The Committee of Public Safety

The first principle Walter McDougall proposes as part of his “Old Testament” of American foreign affairs in his 1997 book Promised Land, Crusader State is that of “Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)”. McDougall (and others) have argued that the War for American Independence was fundamentally conservative, especially when compared and contrasted with the revolutions that followed in France, Latin America, Russia, and elsewhere in the Great Wide World outside the United States. As a conservative revolution, the American Revolution was primarily a war of defense fought to preserve the century old Whiggish institutions and mores then existing in the Thirteen Colonies from the dangerous constitutional innovations of King George’s Tories, innovations that would lead to the Second, more illiberal, British Empire of the nineteenth century.

This radical defense against the encroachments of the King in Parliament was conceived in the fevered imagination of America’s Lenin, Samuel Adams, years before it became politically palatable to the Colonies or their leaders. There was a real danger of British oligarchic encroachment on colonial affairs. The Parliament of George III was less representative of the English (and Scottish) populations than the Parliaments that battled King Charles the Headless and his constitutional innovations 14o years before. In fact the earlier battles of the English Civil War were themselves a conservative revolt against a King intent on governmental innovations that would destroy existing English institutions and liberties. Both the English and American revolutions threw up their share of crusading radicals who wanted to make the world anew under a Leveling wind but in both cases the Establishment kept the crazies from taking the entire endeavor over the edge and into a Jacobin abyss.

The Founding Fathers were looking backwards at the English Civil War; the resulting dictatorship of Cromwell, his major generals, and his standing New Model Army; the Restoration of the Stuarts through the intrigues of General Monck; the attempt to subvert Parliament again in the interests of Stuart autocracy, French pretensions, and Popish plots; the Dutch Invasion of 1688 and William of Orange’s coup against his uncle/father-in-law James II, the menacing corruption of Sir Robert Walpole, and the pretensions of George “Be King” Hanover III, Defender of the Faith. Benedict Arnold, looking backwards, conceived of himself as the second coming of George Monck, rounding up the crazies of the New New Model Army, with Washington as the new (inconveniently alive) Cromwell, and restoring King and Colonies to their proper harmony. George Washington, looking backwards, played the role of the anti-Cromwell, the anti-Monck, and, even further back, the anti-Caesar. Due to myriad socio-political factors and the will of Almighty God, the liberty of white Protestant males had been miraculously preserved in the Colonies and, darn it all, Americans were going to keep it that way.

McDougall argues that American foreign policy from the earliest days of the First Continental Congress to the disastrous regime of Thomas Woodrow Wilson (may he burn in hell) was based on this simple formula:

American Exceptionalism as our founders conceived it was defined by what America was, at home. Foreign policy existed to defend, not define what America was. In given circumstances all sots of tactics might be expedient save only one that defeated its purpose by eroding domestic unity and liberty.

This creed was famously summed up in a Fourth of July speech delivered by John Quincy Adams in 1821:

If the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.

America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.

She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.

She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.

She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…. [America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

McDougall argues that the fundamental worldview of the Founders was Manichean: the world was divided into a House of Peace and a House of War:

So what did American Exceptionalism mean wben it came to foreign policy? That the United States would make no alliances, fight no wars, spurn all intrigue? Of course not. If anything, America’s vulnerability from 1776 to 1820 only proved the timeless wisdom of the Roman motto Si vis pacem pare bellum (If you desire peace, prepare for war), and you will find that dictum in the writings of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Jay, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, James Gadsen, and Richard Henry Lee. Did American Exceptionalism mean that the Founding Fathers embraced none but idealistic ends sought by scrupulous means? Jefferson might have wished it were so. but in the end even he bowed to reality in defense of the national interest.

Inside the House of Peace, McDougall asserts, the man in power must walk softly to preserve the liberty and unity that already exist at home. Outside, in the House of War, a state of nature among nations that is red in tooth and claw and follows only the law of the jungle, all means are on the table except those that threaten liberty at home. American liberty is a gift from God for its citizens to treasure and exercise at home. It is not a spear for our enemies to impale us upon or a rope to go hang ourselves with while abroad.

