Reblogged: Review: Nothing Less Than Victory

[Rule of Reason Blog]

Review: Nothing Less Than Victory: The last engaging book I read on the means and ends of warfare before John Lewis's was a 2009 abridged version of Winston Churchill's The River War, originally published in 1899. Its original, full title included An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan. The term "reconquest" was misleading, because the Sudan had never before been "conquered" by the British, but was under the jurisdiction of Egypt, then a protectorate of Britain. Egypt was unable to deal militarily with the Dervish forces that meant to conquer it. It fell to Britain extinguish the Mahdist or Islamic threat, which, unchecked, could well have spread from Egypt to the rest of North Africa and the Middle East.

General Herbert Kitchener was tasked with that formidable project. Churchill describes the meticulous and determined campaign he waged, which was not just a matter of sending an army into the desert wastes to fight fanatical tribesmen. It meant reforming the corrupt and ineffectual Egyptian government, rebuilding the Egyptian army and its Sudanese levies, building a railroad into enemy territory, and mastering the stupendous logistics of supplies and men. The stated objective was to erase the Mahdist regime as a military and political threat in the whole region. The climax of the campaign was the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898, in which the Dervish army was utterly decimated and routed.

In the end, over a year later, the successor of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed, Abdallah ibn Muhammad, was killed and the remnants of his forces routed at the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat.

The Sudan Campaign had clear military and political objectives. The British government then had the will to take the necessary actions to destroy an enemy and discredit the ideology that moved it.

Churchill noted in The River War that, " The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men."

In short, Islam, like the Nazi, Fascist, and Shinto ideologies which compelled Germany, Italy, and Japan to invade other countries, must be repudiated by the aggressor and cease to be regarded by its adherents and converts as a feasible and desired ideology that fosters "peace."

This comports with the main theme of John David Lewis's seminal work on the efficacious "warfighting" policies of the past, Nothing Less Than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History (Princeton University Press, 2010). That "great power" comes in many disguises. Lewis tackles some of them.

Lewis, however, does not immediately discuss 20th century conflicts, but wars of antiquity, using them as overtures to his discussions of the Civil War and World Wars One and Two, underscoring the need, in warfare, of a government to have the will to identify an enemy and his morality or ideology, and then the will to fight the war on its own terms, and not those of the enemy. What is more, the attacked nation must be willing to eviscerate the enemy's will to fight on to foreshorten the conflict and possibly establish a peace beneficial to the former opponents.

In each of the conflicts that he illustrates, Lewis economically dwells on military strategies of opponents, but places far more importance on the moral force, or lack of it, that guides one side to victory and the other to defeat. In his Introduction to Nothing Less Than Victory, Lewis states:

Those who wage war to enslave a continent – or to impose their dictatorships over a neighboring state – are seeking an end that is deeply immoral and must not be judged morally equal to those defending against such attacks.

Further on he notes:

Certainly the tactics of Roman foot soldiers cannot be applied to tank divisions today, but the Romans might be able to tell us something about the motivations of a stateless enemy that is subverting a world power….The goal of war is the subjugation of the hostile will, which echoes Carl von Clausewitz's identification that war is 'an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.'

This is Lewis's only indirect reference to Islamic jihad. Today, Islam is the "stateless enemy" subverting a world power (the U.S.), but the U.S. lacks to will to identify that enemy and take the necessary steps to vanquish it. (Lewis does not discuss the Islamic jihad, but all the points he makes about other wars may be applied to that species of aggression.) There is an eerie parallel between the current situation and Lewis's Chapter Six, "The Balm of a Guilty Conscience," which details the evasions, fallacious soul-searching, and moral disintegration of British diplomacy in the face of the evolving and maturing nemesis of Nazi Germany before the onset of World War Two. As Lewis demonstrates in that chapter, British and Allied concessions to Hitler abetted the maturation of Hitler's régime to the point that Hitler could confidently plan and embark on his conquests. Lewis demonstrates novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand's observation that

Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is

consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others

. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.

In a brilliant dissection of the causes of the rise of Nazism, Lewis pinpoints those "feelings" stemming from the Versailles Treaty of 1919, in which the victors laid blame for World War One squarely on Germany's aggressions, but which German politicians and moralists interpreted as an unjust victimization of Germany. It is in this chapter that Lewis best explicates the differences between an aggressor nation's surrender and its defeat.

Germany, he writes, surrendered without admitting defeat. Over time, British and Allied governments were persuaded – or persuaded themselves – that German feelings and assertions of victimization and humiliation were justified, and incrementally, in a succession of concessions, allowed Hitler to cement his power over Germany, and later waived all moral judgment for his takeovers of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia, not to mention his determined rearmament in violation of the Treaty's terms.

