Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (45 page)

Evidence from the archaeological study of prehistoric societies and from the ethnographic record of modern hunters and gatherers indicates that warfare was probably a frequent cause of death, averaging 13 percent to 15 percent of total deaths in small-scale tribal societies. By comparison, war was responsible for less than 1 percent of male deaths in the United States and Europe during the very bloody twentieth century.
³³
Archaeologist Lawrence Keeley reasons that if industrialized countries were stillorganized into small bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, then there would have been 2 billion war-related deaths in the twentieth century rather than the estimated 100 million or so.
³⁴
Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker also charts the decline of violence from biblical times to the present and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given the recent history of genocides around the world, we are living in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence.
³⁵

But this may be something of an illusion.

Adam Smith’s sentiment about warfare being so noble stemmed in part from the belief that powerful nations had a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction and dissuasion and thus had finally put an end to the threat against civilization from barbarians. This sentiment was justified at the end of the eighteenth century, but not today. Work by Boston University historian Ivan Arreguín-Toft reveals a steady increase since that time in the ability of “weak actors” to win wars with at least ten times less destructive means available to them than to “strong actors.”
³⁶
Indeed, since 1950, weak actors have won a majority of their “asymmetric” conflicts with strong actors, thus making future “small wars” more inviting for the less powerful.

While it’s apparently true that the overall percentage of deaths from violence among humankind has generally declined, especially in homicide rates, it is also the case that large-scale wars have become increasingly catastrophic, world-changing events. A mathematical trend known as a “power-law distribution” seems to capture the progress of wars over the last couple of centuries: for each tenfold increase in the magnitude of wars there is roughly a threefold decrease in the number of wars. There were some 20 millions deaths in World War I, slightly less than half of them civilian. This compares to 72 million fatalities in World War II, about two-thirds of them civilian. Following the trends, one might expect hundreds of millions of deaths in a future war, nearly all civilian.
³⁷
The collective implications of such violence would probably reverberate across the world to orders of magnitude greater than if those fatality figures were the accumulated results of individual homicides or small wars.
³⁸

Ever since World War II, deterrence—based on a credible threat of nuclear annihilation, and the rational expectation that fear of annihilation will compel people to avoid war—has maintained peace among major powers, however cold. Deterrence has worked so far, but maybe just barely. The world came perilously close to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, and as more and more countries acquire nuclear weapons, the chances of miscalculation increase. Not to mention nuclear terrorism, where calculations may be skewed out of whack by divinely inspired preferences and prejudices. Without global institutions to limit reaction to any initial nuclear attack, a rapid chain of events could readily lead to the meltdown of society—not from any terrorist blast but from reaction to it.
³⁹

LIVING WITH NO END TO WAR

Politicians easily make war popular, even after recent catastrophic defeat: “Naturally, the common people don’t want war,” reasoned Nazi leader Hermann Goering, so “all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” In the United States, such jingoist calls by politicians and pundits to unprovoked or unnecessary wars have been quite successful, from the Spanish-American War to the Iraq War. Of course, if you actually
are
being attacked, then pacifism can be suicidal, as Winston Churchill rightly surmised.

“War isn’t an adventure; it’s a disease, like typhus,” opined Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who authored the marvelous French childhood fantasy
The Little Prince
and died piloting a plane for the Free French in World War II. If only it were so. War is not amalfunction of human nature, a flaw of history, or a failure of politics. War is no more a disease or a parasite on society, consuming resources and people, than it is a creator of cultures, generating innovation and expansion of resources, populations, and ideas. In war, or under the threat of it, people use their worst, and no small amount of self-justification, to do their best.

Only in the twentieth century, in the wake of two world wars and under threat of nuclear annihilation, have large numbers of people and their leaders begun to question if war is necessary and unavoidable. But this antiwar sentiment hardly extends to everyone. Antiwar movements over the last century have been well meaning but only marginally successful in efforts to stop killing. It’s usually when the waste of lives and treasure becomes apparent to those who previously supported a war, or when defeat looms large, that pacifism gains purchase in the public.

Peace in the life of our species, like good health in the life of a person, may just be “a transitional state that presages nothing good”
⁴⁰
in the end. Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work as hard as we can for peace or good health. But our biology and our history say that permanent peace is about as improbable on earth as unending day. There may always be jihads of one sort or another. We may not be able to end them, but we can find ways to lessen their impact.

CHAPTER 19
BEYOND ALL REASON: THE CLAUSEWITZ DELUSION

The Moral Law causes the people to be … undismayed by any danger.

—SUN TZU,
THE ART OF WAR
, C. 54 0 B.C.

Don’t ask me what the political solution is to be…. Our sacred duty is to fight, to resist occupation of our sacred land and change the conditions of our people. That is our duty, our sacred duty…. I will not accept the existence of Israel. I will never accept the existence of a state of Israel. Never, ever.