Armstrong Coat of Arms

Tom Moss made this (otherwise buried) comment on my Steven Pressfield inspired post Kill the Tribes in relation to one of my distant ancestors:

Charlie Rose interviewed the former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew the other night. Rose asked Lee who, out of all the world leaders he had met, he most admired. Lee answered that he admired Deng Xiaoping for his adaptability. Lee related an anecdote about Deng’s first visit to Singapore in 1978. Deng was surprised by Singapore’s prosperity, which his brief had not adequately covered. Deng asked Lee how he had made Singapore so prosperous. Lee replied that they had attracted foreign direct investment due to Singapore’s cheap (at that time) labor costs. They then became subcontractors then contractors then competitors, learning as they went. Deng observed that Lee had created an egalitarian society using capitalism, an observation Lee seconded. Deng then went back to China and, Lee implies, applied the Singapore model to China with the side effects the world has experienced since.

If this implied influence on Deng is accurate, it makes Lee one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, all from a little dot south of the Malay peninsula. Lee is often times considered the most effective authoritarian of the late twentieth century, the sort of man that, if they could be produced on demand, would doom democracy.

Interestingly, Lee insisted that senior government and civil service officials be paid at a level on par with the highest paid figures in the public sector. Whether this produces better senior politicians and officials is an open question, though Singapore seems to have better governance that a lot of other countries in the region. Makes you wonder if you get what you pay for in your politicians.

An interesting line of historical development from one great song of liberation to another, starting with the most influential terrorist in American history. Says Wikipedia:

In 1890, George Kimball wrote the story of how the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia, known as the “Tiger” Battalion, collectively worked out the lyrics to “John Brown’s Body”. Kimball wrote:

We had a jovial Scotchman in the battalion, named John Brown…and as he happened to bear the identical name of the old hero of Harper’s Ferry, he became at once the butt of his comrades. If he made his appearance a few minutes late among the working squad, or was a little tardy in falling into the company line, he was sure to be greeted with such expressions as “Come, old fellow, you ought to be at it if you are going to help us free the slaves”; or, “This can’t be John Brown–why, John Brown is dead.” And then some wag would add, in a solemn, drawling tone, as if it were his purpose to give particular emphasis to the fact that John Brown was really, actually dead: “Yes, yes, poor old John Brown is dead; his body lies mouldering in the grave.”

According to Kimball, these sayings became by-words among the soldiers and, in a communal effort–similar in many ways to the spontaneous composition of camp meeting songs described above–were gradually put to the tune of “Say, Brothers”:

Finally ditties composed of the most nonsensical, doggerel rhymes, setting for the fact that John Brown was dead and that his body was undergoing the process of dissolution, began to be sung to the music of the hymn above given. These ditties underwent various ramifications, until eventually the lines were reached,–

“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

His soul’s marching on.”

And,–

“He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,

His soul’s marching on.”

These lines seemed to give general satisfaction, the idea that Brown’s soul was “marching on” receiving recognition at once as having a germ of inspiration in it. They were sung over and over again with a great deal of gusto, the “Glory hallelujah” chorus being always added.

However these earthy lyrics offended the finer set:

Bishop’s battalion was dispatched to Washington, D.C. early in the Civil War, and Julia Ward Howe heard this song during a public review of the troops in Washington. Rufus R. Dawes, then in command of Company “K” of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, stated in his memoirs that the man who started the singing was Sergeant John Ticknor of his company. By this time the association with the diminutive Scotsman John Brown was forgotten or unknown to most listeners, who heard only a rough and somewhat oddly-phrased marching song about John Brown the abolitionist. Howe’s companion at the review, the Reverend James Clarke, suggested to Howe that she write new words for the fighting men’s song. Staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the night of November 18, 1861, Howe awoke with the words of the song in her mind and in near darkness wrote the verses to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”. Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembers, “I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, ‘I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.’ So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

Many of the troops that marched deep into Dixie marched into battle singing one of these two songs. Many of the children of my generation sang a song of liberation set to the same music:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured all the teachers – we have broken every rule
We went marching down the hall just to hang the principal
Our troops go marching on!

