Recommended: War: Ends and Means

I have written before that the well-educated, comfortable middle class political, academic and business elites who run this country apparently have a far less realistic view of the world than the poor who live in tough neighborhoods dominated by gangs. The poor understand first hand that force and the threat of force matters, and that some people can’t just be reasoned out of conflicts.

And recent events have shown, once again, that liberal American Utopian views of a peaceful, orderly world are not shared by the brutal Islamic State, nor Hamas in Gaza, nor any of the many, many other armed militias, jihadist groups, pseudo-communist insurgents, or pirates in Africa or the Middle East or even in parts of Latin America. And now we can see that they aren’t shared by Russia and President Putin either.  In fact, the world produces a steady, reliable stream of brutal dictators and ambitious leaders in the mold of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussain, Napoleon, Bashar Assad, Vladimir Putin, and their ilk, who are only contained or defeated by force.

Paul Seabury (Prof of Political Science , Berkeley) and Angelo Codevilla (Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institute, Stanford) wrote War: Ends and Means (1989) as an attempt to educate a new American generation, who did not live through World War I or World War II, about the importance of understanding wars – why they are sometimes necessary (because bad as they are , the alternative is sometimes worse), how they start, how they are prosecuted, and how they end - instead of just naively pretending it will never happen again.

This excerpt from the introduction makes their point:

This book is not written for strategic theorists, military professionals, or historians who devote themselves to the nature of organized violence and its relation to politics. It is written for a generation of Americans whom the absence of the military draft has trained to live as if military matters were a spectator sport, whose popular culture gives the impression that violence belongs exclusively to the past or to lower forms of life, and whose university curriculum make it well-night impossible to put one’s self in the shoes of history’s protagonists – or of those caught in the middle. This book would not be understood in the Communist world or in much of the Third World, where violence is endemic and discourse on this subject is deformed or nonexistent.  It would be superfluous in, say, Switzerland or Israel, where personal involvement in military matters  goes hand-in-hand with sober discourse, as it would have been superfluous in America  prior to the 1950s.  But in the magic kingdom of modern upper-middle-class American life, it is as necessary as it was two thousand years ago for the slave who sat behind the conquering hero in Rome’s triumphal processions and whispered in his ear: “All glory is fleeting”.  Hubris and ignorance are equally narcotic.  We write to break the spell of ignorance about war and to bring some of the least palatable aspects of reality into contemporary American minds though the gentle medium of the printed page lest someday these aspects intrude of their own accord.

In a time when the world is aflame in violence, from the Middle East to the Ukraine, and our government appears unable to settle on a coherent strategy to manage our responses, if any, to these crises, this book seems to me particularly relevant and important.

PS - Get the 1990 paperback reprint, if possible.  It includes a new forward analyzing the first Gulf war in the context of this discussion - and the analysis is very revealing indeed!

PPS - Better yet, get the second edition (2006), which adds a new extensive discussion of the American "war on terror".