A scholar I’ve written about on this weblog before, Victor Davis Hanson, recently published a superb assessment of the value of military historian to public knowledge. Anyone intrigued or averse to the study of warfare’s bloody brass tacks should read it. It is a cogent cry for some awareness of how major states’ most mortal matters are conducted, in the hopes of giving some shape to the urgent concerns we now - as we should - have about them.

Hanson’s rhetoric is stirring - for good or ill, given the reader’s perspective on the value of willful bloodshed - and his logic is infallible. At the core of his work is a brilliant quote by poet Margaret Atwood, which Hanson places in the following context:

…it’s hard to find many wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Margaret Atwood also wrote in her poem: “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.” Hitler did; so did Mussolini and Tojo — and their assumptions were logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time.

Despite utopian notions that a nation could strip itself of its military component and lead the world by a Christ-like example of peace, it is the principle Atwood and Hanson describe that actually holds sway over a globe that is resource-starved and rife with tribal rivalries. And even those that decry the many human rights violations that are perpetuated around the globe - in fact, especially those - need to recognize the fundamental dynamic that deterrence by threat of real violence foremost deters violence. Rwanda would not have happened had the perpetrators considered their genocidal gambit more costly to their lives than to their victims, and so with Darfur, so with Uganda, so with Nepal, and with the numerous other silent catastrophes that groups like Human Rights Watch hope to rally against. In some instances, diplomacy’s strong left arm of economic pressure is sufficient, but in each of the examples cited, it would not be adequate alone. Hanson’s article well illustrates that in order to protect the weak from the strong and depraved, one has to be willing to impose one’s strength.

Willing and capable - and it is here that Hanson’s primary argument takes flight into practicable and important policy conclusions that serve his ends, while undercutting one specific historical assertion he makes. He writes:

Military history reminds us of important anomalies and paradoxes. When Sparta invaded Attica in the first spring of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides recounts, it expected the Athenians to surrender after a few short seasons of ravaging. They didn’t — but a plague that broke out unexpectedly did more damage than thousands of Spartan ravagers did…The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted doom-and-gloom critics who predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy four-year reconstruction hasn’t evolved as anticipated into a quiet, stable democracy — to say the least.

While it is true that there are anomalies and paradoxes to warfare - far many than most war planners would care to admit - the plague of the Peloponnesian war could be counted among them, whereas the evolution of the 2003 Iraq War need not be and should not be. And here is a lesson that future historians, politicians, warriors and the body politic should bear in mind when preparing to either engage or shy from the conflicts inevitably to come.

The Iraq campaign of 2003’s collapse was no more anomalous than the Iraq campaign of 1991’s victory was. That we attained a relatively inexpensive triumph over Saddam’s army in 1991 was the result of having the means to achieve the objective. Whether one considers that objective to have been too limited or too broad in its violence or aims, it was nevertheless a successful objective. Overwhelming international support, a massive troop build-up that met the requirements of even pessimistic planners and significant post-war security planning were the factors in this formula of success. Iraq in 2003 was hubristically conceived as an essentially unilateral venture cloaked in an emphemeral pretext of international interests, executed in ways that were inadequate to not only the barest requirements of critics but often in direct defiance to them and to conventional military wisdom, such as the three-part structure to an assault. And while the war planners were correct in estimating that Saddam’s military was so impoverished and fragile as to still be vulnerable to such a haphazard opponent, they were sorely mistaken that a last-minute, venal and idealistically naive post-war plan could hold together the maelstrom created after the infamous iron fist of Saddam that had contained it was cracked.

No, Iraq 2003 was not anomalous. It is the closest thing to deliberate disaster in foreign relations by our Executive. And this is particularly important for Americans staring down Iran, Afghanistan, Darfur and the future monstrosities it might prevent with its strength to consider: Not all military conflicts are malfunctions. The first casualty is, indeed, the plan, but so long as you have adequate contingencies, sufficient reserves and resilient support, you can achieve reasonable and even virtuous objectives. We lost sight of this after seeing the furious savagery of Somalis we thought we were helping visited on our troops, and so did not go into harm’s way a year later to prevent another African humanitarian crisis, Rwanda. We sneered at Clinton’s bombing of “an aspirin factory” in response to al-Qaeda’s first resolute, high-profile attack against us, dismissing it as a “Wag The Dog” scenario devised to distract from his impeachment woes, and so inculcated in our Executive a dangerous reluctance to respond asymmetrically to terrorists. In essence, when examining Iraq in 2003, we have to realize that war planning can be catastrophically flawed, and in turn realize it can be sufficient and just. We can indeed stop bad things from happening.

How we fight may not always be the same as why we fight. Moral constructions of aggressors and the “good men” poised to stop them are not only facile, but a dangerous premise to judge a war’s causes by. Yet any examination of how we fight is necessary to understand that, regardless of what “whys” history’s course inspires a nation’s heart to commit homicide and suicide for the sake of, “why” a nation should know how to fight and should be ready to do so should never be questions.