Glory, glory, hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Met her in the dark with a man eating shark
Our troops go marching on!

Those were variations we used when I was a freedom fighter. Wikipedia has documented other variations:

Glory, Glory halleljah,
My teacher hit me with a ruler,
I hide behind the door with an AK-44
And that was the end of my teacher.
My dad was mad, My mom was sad
Me and my brother were laughing like mad.

We have tortured all the teachers – we have broken every rule

We have even drowned the principal in the local swimming pool

And we’ll go marching on!

We have tortured all the teachers – we have broken every rule

When the principal tried to stop us we just flushed ‘em down the stool

Our truth is marching on!

We have ruptured all the teachers and we’ve broken all the rules,

And we’ll go marching on!

We have sliced the English teachers and have drowned them in their blood

And we’ll go marching on!

We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule

We have barbecued the principal and hung the janitor

Our school is burnin down!!

I went to her funeral and I went to her grave,

instead of throwing flowers I threw a handgrenade

We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule

We have plans to hang the principal tomorrow after school!

We have forgotten our multiplication tables, eaten our teachers and their families,

And we’ll go marching on!

We have shot the secretary and we hung the principal

Us brats keep marching on.

We have smashed up all the blackboards, we have thrown out all the books

The school is burning down.

We have wandered down the halls writing cuss words on the walls

The school is burning down.

We have bound and gagged the principal and tossed him in the pool

The school is burning down.

We have barbecued the principal, destroyed the PTA,

Our school keeps burning on.

They sent us to the office, so we hung the principal,

Our troops are marching on!

We are killing all the teachers, we are breaking all the rules

We broke into his office and we murdered the principal

Our troops go marching on!

We broke into his office and we tickled the principal

We have tortured every teacher and we’ve hung the principal.

We have broken every piece of chalk as well as every rule.

They have taken all the teachers out and broken every rule.

They have painted all the toilets black and all the lockers white.

There won’t be school no more!

We have tortured all the teachers, we have broken all the rules.

We’re marching down the hallway for to kill the principal.

We have tortured every teacher. We have broken every rule.

We have spit in every corner of the dirty, rotten school.

We have shot the secretary and destroyed the PTA!

Us kids are marching on!

We have tortured all the teachers, we have broken every rule

We have even spanked the principal and kept him after school

Examples of variations of the chorus:

Met her at the store with a loaded .44…

So I hit him in the bean with a rotten tangerine…

I hit her in the butt with a rotten coconut…

I hit her in the bean with a rotten tangerine…

Met her in the attic with a semi-automatic…

Met her at the gate with a loaded .38…

I hid behind the door with a big ole’ two-by-four

I stood behind the door with a loaded .44…

I bopped her up the bean with an atomic submarine…

Shot her up to heaven with an AK47…

Shot her in the bean with an M-16…

Shot her out the door with a Magnum .44…

Shot her in the head and the teacher dropped dead…

Met her at the bank with a loaded German tank…

Reform school here I come!

And there ain’t no teacher no more

Now the teacher is no more

And she ran right out the door!

Met her at the door with my trusty .44

and she’s not my teacher anymore!

Carl von Clausewitz famously asserted that war is the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. The Anabasis of Cyrus puts this assertion to the test, reducing the phenomenon of war to a single petri dish filled with Ten Thousand wayward Greeks. The Ten Thousand descend into Mesopotamia for a purely political purpose: Cyrus the Younger wants his brother’s throne. Cyrus calculates that a quick strike into the political heartland of the Persian empire will allow him to catch his brother at a disadvantage. The initial descent is calculated to roll from Asia Minor down to Babylon with such momentum that Artaxerxes II’s political decision loop would be overwhelmed. Most of the political impact that Cyrus’s military strategy is calculated to produce will be produced by strategic shock alone.

