Why The West Has Won

...Luck, individual initiative and courage, the brilliance of a Hannibal or Saladin, the sheer numbers of Zulu or Inca warriors—all on occasions could nullify Western inherent military superiority...

...Instead, they prepared to fight their way back to the Greek world...

...The conquistadors, who put an end to human sacrifice and torture on the Great Pyramid in Mexico City, sailed from a society reeling from the Grand Inquisition and the ferocious Reconquista, and left a diseased and nearly ruined New World in their wake...

...War, as the Greeks teach us, seems innate to the human species, the "father of us all," Heraclitus put it...

...The effective use of guns requires the marriage of rationalism and capitalism to ensure steady improvement in design, fabrication and production, but in addition an egalitarian tradition that welcomes rather than fears the entrance of lethal newcomers on the battlefield...

...Heavy infantry is also a particularly Western strength—not surprising when Western societies put a high premium on property, and land is often held by a wide stratum of society...

...In battle alone we receive a glimpse of the larger reasons precisely why and how men kill and die...

...The conduct of a war can be rational, but often its origins are not...

...Alexander himself killed more Europeans in Asia than did the hundreds of thousands of Persians under Darius III...

...Contemporary wars are not merely frequent, but often brutal beyond anything in the nineteenth century.The 1991 GulfWar drew down the might of the United States to its National Guard reserves, a state of mobilization rarely reached even during the worst crises of the Cold War...

...no Thracian embrace of the scientific tradition...

...Western fratricide, as it has in the past, threatens an entire civilization, which for good or evil has given the world industrialization, technological advance, popular culture and blueprints for political organization...

...Although they were mercenary veterans and bent on booty and theft, the Ten Thousand were no more savage or warlike than other raiders and plunderers of the time...

...Guns destroy the hierarchy of the battlefield, marginalizing the wealthy mailed knight and rendering even the carefully trained bowman ultimately irrelevant...

...Let us hope that we at last understand this legacy...

...Consensual governments, in fact, have often fought other Western consensual governments...

...Deterrence draws on a human, not a culturally specific, phenomenon: even democracies engage in brinkmanship to protect their self-interests...

...few prefer to do so in careful rank and file, to advance head-on in shock collisions...

...And lastly, every army possesses men of daring, but few encourage initiative throughout the ranks and welcome rather than fear innovation—so apprehensive are they that an army of independent-thinking soldiers just might prove the same as citizens...

...Western capitalists and scientists alike have been singularly pragmatic and utilitarian, with little to fear from religious fundamentalists, state censors or stern cultural conservatives...

...The peril to come, however, is not just the spread of atomic weapons and F-16 fighters but much more so the dissemination of rationalism and knowledge—the real ingredients of a most murderous brand of battle...

...The insecurity of eastern Europe is part of a larger dilemma facing a Russia neither quite European nor Asian...

...Nearly everything in that statement is false, except for one indisputable phrase: "Western energy...

...Nor did it matter much that their armies were organized and modeled after those in Europe...

...and Asian jets have not incorporated new propulsion systems with a radically novel Korean or Cambodian way of producing thrust...

...Athens wrecked its culture by invading democratic Sicily, in 415 B.C...

...Some critics of the idea of Western military predominance point to the easy transference of technology...

...Discussion of Western military prowess demands a precision in nomenclature...

...It matters little where a weapon was first discovered, but a great deal how it was mass-produced, constantly improved and employed by soldiers...

...Yet there were also a few privileged students of philosophy and oratory in the ranks, who would march into Asia side by side these destitute mercenaries—aristocrats like Xenophon, student of Socrates, and Proxenus, the Boeotian general, as well as physicians, professional officers, would-be colonists and wealthy friends of Prince Cyrus...

...WEST ON WEST With the worldwide spread of democracy, capitalism, free speech, individualism and a globally connected economy, it may be that world-encompassing wars will be less likely...

...Those reasons are hard to disguise and harder still to ignore...

...They had routed every hostile Asian force in their way...

...Western military power, however, is more than superior technology...

...or in the agora,Wall Street...

...Most have not a clue about the nature of their own military or its historic relationship with its government and citizenry...

...My curiosity in this particular discussion is not with Western man's heart of darkness, but with his ability to fight—specifically, how his military prowess reflects larger social, economic, political and cultural practices that themselves seemingly have little to do with war...

...I am not suggesting that the intrinsic characteristics ofWestern civilization predetermined European success on every occasion...

...If a Third World autocrat buys weapons from China, India, or Brazil, he does so only because these countries can copy and provide Western-designed weapons more cheaply than the West itself...

...The Anabasis makes it clear, however, that the Greeks fought much differently than their adversaries and that those unique characteristics of battle—a sense of personal freedom, superior discipline, matchless weapons, egalitarian camaraderie, individual initiative, constant tactical adaptation and flexibility, a preference for the shock battle of heavy infantry—were themselves the murderous dividends of Hellenic culture at large...

...a democratic United States fought twice against the consensual government of Britain...

...Bickering among soldiers and disagreement among a small cadre of generals—whether Hitlers captains or Aztec lords—are universal traits...

...The Boers and the British in southern Africa each elected representatives...

...And on nearly every occasion, it was not merely the superior weapons of European soldiers, but a host of other factors—organization, discipline, morale, initiative, flexibility and command—that led to Western advantages...

