[Should be required reading for all the traitors in America hoping we lose in Iraq]
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/huerta200511110822.asp
I Never Knew His Name
The true face of Muslim martyrdom.
By Chaplain Carlos C. Huerta
Mosul, Iraq — It is October 11 as I write this, the day before Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement is supposed to be a day of fast, reflection, and prayer for the Jews: a time when I reflect on my own actions and intentions from the previous year. But the images I carry into my fast are sad ones, of someone else’s child, a Muslim child. There is blood spattered on my uniform despite the fact that I haven’t been hit or wounded. And yet it is B-positive blood, my own blood, mixed with the blood of a nine-year old Iraqi boy who was observing his fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Today there was a terrorist attack at a place most people have never heard of. Unless you’re a soldier stationed here, the name Tal Afar would probably be insignificant to you. But Tal Afar means a lot to me.
Today some terrorists decided to kill some Iraqi citizens — good Muslims — in order to discourage them from voting on Saturday on the new constitution. These terrorists called themselves Muslims and claimed that what they did was for Allah. But their connection to Islam is about as true and strong as Timothy McVeigh’s connection to Christianity. What they did is so contrary to the holy teachings of the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) that to say their name in the same breath as Islam is considered sacrilege.
I was at the Combat Support Hospital — known as CASH — when the call came: Terrorists had hit, no American casualties, but 22 Iraqis wounded, five of whom were children under the age of twelve. I stood on the tarmac watching as the MEDEVAC choppers came in one at a time to deliver the wounded. Many of the wounded had no legs, or deep chest, head, and abdominal wounds. I noticed the children, two in particular who had severe head trauma. I followed them into the ER and then watched our physicians struggle in the OR to stabilize them. After the physicians did what they could, the children were taken to the ICU. I helped carry their stretchers into the ICU and stood by to see if I could help. I had a serious conversation with G-d and pleaded with him to take care of these kids — kids who should be playing soccer, or doing their homework for school the next day, or helping their parents get ready for supper. Both of these children had skulls so badly shattered that their heads needed to be bandaged to keep their brains in. I watched as the nurses and medics gave them pint after pint of blood and as their head bandages turned from white to red. I held the youngest one’s hands, reassuring him to the extent I could.
As they were giving the youngest his third pint of blood, I heard the nurse say that they were running low on O Positive, the universal donor, and that due to the tremendous internal bleeding, this child would need more. I asked what blood type he was, and it turned out both children were B Positive, my own blood type. I went to the head nurse and asked if I could donate blood for the youngest child and they quickly hooked me up and took a pint. After giving it, I went back to see him; he already my blood hooked up to him and surging in his veins.
I held his tiny hand and watched as the monitors told the story: His heart was in trouble owing to the brain trauma. I watched as he fought for his life, fighting to breathe. But I knew he was dying and there was nothing I could do. This innocent Muslim child, who had been observing Ramadan the way a child does, was now dying despite the fact that my blood was moving though his veins, despite the fact that I pleaded with G-d to do what I thought was right, to keep him alive. But G-d had other plans.
I didn’t want this boy to die hearing the strange sounds of a hospital and a foreign language. I wanted him to be comforted by the last sounds he heard, by words that were close to his heart, words that spoke of home and faith. I started to recite the Holy Koran to him.
My close friend, a fellow clergyman, Imam Burgos, the imam for the United States Military Academy, had helped me learn Surahs of the Holy Koran, and I chanted these out to the boy in Arabic. As I chanted, I heard the monitor go flat-line. I held his little hand, as my blood moved through his tiny pure heart that could no longer bear the evil of this world.
I held his hand and cried — cried for a boy whose name I didn’t know, for an innocent Muslim child who gave his life for his G-d, Allah, for his country. He was the true face of Muslim martyrdom. With tears streaming down my face, I looked down and noticed blood on my uniform. His blood, my blood, our blood had dripped from his open head wound onto my uniform.