This strategy, fed by what seems to be a decided tilt in Cyrus’s character towards rashness, nearly works. Cyrus’s seemingly rash attack mano a mano against Artaxerxes early in the Battle of Cunaxa could be charitably interpreted as a political act as well. By committing the ultimate political atrocity of lese majeste himself, Cyrus is asserting his superior claim as ruler by physically and therefore politically invading Artaxerxes’s sacred space, that splendid apartness that elevates a divine monarch in the eyes of mere mortals. Cyrus seeks to knock Artaxerxes off his pedestal, revealing him as an ordinary, physically vulnerable, and, hopefully, dead human being. Through the myth created by dispatching Artaxerxes through his own prowess, Cyrus will take on a new aura as the biggest man in Persia not only symbolically but physically as well.

Cyrus, as shown by the spectacles that he repeatedly puts on as motivation exercises for his reluctant mercenaries during the descent to Babylon, is a showman. Many citizens of modern liberal democracies miss the subtlety of manufacturing consent in a traditional hereditary monarchy. Monarchy relies on spectacle as much or in fact more so than a liberal democracy. Masters of the form, whether continent spanning tyrants like Louis XIV or petty princelings of the Holy Roman Empire, rely on symbol, spectacle, and sacralizing as much as the naked violence to which they often resorted. Traditional state violence, whether it be an execution, a military campaign, or jousting, served a theatrical, educational, and propagandizing purpose on top of its pure manifestation of brute force. Cyrus was putting on a performance intended to symbolically and morally knife Artaxerxes almost as much as he was seeking to literally shove eight inches of wrought iron into his own brother’s chest. That Cyrus signally failed in his attempt is no argument against the fundamentally political nature of his warfare. Failure is as much a part of politics as success. If Cyrus failed in his aspiration to become a potent symbol of political success in life, through the freshly rendered pieces of Cyrus meat conspicuously displayed by his brother, Cyrus became a potent symbol of political failure in death.

The remainder of the Anabasis is devoted to a political community whose war is waged for that most naked of political motives: survival. As Victor David Hanson pointed out in one of his more lucid moments, in the Anabasis we are presented with another species of political spectacle from the monarchial pomp and circumstance that Cyrus greets us with at the beginning of Book I. The Ten Thousand are a movable polis, the raw incarnation of Plato’s political animal. Artaxerxes and his minions attempt a decapitation strike on the Ten Thousand, expecting the loss of such high quality individuals as Proxenus, Menon, and Clearchus to reduce the Ten Thousand to the milling peasant rabble. In an Oriental context this strategy made sense: most Asiatic armies were composed of impressed peasants who would eagerly flee the scene of battle if their kings and lords were slain. But the Greeks of this time, before the Persian virus of autocracy transferred through the medium of Macedon hegemony rendered free Greece into slavish Byzantium, were different. Being a distributed command of more or less free men, they selected new leaders including the silver tongued Xenophon, debated their options, and retreated into the mountains of the Kurds and Armenians.

The entire ascent of the Ten Thousand is marked by the intensely political nature of its organizational structure. Leaders such as Xenophon go to great lengths, summoning all of the power of the century old art of sophistry, created just for such occasions of political deliberations by bodies of citizens, to keep the troops together. Discipline seems in many cases to be only imposed when the Ten Thousand want it. Xenophon, for example, is notably called to account for striking a soldier, something the soldiers found appalling. Much of the discipline imposed on the march up to the Euxine is imposed by the pressure of marching through hostile territory but much of it is imposed because the troops have heard the various options, discussed them openly, voted on them, and agreed that that vote is binding upon all. Those that deviate from the agreed consensus are not only scorned by the officers leading them but by their fellow soldiers. The Greeks practiced majoritarian tyranny in its purest form in a state where political questions were at their most stark: one road survival, one road death. Convinced that deviation from the general consensus physically threatened the survival of all, slackers were dealt with harshly.