...Will they win occasional battles but not wars...

...Italian republics of the Renaissance were constantly at each other's throat...

...During their ordeal, the Ten Thousand were dumbfounded by the Taochians, whose women and children jumped off high cliffs in a ritual mass suicide...

...No American Indian tribe or Zulu impi could have marshaled, supplied, armed—and have killed and replaced—hundreds of thousands of men for months on end, for the rather abstract political cause of a nation-state...

...Japan learned to its advantage in the nineteenth century that Europe alone could design battleships—and that battleships were superior to anything that floated in the Sea of Japan...

...Africans and American Indians could employ European rifles, become crack shots and occasionally repair broken stocks and barrels...

...the Peloponnesian War was a bloodbath...

...Persians, Aztecs, Zulus and North Vietnamese all wished to be free of foreign troops on their native soil, but they fought for the autonomy of their culture— not as free voting citizens with rights protected by constitutions...

...The desire to fight as freemen is also different from the simple elan of defenders who expel tyrants and foreign powers from their homeland...

...Large numbers were unemployed and desperate for lucrative work as killers in the exhausted aftermath of the internecine war that had nearly ruined the Greek world...

...Indigenous armies in Vietnam and Central America have had success against Europeans—but largely to the degree that they were supplied with automatic weapons, high explosives and ammunition produced to Western specifications...

...War is ultimately killing...

...Will the West always, then, possess persons of the type who fought at Midway, or who rowed for their freedom at Salamis, or who rushed to reform their battered legions in the aftermath of Cannae...

...Defensive systems in the cosmos are already on the verge of being deployed...

...Yet, abstract ideas must often be seen in the context of their times: while Alexander's Macedonians were revolutionaries who had destroyed Greek liberty, there was no escaping their ties with the Hellenic tradition...

...And how could such a small force led by an elected committee navigate thousands of miles home amid thousands of hostile enemies...

...Shaka proved this tens of thousands of times over...

...Again, the democratic and capitalist society of the United Kingdom sent out better-trained and more disciplined combatants in this strange little war, soldiers far different from those fielded by the Argentine dictatorship...

...On January 17,1991, a coalition of U.S...

...Such nightmarish realities of war lurk beneath the surface of our current crisis...

...The Islamic world never developed the proper tactics of shooting in massed volleys, to accompany weapons that were so antithetical to the idea of personal bravery of the mounted warrior...

...Even the royal army of Persia appeared strange...

...The Roman Civil Wars nearly ruined the republic, in a way that even Hannibal had not...

...The brave American pilots who blew up the Kaga at Midway were no more gallant than the brave Japanese who were engulfed in its flames below...

...Any Iraqi journalist who questioned the wisdom of invading Kuwait was likely to end up like Pythius the Lydian on the eve of Xerxes' invasion of Greece...

...We should not expect to see precisely in Greek freedom, American liberty...

...Indeed, the story of military dynamism in our world is ultimately an investigation into the prowess ofWestern arms...

...I am also less concerned in ascertaining the righteousness of particular wars—whether a murderous Pizarro in Peru (who calmly announced, "The time of the Inca is over") was better or worse than his murdering Inca enemies, whether India suffered enormously or benefited modestly from English colonization, or whether the Japanese had good cause to bomb Pearl Harbor or the Americans to incinerate Tokyo...

...But such arguments have the paradoxical effect of proving the opposite of what is intended: Englishmen were in the New World and selling guns to natives, not vice versa...

...Our institutions, if they do not erode entirely, can survive periods of decadence brought on by our material success, eras when the whole notion of civic militarism seems bothersome, and in which free speech is used to focus on our own imperfections without concern for the ghastly nature of our enemies...

...Ideas from consensual government to religious tolerance are often ideal rather than modal values...

...There are three often-discussed military scenarios for the future: no wars, occasional wars or a single, world-ending conflict.We can dismiss the first fantasy without much discussion...

...But Themistocles, Alexander the Great, Cortes and the British and American officers of the last two centuries enjoyed innate advantages that over the long duration could offset imbe-cilic generalship, flawed tactics, strained supply lines, difficult terrain and inferior numbers—or a simple "bad day...

...What is clear, however, is that once developed, the West, ancient and modern, placed far fewer religious, cultural and political impediments to natural inquiry, capital formation and individual expression than did other societies, which often were theocracies, centralized palatial dynasties or tribal unions...

...We see glimpses of that today— tribal fights in which hideous Western weapons are used by those who have not a clue how to create them...

...We should be apprehensive that there are once again fundamental upheavals transpiring in Europe, more so that at any time since the 1930s...

...Meditation, religion and philosophy are not the same as industrial production, scientific research and technological innovation...

...Iraq's military hardware—from poison gas to tanks and mines—was all imported...

...Israel, Britain and the United States, often despite difficult logistics, all found victory relatively easy...

...But the question is not the only one of relevance, for there is no guarantee now—nor was there ever—that the West itself is always stable, not prone to turn its lethal arsenal upon itself...

...American natives, they point out, became better shots than European settlers...

...In these new flash points to come, can the non-West import our weaponry and organization and doctrine...

...Yet it will also be true that when wars do break out, they will be far more lethal, and 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO1 draw on the full resources of a deadly military tradition...

...Its story becomes absurd when the wages of death are ignored...

