There is one thing about war which Clausewitz did not think of, but which Bush must
FRANK JOHNSON
Ahead of government's natural instinct, in a crisis like this, is to hold meetings of experts: generals, officials and so on. If he is wise, he will also consult experts who are no longer with us. In this case, the people who have been good at winning battles or at writing about how to win them.
People such as Bonaparte, for example: but if President Bush, the head of government whom I have in mind, consults him, he will find himself advised against too much consulting. 'Do not hold a war council,' says one of the maximes put together some years after Bonaparte's death from his random sayings, 'but ask the opinion of everybody individually.'
Bonaparte does not explain why he is against war councils. We can infer that he thinks that in a meeting the experts say what they think they should say, or say what they think is to their future advantage, rather than what they really think. If so, Napoleon's is good advice. Mr Bush must by now have presided over many councils of war since 11 September in which generals, cabinet members and advisers say things that are less or more moderate, or less or more 'right-wing', than the speakers really are. They do so safe in the knowledge that theirs is not the final responsibility. Only Mr Bush has that. He is commander-in-chief. And as Bonaparte says, 'In war, only the commander-in-chief understands the importance of certain things... . A collective government has less simple ideas and takes longer to decide.'
So poor Mr Bush would discover that here is an expert, Napoleon (as expert in the art of war as anyone in history), who is advising him to be wary about how he consults other experts. This is a measure of how difficult Mr Bush's situation is.
Another example: he cannot even know whether a war is what he is fighting. Is it, instead, an insurrection? If the Taleban made possible the attack on the twin towers, it is a war. Wars, except when they are civil wars, are between states, and the Taleban rules a state. If it is a war, Mr Bush should consult the experts, living and dead, on wars.
But we do not know for sure whether it is. Such evidence as we have shows that the conspiracy that led to 11 September was planned as much within the United States as without. It was perpetrated by people who had a legal right to be in the United States. We strongly suspect that they were helped and financed from without: Afghanistan, almost certainly;
Iraq perhaps. But we cannot be sure that aid from a nation state was essential to the outrage. We can envisage it having happened without such aid. Al-Qa'eda is not a nation state. It is a force, or a conspiracy, which crosses national boundaries. In any case, militant Islam, like Bolshevism in the Soviet Union's earliest years and in the conspiratorial years leading up to 1917, does not believe in national boundaries. It aspires to a kingdom of all the world. We can imagine the United States, either alone or by arming and aiding the Northern Alliance, overthrowing the Taleban, killing bin Laden, perhaps going on to overthrow Saddam's regime, only for there soon to be another Islamic terrorist outrage on United States soil, Let us assume that it is a war. How would the experts of old advise Mr Bush? Only one of Bonaparte's maximes seems especially relevant: 'In mountain warfare the attacker is disadvantaged; even in an offensive war, the art consists in not having anything but defensive fights and in forcing the enemy to attack.' Otherwise, Mr Bush's advisers would undoubtedly tell him that the authorities are Clausewitz's On War (1832) and Sun Tzu's The Art of War (c. 500 Bc). Of these two books, Mr Michael I. Handel, professor of strategy at the US Naval War College, has written, 'Imagine what it would be like if scientists, physicians, or even economists were to rely on texts written over 150, let alone 2,000, years ago as the most valuable source of instruction in their profession. Yet this is precisely the case in the study of war, a fact which is especially ironic because no other area of human activity — the better understanding of which could determine the future of the human race — has been so transformed by rapid technological advances.' But the books are still classics, because 'the underlying logic of human nature and, by extension, of political action has not changed throughout history'. But, after a few pages of either book, we soon realise that they really are helpful about Afghanistan, no matter how scientific and technological war has become. And Mr Bush would be struck by the only phrase of either that is quoted: war is the continuation of politics by other means. What does it mean for the present situation?
The phrase is Clausewitz's, but Sun Tzu also assumes it. Its meaning for President Bush is that he must maintain political support in the United States for the war, more specifically for his means of conducting it. But there is something about this war which Clausewitz may not have thought of, but which confirms his theory. He would have understood American voters not tolerating many American casualties, as happened with Vietnam. But the evidence suggests that Western electorates do not now tolerate many enemy casualties. If American aircraft hit what American voters consider to be too many Afghani or Iraqi civilians. American public opinion will stop supporting the war. At the end of the Gulf War, President Bush Snr and General Powell concluded that American public opinion — not just America's Arab allies — would not tolerate heavy enemy casualties, even when the casualties were soldiers. That was why American forces stopped killing the Republican Guards that lay between them and Baghdad.
Western public opinion does not regard Third World civilians in the way that the British and American peoples regarded German civilians in the second world war: complicit in the Nazi regime, and therefore legitimate targets. All the evidence suggests that it regards Third World civilians as victims of their regimes, not supporters, and that it sees many Third World soldiers as victims, too.
It is possible to offer this theory of public opinion without approving of it, though actually I do approve of it, since I see it as a further development in that European Enlightenment which has been proceeding since at least the beginning of the 18th century, and one of whose early achievements was the United States. But, irrespective of whether public opinion is right to think this way, it is something that heads of government waging war must take into account. I suspect that Mr Bush, a representative American, does. If he does not, he will learn that defeat is also the continuation of politics by other means.
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