After the Greeks reach the sea, Xenophon’s strategy has a clear political purpose: the Ten Thousand must acquit themselves in such a way that they can be easily reintegrated into the contemporary Greek world. Not only that, but they had to be able to be reintegrated into a contemporary Greek world ruled by Sparta. This meant the Ten Thousand had to conduct themselves in a manner that fit Greek norms and accommodated Spartan interests. This meant that if they pillaged other Greeks they would draw the hatred of the entire Hellenosphere and if they got on the wrong side of the surly Spartans, they not only couldn’t go home but they might be attacked by the Spartans. In accommodation there was the possibility of pay and provisions. In crossing the Spartans, there was the possibility of poverty and starvation, the common lot of the ancient world. Relations with barbarians were less important but the Ten Thousand politically exploited local disputes to win themselves provisions and passage as they hacked, slashed, sailed, and marched their way across northern Asia Minor. Even when Xenophon plays with the notion of founding a city he clearly is expecting to found a city that would be well integrated with the Greek world. Military operations contrary to that goal of integration are contrary to the political end that Xenophon consistently seeks.

The denouement of the Anabasis with its petty squabbles with the Spartans and Thracian warlords can sometimes seem anticlimactic after the drama of the initial descent and the retreat up to the sea. However, in micro, they present the close intertwining of politics and its servant war. Watch the fun of Xenophon seeking to gain leverage with the Spartans by keeping the Ten Thousand together even if it means slumming with the Thracians. Witness the Thracians maneuvering for political advantage even while they are fighting in the field. See Seuthes try and cozy up to the Spartans while attacking the reputation of the Ten Thousand. In the end the Spartans accommodate the Ten Thousand for their own political purpose: they want to loose them upon the Persians. The Ten Thousand march off to fight in another hazy war under yet another Spartan general.

Politics is nothing if not circular.

Cunaxa is an interesting counter-point to the three traditional pillars of Herodotus’s Histories, Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. While those three confrontations took place in or near Attica, the cradle of democracy, Cunaxa happens in Mesopotamia, the cradle of despotism. Herodotus skillfully built a narrative of the clash of East and West, Freedom and Slavery, Democracy and Despotism out of the Persian attempts to conquer an obscure people on the fringes of the Known World. His account looms over those of his successors, even the works of the prickly Thucydides, who considered himself superior in every respect to the world traveling gossip from Halicarnassus.

Xenophon was no exception. The Anabasis almost reads like a strange mirror version of the Histories. Instead of the Ascent of Darius, Xerxes, or Mardonius into the heart of Hellas, it’s the descent of the Greeks into the heart of Achaemenid power. The squabbling Greeks, under the less than inspired figures of Clearchus, Proxenus, and Menon, appear rather shabby compared to the heroic generation of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Pausanias. Cyrus in his foolish death and disfigured body and Artaxerxes II in his pettiness and undignified scramble to keep his throne fall far short of the power and majesty of Darius and Xerxes, so exalted that Herodotus portrayed them as living embodiments of hubris, pride that not only rivaled but threatened that of the gods themselves.

Herodotus portrays the mighty Xerxes, in the full flower of his pride, flogging the Hellespont as punishment for destroying his first pontoon bridge from Asia into Europe. Artaxerxes II, on the other hand, barely escapes with his life and throne, blusters at the Ten Thousand, flees cravenly when the Ten Thousand post him up, and proceeds to engage in all sorts of gutter intrigue. With great insight, Xenophon convinces the leaderless Greeks that the Great King would never negotiate with them in good faith. Artaxerxes II knew he looked pathetic. If I were Artaxerxes II, I wouldn’t want my vulnerabilities broadcast to all the world either, especially when I’d been shown up by a bunch of country bumpkins from Arcadia, the armpit of Greece. I would kill every last man, woman, child, beast of burden, or slave of the Ten Thousand. Being routed is one depth of humiliation. Being routed by rednecks, however, is a depth of humiliation that Persians hadn’t faced since the Spartans reacted to a demand for earth and water by throwing the Great King’s emissaries down a well into the bowels of Mother Earth.

