THE WEST ON THE MARCH:

War Names (NIALL FERGUSON, December 15, 2002, NY Times Magazine)

Long before Clausewitz, the Roman writer Vegetius put it neatly: Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. The converse of this might seem even more paradoxical, not to say Orwellian: if you want war, then prepare for peace. In other words, the surest way to make war more frequent would be for the United States to follow the European example and disarm, or simply heed the old isolationist call to bring ''our boys'' back home. For the enemies of the United States know only too well that the Achilles' heel of American foreign policy is the habitual reluctance of the electorate to risk the lives of American servicemen in far-flung conflicts.

The new war we will wage is Remote War in another sense too. Not all the battles in this war can be watched on CNN. For the campaigns to penetrate and disrupt the terrorist networks are conducted covertly, using a combination of traditional espionage and high-tech surveillance. The battles in this campaign are mostly unspectacular -- an arrest at an airport or in a seedy Pakistani flophouse, perhaps the occasional C.I.A. or Mossad assassination. It is a little like having the espionage of the cold war without any of the front-of-house hardware: no serried ranks of missiles and tanks. Just cameras. Bugs. Spooks. But this, too, has its 19th-century character. In truth, it is the ''Great Game'' -- once played by Britain and her rivals in the Middle East, Central Asia and Afghanistan -- with gizmos.

So Clausewitz -- and, indeed, the imperialism that flourished in the century after his death -- can teach us how to match Random War with Remote War. Liberals should be more relaxed about this. The bottom line of ''On War'' is, after all, a perfectly acceptable liberal axiom: namely, the primacy of political decision-making over military expertise. ''The subordination of the political point of view to the military would be contrary to common sense,'' Clausewitz writes, ''for policy has declared the War; it is the intelligent faculty, War only the instrument.'' (To his credit, Clausewitz had no illusions about the nature of that instrument: its violence, its unpredictability, its emotiveness.)

True, the war against terrorism has a novel character -- it is remote both geographically and technologically. It will nonetheless be Clausewitzian in principle, the wholehearted pursuit of a legitimate political objective by, regrettably but necessarily, violent means.

Ever seen one of those WWII newsreels where the big arrows with swastikas and rising suns spread across the globe? Well, it certainly seems like folks are failing to understand the victories we're scoring against al Qaeda because it's a war where you can't visualize our successes in the same way. There's a certain sense in which we need to defeat Iraq in a set battle for just that reason, so that it becomes psychologically clear here and, more importantly, in the Arab world, that there is no future in a statist Islamicism. The progress we've made against al Qaeda is all well and good, but now people need to see the big arrows creeping across the Middle East as a series of totalitarian governments--Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine, Iraq, Lenbanon, Syria--succumb to democratizing forces from within and without. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 21, 2002 8:38 PM