An hour or so later I walked away into the waiting area as they prepared his body for transport. There I met Chaplain Mark Greschel, a Catholic priest. He looked at me and knew that I was in trouble. He sat with me, somehow knowing that the pain we felt was best not mixed with words. He quietly put his arms around me, and we both sat there in silence. I thought to myself, isn’t this the kind of world we are fighting for — a world where an Imam teaches a Rabbi words from the Holy Koran to comfort a young Muslim boy, and that rabbi himself is comforted by a Christian, a Catholic priest.
On this day before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Fast Day, the Day of Atonement, I ask myself: What is Ramadan all about? Is it about killing, or is it about seeking out G-d through fasting and prayer? For those of us who choose not to carry hatred and prejudice in our hearts, the answer is simple. For the holy Islamic community, Ramadan is a time of introspection, of hope, of belief that if we all work together, we can truly build a better world for all our children, even those whose names we don’t know. There is so much that we can learn about faith and G-d through other religions; there is so much that our Muslim brothers and sisters can teach us about our Creator, about personal sacrifice and selfless service. But if we consider their faith only with mistrust, hatred, and indifference, then this nine-year-old angel with his faith in G-d means nothing. Then we have diminished our own faith in G-d. If we objectify the Muslim people as well as those who don’t share our exact views on the nature of G-d, if we see them as less than our brothers and sisters, then we as a human race are lost.
There are many Americans who ask why we’re here. Why are we sacrificing so many American lives and placing so many in harm’s way? What is the purpose of it all? Well, I don’t really know the big picture. But from my small sector of the battlefield, the reason I am here is to give “the least of these,” my children over here, a shot at “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — just like my other children living in America.
I didn’t give birth to him, but on this fast day in Ramadan, on this day before Yom Kippur, I lost a son, someone who had my blood coursing through his body. And for him, I choose not to hate, I choose to follow the path that the great Sheik Ibn Arabi followed when he said, “Love is my Faith and my religion and wherever its caravans take me, that is where I shall follow, for love is my religion and faith.” Let us join hands with our Muslim brothers and sisters and let this be the message of Ramadan that we carry in our hearts and take with us. G-d has a new Muslim angel in Paradise. I hope to tell you his name one day when I meet him again.
— Chaplain Carlos C. Huerta is Jewish Community chaplain in Mosul, Iraq.
Moving On
Rhetoric at war with reality.
Recently George Bush met hostile crowds and a critical press during a 34-nation Summit of the Americas. Leftists and elite commentators criticized his recent proposals to liberalize American markets from Canada to Chile even though such an enlightened policy would be deeply resented by many American unions and small businesses here at home, but of inestimable value to South American exporters with their much cheaper costs of production.
Perhaps this automatic anti-Americanism that clouds Latin American self-interest is a result of the present hysteria over Iraq or the foul fumes from American corporations of the 1950s.
Maybe countries like Argentina, in the manner of post-Soviet Russia, allowed corruption and cronyism to subvert overdue market-driven reforms and now need a convenient scapegoat for their own self-induced miseries.
Or is the furor due to the influence of Hugo Chavez's billions of petrodollars? He has promiscuously spread money throughout Latin America and tends to prop up socialist policies that otherwise would probably fail.
Still, one wonders what would have been the reaction of the various anti-American protesters had the president agreed with much of their clamoring to be free of influence of the United States. Maybe George Bush could have offered something more palatable such as the following:
Unfortunately at a time of trade imbalances, budget deficits, and security concerns, the United States regrets that it must consider first the interests of its own small businesses and workers. So sadly it must maintain or increase its protection of the domestic American market, restrict the remittances of illegal aliens back to Latin America, and close our borders to the entry of all illegal aliens from the south.
Recently the Spanish High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz issued international arrest warrants for three American soldiers, charging them with murder in the accidental death of a Spanish cameraman at the Baghdad's Palestine Hotel on April 8, 2003. The idea of Pedraz and many of his associates is that Spain is now the world's custodian of universal justice and can indict those it feels commit crimes against humanity — or at least sort of.
In the world of the utopian European, Pinochet is logically indicted for killing thousands, but strangely not Castro for tens of thousands. American soldiers in the heat of battle are deemed criminals for accidents in the way that former Eastern European and Soviet intelligence officers truly responsible for thousands killed not to mention top al Qaeda officials. If the French police or military gets a little too heavy-handed against Muslim rioters, none will be indicted by Judge Pedraz.