...The Crusaders were religious zealots...

...The latter Persian Wars saw relatively few Greek deaths...

...Rather, Western civilization gave a spectrum of advantages to European militaries that allowed them a much greater margin of error and the ability to overcome tactical deficiencies—battlefield inexperience, soldierly cowardice, insufficient numbers, terrible generalship...

...Most see in the advance of capitalism, democracy and their ancillary values the seeds of perpetual peace and prosperity...

...Similarly, buying and selling is a human trait...

...The Iraqi army could be easily supplied by highway from Baghdad...

...It is no accident that Themistocles, like both the victorious Cortes and Lord Chelmsford, did not die a hero in a homeland grateful to him for the slaughter of its enemies...

...As observers as diverse as Aldous Huxley and John Keegan have pointed out, to write of conflict is not to describe merely the superior rifles of imperial troops or the matchless edge of the Roman gladius, but ultimately the collision of a machine-gun bullet with the brow of an adolescent, or the carving and ripping of artery and organ in the belly of an anonymous Gaul...

...African machine guns have not evolved beyond American models...

...In a series of border wars from 1947 to 1982, tiny Israel fought and decisively defeated a loose coalition of its Arab neighbors, who were supplied with sophisticated weapons by the Soviet Union, China and France...

...In battle, the insidious and more subtle cultural institutions that heretofore were murky and undefined become stark and unforgiving...

...We owe it to the dead to discover at all costs how the practice of government, science, law and religion instantaneously determines the fate of thousands on the battlefield—and why...

...Western armies often fight with and for a sense of legal freedom...

...Freedom for many means an absence of responsibility, while the culture of the mall, video and Internet seem to breed uniformity and complacence, rather than rationalism, individualism and initiative...

...POLITICS BY BLOODIER MEANS The Western way of war is so lethal precisely because it is so amoral— rarely shackled by concerns of ritual, tradition, religion or ethics, by anything other than military necessity...

...Alexander's brigands were hardly emissaries of culture and went east to loot and plunder, not to "civilize...

...no disciplined files of shock phalangites in Phoenicia...

...In less than three months in 1982, a British expeditionary force crossed 8,000 miles of rough seas and expelled a well-entrenched Argentine army on the Falklands, which was easily supported by ships and planes from the Patagonian coast a mere two hundred miles away...

...But there is also something radically democratic about firearms in particular that explains their singularly explosive growth in the West...

...Revolutionary France and parliamentary England were deadly enemies...

...Yet an often idealistic and self-proclaimed pacifistic Clinton administration called out the American military for more separate foreign deployments than any presidency in a hundred years...

...I worry less for the millennium to come about constant warring between the West and non-West...

...There is no reason to think that either is more rather than less bellicose after the fall of communism...

...Five out of six made it out alive, the majority * and will NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 6l of the dead lost not in battle, but in the high snows of Armenia...

...The polls would never have crafted a Bill of Rights...

...But they killed without dying because of a military tradition that for centuries prior had proved unlike any other in the ancient world...

...It is no accident that feudal Japan eventually found firearms revolutionary and dangerous...

...Western warring is often an extension of the idea of state politics, rather than a mere effort to obtain territory, personal status, wealth or revenge...

...German tribesmen were ostensibly as individualistic as Roman legionaries...

...Many were murderous renegades and exiles...

...The victory of the Ten Farmer, classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson is the author of Carnage and Culture, from which this is adapted...

...Many have accepted the truism that democracies do not fight democracies...

...Any nation in this new century that threatens the use of the atomic bomb realizes that it is faced with two unpleasant alternatives: massive reprisal in kind, and soon the possibility that its use will be deflected or destroyed before harming its adversary...

...a system of ethics and a religion that brings out the best in humankind...

...But I am not so sure we are yet at the point of collapse...

...the latter lament a spreading global atrophy, under which enervated citizens shall risk nothing if it might endanger their comfort...

...Throughout most ofWest-ern civilization there have been countless compromises, as what was attained proved less than what Western culture professed as the most desirable...

...Western values are absolute, but the methods of their implementation are also evolutionary, being perfect at neither their birth nor their adolescence...

...All ideas are in part captives of their time and space, and much of ancient Greece today would seem foreign if not nasty to most Westerners...

...Why should we concentrate on a few hours of battle and the fighting experience of the average soldier, and not on the epic sweep of wars, with their cargo of grand strategy, tactical maneuver and vast theater operations that so much better lend themselves to social and cultural exegesis...

...By the same token, Mon-tezuma could not envision fighting in the Mediterranean, just as Ali Pasha would never see the Americas.There was little chance that the Aztecs, for all their rich local natural resources, on their own accord could make harquebuses, gunpowder or crossbows, the Ottomans topflight bronze cannon and the Zulus Martini-Henry rifles...

...The Western tradition of critique and audit has not only established European credibility, and so Spanish conquistadors versus Aztecs, 1520...

...But there is little margin of error, given the carnage and cultural chaos even a single intramural European war can bring...

...Israel's population during those decades never exceeded five million, where66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO1 as its surrounding antagonists—at various times including Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf states—numbered well over 100 million...

...The general public itself is mostly unaware of their cultures singular and continuous lethality in arms .Yet for the past 2,500 years, there has been a peculiar practice ofWestern warfare—a common foundation and continual way of fighting—that has made Europeans the most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization...

