May 13, 2007
IF THEY WANT PEACE, THEY'LL GO TO WAR WITH THEIR OWN REGIME:
War without limits: New scholarship on the origins of 'total war,' from the French Revolution to World War II, helps explain the war on terror. (Christopher Shea, May 13, 2007, Boston Globe)
Sometimes it seems as if the country has fallen into a high-stakes, all-consuming global conflict, and sometimes it seems that nothing has changed at all.In the war on terrorism, American soldiers and intelligence agents are active on every continent. At home, our cities gird themselves for a major attack. The country, Vice President Cheney and others argue, faces an "existential" threat. We are pitted, one contributor to The Wall Street Journal wrote, against "an enemy who will stop at nothing to achieve world domination and force a life devoid of freedom upon all."
Yet most Americans live very much as they did before Sept. 11.
To historians, the situation poses an intriguing paradox that has sparked fresh interest in the concept of "total wars," conflicts that burst through the old boundaries of fighting and came to define warfare for at least the first half of the 20th century. The idea was first articulated during the mechanized horror of World War I, but historians today are pushing for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, an effort that may yield insights into the conflicts unfolding today.
Two scholars have just published studies -- one on Napoleon's Europe, the other on the annihilation from the air, by German bombers, of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937 -- that trace the roots of total war. These works, and others, argue that total wars have been, in part, a product of modern technology (poison gas, bombs, etc.) and the modern economies that can produce these weapons on a mass scale. But, this burgeoning work suggests, total wars are also very much a product of modern ideologies that contribute to the idea that a nation at war should hold nothing back.
Folks would understandably not like to acknowledge the fact, but total war is an inevitable outgrowth of democracy. If sovereignty in a state resides in all of the people then all of the people are legitimate targets in wartime. The argument that they may be victims of their own regime can hardly hold water given "their duty, to throw off such Government." Posted by Orrin Judd at May 13, 2007 8:01 AM
I do not concur.
Outside of the special case of counter-vslue deterrence, the Law of War distinction between combatants and non-combatants persists.
Military necessity, proportionality and double effect make war very dangerous to children and other living things, but htat is not the same thing as intentionally killing civilians to promote Schrecklichkeit,-terror, simply, to break the enemy's will.
The Germans really invented all this, you know, not Napoleon. Levee en masse is not the same thing as intentional terror.
Now about that special case: nuclear weapons are so indiscriminate as to be almost always productive of disproportionate collateral damage.
Only credible deterrence, namely the believable threat of assured destruction, keeps nuclear weapons unused.
In the present day and age, precision guided munitions have rendered counter-strike nuclear warfighting almost obsolete. However, to prevent adversaries from using atomics as counter-measures to our non-nuclear forces, we must deter then with our own nuclear threat.
I do not concur.
Outside of the special case of counter-vslue deterrence, the Law of War distinction between combatants and non-combatants persists.
Military necessity, proportionality and double effect make war very dangerous to children and other living things, but htat is not the same thing as intentionally killing civilians to promote Schrecklichkeit,-terror, simply, to break the enemy's will.
The Germans really invented all this, you know, not Napoleon. Levee en masse is not the same thing as intentional terror.
Now about that special case: nuclear weapons are so indiscriminate as to be almost always productive of disproportionate collateral damage.
Only credible deterrence, namely the believable threat of assured destruction, keeps nuclear weapons unused.
In the present day and age, precision guided munitions have rendered counter-strike nuclear warfighting almost obsolete. However, to prevent adversaries from using atomics as counter-measures to our non-nuclear forces, we must deter then with our own nuclear threat.
Value? Never mind the outright bombing of non-combatants, our embargoes of North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, Iran etc. are designed to starve the popoulace into submission. Democrats naturally value the lowest in society at the same rate as the highest and therefore target both and everything in between.
Posted by: oj at May 13, 2007 9:52 AM"...a nation at war should hold nothing back."
By the above calculus, it is evident that only one side in this war feels that there is a war and it's not our side.
As for total war, the enemy has only to continue to fight this war through the uteri of its women to slowly but most assuredly overwhelm his enemies in the West. Just read Mark Steyn's America Alone, or Fallaci's The Force of Reason to understand that this round of Islamic invasion of the former Christian lands will probably succeed without the use of overwhelming military might.
Posted by: morry at May 13, 2007 10:23 AMPlenty of non-democracies practiced total war: Ancient Rome, the Mongols, Zulus, WOII Russia, North Vietnam. Any conflict that lasts long enough and offers an existential threat to one of the parties will result in total war by at least that party.
Posted by: Daran at May 13, 2007 10:47 AM1 Sam 15:2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember [that] which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid [wait] for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. (3)Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
Posted by: Lou Gots at May 13, 2007 11:30 AMYes, we do it irrespective of the lack of a threat, nevermind an existential one.
Posted by: oj at May 13, 2007 12:03 PMRadical, militant Islam wants total war with the "West", insane as it sounds. But if the "West" ever decides to oblige, it would be over in about 12 hours. We know it, although we don't talk about it; whether they know or not is up for debate. How long would it take MI-5, for example, to kill every jihadi being watched in Great Britain? An hour?
I think your comment misses the point - 'total' war is not so much in the receiving, but in the giving. Bombing the cities of Germany and Japan was not difficult, because they had already been so 'total' themselves towards Europe and the Chinese (and so "sneaky" in the case of Pearl Harbor).
If radical Muslims were beheading a hundred a week around the globe (instead of just one or two), attitudes here at home might be a bit more strident. One mountain of skulls would lead to another, and they aren't going to win that battle.
Posted by: ratbert at May 13, 2007 12:40 PMThey would do well to concentrate on the Union armies in 1864. Grant in the Wilderness, Sherman on the March to the Sea, Sheridan in the Shenandoah.
That was total war - We Will Break You.
Posted by: Mikey![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://brothersjuddblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at May 13, 2007 12:54 PM