Xenophon continues Herodotus’s amateur anthropology by observing the Oriental Other. However Xenophon lacks the cosmic depths of Herodotus’s cosmopolitanism. Xenophon goes up country a Greek and comes down it a Greek. The locals are primarily defined by their non-Greekness, suffering from the irreversible disease of original high barbarity. Bar bar they all say. Bar we are shifty. Bar we are treacherous. Bar we betray even the gods with our lies. Bar we are unable to rule ourselves. Bar we are slaves. Bar we are sheep. Bar we are strange. Some of the Oriental world is familiar, a terrain populated by agrarian villages bursting with provisions and ripe for plunder. Some of it lies behind an iron cage that Xenophon, trapped in his Greekness, is barred from opening.

Everything Xenophon does is in deadly earnest. While this is largely because Xenophon’s fate and the fate of the Ten Thousand were delicately balanced on the edge of a knife blade, Xenophon doesn’t strike me as a bon vivant in any of his other works. In contrast, Herodotus is a damned hippie, cheerfully imbibing and inhaling whatever the locals would offer. Herodotus is Mr. Fun, painting the world in bright fun Deluxe Crayola colors, a literary Expressionist for all time. Xenophon is more like Thucydides, a gloomy and bitter exile justifying the vagaries of his career by pouring out apologia galore. Like Seurat, he paints the world as a summation of pinpricks, with himself cast as the most prominent prick.

I’m more sympathetic with Herodotus, who toiled away making his living through readings before a democratic mob, than with Xenophon, who spent much of his career as a literary Vyshinsky for the totalitarian Spartans. But with his descent into Mesopotamia, the birthplace of autocracy, Xenophon demonstrates that there are differing degrees of tyranny and even the citizens of Sparta had not fallen to the depths of the Great King’s slaves, driven into battle and corvee with whips. Of course tyranny, like influenza, is catching and the Ten Thousand may have brought the virus back with them from Mesopotamia, setting the scene for the passing of vigorous Greek liberty at Chaeronea a mere 63 years later. It is not without a touch of truth that the great historian Arrian’s history of the first flowering of Oriental despotism in the free soil of Greece is called the Anabasis of Alexander.

Lexington Green sent me this research guide from the Joint Services Command and Staff College Library of our former colonial overlords. It’s monograph section has some good books and some questionable choices:

The Good

• On War by Carl von Clausewitz (the fact that Amazon pimps the Graham translation is evidence that Jeff Bezos is part of a grand conspiracy to wreck this country)
• Another Bloody Century: Future War by Colin S. Gray (good despite Gray occasionally being too high on his bad self)
• Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought by Michael Handel (the best companion to Clausewitz)
• Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Howard
• The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World by Rupert Smith

The Questionable

• New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era by Mary Kaldor (if you agree with Kaldor you might as well take that fat juicy volume of On War and all of classical strategic thought for that matter, soak it in gasoline, and light it on fire)
• The Art of War: War and Military Thought by Martin van Crevald (ditto)
• War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century by Alvin and Heidi Toffler (astonishingly bad choice. It’s a fun read but this list was supposed to be about war, right?)
• The Art of War translated by Thomas Cleary (the Cleary translation would be appropriate for a children’s collection of strategic works i.e. Baby’s First Sun-tzu. For adults, go with the Ralph Sawyer translation).