...its pursuing infantry, sometimes whipped on by their officers, fled at the first onslaught of the Greek phalanx...

...In this regard, the future ofWestern warfare looks somewhat more disturbing—so many have perished due to the diffusion of Western arms.The most obvious worry is the continual spread ofWestern notions of military discipline, technology, decisive battle and capitalism, without the accompanying womb of freedom, civic militarism, civilian audit and dissent.Those semi-Western autocracies now on the horizon—China, North Korea, Iran—may soon, through the purchase or the promotion of a Western-trained scientific and military elite, gain the capability nearly to match European and American weapons research and development, without any sense of affinity with—indeed, with abject hostility to—their original mentors...

...We may well be all Westerners in the millennium to come, and that could be a very dangerous thing indeed...

...More recently Belgrade was bombed and the Danube blocked...

...but the Zulu, not the Englishman, was subject to execution by a nod of his king...

...The freedom that was won at Salamis is not entirely the same as what was ensured at Midway, much less as what was at stake at Lepanto or Tenochtitlán...

...Culture is not a mere construct, but when it comes to war, a very deadly reality that often determines whether thousands of mostly innocent young men and women live or die...

...a rationalist tradition that alone allows us material and technological progress...

...Suddenly confronted by a host of enemies and hostile former allies, stranded far from home without money, guides, provisions or the would-be king, lacking ample cavalry or missile troops, the orphaned Greek infantrymen nevertheless voted not to surrender...

...What they shared was a holistic tradition that transcended howitzers and jets...

...Prudence in the use of nuclear weapons, not profligacy, remains the protocol in hot and cold wars...

...But the institutionalization of critique in the military—soldiers' subservience to political leaders, existence of law courts, uniform codes of discipline subject to review, appeal and ratification—is unknown outside the West.The freedom among citizens to criticize wars and warriors openly and profligately has no pedigree outside the European tradition...

...There is no evidence either that the Greeks were by nature "different" from King Artaxerxes' men.The later pseudoscientific notion that the Europeans were racially superior to the Persians was entertained by no Greeks of the time...

...How can we write of larger cultural issues that surround war without describing the way in which young men kill and die, without remembering how many thousands are robbed of their youth, their robust physiques turned into goo in a few minutes on the battlefield...

...The most gallant Apaches— murderously brave in raiding and skirmishing on the Great Plains—would have gone home after the first hour of Gettysburg...

...the abstract protection of private property, the institutionalization of interest and investment, and the understanding of markets are not...

...That shared heritage explains why soldiers in the phalanx, commanders in the fields and generals at Alexander's table all voiced their ideas with a freedom unknown in the Achaemenid court...

...The dramatic European expansion of the 16th century may well have been energized by Western excellence in firearms and capital ships, but those discoveries were themselves the product of a long-standing Western approach to applied capitalism, science and rationalism not found in other cultures...

...None of them were in any sense of the word free indi-viduals.The Republican Guard turned out to be about as effective against Westerners as had been Xerxes' Immortals...

...Plague, nerve gas and new viruses not yet imagined, we are told, will some day kill us all...

...A rogue state that sponsors a terrorist with a vial in Manhattan is still cognizant that its own continued existence is measured by a 15-minute missile trajectory...

...Elected prime ministers have not pacified India and Pakistan...

...The growth in influence of a unified Germany has scarcely begun.The specter of a pan-European state highlights the increasing ambiguous position of Great Britain, and seems to create unity among its members by collective antagonism toward and envy of the United States...

...Although an army's organization, discipline and arms can surely magnify or whittle down the martial spirit of a man, bravery nonetheless is a more universal human characteristic and so tells us little...

...I am not interested here in whether European military culture is morally superior to, or far more wretched than, that of the non-West...

...Many of his soldiers were seasoned veterans of a brutal war with Iran.They were entrenched on or adjacent to their native soil...

...As long as Europe and America retain constitutional government, capitalism, freedom of religious and political association, free speech and intellectual tolerance, then history teaches us that Westerners in their hour of need can still field brave, disciplined and well-equipped soldiers, who kill like none other on the planet...

...That Arab and Argentine officers were trained abroad meant little...

...A century later, Democratic Boeotia fought democratic Athens at Mantinea...

...Perhaps, perhaps not...

...It broke the monotony of the Eastern world by the impression ofWestern energy and superior civilization, even as England's present mission is to break up the mental and moral stagnation of India and Cathay by pouring upon and through them the impulsive current of Anglo-Saxon commerce and conquest...

...They are frequently products of civic militarism or constitutional governments, and thus are overseen by those outside religion and the military itself...

...Bernardino de Sahagun's narrative of the Spanish conquest of Mexico sought to criticize the morality of his countrymen's army—in a way unthinkable in Aztec, Vietnamese or Zulu society...

...It is no accident that gifted writers of war—from Homer, Thucydides, Caesar, Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy to Stephen Runciman, James Jones and Stephen Ambrose—equate tactics with blood and strategy with corpses...

...were to go to war...

...The pride and fears of a Westernized Japan remain, accentuated by the rise of a capitalist China and the unpredictability of the two Koreas, who themselves promise a new unified nationalist identity—perhaps fueled by South Korean capitalism and North Korean nuclear arms...