More curiously, Judge Pedraz seems oblivious that there are thousands of American personnel not far away from his courtroom stationed on Spanish soil. So rather than charging Americans for supposed wartime crimes in distant Iraq, cannot the Spanish, to ensure a more sensitive military landscape, instead simply ask us to leave their country entirely — and allow the defense of Spain to become strictly a Spanish matter? Most Americans and Spanish alike would welcome the idea — perhaps the former far more than the latter.
It is now common knowledge that Iran is hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. It has three or four probable aims in doing so. Blackmail worked in the case of North Korea, giving an otherwise failed state cash, food, "peaceful" nuclear expertise, and, most importantly, global attention. Iran might win the same from the EU.
Or it could gain the type of deterrence that Pakistan has obtained with both the United States and India, allowing it even greater exemption to fund and host terrorists.
Or, as its so-called president suggested, it might wish to wipe out Israel — either on the frightening premise it could survive such an Armageddon and Israel would not, or on the lunatic assumption that it was willing to go to a collective paradise, martyring itself to end once and for all the Zionist plague.
Or, perhaps Iran wishes to supply stealthy nuclear devices to groups like Hezbollah that could terrorize the West while allowing Iran deniability of culpability and thus avoidance of massive retaliation.
In any case, it is clearly not in the interest of the United Nations nor the European Union nor the Arab League that Iran goes nuclear. It is even more evident that no one apparently can stop it — despite all the remonstrations of the three EU nations talking to Iran, a Peace Prize to Mr. El-Baradei, and grandstanding slurs against a supposedly trigger-happy United States from Germany and France.
In response, perhaps the United States should declare something like the following:
Iran's nuclear ambitions are both an internal and regional matter that properly fall under the auspices of the U.N., EU, and Arab League. Our own strategies — missile defense and massive nuclear response to any attack — are designed to protect the United States and its allies; but we certainly would not wish to prejudice alternative avenues of national or global approaches undertaken by others, and most definitely do not wish to interfere in the internal affairs of Iran.
All these examples — and far more could be adduced — reveal a radical disconnect between rhetoric and reality. South Americans want unfettered access into America's markets, assume thousands will illegally cross into the United States, and welcome in return billions in cash remittances. Similarly, Spain assumes perpetual NATO protection. In reality that means that the U.S. nuclear deterrent and its vast conventional forces will keep the Mediterranean and Western Europe free from outside threats at little cost to Spain, with a relatively low American profile, and in consultation with Spanish officials. The bad cop United States is not unwelcome to anyone dealing with Iran, because all accept that the scary scenario — America is the only power with the capability and will to stop Iran's nuclear roguery — is not as bad as the worse alternative of the theocracy becoming a major nuclear power.
Why then all the dissimilation? The most obvious answer is pride, envy, jealousy, and all the other primordial emotions that the weak and the vulnerable harbor against the strong and autonomous.
Second, for all our pride, we are not like the once-powerful — and scary — Soviet Union, so Latin Americans and Europeans know that there is rarely any price to be paid for attacking the United States. Slandering us is a win-win situation — cowardly and expedient to be sure, but hardly like indicting bin Laden or embargoing Iranian oil. No Argentinean is furious over Chinese unfair trade; no Spaniard protests Russian oilmen for spoiling the arctic. And worse still, we know why.
Third, so far anti-Americanism is tactically smart. The heated rhetoric of the extremists makes others seem moderate. So Latin American leaders can grudgingly "take political risks" to "permit" America to accept their cheap products into the United States. The leftwing Spanish government can pose as responsible in opposing its own court's theatrics. The Europeans and U.N. can apologize to Iran that it is forced into such unpleasant dialogue by the alternative specter of American preemption and unilateralism.
