Limited Wars and Americans, 9-14-2010

 The Atlantic Monthly for September 2010 has an article from Robert Kaplan about limited nuclear war. Kaplan acknowledges Americans' inability to deal with limited war without addressing why.

Excluding our gunboat diplomacy in Central and South America and the Caribbean, we fought the World Wars demanding unconditional surrender. The idea that wars were for something higher than land had not really existed before. Unconditional surrender is as American as our Civil War - and the idea can be traced from U.S. Grant to John J. Pershing to George Marshall and Eisenhower.

Does anyone recall Eisenhower's book? It was titled Crusade in Europe. Crusades cannot be limited - their enemy is evil itself. Against evil, all force must be mustered against evil's source. Anything less than exerting the full powers of the nation is a victory for evil.

Getting past this mentality is the great bar to Americans agreeing to limited wars. That evil did not overwhelm the world with the fall of Saigon ought to have taught us the dangers of overselling the basis for a war. Iraq's invasion was to fight evil; although the specifics of that evil varied over the course of the Bush Administration.

Not that all our wars ended with unconditional surrender. The Revolution, the War of 1812, The Mexican-American, and the Spanish-American War ended with treaties with conditions. Americans can be made to understand limited war.

But the politicians may be in trouble if the people critically examine the politicians' arguments for using force. That may be a real problem for the politicians. 

On the other hand, the armaments industry does love unlimited war, and the military will not need large armies to fight limited war, so may see a decline in their budgets. Therein may lie the real limit on limited wars - Eisenhower's military-industrial complex.

sch

[Twenty years now since we invaded Iraq, how long we stayed in Afghanistan, may counter what I wrote almost 13 years ago. However, those conflicts were kept obscured, there was no draft, and the politicians have been keen to keep our involvements elsewhere - Syria and Ukraine - nonexistent for keeping calm public opinion. sch 3/31/23.]