...Foot soldiers are common in every culture, but infantrymen, fighting en masse, who take and hold ground and fight face-to-face, are a uniquely Western specialty—the product of a long tradition of a middling landholding citizenry, uneasy with both landless peasants and mounted aristocrats...

...Gifted intellectuals of vision and character, products of this new Westernized intellectual culture, could only sigh when, during the spring of 1982 in the harsh seas of the South Atlantic, British seamen blew up Argentines and vice versa...

...States that become thoroughly Western are less likely to attack the traditional West, but not less likely enough to ensure that they never will.The horror of organized warfare throughout history has not been constant fighting between tribal societies—or even, between the West and "the Other"—but the far deadlier explosions inside Europe—between Westerners...

...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69...

...The idea of annihilation, of head-to-head battle that destroys the enemy, seems a particularly Western concept, largely unfamiliar to the ritualistic fighting and emphasis on deception and attrition found outside Europe...

...A not insignificant percentage of the world's oil supply was for a time either embargoed, aflame or in peril at sea...

...Not a phalangite in Alexander's army voted him general, much less king...

...it has also shown that minds outside the battlefield ultimately had a say in how their nation's treasure and manhood were spent, sometimes saving the military from itself...

...All armies at times engage in mass confrontations...

...Mural by Diego Rivera...

...A Zulu could roam relatively free on the plains of southern Africa, enjoying a somewhat more "free" lifestyle than a British redcoat in a stuffy barracks...

...It is hard to see in Cortès's small band religion and politics as entirely separate...

...England was in India, India not in England...

...It is the age-old specter of horrendous war inside the West itself...

...Had the United States unleashed its full arsenal of brutal military power and fought without political restrictions, the war in Vietnam would have been over in a year or two, and may well have resembled the lopsided affair in the Gulf War...

...The critical point about firearms and explosives is not that they suddenly gave Western armies hegemony, but that such weapons were produced in quality and great numbers only in Western countries...

...Western technology and science has not always been superior—Themistocles' triremes at Salamis were no better than Xerxes', and Admiral Nagumo's carriers at Midway had better planes than the Americans did.The status of freedom, individualism and civic militarism at those battles, however, was vastly different...

...Both idealists on the left and pessimists on the right—whether Kantian Utopians or gloomy Hegelians, worried over the end of history—have at times prognosticated a cessation to civilized warfare...

...Technological superiority does not in itself explain the miraculous Greek achievement, although Xenophon at various places suggests that the Ten Thousand's heavy bronze, wood and iron panoply was unmatched by anything found in Asia...

...Maybe, but we must remember that these ideas have also been the foundations for the world's deadliest armies...

...in the same manner, we would not turn our courts over to majority vote of mass juries without the right of appeal to a higher judiciary...

...We forget that in the half century since the end of Hitler's Germany, far more Koreans, Chinese, Africans, Indians and Southeast Asians have died in mostly forgotten tribal wars, at the hands of their own governments or in hot spots of the Cold War...

...The presence of a Palestinian parliament has not brought peace to the Middle East...

...Where else would every man under arms feel equal to anyone else in the army-or at least see himself as free and in control of his own destiny...

...Or threaten us endlessly with the specter of nuclear-tipped missiles over Los Angeles...

...At a cost of some 255 British lives— mostly seamen who perished from missile attacks on Royal Navy cruisers—the government of Margaret Thatcher won back the small islands in the South Atlantic at little human cost, despite enormous logistical problems, the excellent imported weapons of its adversary and the complete surprise of the initial Argentine invasion...

...and no landed infantry of small property owners in ancient Scythia-and thus no military in the ancient Mediterranean like the Greeks at Thermopylae, Salamis, or Plataea...

...Moroccans quickly mastered Portuguese artillery...

...The Aztec warriors who were blown to bits by Cortès's cannon or the Zulus who were shattered by British Martini-Henry rifles at Rorke's Drift may have been the most courageous fighters in the history of warfare...

...Its enemies simply were not...

...Israel itself was a democratic society of free markets, free elections and free speech...

...These advantages were not the product of the genes, germs or geography of a distant past...

...Likewise, armies from the Persians to the Ottomans often developed sophisticated methods of mustering troops...

...While the Inquisition was an episode ofWestern fanaticism and at times unrestrained by political audit, the tally of its entire bloody course never matched the Aztec score of corpses in a mere four days at the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in 1487...

...And those are what ultimately determined whether at Lepanto twenty-year-old Turkish peasants survived or were harpooned by the thousand, whether Athenian cobblers and tanners could return home in safety after doing their butchery at Salamis or were to wash up in chunks on the shores of Attica...

...Statistics seem to support this encouraging belief...

...But the Iraqi soldiers were not merely poorly disciplined and organized...

...In fact, Xenophon's men could only envy the inhabitants of Asia Minor, whose arable land and natural wealth were in dire contrast to their poor soil back in Greece...

...But military historians will answer that the forces of vigilance, keen border defense, technologies of prevention and vaccination and counterintelligence are also never static...

...Rather, it is a peculiar Western practice that acknowledges the self-interest of man and channels that greed to the production of vast amounts of goods and services, through free markets and institutionalized guarantees of personal profit, free exchange, deposited capital and private property...

...much less were they kinder or more moral people than the Asian tribes they met...