—AUTHOR’S MEETING WITH RAMADAN SHALL AH, GENERAL
SECRETARY, PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD, DAMASCUS,

DECEMBER 15, 20 09

THE CLAUSEWITZ DELUSION (“WAR IS POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS”)

War is never wholly a product of reason and rational calculation,
¹
never just “politics by other means,” despite what von Clausewitz famously stated in his classic study,
On War.
²
This, the sentiment of a Prussian regimental officer in the post-Napoleonic era of state interests and strategies to rearrange “the balance of power,” disastrously misguided European elites into believing that wars could be started and pursued to a desired end by careful planning (although he did grant that in the fog of war events can sometimes spin out of control). Many of our political and military leaders still believe in this Clausewitz delusion: It’s a mainstay in the curriculaof U.S. war colleges and the international-relations departments of top U.S. universities. Yet war is almost always an emotional matter of status and pride, of shedding blood and tearing the flesh of others held dear, of dread and awe, and of the instinctual needs to escape from fear, to dominate, and to avenge.

Even the First World War—actually the first and only war whose leaders almost uniformly believed that they were following Clausewitz’s dictum—is remembered in the end not so much for destroying the old monarchical world order and forcing in the modern age, for preserving democracy or bringing on communism and fascism. In France, as in most other places in Europe, “the Great War” is still today ritually remembered as it was mostly lived then: in countless village and family memorials of sorrow and pride, and collective confusion over what purpose the mass slaughter served except as a costly show of commitment to
La Patrie,
the Fatherland. But once in the battle, the French
poilus,
the German
Landsers,
and our doughboys mostly continued the fight unto death out of solidarity and for the esteem of their comrades and community.

FOR COMRADES

Among American military psychologists and historians, the conventional wisdom on why soldiers fight is that ideology is not important. Most of the studies focus on measures of “fighter spirit” among American soldiers in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
³
Only leadership and group loyalty seem critical. In World War II, for example, solidarity and loyalty to the group helped mightily to sustain combat soldiers, while personal commitment to the war and ideology were much less meaningful. American soldiers “ain’t fighting for patriotism,” and the British soldier “never gave democracy a thought.”
⁴
Soldiers’ belief in the legitimacy of a cause worth fighting for steadily increased during World War II and steadilydecreased during the Korean War, yet fighting spirit remained fairly constant.
⁵

In
The Deadly Brotherhood,
⁶
John McManus argues that the American combat soldier in World War II did not fight and die for abstract concepts, such as democracy or love of country, but for his “devoted fraternity” or band of brothers with whom he shared dangers and hardship on the front line. A rifleman in the Thirty-second Infantry Division wrote: “Survival for one’s self was the first priority by far. The second priority was survival for the man next to you and the man next to him. So, right or wrong, love of country and pride … was a good bit behind.”

William Manchester described the importance of camaraderie in his memoirs of U.S. Marine Corps service in World War II: “Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than … friends had ever been or would ever be. They never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them.”
⁷

A Confederate corporal in the Ninth Alabama, returning to his regiment after recovering from a battle wound, identifies this sentiment of friendship as love: “A soldier is always near crazy to get away from the army on furloughs, but as a general thing they are more anxious to get back. There is a feeling of love—a strong attachment for those with whom one has shared common dangers, that is never felt for any one else, or under any other circumstances.”
⁸

Ideology is only as strong as the ties of friendship and camaraderie in war. Like initiation into other legendary groups of warriors, such as ancient Sparta’s hoplites or the French Foreign Legion, candidates would be stripped naked, bodily and mentally, as they trained and bonded in a common cause. To abandon a friend on the field was the greatest sin imaginable. According to Nazi SS member Johannes Hassebroeack, each in a unit “devoted himself to all of the others”:

Even the ties of love between a man and a woman are not stronger than the friendship there was among us. This friendship was all. It both gave us strength and held us together, in a covenant of blood. It was worth living for; it was worth dying for. This is what gave us the physical strength and courage to do what others did not dare to do…. What we did—we did, of course, for Germany, for the Führer, for the future. But every one of us did what he did for every one of the others.
⁹

When there is an undeniable esprit de corps, there can be great courage and sacrifice, whatever the ideology.

AND FOR CAUSE

But it is not camaraderie alone that made the Germans the best fighting soldiers of World War II or the Confederate armies persevere when much larger and better-equipped Union armies flagged. In
Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II,
Stephen Fritz argues that strong unit cohesion and ideological commitment infused the German ranks:

The Germans consistently outfought the far more numerous Allied armies that eventually defeated them…. On a man for man basis the German ground soldiers consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50 percent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances. This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had a local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered.
¹⁰

By D-day (June 6, 1944), 35 percent of German soldiers had been wounded at least once and 21 percent twice or more. The impressiveunit cohesion and fighting spirit of the
Landser,
the ordinary German infantryman, was most remarkable on the Russian front, where 80 percent of Germans fought. German soldiers, it seems, were far more committed to the war aims of National Socialism than previously thought, though especially among the SS. In December 1944, at Budapest, overwhelming Soviet forces were advancing into the city, and remaining German troops were faced with retreat, surrender, or death. Allied reports from the city indicated that “General [Johannes] Friessner [commanding German regular forces] can count for defense of the [Hungarian] capital on SS units that operate under the name ‘Death Volunteers.’ “
¹¹
Among the 400,000 or so German soldiers in the Waffen SS, losses—killed and missing—were about one-third, versus about 10 percent for U.S. troops, and German troops fought on with massive casualty rates that typically destroyed the fighting ability of combat units in other armies, including America’s. Most important were the bonds of military friendship inherited from Prussian tradition, which raised comradeship to the level of ideological and strategic doctrine.