Craven British diplomatic maneuvering and peace-hankering newspapers pressured France into making conciliations. France, devastated by the German invasion and depredations in the first war, and which stood the most to lose if Germany rearmed, initially took steps to enforce the Treaty's terms, but was browbeaten into submission by "public opinion" and the Allies virtual abandonment of the Treaty. After the invasions of Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands, France was the next country targeted by the wrath of Germany's vengeful feelings.

I guarantee that anyone who reads Chapter Six will emerge with an enriched and refocused understanding of the causes of World War Two. Complementing that chapter is "Gifts from Heaven," in which he discusses how and why the Shinto/Bushido culture of Imperial Japan had to be gutted from top to bottom, beginning with the Emperor clear down through Japanese politics to the schoolroom, as an integral element of the American defeat of Japan to ensure that it would never again formulate a design for conquest. It was necessary for Japan not only to surrender, but to admit to the world and to its citizens the ignominious defeat of its philosophy of existence, which was essentially a philosophy of death.

Grant Jones, in his 2010 review of Lewis's book in Michigan War Studies Review, reprises Lewis's comparison of the strategies adopted by Civil War Generals George McClellan and William T. Sherman in Chapter Five, "The Hard Hand of War." McClellan, notes Lewis, was a superb administrator but a poor strategist, hamstrung by an ambivalent attitude towards his own troops and absent a clear goal.

Lewis shows that Sherman was cut from different cloth, not by focusing on his famous Marches, but by examining the moral force behind his ruthless strategy to destroy the Southern planter class. In looking at Sherman's correspondence with John Bell Hood, Lewis discerns the elements that together made Sherman's strategy so effective: properly assigning war guilt, developing an understanding of both one's own society and the enemy's, identifying the enemy's vital center, and defining victory. Lewis sums up Sherman's famous "War is cruelty" response to Confederate entreaties that he moderate his policies: "These familiar passages cut to the heart of Sherman's attitude toward an enemy that had started a war that his command now charged him to end: he accepted no guilt for a war that was not of his making. This sense of rightness allowed him to prosecute the war to its conclusion quickly, with his force directed at the true source of southern power rather than merely at military positions dependent upon that power.

Lewis briefly discusses the failed war policy of Vietnam, and further rebuts the many and varied arguments that the U.S. should not have used atomic bombs on Japan. He concludes his rebuttals with:

All weapons – from bowie knives to hydrogen bombs – are designed to kill, and there is a scale of destructiveness on which they fall….To break the Japanese leadership out of their ideological blunders and end the war, American leaders needed to kill a lot of Japanese in a visibly shocking way. The resulting shock led to an immediate end to the war.

The alternative, as described in detail by Lewis, was a massive invasion of Japan whose population was being exhorted to fight the Americans to the death with sticks and stones, thus prolonging the war and resulting in incalculable American casualties.

Compare America's warfighting philosophy then with that which has governed our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, governed by "just war theory" which deliberately, at the cost of American lives and treasure, spares enemy populations of the consequences of their active or passive support of their masters.

Lewis's book is not a cobbled-together collection of arbitrary, hindsight anecdotes, but one that takes the rare examples of proper warfighting policy adopted by aggressed-upon nations, and drives home the principles behind his thesis. The logical progression of his examples is enlightening and indisputable.

Lewis, a classical studies scholar, is the author of two previous books on the politics and judicial thought of antiquity, Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens (Duckworth Publishers, 2008), and Early Greek Lawgivers (Duckworth Publishers, 2007). So it is not coincidence that he chose to illustrate his thesis in the first four chapters of Nothing Less Than Victory, covering the Greco-Persian Wars, the Theban war against Sparta, the Second Punic War, and Roman Emperor Aurelian's campaigns to prevent the disintegration of the Roman Empire. In each of these chapters he illustrates the efficacy of the policy of taking the war to the aggressor enemy's land for the sole purpose of deflating the aggressor's moral motivation.

Lewis concludes his nonpareil survey with this advisement:

Sic vis pacem, para bellum

. Or – If you want peace, prepare for war.

Original entry: See link at top of this post

[SapereAude]

In short, Islam, like the Nazi, Fascist, and Shinto ideologies which compelled Germany, Italy, and Japan to invade other countries, must be repudiated by the aggressor and cease to be regarded by its adherents and converts as a feasible and desired ideology that fosters "peace."

The mention of Shinto makes no sense here. There is nothing in Shinto to "compel" Japan to invade other countries.

That is just staright up misinformation.