...Western elections and constitutions are not the same as tribal freedom, in which much land and few people occasionally give individuals opportunity to find solitude and independence...

...Honor, even in this age of decadence, still exists and will still get people killed for some time to come...

...It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest that abject defeat is somehow victory...

...Fewer Americans— soldier and civilian alike—are voting than ever before...

...Not always, at least not in the long term...

...Military history must never stray from the tragic story of killing, which is ultimately found only in battle.The culture in which militaries fight determines whether thousands of mostly innocent young men are alive or rotting after their appointed hour of battle...

...True, some key ingredients of traditional Western warfare appear to be all but gone...

...Greek religion did not put a high premium on turning the other cheek or on a belief that war per se was either abnormal or amoral...

...There is an inherent truth in battle...

...thousands died at Nemea and Coronea, where Greek fought Greek...

...After a successful eastward march of more than 1,500 miles that scattered all opposition, the Greeks smashed the royal Persian line at Cunaxa, north of Babylon.The price for destroying an entire wing of the Persian army was a single Greek hoplite wounded by an arrow...

...Despite nearly indefensible borders, the outnumbered Israeli army— the creation of a brilliant generation of European èmigrès—consistently fielded better-organized, -supplied and -disciplined armies, with superbly trained and individualistic soldiers...

...And should our present adversaries adopt consensual government, free speech and market economies, would they then really remain our adversaries...

...They found the barbaric white-skinned Mossynoecians, who engaged in sexual intercourse openly in public, equally baffling...

...In some form or another, the Ten Thousand would be followed by equally brutal European intruders on the rest of the worlds landscapes: Agesilaus and his Spartans, Chares the mercenary captain, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and centuries of legionary dominance, the Crusaders, Hernán Cortès, Portuguese explorers in Asiatic seas, British redcoats in India and Africa and scores of other thieves, buccaneers, colonists, mercenaries, imperialists and explorers...

...Wars are fought by men who are fickle, and in real conditions that are wholly unpredictable—heat, ice and rain, tropical and near-arctic, close and far from home...

...Saddam Hussein's military, like the Argentines', had purchased excellent equipment...

...Nevertheless, they outfought their numerically superior enemies, and in varying degrees drew on elements of Western culture mercilessly to slaughter their opponents...

...At various periods in Western history the above menu has not always been found in its entirety...

...But fight they did.Thucydides, who wrote history as "a possession for all time," reminds us that states fight for "fear, self-interest and honor"—not always out of reason, economic need or survival...

...It is a weighty and sometimes ominous heritage that we must neither deny nor feel ashamed about—but insist that our deadly manner of war serves, rather than buries, our civilization...

...The Iraqi military—having no ability to invade Europe or the United States— was nearly annihilated not far from the battlefields where Xenophon's Ten Thousand and Alexander the Great had likewise routed Asian imperial armies so long ago...

...Western militaries put a high premium on individualism...

...What other army of the ancient world elected its own leaders...

...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO1 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 served to ensure that the written and published story of war was largely Western...

...Europeans were NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO1 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 intrinsically no smarter or braver than the Africans, Asians and Native Americans whom they usually butchered...

...Capitalism is more than the sale of goods, more than the existence of money and more than the presence of the bazaar...

...But let us remember as well that the more Western the world becomes, the more likely that its wars will be ever more Western in nature, and thus ever more deadly...

...The more the world becomes thoroughly Western, the larger the Europeanized battlefield shall become...

...Gettysburg in a single day took more Americans than did all the Indian wars of the nineteenth century...

...Has not the real danger to progress and civilization always arisen when the West turns its deadly arsenal upon itself...

...The former hope for global peace under the aegis of international judicial bodies, most recently the United Nations and the World Court...

...Most of the crises that have plagued the world in the twentieth century grew out of Europe's two world wars—the status of Germany, the division and unification of Europe, the rise and collapse of the Russian empire, the spread of communism after the defeat of fascism, the mess in the Balkans...

...We in the West still shudder at the carnage of World War II, largely because it took the lives of so many Westerners...

...By the same token, there was little chance that the American government in the darkest days of December 1941—Britain on the ropes, the Nazis outside Moscow, the Japanese in the air over Hawaii—would have ordered thousands of its own pilots to crash themselves into Admiral Yamamo to's vast carrier fleet or commanded B-17s to plunge into German oil refineries...

...THE LETHAL EDGE There was no idea of personal freedom in the Pharaoh's ranks...

...What trumps courage, however, is culture, which determines how militaries are armed, supplied, organized and disciplined...

...Wars are the sum of battles, battles the tally of individual human beings killing and dying...

...Europeans have been quick to alter tactics, steal foreign breakthroughs and borrow inventions when in the marketplace of ideas their own traditional tactics and arms have been found wanting...

...Indeed, their leaders warned that any Greeks who stayed might become lethargic "Lotus-Eaters" in so wealthier a natural landscape...

...Though surrounded enemies, their generals captured and beheaded, forced to traverse the contested lands of more than twenty different peoples, caught in snowdrifts, high mountain passes and waterless steppes, suffering frostbite, malnutrition and frequent sickness, the Greeks nevertheless reached the safety of the Black Sea largely intact, less than a year and a half after leaving home...

...Did such dissent weaken consistently Westerners' ability to wage war...

