Wars Are For Winning - Iran And The New Calculus Of American Will

With the current war in Iran, Donald Trump has left moral exceptionalism behind.  Wars are for winning, and in the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman who did not hesitate to use overwhelming military force to defeat the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, the American President has not hesitated to eliminate the leaders of the Iranian theocracy, to destroy Iran's offensive and defense military capacity, and to reduce its energy, power, and transportation infrastructure to rubble. 

America is now in a struggle with an enemy which shares the brutality of Genghis Khan and operates under a moral system which is antithetical to ours.  The creation of an Islamic caliphate, one in which strict Koranic and Sharia Law are established, practiced, and enforced, is the only goal.  

Like the West’s medieval Crusades, the march of Islamic militancy is in the honor of God, the establishment of His kingdom.  Of course secular and venal interests will always be important and the fights of Iran, al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Shabab, and others have territorial and economic interests driving them as well; but the struggle is fought for higher ends.

For these terrorist regimes, the death of civilians, therefore, has no relevance since the ends of battle are religious and spiritual.  The ends justify the means far more than any secular struggle. What Americans consider heinous crimes – blowing up school buses, crowded markets, and residential neighborhoods – have no moral implication per se.  They are only necessary measures to assure the final and ultimate moral end.

In this war with Iran, the United States' ally is Israel, the  only country that has understood the dangerous, aggressive militancy of Islam, and they fight with the same moral rectitude and purpose as their radical Islamic opponents.  They will brook absolutely no threat to the Jewish homeland, and civilian Palestinian and Iranian deaths are the price the enemy must pay for its aggression and permanent hostility.  The Israelis know that they are fighting an enemy who uses a territorial imperative – a Palestinian state and the creation of an Islamic caliphate – only as pretext for the annihilation of Israel, the ridding of Arab lands of the infidel, and in preparation for universal Islamic rule.

Israel's stand with the United States in its war against Iran is an extension of this existential faith.  Iran, sponsor of Middle East terrorism, intent on building a nuclear bomb and the missiles to deliver it, and an implacable hatred of Israel and the West, must be destroyed before it is too late.  In a matter of months, not years, the regime could build enough missiles and drones to deter any counter attack and to indiscriminately attack, threaten, and cause instability in the Gulf states.  The time for determined military action in a war to annihilate the theocratic regime and completely neutralize its military capacity is now. 

Radical Islam is expansionist by expressed design and Koranic sanction,  Israel is only self-protective but defiantly so. Radical Islam is not simply another culture to be respected and understood for its principles, traditions and history.  It is the enemy to be defeated if not annihilated.

Within a historical context, war has been a permanent feature of human society since the Paleolithic.  An expression of a violent, territorial, aggressive, self-interested human nature, it will always exist and the only way to stop the natural aggressive intents of individuals, countries, regions, and religions is to do so with force.

Wars have never been fought with moral restraint - force must be met with force and peace results either when an attacking force is defeated or their is a military standoff.  The Cold War was such a standoff, and the Pax Romana was one of complete Roman control. 

Tolstoy wrote of Napoleon's Franco-Russian war and the famous Battle of Borodino, but Russians were always at war. In the 18th century alone Russia fought Poland, the Turks, the Swedes, and the Persians at least once. 

The rest of Europe was no different.  England alone fought the Hundred Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War, the War of the Roses; and constant wars against the Dutch, Spanish, French, Scottish, Irish, and Portuguese.  England was racked by twenty-five bloody civil wars between 1088 and 1746.  Minor skirmishes, internal conflicts, palace revolts and rebellions are not even counted.

Before the Battle of Agincourt described in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the king visits his troops in disguise to gauge the mood of the enlisted men.  They tell him that the king has brought them to France to fight a war based on his own dubious claims and that although it is their duty to die for him and for England, they are unhappy that they will perish for such a cause.

Since WWII wars have been fought fought as much as with soldiers’ safety in mind than in victory. The defeat of the enemy – Iraqi, Afghani, or Vietnamese -  has been conditional on limited American casualties.  Battlefield generals have always calculated personnel losses when defining military strategy.  If too many men were lost, then the battle would be lost.  

Marcus Aurelius fighting his last wars against the restive German tribes did indeed calculate risks to the cavalry and to his infantry, but was not making moral decisions, only practical ones.  American generals on the contrary very much consider the moral implications of G.I. deaths.

The wars of the early and mid-20th century and those before were also only marginally concerned with civilian populations, unlike today when ‘collateral damage’ is always to be avoided and risk to non-combatants carefully calculated.  American persistent but recent moral rectitude and sense of democratizing mission demands such calculations.

It was most definitely not so during World War II when we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – all deliberate attempts to incinerate civilian populations.  The only relevant objective was the defeat of the Nazis and the Japanese.  Any other consideration was irrelevant.

In the Vietnam War, perhaps because American leaders were never really convinced of the rightness of their cause, a special emphasis was placed on ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of Vietnamese civilians.  This effort was designed to both show American beneficence and generosity and to gain local allies.  As history has shown, this idealistic notion never worked, nor ever had a chance of working.  

The Vietnamese showed themselves to be a brutal, implacable enemy which had only one thought in mind – defeating the Americans by killing them.  Ho Chi Minh of course understood the psychology of war and knew how to rattle American forces through the uncertainty and unpredictability of attacks, by quickly removing their dead, and by the placement of landmines; and he understood American history and current political opinion and knew that we would get tired of war.  Yet he was determined and unstoppable in his fight to kill and remove.

Times have changed.  America has finally accepted the ineluctable realities of human nature, war, and the endless conflicts over domain, territory, resources, and hegemonic control.  The calculus has not shifted to one applicable throughout history.  Wars will always occur and they are for winning - not ro compromise, not conciliation, not negotiation or commiseration

As an expression of this newfound, historical imperative, Donald Trump has joined the new geopolitical triumvirate - Russia, China, and America, all countries with the implacable will of dominance, control, and socio-cultural influence.  The triad are not partners but adversaries, but in their competitive will are unlikely to fight each other.  America's war in Iran is as much about showing China and Russia that the old American contingencies are gone.  

America is back.