It has become all too clear that the turn of the millennium marked a transition to a far more unstable age than the latter half of the 20th century. Frightening as the Cold War was for those of us who who grew up waiting for the balloon to go up in the shape of a mushroom cloud, and bad as it was for those poor sods unlucky enough to live in the theatre of one of the many fringe proxy wars between the super-powers mainly fought in the third world, many might wax nostalgic for a time that offered some semblance of stability under the threat of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), and, not least, a period of almost unbroken egalitarian economic progress in the Western world.
This "New World Order" might very well also see the large scale reintroduction of a mode of conflict as ancient as the first human like primate who wiped out his Australopithecine ancestor, genocide.
The Distant Sound of Thunder
Looking back to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, most people were filled with hope for the future. There was talk of the "peace dividend"; funds formerly channelled into armaments could now be allotted to social, scientific and industrial ends. Swords would be beat into plowshears.
Some even claimed it to be "The End of History", as one time neoconservative
Francis Fukuyama did, meaning that western liberal democracy had triumphed once and for all. The rest was simply mop-up.
But history ran its bloody course long before recent western ideologies such as Fascism, Communism, and even liberal democracy, and will probably do so unaffected by their demise. Tribes, nations, confederations and empires come and go and vie for power and dominance. People will form alliances with those they feel they have something in common with and seek to impose their way of life. This would probably be the case even if the only thing separating one group from the other was which end to cut a boiled egg for breakfast.
Like Samuel Huntington in his "The Clash of Civilizations", though not of accord with him in many things, I was among those who doubted that the future would be quite so pacific as the 90s wore on.
Now as much as I'd like to claim credit for this being the result of Holmesian deduction and tireless analysis of reams of carefully weighed intelligence, it was nothing of the kind. It was simply my pessimistic nature and gut feeling take on the
zeitgeist talking.
The 90s just reminded me too much of another 90s, the fin de siècle of the 19th century - a pervasive boredom, an underlying, but still largely hidden, economic class conflict, Delicious decadence, and some great art being made about it all, and a general feeling of the post-World War II era having, as they say, "jumped the shark"
And seeing as history does tend to repeat itself, at least when it does... repeat itself... those terrorists were very reminiscent of Gavrilo Princip, and that noise I heard, in the distance, just across the horizon, sounded very much like cannon thunder.
But simply reading the tea leaves and seeing war is no great feat. Do that at any point in human history, and chances are you'd be proved prescient. The question is always, what sort of war?
The Generations of War
The history of warfare has been the story of defense versus attack. The club trumped the bare head. The shield and helmet trumped the club. Firearms trumped armour, and so on. Some times the defensive had the upper hand, such as when barbed wire and stationary machine guns were introduced on a massive scale in the First World War, making any infantry attack a suicide mission, only for that strategy to be superseded by offensive mobile armour in the next.
Contemporary theoreticians, such as
William S. Lind, have taken to dividing modes of war into 4 "generations", which is probably not very helpful or exact. But there you are. The first generation, at least of "modern" warfare, was the clashes of the true nation states following the
Treaty of Westphalia. Uniformed armies with muskets fighting in formations of lines and columns for states with a monopoly on violence was the order of the day. Look at maps of old battles with neat squares moving back and forth, and you get the idea.
Second generation warfare, following the Napoleonic Wars and the invention of the rapid fire breach loading gun, would be best described by using the example of the Western Front during the First World War. The line of battle was still there. But advancing on the enemy waiting with rapid loading rifles and machine guns in trenches behind open country covered with barbed wire, in a tightly packed square was not such a good idea, not that the equivalent wasn't tried, and tried again.
Third generation warfare was what broke the supremacy of the defensive strategy by using maneuverable forces and tactics. The use of tanks, mechanised infantry, and close air support during the German invasion of France in World War II is perhaps the best example. You simply bypass the enemy trenches and fixed artillery and attack them from the flanks, from behind or even targets to their rear.
Which brings us to
4th Generation Warfare, or 4GW, and also in a way full circle to the time before Westphalia, when nation states as we are used to them did not have a monopoly on violence. In the
Thirty Years' War that preceded that peace treaty, which by the way was one of the most horrific bloodlettings ever devised by man, transnational loyalties, such as religious faith, might well decide war or peace, not narrow national interests. And the commanders and fighters weren't governments or armies in the modern sense, but feudal lords and their levies, warlords and even just ragtag bands of roaming ruffians.
In 4GW the actors on one, or both sides of the conflict might not be state, or at least not acting as a state in classical warfare. Fighting and command and control, such as it is, is decentralised. The lines between war and politics, combatants and civilian population, peace and conflict, battlefield and home are blurred. Call it modern guerrilla warfare, with an added dash of technology and PR, and you're not far off really.
This strategy has been very effective in stumping traditional armies, as seen in the recent incursion by Israel into Lebanon, and of course the ongoing conflict in Iraq. The disdain evidenced by otherwise bone conservative people like
Lind (this is after all a fellow who only half in jest calls
Kaiser Wilhelm II "my rightful Sovereign and
oberste Kriegsheer") towards the planners of this war, was chiefly motivated by the understanding of the limitations of superior firepower in the face of a 4GW enemy, which was always likely to spring up in the aftermath of the initial victory.