...Over time, however, the resiliency of the Western system of war prevailed, allowing horrible disasters from Thermopylae to Isandhlwana and Little Big Horn not to affect the larger course of the conflict or to lead to an overall Western collapse...

...Outwardly, whether Iraqis fight Iranians or Somalians battle Ethiopians, the world's regular armies are now almost identical in their Western khaki, camouflage and boots...

...Waterloo, the Somme and Omaha Beach only confirm the 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO1 holocaust that occurs when Westerner meets Westerner...

...Nor is a second scenario likely either— total war brought on by a nuclear America, Europe, Russia, China or a warlike Islamic world that would incinerate the planet...

...Just as deadly as satellite guidance systems in China is a Chinese chain of command with a flexibility and initiative modeled after that in Europe and America, and a private rather than state-owned munitions industry...

...The ability to shield blows is a law of military history, forgotten though it has been in the last half century of threatened nuclear Armageddon...

...Westerners, in short, long ago saw war as a method of doing what politics cannot, and thus are willing to obliterate rather than check or humiliate any who stand in their way...

...Those consumers of different races, religions, languages and nations, who all wear Adidas, buy Microsoft software and drink Coke, are just as likely to kill each other as before-and still watch Gilli-gan's Island reruns...

...Chinese tanks look European...

...Western armies in Africa, Asia and the Americas, like soldiers everywhere, were often annihilated— often led by fools and placed in the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time...

...Most subsequent Western expeditionary forces were outnumbered and often deployed far from home...

...The fumes of Roman republicanism kept the empire going long after the ideal of a citizen soldier sometimes gave way to a mercenary army...

...The Chalybians traveled with the heads of their slain opponents...

...No other culture but the West could have brought such discipline, morale and sheer technological expertise to the art of killing as did the Europeans at the insanity ofVerdun—a sustained industrial approach to slaughter unlike even the most horrific tribal massacre...

...many early European armies were monarchical, with only occasional oversight by deliberative bodies...

...The terrorist attack on Sept...

...The real hazard, as it has always been, is not Western moral decline or the threat of the Other—now polished with the veneer of sophisticated arms...

...The Zulu empire was doomed once the British decided to invade, regardless of its victory at Isandhlwana, despite the tactical lapses of Lord Chelmsford and irrespective of courageous impis...

...Or do such would-be antagonists merely pick the fruit of the West, which soon withers without the deep taproots of intellectual, religious and political tolerance...

...Nations, clans and tribes, it seems, will continue to fight despite international threats, sanctions and the lessons of history, regardless of the intervention of the world's sole superpower and oblivious to the economic absurdity inherent in modern military arithmetic...

...There was a Union and a Confederate president and Senate...

...They are not necessarily entirely professional, but outlets for the disaffected, who seek economic opportunity, with the realization that those of a far different social class will determine where, when and how NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67 they will fight and die...

...Pessimists see seeds of decay in the lethargic teenagers of affluent American suburbs...

...Few Greeks were killed stopping the Persians at Marathon...

...Will—and should—this lethal heritage continue...

...Two colossal enemies—the Soviet Union and America—did not employ their huge nuclear arsenals through fifty years of the Cold War...

...The North Vietnamese did not fight with the tribal spears of their own past...

...Moroccans were not in Lisbon teaching Portuguese the arts of Islamic heavy gunnery...

...They are 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 often subject to criticism and civilian complaint that may improve rather than erode their war-making ability...

...By the same token, despite a growing uniformity in the world's militaries—their automatic weapons, chains of command and uniforms Western to the core—there is little solace that some new global culture has ushered in perpetual peace...

...The Gulf War, 1991...

...THE FUTURE OF FIGHTING Nothing that has transpired in the last decades of the twentieth century suggests an end to Western military dominance, much less to war itself...

...If so, let us pray for another half century of aberrant European and American peace, for a few more decades of good behavior, so at odds with the West's own past...

...in Greek democracy, English parliamentary government...

...During the 1990-91 Gulf War, the designer of an American smart bomb, the assembler in its plant of fabrication, the logis-tician who ordered, received, stockpiled and loaded it onto a jet, all functioned in a manner unlike their Iraqi opposites—if there were such exact counterparts—and so ensured that an innocent conscript in Saddam Hussein s army would find himself blown to pieces with little chance to escape the attack, display heroism in his demise or kill the pilot who killed him.Why Iraqi adolescents were targets in the flashing video consoles of sophisticated American helicopters and not vice versa, or why GIs from icy Minnesota were better equipped to fight in the desert than recruits from nearby sweltering Baghdad, is mostly a result of cultural heritage, not military courage, much less an accident of geography or genes...

...The European-educated, Argentine Nobel Prize winner Jorge Luis Borges likened the Falklands War to "two bald men fighting over a comb...

...Yet they could not produce guns in any great number, if at all, much less craft improved models, or find in a written literature the abstract principles of ballistics and munitions, in order to conduct advanced research...

...The Russian entry into Chechnya received parliamentary approval...

...Western civilization has given mankind the only economic system that works...

...Where else in the Mediterranean would philosophers and students of rhetoric march in file alongside cutthroats to crash headlong into enemy flesh...

...If we are to have neither perpetual peace nor a single conflagration to end the species, the third option—random and even deadlier conventional wars—seems a certainty...

