. We tend to think
nothing of the news report of ten fatalities. We are alarmed by one
thousand fatalities. Should the fatalities reach one million we are
revolted by what we perceive as a morally reprehensible destruction
of human life. Yet the simple fact remains that any human life is of
inestimable value, and taking one life is no more or less disturbing
than the sacrifice of 100,000 lives or even a million lives, provided
the strategic goal justifies the magnitude of the loss. It is NOT the
number of lives lost, but the justification of such losses from a
strategic point of view. If the loss of human life amounts to an
entire city, or even an entire nation, we categorize the event as a
genocide or ethnocide or holocaust. But, from a strategic military
perspective, the value of the objective is weighed against the loss
of life, and hopefully, strategists are motivated to take no more
lives than might be considered necessary and justified to achieve a
victory. Military and strategic victory will never be equivalent to a
MORAL victory. War and killing is never moral. And there is no war
without the taking of human lives.

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