The truth is that when a conventional army acting under classical rules of engagement, is faced with an urban guerrilla, with the widespread support of the local population, or a sizable part of it, military victory, as that word is generally understood, is all but impossible.
Faced with a seemingly intractable problem, the obvious course of action is to look to the past, and see if other armies were confronted with similar problems, and if, and in that case how, they solved the situation. As often is the case, the ancients had this one licked. But the solutions that present themselves are rather grim.
Sowing the Fields with Salt
Why don't we hear much about the grinding guerrilla campaigns of the ancient world, especially considering that 4th generation warfare in many ways is a return to pre-1th generation warfare? 4GW has more in common with ancient tribal skirmishes, with rowing bands of "braves" armed with RPGs and AK-47s taking on targets of opportunity among the enemy camp that happen to stray into hostile territory undermanned.
Yet the classical writers were strangely silent on the problems this presented. The reason is that they didn't see it as much of a problem.
Taking their cue from the Assyrians, who were as close to pure undiluted grade A evil as any people in history, the Greeks and Romans had a simple answer to any conquered city that got uppity and tried their hand at insurrection and picking off occupying soldiers in dark alleys.
Become enough of a nuisance, and they'd cold-bloodedly and efficiently go about the extermination of the entire male population of any city or region, burn the city to the ground, and cart off the children and womenfolk to slavery. Become a bad enough pebble in their caliga, and they'd sow the fields with salt for good measure, just to makes sure that anyone escaping to the hills would have nothing to come back to. Worked like a treat.
Of course another thing that the Assyrians, and Rwanda, teaches us, is that genocide doesn't take neutron bombs, or even Zyclon B gas. Machetes, can do spirit, and enthusiasm for the job at hand, will suffice nicely.
But we don't go in for that sort of thing anymore do we. Well, there are Europeans still alive today who did, with vim, vigour and gusto. Even that liberal democracy the United States was making a good show of it exterminating their indigenous populations relatively recently. No people, no problem.
Granted you could say that the horrors of the concentration camps and the gulag scared us straight. Some would argue we've become more civilised. While others might say we've gone soft. As in most things, it's probably a bit of both. But mostly it has paid to be nice for half a century. And there's been little need for, and less profit in, being genocidal. Which is where the terrorists and 4GW armies and militias might have miscalculated and provoked a new turn of the screw in the neverending tug of war.
The proponents of 4GW have had a good run, with that dashing poster boy
Che Guevara formulating the definitive doctrine for the modern guerrilla. But the seemingly effortless unravelling of the colonial era by nationalist insurgencies, and the recent successes of 4GW forces, might be a tad misleading.
Colonial dominion didn't end because the subjugated peoples and nationalist liberation movements suddenly reached military parity with the old colonial powers. It ended for economic and balance of power reasons wholly unconnected to the colonies. But first and foremost because the industrialised powers, and their peers, could not stomach the blood it would take to strike them down. And the time had long since gone when old school colonialism was a going concern, economically speaking. A lot of colonial powers were actually seeing capital drain out of the imperial centre to maintain the provinces. National pride was just about the only thing at stake towards the end.
It just wasn't worth it. Which is why the terrorists of today are making a huge miscalculation in striking at the West itself, and not just the remnants of that colonial structure in their own countries, where they can claim, if not the moral high ground, at least some credible justification and plea to self-defense.
Their relative success is solely based on their not being a real threat to the core interests of the industrialised nations, and the average voter in those countries. Paradoxically, should they ever become so, the jig would well and truly be up right there. Fuelled by an existential threat and fully mobilised, Finland could lay waste to the entire Middle East, Mongol style, and still have birch branches left over for a spot in the old sauna afterwards.
The sad fact is that genocide works. Indeed in the face of 4GW warfare, other than withdrawal, it's the only thing that works. And evolution, which is a process, applicable to most any systems, unconcerned with right and wrong, or better or worse, and not a purely biological mechanism, tends to favour what works.
"Exterminate all the Brutes"
This is the stark realisation that drives Col. Kurtz insane, memorably played by Marlon Brando, by dint of being too lazy to read the script and improvising, and by that alchemy that was his alone, in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam palimpsest of Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness", "Apocalypse Now".
He is a man tasked with solving a problem which has no solution within what is deemed "sound" methods, and his own moral judgement.
"Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces...Seems a thousand centuries ago...We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile...A pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried... I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot...Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought: My God...the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters...These were men...trained cadres...these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love...but they had the strength...the strength...to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral...and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling...without passion... without judgement...without judgement. Because it's judgement that defeats us."
Many viewers take away the impression that Col. Kurtz was an über-warrior gone to seed. But the point is that he was a dedicated, educated, civilised man, a deeply moral man, come face to face with a situation which had no solution within his moral framework. His "crystal" sharp mind came to a conclusion, that the only way to victory was to "exterminate all the brutes", which his soul, for lack of a better word, was unable to accept without losing itself to madness.
The moral of the story is that there is an option for victory, and it will only cost you your soul. I fear that price will soon seem little enough to pay.
This article is also published at Bits of News.