A More Complete Strategic Bookshelf

In no particular order:

• Roots of Strategy: The 5 Greatest Military Classics of All Time (Vegetius’s De re militari, Saxe’s Reveries on the Art of War, Frederick the Great’s Instructions to Generals, Buonaparte’s Military Maxims, and Giles less than great translation of the Sun-tzu, all in one volume)
• The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China Of Ancient China translated by Ralph Sawyer
• Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control by J.C. Wylie
• On War by Carl von Clausewitz
• Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought by Michael Handel
• The Arthashastra translated by L. N. Rangarajan (probably the most accessible translation so far)
• Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy translated by George T. Dennis (how people in the West fought while they were taking a break from Victor David Hanson’s Western Way of War)
• Cheating and Deception by J. Bowyer Bell and Barton F. Waley (the definitive book on…cheating and deception…no lie)
• Sun Pin: Military Methods translated by Ralph Sawyer
• Strategy by A. A. Svechin
• Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France by Ernest R. May
• Modern Strategy by Colin S. Gray
• Miltary Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War by Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch
• The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 by Niall Ferguson (good book on the interaction of finance and war written by historian Niall Ferguson before he became celebrity historian Niall Ferguson)
• Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to The Nuclear Age, edited by Peter Paret
• The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, edited by Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox
• The Pursuit of Power by William H. McNeill
• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, translated by Richard Crawley

The Prince of Ghor

The first American to enter Afghanistan was one Josiah Harlan. During a conversation with Dost Mohammad, the ruler of Afghanistan about his native country, Harlan described American institutions. Dost Mohammad was complimentary, remarking upon how Afghan American institutions seemed. The concept of a congress of men gathering together to select their leaders and discuss questions of interest was not foreign sounding to the Afghan leader. Such was the first rapprochement between American and Afghan.

Harlan later went on to serve Dost Mohammad as a military commander, in exchange for which he and his descendants were named Princes of Ghor in perpetuity. Harlan, ardently anti-British, was driven out of Afghanistan by the first British forces to enter Kabul and eventually made his way back to America. He raised a regiment for the United States Army in the War of the Great Rebellion but was eventually forced out because he was too imperious a commander. It seems Harlan had gone decidedly native during his experience.

As to whether anything constructive has been accomplished in the intervening years between Harlan’s time and our own, I’m reminded by this blog post I found through this Zenpundit post about something I wrote in Kill the Tribes:

No outsider has successfully conquered Afghanistan with the exception of this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and maybe this one. In truth, Afghanistan has spent the majority of its history as a Persian sock puppet.

Afghanistan could better be called “Eastern Persia”. As late as the 1860s, Persia was menacing Afghan autonomy. Afghanistan’s tragedy is that it became the modern Central Asian equivalent of the Scottish Borders: it wasn’t dominated by a single power like it was in the various heydays of Persian imperialism. Instead it became the plaything of two rival empires, the Raj and the Russians, whose tugging too and fro kept Afghanistan from being properly Europeanized, nationized, and statified during an era when such things were possible. Such processes took place in nearby regions like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the Punjab, Sind, and Kyrgyzstan, which were not all that different from Afghanistan in the mid-nineteenth century. The end result was not only did Afghanistan remain feudal and tribal despite the best efforts of professional Afghans like Abdur Rhaman Khan but the disintegration was encouraged by Russians and Brits manipulating the tribes for their own purposes. Each had their favorite tribes and each backed their men in Afghanistan. This didn’t help Afghanistan solidify into a solid state. Similar outcomes happened in the Ottoman Empire and the Persia. They were never allowed to be colonized or consolidated because they were always being kept up in the air between Russia and Britain. Hence a Sick Man of Europe, a Sick Man of the Persian Gulf, and a Sick Man of the Hindu Kush.

Afghan strategy isn’t a matter of expertise. It isn’t a matter of local or central. It isn’t a matter of understanding Dari or the complex amalgam of ethnicities in Central Asia. It’s a matter of having a picture of what you want Afghanistan to be and sitting on the Afghans until you have something approximating what you want. If the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan had come in 1919, 1929, 1939, or 1949, chances are that today Afghanistan would resemble its neighbors to the the north: an authoritarian kleptocracy ruled by former Communist apparatchiks. Maybe, in the long run, that would have been a better fate for the Afghans than their current lot. Unfortunately, the Soviet intervention was late in the game for the era of European colonialism and took place after the petro-powered Islamic resurgence.

