by Sun Tzu, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and the Incan Empire
Any close examination of recent American or European Wars will reveal two essential types of war: The first kind is best represented by WWI and WWII (or the earlier Napoleonic Wars also come to mind), where European/Western nations were expanding and were checked by their neighbors, only to have power and local control restored at the conclusion of the conflict. Though often disasterously bloody, these wars are typically characterized as following Geneva Conventions. Also, and most importantly, these wars end.
In the second category are wars like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. These are wars waged by western nations against non-western nations in order to promote security and democracy. You probably see where this is going, but western nations typically LOSE these wars, they don’t have clear endings, don’t follow the rules of engagement, and are just generally a mess.
Why the discrepancy? The first reason is that the major wars, like WWII, were military campaigns more than culture wars. Both sides knew why they were fighting, and at the conclusion of the war the civilians on the losing side didn’t harbor enough distrust to engage in insurgency. In fact, many studies about European wars have shown that the lives of the average civilians changes very little from regime to regime as the result of wars (though the glaring exception to this rule would be World War II).
So what about the other kind of wars? Too often, military engagement with drastically different cultures results in ideologically fueled wars. Civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Somalia had been taught, for many years, to distrust foreign powers, especially the United States. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, quick military victories were quickly replaced by failure to significantly improve the lives of citizens in those countires. The result was that America didn’t fulfill promises made, and so people began to lose trust in the West.
So how do you win such a war? Our wars of nation building are not that significantly different from wars of conquering and domination. Julius Caesar, Alexander, and the Inca all shared similar tactics, and were quite successful at winning such wars and turning the conquered territory into first rate nations in less than a life time. How did they do it?
A basic tenant of military strategy, from Rome to Sun Tzu’s China, is that if you are not prepared to do whatever is necesarry, then you should not fight. Christianity’s own Just War Theory argues that if you can’t justify the war then it should not be fought. In order to win an ideological war (like we are fighting against the Taliban) in order to truly win we must be willing to kill everyone who disagrees with our ideology. I don’t think this is possible, or wise, so I don’t think we should be fighting.
Also, rarely would a nation like Rome or the Inca allow a conquered nation to maintain its cultural identity without first putting the conqueror’s culture at the top of the heirarchy. Roman and Incan practice, when encountering a culture with its own set of gods, was to subjegate those gods to the conquerors gods in the heirarchy, thus establishing the conquering culture as dominant. We don’t want to do that either.
So what Obama is trying to do is really a relatively new concept. Without colonisation or slavery, European and Western powers have not accomplished the task set before America in Afghanistan and Iraq. Call me crazy, but it’s unlikely that Obama will be able to accomplish what we have never seen in nearly 8,000 years or recorded history.
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