[Wotan]

Nice review, Edward Cline!

Prof. John Lewis's book is amazingly good and important -- albeit a bit slow-paced and redundant. He says: To win a war, the good guys must militarily and intellectually defeat the bad guys. Tell the aggressors afterward that they were evil, and that the past war was their fault, and that if they don't change their beliefs they will be militarily crushed again. Better yet, their occupation will never end. They have no choice but to submit -- they must admit their guilt, apologize, and then clearly and openly change their militarist beliefs and ways.

Has America and the West done this to the evil aggressor Islam in our current War on Jihadism? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!! We don't even dare name the enemy -- which is the philosophy of Islam or Jihad. Thus while we might be able to militarily hold off the loathsome muzzies in our absurdly self-hating "War on Terror," intellectually we will never defeat them. So "the long war" will go on essentially forever.

As a side note, but one which is still important: In analyzing the various seven wars, Lewis is wrong to not acknowledge or comprehend that the North was the aggressor in the US Civil War, and the South had every right to peaceably secede. He's also wrong to not acknowledge or comprehend that America is fundamentally in the wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan: We are expending copious blood and treasure to prop up evil, loathsome, barbarian, socialist, shariaist, anti-American, popularly-rejected dictatorships in both nations.

[Grames]

The mention of Shinto makes no sense here. There is nothing in Shinto to "compel" Japan to invade other countries.

That is just staright up misinformation.

See State Shinto Fetishizing obedience and duty as virtuous and the Emperor as divine were the essential elements. There is a parallel to be drawn with the Kantian ethics and devotion to the Fuhrer in Nazi-Germany.

[Grames]

As a side note, but one which is still important: In analyzing the various seven wars, Lewis is wrong to not acknowledge or comprehend that the North was the aggressor in the US Civil War, and the South had every right to peaceably secede.

Except the South did not peaceably secede, instead they fired the first shots.

[SapereAude]

See State Shinto Fetishizing obedience and duty as virtuous and the Emperor as divine were the essential elements. There is a parallel to be drawn with the Kantian ethics and devotion to the Fuhrer in Nazi-Germany.

Kokka Shinto was a modern bastardization of Shinto dating only back to the the Meiji Restoration. Shinto is over 1000 years old.

State Shinto was a terrible twisting of Shinto.

To blame true Shinto for the actions commited under the warped version started in 1871 would be like blaming Ayn Rand for Alan Greenspan's idiocy.

That aside, much of Japan's growing aggression was due to trade imbalances going back to the kurofune under Perry in the 1850's.

[Wotan]

Except the South did not peaceably secede, instead they fired the first shots.

After the seven Southern states peaceably seceded and formed The Confederacy, they reasonably demanded that the hostile North let them have Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina. That military installation was an objective threat which reasonably belonged to the South. The North was intent on a pretext/excuse for war, unlike the South, and refused to divide the formerly shared gov't properties equitably. I think that objectively the North has to be considered the attacker and aggressor state.

[Grames]

After the seven Southern states peaceably seceded and formed The Confederacy, they reasonably demanded that the hostile North let them have Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina. That military installation was an objective threat which reasonably belonged to the South. The North was intent on a pretext/excuse for war, unlike the South, and refused to divide the formerly shared gov't properties equitably. I think that objectively the North has to be considered the attacker and aggressor state.

There can be no such thing as a unilateral peaceful secession. The states of the Confederacy simply rebelled without bothering to negotiate, and not in response to any particular action by Presidents Buchanan or Lincoln. The political and military-tactical initiatives were all on seceding states' side. They took those initiatives when it became clear that the Southern slave economy would not be permitted to expand indefinitely, not because of any imminent threat to existing slave states.

It was clear to at least the Confederate secretary of State Robert Toombs where the fault lay:

On April 6, Lincoln notified Governor Pickens that "an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumter with provisions only, and that if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition will be made without further notice, [except] in case of an attack on the fort."^[21]

Lincoln's notification had been made to the governor of South Carolina, not the new Confederate government, which Lincoln did not recognize. Pickens consulted with Beauregard, the local Confederate commander. Soon Jefferson Davis ordered Beauregard to repeat the demand for Sumter's surrender, and if it did not, to reduce the fort before the relief expedition arrived. The Confederate cabinet, meeting in Montgomery, endorsed Davis's order on April 9. Only Secretary of State Robert Toombs opposed this decision: he reportedly told Jefferson Davis the attack "will lose us every friend at the North. You will only strike a hornet's nest. ... Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal."^[22]

I find few things in this life more confounding, contradictory, hypocritical and vile than any variety of libertarian or especially an Objectivist to harbor sympathy for slave masters.

