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SPENGLER
More killing, please!
"I think people are sick of [killing]," said
President George W Bush of the Israeli-Palestinian war.
The contrary may be true. People may want the killing to
continue for quite some time, as the Palestinian radical
organizations suggest. A recurring theme in the history
of war is that most of the killing typically occurs long
after rational calculation would call for the surrender
of the losing side.
Think of the Japanese after
Okinawa, the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge, or
the final phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty
Years War, or the Hundred Years War. Across epochs and
cultures, blood has flown in proportion inverse to the
hope of victory. Perhaps what the Middle East requires
in order to achieve a peace settlement is not less
killing, but more.
Mut der Verzweiflung,
as the Germans call it, courage borne of desperation,
arises not from the delusion that victory is possible,
but rather from the conviction that death is preferable
to surrender. Wars of this sort end long after one side
has been defeated, namely when enough of the diehards
have been killed.
Don't blame the president's
provincialism. This has nothing to do with Bushido, Nazi
fanaticism or other exotic ideologies. The most
compelling case of Mut der Verzweiflung can be
found in Bush's own back yard, during the American Civil
War of 1861-1865. The Southern cause was lost after
Major General Ulysses S Grant took Vicksburg and General
George G Meade repelled General Robert E Lee at
Gettysburg in July 1863. With Union forces in control of
the Mississippi River, the main artery of Southern
commerce, and without the prospect of a breakout to the
North, the Confederacy of slaveholding states faced
inevitable strangulation by the vastly superior forces
of the North.
Nonetheless, the South fought on
for another 18 months. Between Gettysburg and Vicksburg,
the two decisive battles of the war fought within the
same week, 100,000 men had died, bringing the total
number of deaths in major battles to more than a quarter
of a million. Another 200,000 soldiers would die before
Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865.
The chart below shows the cumulative number of Civil War
casualties as the major battles of the war
proceeded.
The chart is demarcated into
sections labeled "Hope" (prior to Gettysburg and
Vicksburg) and "No Hope". Geometers will recognize a
so-called S-curve in which the pace of killing
accelerates immediately after Gettysburg and Vickburg
and remains steep through the Battle of Cold Harbor,
before leveling off in the last months of the war. Not
only did half the casualties occur after the war was
lost by the South, but the speed at which casualties
occurred sharply accelerated. The killing slowed after
the South had bled nearly to death, with many regiments
unable to field more than a handful of men.
In
all, one-quarter of military age Southern manhood died
in the field, by far the greatest sacrifice ever offered
up by a modern nation in war. General W T Sherman, the
scourge of the South, explained why this would occur in
advance. There existed 300,000 fanatics in the South who
knew nothing but hunting, drinking, gambling and
dueling, a class who benefited from slavery and would
rather die than work for a living. To end the war,
Sherman stated on numerous occasions these 300,000 had
to be killed. Evidently Sherman was right. For all the
wasteful slaughter of the last 18 months of the war,
Southern commander Lee barely could persuade his men to
surrender in April 1865. The Confederate president,
Jefferson Davis, called for guerilla war to continue,
and Lee's staff wanted to keep fighting. Lee barely
avoided a drawn-out irregular war.
What will happen now in the Middle
East? At the outbreak of the war, Grant and Sherman were
unknown. They rose to command because the nerve of their
predecessors snapped at the edge of the abyss. The
character of the war was too horrible for them to
contemplate. Bush's nerve appears to have snapped, as I
predicted (
Bush's nerve is going to snap,
March 4), "The danger is that America will find itself
fighting a sort of Chechnyan war on a global scale.
President George W Bush cannot wrap his mind around
this," I wrote then. "The blame lies at the doorstep of
the neo-conservative war-hawks who persuaded the
president that America should undertake a democratizing
mission among a people who never once voted for their
own leaders."
For that matter, Ariel Sharon's
claim before last week's Likud party congress that
Israel had achieved victory against terrorism was both
accurate and misleading. Wars do not end when they are
won, but when those who want to fight to the death find
their wish has been granted. Sherman's 300,000 fanatics
could not face the mediocre circumstances of a South
without slaves and were willing to die for their way of
life.
Three million Palestinians packed into a
narrow strip of land one day may accept the modest fate
of a small and impecunious people, but their young
people do not seem ready to do so. We do not know how
many ever will. The killing will continue for some time
before we find out.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
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