Now the task is much harder because Americans are doing it. Americans have the attention span of a three year old with ADHD who’s just found mommy’s heroin stash. The critical problem is that Afghanistan is far away, the American people are easily distracted by the latest celebrity imbroglio, and our staying power in Central Asia is questionable. If Afghanistan was in the American Mountain West, chances are that in fifty years that we’d crush them and make them into good little Americans. That’s what happened to my own tribe after fifty years of constant pressure from the U.S. Government. If there was a compelling narrative to keep America in Afghanistan for fifty years, the result would probably be similar. Our faults are not in Afghanistan, Horatio, but in ourselves.

Where's the beef?

There is an ongoing tug of war in the U.S. Armed Forces between two factions that military commentator Andrew Bacevich has labeled the Crusaders and the Conservatives. The Crusaders, Bacevich argues, claim that “failed states” create the conditions for terrorism, drug trafficking, and other instability that threatens the United States. The United States must intervene to stabilize these failed states, suppressing active agents of instability using counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics, and rebuilding the broken state and social institutions of those failed states to prevent future instability. The Crusaders, Bacevich asserts, want to institutionalize COIN in the U.S. Armed Forces, arguing that that the wars the United States is likely to find itself in during the immediate future will be COIN-intensive wars similar to the current American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Conservatives, according to Bacevich, want to retain the edge in conventional combat that the U.S. military developed in the aftermath of the American intervention in Vietnam. Conservatives advocate a less interventionist foreign policy, focusing on threats that actively threaten the core interests of the United States. They argue that intervening in every failed state wastes American resources and distracts from bigger threats.

The Beef Bites Back

One operational technique that might bridge the two warring camps is the razzia. A razzia is a raid involving division-sized ground units. Units would move into a failed state, crush all active resistance, destroy military and dual-use infrastructure, and withdraw. Razzias into a failed state would be frequent, perhaps on an annual basis, but usually on an as needed basis. A razzia would have more destructive conventional power than an air raid, a missile strike, or a special operations raid. However, it wouldn’t expose the military to the cost, rigors, and need to train for COIN. Conventional fighting tactics would be emphasized while dispiriting, manpower intensive COIN would be avoided.

The strategic effect would be creating areas of denial. While whole regions would lake state institutions, their use would be denied to anyone who wished to use it as a base for terrorism and other kinds of war. Any significant attempts to create a base for terrorism would prompt another razzia. Attrition through firepower would replace attrition through occupation. Lodgements ashore, usually islands or ports, would be seized and used as basing areas. The local population would be expelled. Razzias would be launched from these lodgements as needed.

The chances of this being adopted, however, by any American government, is just about nil. But if someone decided to launch a razzia, I have a recommended target:

Tomax and Xamot Keno

From Lexington Green over at ChicagoBoyz:

The revised schedule is for our roundtable on Xenophon’s Anabasis of Cyrus is as follows:

Week of September 13, 2009: Posts re: Books I, II, III and IV
Week of September 20, 2009: Posts re: Books V, VI and VII
Week of September 27, 2009: “Wrap up” Posts: Opinions, Analysis, Conclusions.

Late in August I will post the list of contributors.

I am starting to think about what I am going to write, having recently finished my first read-through of the Anabasis.

I have been looking at two books on background, which I am finding of interest: Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age by Robin Waterfield, and Xenophon and the Art of Command by Godfrey Hutchinson. I also hope to read at least some portions of Xenophon’s The Education of Cyrus, also translated by Prof. Wayne Ambler.

(I linked earlier to this review of the Anabasis from Military Review.)

ALSO: A “distant early warning” for our readers. The current thinking is that we will have roundtable discussion of The Federalist Papers in the Winter of 2010, and we will have a roundtable discussion of selections from the Arthashastra of Kautilya (The Clausewitz, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli of India all in one) in the Fall of 2010.

Two good articles about Kautilya’s Arthashastra.

An earlier post on Kautilya from CoPS can be found here.