[Wotan]

Grames -- I harbor no sympathy for slave masters, invader conquerors, or those who see no evil in the pointless slaughter of over 700,000 Americans.

The South negotiated endlessly, and for fruitless decades, with the North, prior to the "Union's" aggressive war of conquest. The dictatorial North imperiously refused to even discuss a just and peaceful political separation in 1860.

You say: "There can be no such thing as a unilateral peaceful secession." Hong Kong doesn't have the right to secede from China? Quebec can't freely and unilaterally secede from Canada? A freedom-loving province of a slave state has no right to exit their political partnership? The American Revolution was illegit? Business and personal relationships can't be mostly unilaterally terminated by the unhappy party? Is freedom of association negotiable? Do we need our slave-master's permission to peacefully walk away from an unwanted alliance, and be free?

[softwareNerd]

Hong Kong doesn't have the right to secede from China? Quebec can't freely and unilaterally secede from Canada?

It depends. You're speaking of a group, so any such right must be derived by looking at individual rights.

To show that the South had a right to secede one must show that this would have resulted in the protection of individual rights in the South which were otherwise not being protected. If the South had put an end to slavery, and given equal rights to blacks, and if they had seceded in order to secure rights that the U.S.A. was denying them, then they would have had a case.

A club is not a country. Ten thousand people can agree to go live somewhere according to some rules, but that does not constitute a government.

To take another example, even if 99.999% of Iranians had voted for a religious government, they have no right to force their views on the few who did not want it. In fact, they do not have a right to force it on children who did not vote at the time. And, further, they do not have the right to enforce many provisions even against someone who voted for them and changed his mind.

[Grames]

Grames -- I harbor no sympathy for slave masters, invader conquerors, or those who see no evil in the pointless slaughter of over 700,000 Americans.

The South negotiated endlessly, and for fruitless decades, with the North, prior to the "Union's" aggressive war of conquest. The dictatorial North imperiously refused to even discuss a just and peaceful political separation in 1860.

The eradication of slavery in America fully justifies all the ruination and death that occurred and more. Your framing of the conflict as the Union being aggressive and dictatorial when what was at stake was the proliferation of chattel slavery is absurd. When it comes to defending human rights within the borders of a country aggression and non-compromise is ethically mandatory.

You say: "There can be no such thing as a unilateral peaceful secession." Hong Kong doesn't have the right to secede from China? Quebec can't freely and unilaterally secede from Canada? A freedom-loving province of a slave state has no right to exit their political partnership? The American Revolution was illegit? Business and personal relationships can't be mostly unilaterally terminated by the unhappy party? Is freedom of association negotiable? Do we need our slave-master's permission to peacefully walk away from an unwanted alliance, and be free?

It is simple logic. In order for a secession to be truly peaceful then both sides must agree to the secession, in which case it is not unilateral. It is possible that a unilateral secession can occur without violence but only if one side is intimidated by the threat of or cost of resorting to the use of force, but the means of resorting to force are present in that case, which means the secession occurred without the consent of one side and so cannot be considered peaceful or lawful. Unilateral belligerent seccessions are possible and that is what happened in the American Civil War. As the justification for secession was the preservation of chattel slavery it was an utterly unethical and rights violating secession.

[Spiral Architect]

There is no right for a society to “rebel” when they claim the right to enslave others. That society has no rights period. The south succeeded because they lost the political clout to continue to keep the evil inhuman practice of human chattel enforced in a society built upon the opposing principles. The growing industrial north and the growing ethical arguments against slavery from that quarter tipped in 1860 when the Republicans ran for office on those premises and won. Salve owners dominated the Presidency for 50 years leading up to 1950 and even key positions in Congress were occupied first by slave holders and eventfully by compromisers. After 1950 things went down hill fast and the South started to lose the political muscle to enforce their policies. Southern States new they what was going to happen in 1960 so they succeeded to prevent what would have been legal elimination of slavery. First, in the territories, then blocked as those territories became states, then blocked with elimination of ridiculously immoral laws like the Fugitive Salve Act, then finally by legal decree everywhere. That would have been peaceful if the South accepted the right for humans to have individual rights. They did not. But don’t ask me, as Jefferson Davis when asked about individuals and their rights:

"We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority"

At that point you’re out of excuses. You are a criminal entity for enslaving people and your choice to rebel, outside of rebelling against reality, is nothing more than the actions of any despot to protect the status quo of enslaving and feeding off your fellow man. Those in the South that wanted to protect such an evil institution got what they deserved and it was Sherman marching to the sea.