The following is an excerpt from the controversial Afterword to my new book, A Rage to Conquer, published in late January, in which I argue that unconditional surrender or destruction of the enemy is the only acceptable objective in an existential struggle, such as those outlined in the book: Troy, Gaugamela, Alesia, the Milvian Bridge, the Catalaunian Plains, Dorylaeum and Antioch, Austerlitz, St.-Mihiel/Midway/the Bulge, and 9/11. The narrative begins with a discussion of the first chapter of Carl von Clausewitz's seminal treatise On War, and the principles of Western warfare outlined therein.
Reactions so far have been largely positive, with two politically incorrect caveats. The first is my belief that women have no place on the battlefield, that if women are fighting in your Army you're in trouble. This has earned me from some reviewers the sobriquet of "misogynist" but I prefer to think of it as the historically, martially, and morally correct position. Women should no more die on the battlefield than men should die in childbirth.
The second is my criticism of American warfighting since the end of World War II, which has until Donald Trump's bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities over the weekend forsworn victory in favor of "proportional responses" and "negotiated settlements" as part of "exit strategies"-- luxuries unaffordable by previous generations of military commanders (including commanders-in-chief) who knew that their only options were, often literally, win or die.
So the ongoing conflict in Iran should only end one way: with the destruction of the mullahs, the disestablishment of Islam, the eradication of Iran's nuclear capabilities, a stern warning backed up by force if necessary to other nuclear powers not to ship any nuclear bombs or other material to a fundamentalist Iran and the neutralization of the well at Jamkaran to end Shia Islam's belief in the resurrection of the hidden Twelfth Imam. The Jews have survived the destruction of the Second Temple and Christians the loss of Constantinople and the Church of Holy Wisdom (the Hagia Sophia, now a mosque), without any loss of belief; Islam ought to have the opportunity to do the same. The president's announcement late this afternoon that a cease-fire between Israel and Iran has been reached is, therefore, disappointing absent the collapse of the mullahs.
George Patton and his coevals were the last American flag officers to win a major war, and Harry Truman the last president to preside over an unequivocal victory. Since Patton’s death, the U.S. has participated in the inconclusive Korean War, as part of a United Nations coalition; the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961; the disastrous Vietnam War, a classic example of a war without an objective; a small, pushover engagement in Grenada in 1983, with no strategic purpose; the Gulf War of 1990–1991 to expel Iraq from Kuwait, a war in which the country had no national or compelling interests; a pointless and bloody failed intervention in Somalia highlighted by the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, which saw the bodies of American soldiers dragged through the streets; a pointless intervention in a religious conflict in Kosovo in 1998–1999 under the fig leaf of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance whose mission was accomplished in 1945; the civil wars in Bosnia from 1992–1995 that resulted from the collapse of communist Yugoslavia, again without any national interests at stake; and the Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2021, which, after an initial, punitive success following the attacks of 9/11, became a spectacular military and diplomatic failure ending in an ignominious retreat that is without precedent in American history.
That long and futile conflict includes the briefly successful Iraq War, which settled the unfinished business of the Bush family left over from the first Gulf War, but left intact the imaginary Sykes-Picot country of Iraq as a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran; and the purposeless bombing of Libya under the Obama administration in 2011, which resulted in the death of Muammar Gaddafi and rendered that country leaderless and rudderless but was celebrated by then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton in her maladroit evocation of Caesar: “We came, we saw, he died.” A less Caesar-like figure than the wife of a former president and a defeated candidate for the presidency in 2016, a woman of no particular distinction, and animated almost exclusively by bitterness and resentment, can hardly be imagined.
It’s an impressive litany of futility, made even more noteworthy by whom the U.S. did not fight in what has come to be called the Forever Wars: Iran, the architect of the hostage crisis of 1979–1981 that brought down the Jimmy Carter administration; Saudi Arabia, which helpfully contributed fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 and birthed al-Qaeda’s ringleader, Osama bin Laden; and the People’s Republic of China, which attacked the U.S. in Korea and, after the end of the Cold War with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991, supplanted the Russians as the principal enemy of Western, and especially American, civilization. As of this writing, none has yet been decisively confronted.
One notes that in all the conflicts cited above, none conforms to the Clausewitzian dictum that “war is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force.” In each case, these wars of choice were fought along the invented limiting principle (found nowhere in the ancient world) that wars (a) should be defensive, fought in response to some provocation, and (b) any response should be “proportionate” to the initial injury. In other words, the goal has always been a return to the status quo ante—a recipe for an unstable stasis that must eventually fly apart.
What would Caesar do?
Call it diplomacy with no other means. Among other things, an irrational fear of Friktion on the part of the politicians and fruit-salad generals and scrambled-eggs admirals is why there has not been an unequivocal victory among them. As well, American public opinion, goaded by the corporate media, has become obsessed with the chimera of an “exit strategy” even before a war is fought, much less won. A war fought not to win is by definition unwinnable—and these are precisely the wars the U.S. has welcomed since 1945, since they keep the Pentagon’s war machine humming, and the only cost is in the lives of the cannon-fodder volunteers, few of whom come from the self-appointed “elite” classes of sitcom-writing Harvard graduates and Yale Law attorneys.
Consider, for example, the fetishistic emphasis on “stability” that became evident at the end of the Cold War, when George H. W. Bush—a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency—took the reins from Ronald Reagan at the conclusion of the latter’s second term. With the “cowboy” Reagan gone, the striped-pants set breathed a profound sigh of relief. “He’s a safe pair of hands,” said one (“conservative”) British cabinet official of my acquaintance at the time. Translation: there would be no more of this “Evil Empire” nonsense.
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[In the wake of 9/11] we know from history what other, more secure and confident, cultures would have done. The imperial Romans would have gone full delenda est on Saudi Arabia, razed its cities, destroyed the Kaaba, leveled the mosques, occupied the oil fields, seized its wealth, executed its leaders, and sold the populace into slavery; they knew an existential struggle when they were in one. Constantine would not have stopped until Greco-Roman writ applied without resistance across his realm. Bohemond would immediately have known the holy warriors for what they were: dedicated, merciless enemies in a religious war in which there could be only one victor, and helpfully converted their mosques back into churches as he put them to the sword.
Napoleon would have as handily defeated them as he did the Egyptian mamelukes—former slaves who had risen to power over the centuries—and added their territory to his empire, sending scholars and scientists to preserve and protect the ruins and artifacts and where possible restore the preexisting nations and faiths that had been overwhelmed by the Islamic conquest, especially in Persia, a once-great nation that has not been the same since the Arab conquest in 654 A.D. Americans, however, have never had a taste for empire.
True, the U.S. successfully rehabilitated Germany and Japan as allies, in large part by Americanizing them via its pervasive popular, even vulgar, culture. But that was only possible after both nations had been convincingly beaten. As for Russia, the Cold War foe, it is still feeling the effects of its loss of manpower during the Great Patriotic War, the collapse of its moral structure under atheistic Communism, its reliance on abortion as birth control, its corresponding declining birth rate, and a host of other ills brought on by its self-imposed, prolonged absence from Western civilization during most of the last century. Once an enemy, Russia is now simply an adversary, and not a particularly potent one at that.
The Dar al-Harb, however, is still out there, itching for a fight.
