Why freedom has the edge
Michael Rose
WHY THE WEST HAS WON
by Victor Davis Hanson Faber, £20, pp. 455, ISBN 0571204171
Although it was possibly a little unwise for Victor Davis Hanson to give his new book the grand and heroic title Why the West Has Won it was certainly excellent timing that the book should have been written before 11 September and the start of Bush's war against international terrorism. For the dreadful events of that day have not only moved us into an entirely new post-Clausewitzian, post-modern form of conflict, they have also opened up the debate as to whether the West can actually ever win this sort of war. Hanson's book provides us with the essential background reading for such a debate.
The basic theme of the book is that freedom will always prevail over tyranny, and that western civilisation, early on and quite uniquely in history, developed economic and political systems that allow for individual freedom, rational thought and technical progress. In addition, our civilisation has given us something that Hanson describes as the 'most lethal way of war'. It is these combined qualities that have made western civilisation so unassailable throughout history. It should be noted that by the term 'western civilisation' Hanson generally refers to the few nation states in the world that derive their culture from GrecoRoman antiquity.
Hanson starts this well researched and highly readable book with an account of the naval battle of Salamis, fought between the free citizens of the Panhellenic alliance and the enslaved oarsmen of Xerxes, and which resulted in the total destruction of the superior Persian fleet. Because Hellenic triremes were no more technically advanced than those of the Persians, Hanson attributes this overwhelming Greek success to the far greater motivation of the Greek soldiers and sailors. This superior motivation, Hanson believes, came from four major elements: freedom of speech which allowed the citizen soldiers to criticise strategy, the ability of the Greeks to choose their own generals and the ensuing trust that this engendered, the fact that they were all stakeholders in society, and finally the greater freedom of action that allowed Greek commanders to respond to the changing dynamics of the battlefield.
He seeks to impose this model on nine successive battles which took place between 480 BC and 1968 AD — a period of almost 2,500 years. He clearly has some difficulty in applying this model to the early battles — particularly in the case of Alexander the Great who was accused by his biographer Arrian in his great work Anabasis Alexandrou of having treated his subjects not as Greeks or freemen but 'as inferior beings according to the custom of foreign kings'. Nevertheless as the centuries pass, Hanson's theory becomes more tenable and his analysis of the battles of Rorke's Drift, Midway and the Tet Offensive are both detailed and convincing.
In his writing, Hanson demonstrates an almost morbid fascination with the mechanics of mediaeval battle. His descriptions are full of imagery and gore.
Each soldier. with shield upraised, would lodge his spear in either a horseman's flanks or legs or the face and flanks of his mount, then slash and stab with his sword to cut the rider down, all the while smashing his shield ... against exposed flesh.
He carefully works out how much blood was spilt on the battlefield of Cannae (30,000 gallons). He describes the battle of Issus in 333 BC as 'a formidable challenge of time and space' and marvels at the sheer physical strength and logistic achievement that enabled Alexander's soldiers to kill 300 Persians every minute continuously for eight hours. With a similar sense of admiration he calculates that at Rorke's Drift each British soldier fired 200 cartridges per man, and that for every British soldier killed, more than 30 Zulu warriors died.
All this is most impressive, but, as Samuel Huntington points out, civilisations rise, fall, merge, divide and also disappear. If the West has indeed won until now, the events of 11 September must surely compel us to question whether it can continue to do so. For the classic western strategy of drawing the foe out and then using overwhelming force to destroy him — a strategy of manoeuvre and attrition that has stood the test of time since it was first successfully used by the Macedonian phalanxes of Philip — no longer seems to be relevant. Hanson concludes that a future enemy will not confront western armies in the classic form of shock battle, and that asymmetric forms of attack are likely to become the chief component of future war, He predicts that the West will have to learn to deal with, as he chillingly puts it, 'a rogue state that sponsors a terrorist with a phial in Manhattan'.
Sadly, the West has evidently not understood the changed nature of conflict, and since the end of the Gulf war has failed to achieve decisive success on any occasion that it has used military force. This was so in Mogadishu in 1993, when the US army failed to defeat lightly armed Somali militias. It was true in 1999 during the Kosovo war when Nato airpower equally failed to defeat an old-fashioned and numerically inferior Serb army, in spite of 11 weeks of the most intensive bombing campaign carried out in the history of war. Today, having learnt the recent lessons of history, the Taleban in Afghanistan are refusing to present fixed targets to US warplanes. They know that time and history are on their side.
War, as Clausewitz observed, is not a pastime but a political instrument in which the people, the general and his armies, and the government are all involved. The political leaders of the West will rightly be encouraged by the central message contained in Hanson's book — that free men will always defeat those who fight because they are compelled to do so. But, whilst the general and his armies may easily adapt to the imperatives of the new form of war that has been thrust upon us, it may be more difficult for our politicians to persuade the people who are all involved to show the necessary fortitude and patience for freedom to prevail over tyranny.
General Sir Michael Rose is the author of Fighting for Peace.
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