Hold that line
Carlin, David R. Jr.
HOLD THAT LINE HUSSEIN'S TANKS, HANNIBAL'S ELEPHANTS How odd that the United States, despite having just prevailed in a Fabian struggle that lasted more than forty years, should be contemplating a...
...What planet have these critics been living on for the past half-century...
...Finally, the president has said the cause we are struggling for is the sanctity of international law...
...True, the American public will become impatient with drawn-out conflicts they don't believe in, e.g., Vietnam...
...did fight two wars that were incidental to the cold war: a necessary war in Korea, an unnecessary one in Vietnam...
...Arab hostility, great enough to begin with because of our long record of support for Israel, will be especially sharp...
...But the dictator proved unpopular...
...true to his promises, he joined battle...
...The U.S...
...This is more promising...
...His strategy was to "contain" Hannibal, to let the invader wear himself out roaming up and down Italy, far from his North African home, short of supplies and allies...
...HOLD THAT LINE HUSSEIN'S TANKS, HANNIBAL'S ELEPHANTS How odd that the United States, despite having just prevailed in a Fabian struggle that lasted more than forty years, should be contemplating a plunge into armed struggle with Iraq...
...the result was that the Romans suffered the worst military catastrophe they had ever experienced (216 B.C...
...from hundreds of millions of Muslims, Arabs, and non-Arabs, from Indonesia to Central Africa...
...Fabius was charged with being a wimp...
...After the battle Roman allies in southern Italy defected to Hannibal, providing him with a base of operations and supplies...
...But that won't do either...
...But this cold war victory is one of the great military-political accomplishments in our national history, probably the greatest of all...
...Why do they want to throw away the lessons of patience we should have learned from our great Fabian success in the cold war...
...Eventually the Romans, who stood so near to total defeat after Cannae, rallied and won the war, but only after many years (in 202 B.C...
...has just won the cold war...
...All in all, a truly amazing achievement...
...When Hannibal inflicted a terrible defeat on Rome at the battle of Lake Trasimene (217 B.C...
...He said it was about our "way of life"-which, I take it, is a pious way of saying "cheap oil...
...It didn't end with a bang...
...Never perhaps in history has so extensive a voluntary alliance held together for so long a period and with so little internal divisiveness...
...If an attack on Iraq would result in a complete victory after a week or two, something might be said for it...
...And this, I think, is President Bush's problem: he has yet to define the cause in such a way that the public will support it patiently over the long haul...
...eventually you'll wear him down...
...Contain Iraq, and we have the world on our side...
...Perhaps that is why the magnitude of our accomplishment has yet to sink in with most of us...
...the frightened Romans appointed Fabius Maximus "dictator," a post of exceptional powers created in great emergencies...
...get involved in a prolonged shooting war, and we'll be increasingly on our own...
...When I say "Fabian" I am alluding of course to the strategy adopted by Fabius the Roman general who opposed Hannibal when the great Carthaginian invaded Roman territory in the late third century B.C., marching from Spain and descending through the Alps to the plains of northern Italy, elephants and all...
...But the Roman-in-the-street was too impatient for this long-term strategy...
...and it could grow to such an extent that it will threaten Arab governments currently friendly to the U.S...
...He compared Iraqi aggression against Kuwait to Nazi aggressions in Europe...
...Critics of a Fabian policy in the Persian Gulf region contend that Americans are constitutionally impatient, too impatient to bear the figurative heat of the day that such a policy demands...
...But they are prepared to support a conflict they believe in, e.g., World War II and the cold war...
...The Fabian strategy was one of delay: stay close to Hannibal, but don't engage him in a pitched battle...
...The real question is not whether the American public will support a Fabian policy in the Persian Gulf, but whether they believe in the cause to which this policy is directed...
...and only after the war had expanded from Italy to Spain, Greece, and Africa...
...So when the dictator's term expired, a general more to the popular taste, Terentius Varro, took command...
...and he promised the impatient Romans to destroy Hannibal the first day he set eyes on him...
...He knows there is a good reason for us to be in the Gulf region...
...it ended, not with a whimper, but a sigh of relief...
...This is a test of President Bush's capacity for "the vision thing...
...Well, Varro soon set eyes on Hannibal at Cannae...
...Yet during that long era Americans and Soviets never killed one another on a battlefield (though the U.S...
...But that won't do, especially when oil has become more expensive...
...Unless he can do that, his popularity will continue to fall, until one day he is tempted to prove he's no wimp by bashing Saddam Hussein as he earlier bashed Michael Dukakis and Manuel Noriega...
...For more than four decades we contained the Soviets, waiting for their system to crack under the strain, which it eventually did...
...But do we realize how much we have accomplished...
...at all events it ended quietly...
...But Iraq is not to be confused with Grenada or Panama...
...but he hasn't been able to translate his sound intuition into persuasive words...
...Like the Romans following Cannae, we may find some of our friends defecting...
...But he will have to reconcile America's relative tolerance of Israel's retention of the West Bank, etc., with our complete intolerance of Iraq's retention of Kuwait...
...They say that unless something dramatic happens soon, President George Bush's popularity will plunge, whereupon the president will feel compelled to prove yet again that he is not a wimp by launching an attack on Iraq...
...And do we appreciate how we accomplished it...
...If so, why are so many Americans-including, it seems, some near the center of power-eager for a quick fix in the Persian Gulf...
...Why not play the waiting game, the game of containment that served us so well in that protracted struggle that went by the name of the cold war...
...Why are they bruising for a fight with Saddam Hussein, instead of continuing to contain him with embargo, blockade, and troops in the desert...
...And we did this, not alone, but at the head of a large and complex alliance, put together and kept together on a voluntary basis...
...World War III, though always feared and often expected, never arrived...
...The result of such a war will be not only many dead Americans and even more dead Iraqis, but increased ill will toward the U.S...
...Iraq is not Nazi Germany, and Saddam Hussein, wicked though he no doubt is, is no Hitler...
...he wanted a quick fix, a knockout punch...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 19
