Well, that worm sure turned. It was only last year that public opinion kept us from going to war with Syria, and now the polls tell us that a substantial majority favor war with ISIS.
There are some indications that the precipitating cause of all this war fever is the beheading of two American journalists. It is sad that these two men were killed, but sadder still to think that we can be stampeded into a war so easily. In Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, she tells of a conversation in 1910 between British General Henry Wilson and French General Ferdinand Foch about the coming war between France and Germany that both men believed to be imminent and inevitable:
“What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?” Wilson asked.
Like a rapier flash came Foch’s reply, “A single British soldier—and we will see to it that he is killed.”
Clearly, the implication was that the death of a single British soldier at the hands of the Germans would arouse the British nation to war, the people demanding that England avenge the death of their fallen comrade, demanding that England’s honor be satisfied, leading ultimately to a fully mobilized nation entering the war on the side of France.
Going beyond the deaths of the two journalists, another reason given for the recent support for war is that Americans are in fear of another terrorist attack. As one reads Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a study of imperial overreach over the last five hundred years, one begins to discern a recurring pattern. A nation will become alarmed about some Terrible Thing. The Terrible Thing must be confronted and destroyed. And so the nation goes to war. Eventually, when the men are dead and the treasury is empty, the war ends. And for several years after that, there is peace, because there simply is no more blood and treasure to be spent. And during that time, strangely enough, nothing bad happens. There is no Terrible Thing that threatens them. But eventually, the women have babies that grow up and become men, and the economy recovers, filling up the king’s coffers. And then, suddenly, there emerges on the horizon another Terrible Thing. And soon the nation is marching off to war again.
The Terrible Thing today is ISIS. In characterizing it, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel did not spare the hyperbole, calling ISIS an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” and saying further, “This is beyond anything we’ve seen. We must prepare for everything.” Why, this is the most Terrriblest Thing we have ever seen!
When I was young, the Terrible Thing was communism. I remember Lyndon Johnson’s saying that we had to stop the communists in Vietnam so that they would not attack us here. But when we lost the Vietnam War, another domino or two did fall, but that was about it. One nice thing you have to say about the Vietnam War is that we lost that one so good that we were completely free of the place. We did not have to keep troops stationed there, we did not have to give them foreign aid, and we were never tempted to go back. I wish we could lose more wars like that.
Back then, of course, we had the draft. Young men weighed the threat of communism against the threat of being killed, and suddenly the idea of communists’ taking over Vietnam just did not quite seem to be the Terrible Thing the President said it was. And thus it was that there was a lot of resistance to that war. One of the smartest things the war mongers ever did was to get rid of the draft. With an all-volunteer army, young men who do not want to go to war simply do not enlist, which means the army is no longer full of a bunch of disgruntled soldiers who resent having to fight for something they do not believe in. Of course, some of the men and women in today’s army have become disillusioned. But now they are more likely to blame themselves for signing up than to blame the government for the situation they are in. This makes war much easier to wage than in the past. Those who talk about reinstating the draft are dreaming.
One of the reasons we do not have to have a draft anymore is that wars just are not as deadly as they used to be, at least, not for us. American deaths in our bigger wars used to number in the hundreds of thousands. After World War II, our wars in Korea and Vietnam resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined are presently less than seven thousand. And this war against ISIS will probably involve far fewer deaths than that, seeing as how we are not going to commit combat troops to the region.
Therefore, the good news is that there will be fewer dead soldiers. The bad news is that this means the war can go on for a long time. As noted above, one thing that will end a war if nothing else will is death. When enough soldiers have died, the fighting has to stop. The other thing that puts an end to war is running out of money. If we had been forced to remain on the gold standard, the Vietnam War would probably have ended much sooner than it did, but Nixon solved that problem. Now that we can print as much money as we need, the cost of war can be ignored. And as with those who want to reinstate the draft, those who talk about going back on the gold standard are dreaming.
So, with no way of running out of soldiers or money, we will not soon be running out of Terrible Things to destroy.