...Copyright 2001 Doubleday Publishers Thousand, however, was wasted when their employer, Cyrus, rashly pursued his brother, Artaxerxes, across the battle line and was cut down by the Persian imperial guard...

...Abstractions like capitalism or civic militarism are hardly abstract at all when it comes to battle, but rather concrete realities...

...The peculiar way Greeks killed grew out of consensual government, equality among the middling classes, civilian audit of military affairs and politics apart from religion, freedom and individualism and rationalism...

...The very question ofWesternization has a reductionist and sometimes absurd quality about it: there is no concept of "Eastern-ization" within the armed forces of the West, at least in which entire Western cultures adopt wholesale the military practices and technology of the non-West...

...Even on the most controversial of issues like freedom, consensual government and dissent, we must judge Western failings not through the lenses of Utopian perfectionism of the present, but in the context of the global landscape of the times...

...11—accomplished through Western technology, from pilot lessons and cell phones to frequent-flyer miles and the Internet—will be answered by a degree of leathal power simply unimagined and incomprehensible in the Middle East...

...The recruits were mostly battle-hardened veterans of the 27-year Pelo-ponnesian War, mustered from throughout the Greek-speaking world...

...Companies, brigades and divisions—the successors to Roman military practice—are the global standards of military organization...

...The rise of a huge federal government and global corporations has reduced the number of Americans who work as autonomous individuals—as family farmers, small businesspeople or owners of local shops...

...Painting by Carl von Steuben...

...The ordeal of the Ten Thousand, when stranded and near extinction, brought out the polis that was innate in all Greek soldiers, who then conducted themselves on campaign precisely as civilians in their respective city-states...

...Can a capitalist, China, Iran,Vietnam or Pakistan equip and organize a sophisticated army, superior to any Western military, without free citizens, individualism in command hierarchy and constant oversight of its strategy and tactics...

...Rome versus Carthage, at Cannae, 216 B.C...

...The swing is once more toward the defensive, as vast sums are allocated to missile protection, to coun-terinsurgency and even to body armor to deflect bullet, shrapnel and flame...

...CAPITALISM KILLS A century ago, the British historian Sir Edward Creasy wrote of Alexander's victory at Gaugamela that it "not only overthrew an Oriental dynasty, but established European rulers in its stead...

...The key is not to look to the past and expect to see the present, but to identify in history the seeds of change, and of the possible across time and space.Wall Street is much closer to the agora than to the palace at Persepolis.The Athenian court akin to us in a way pharaoh's and the sultan's law is not...

...In the summer of 401 B.C., 10,700 Greek hoplite soldiers—infantrymen, heavily armed with spear, shield and body armor—were hired by Cyrus the Younger to help press his claim to the Persian throne...

...Just as the peace movement and the constant political audit of the military in Vietnam conditioned the behavior of American armies in Southeast Asia, so Bishop Colenso and his family published critiques against the British invasion of Zululand...

...CULTURE WAR In the long history of European military practice, it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western army was another Western army...

...no Persian conception of civic militarism or civilian audit of the Great King's army...

...Not a single soldier who was incinerated by American jets voted to invade Kuwait or fight the United States...

...A small Boer force killed more British troops in six days than the Zulus did in a year...

...That fact is ultimately explained by a long-standing Western cultural stance toward rationalism, free inquiry and the dissemination of knowledge, whose roots lie in classical antiquity and are not specific to any particular period of European history...

...Differences in climate, geography and natural resources tell us equally little...

...What ultimately strikes the reader of the Anabasis is not merely the courage, skill and brutality of the Greek army—which after all had no business in Asia, other than killing and money—but the vast cultural divide between the Ten Thousand and the brave tribes they fought...

...the sole political structure that ensures the freedom of the individual...

...and there was unchecked mass murder for six years in Bosnia and Kosovo, only hours away from Rome, Athens and Berlin...

...A military command may steal secrets daily over the Internet, but if it cannot discuss those ideas openly with its civilian and military leadership, then there is no guarantee that such information will find its optimum application...

...North Vietnamese communists duplic-itously promised to their troops a Western-style "democratic republic"—not a communist police state or a feudal dynasty...

...Some will find that assertion chauvinistic, or worse, and cite every exception from Thermopylae to Little Big Horn in refutation...

...Artist unknown, 15th century...

...and the most lethal practice of arms conceivable...

...none outside the West drafted fighters with the implicit understanding that their military service was part and parcel of their status as free citizens who determined when, how and why they Franks versus Arabs, Poitiers, 752...

...That brutal trek northward to the shores of the Black Sea forms the centerpiece of Xenophon's Anabasis ("The March Up-Country"), the author himself one of the leaders of the retreating Ten Thousand...

...his economy was an extension of an in-house family business...

...Saddam's own military plans were not subject to review...

...Strategic arsenals, both nuclear and biological, are shrinking, not growing...

...Their legacy to others is nuclear restraint, not recklessness...

...allies defeated the veteran army of Iraq—1.2 million ground troops, 3,850 artillery pieces, 5,800 tanks, 5,100 other armored vehicles— in four days, at a loss of fewer than 150 American servicemen and -women, most of whom were killed by random missile attack, friendly fire or other accidents...

...Mercenary armies in America and Europe are the norm...

...Both near-adolescents and the still-hale in late middle age enlisted for pay...