Fourth, the world since the Cold War has become a much wealthier and safer place with the demise of nuclear and intercontinental Communism, and the onset of globalization. Latin Americans are furious not that they are starving in 1950s fashion, but that their glimpse of parity with the affluent United States is slipping away. Spaniards are safe and secure, but in typical human fashion of ever rising expectations, even more apprehensive that things are not as heaven on earth. And Europeans and internationalists are frustrated with Iran. It has oil and money and has been left alone, so why would it wish to ruin a good thing and call the bluff of their new enlightened order?
Are there any dangers to this game of rhetoric masking reality? Plenty. It is now old, tiring, and predictable. The American people are on to the fraud, and probably don't much care for another free trade agreement with ingrates who slander what benefits them. They are tired of NATO and want it to nobly die on the vine and allow utopians to get a taste of the real world they so disdain. And wisely or not, they are not too fond of the Middle East and pretty much want those whom Iran immediately threatens to deal with it on their own and count us out. Our critics forget that American foreign policy is ultimately simply a representation of collective will. Nations are simply people, and thus subject to emotional urges that often trump reason.
So by castigating the U.S., critics forget that their long-term welfare is not the same as the short-term interests of America. Open markets, military alliances between liberal democracies, and sober joint actions now to prevent worse threats later on are to everyone's advantage. But for right now, the United States might benefit by not welcoming any additional free and unfair trade with South America, or spending billions on European defense, or taking on any more burdens in the Middle East.
In contrast, an India, Japan, and Australia are proud and confident nations. They don't indict our citizens and often appreciate an American global role, whether outsourcing jobs or patrolling regional waters. Unlike the U.N., the EU, and South America, they spare us the sanctimonious lectures and look forward rather than nurse wounds of the past.
The world is changing as we speak. The great untold story of our age is that others need to get a life and the United States needs to move on.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=20157
Bay City "Revolutionary Communists" Defeat Military Recruiters
By Andrew Walden
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 11, 2005
With Nancy Pelosi’s home-district San Francisco Democratic Party leading the “Yes on I” charge, San Francisco voters, by a 60-40 margin, Tuesday approved Proposition I, the so-called “College Not Combat” initiative. Prop I does not ban military recruiters, a move that would have put campuses at risk of losing their federal funding. San Francisco leftists will continue to subsidize themselves with taxpayer dollars. Prop I instead asks city and school officials in San Francisco to create scholarships and training programs designed to out do benefits offered by the military. However, the sense of the resolution – backed by self-proclaimed "revolutionary Communists," Islamofascists, and even Cindy Sheehan herself – is that military recruiters are pariahs with no business preying on defenseless young people.
The San Francisco vote spreads the type of politics found on many college campuses to an entire city. While the proposition does not formally challenge recruiters’ right to free speech on campus, leaders of College Not Combat are open about their goals. Quoted in the November 9 San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco School Board member Dan Kelly said the voice of the voter on Proposition I will “strengthen the board’s resolve” to make sure recruiters “don’t have free access.” NewsMax quotes Bob Matthews, a College Not Combat activist for the proposition saying, “We now have the moral weight of the city behind us, and it's definitely a valuable asset to have in our corner."
The San Francisco vote is timed to precede the December 6 U.S. Supreme Court hearing on a case, which will determine the constitutionality of tying federal funding to school policy on military recruitment. According to a news release from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, “In 1994, in response to law schools’ growing opposition to military recruiters on campus, Congress passed the Solomon Amendment, which cuts off federal funding to higher education institutions that discriminate against military recruiters. Schools that violate the Solomon Amendment risk losing funding from the Departments of Defense, Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, and related agencies. The amendment does not extend to administrative grants or student financial aid.
“The Solomon Amendment was struck down earlier this year in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals as violating the First Amendment rights of higher education institutions. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on December 6.”
San Francisco schools are not hostile to all recruiters – only U.S. military recruiters. San Francisco State University has for decades been home to a large chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students, a PLO member organization organized under the PLO’s “Department of Mass Organizations.” Many GUPS members are “recruited” to lead the PLO. These include PLO negotiator Saeb Arakat, a SFSU graduate. Convicted terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart, was welcomed to speak at San Francisco State University and “recruit” students and faculty to join her cause – aiding Sheik Abdel Rahman to communicate orders and fatwas to his murderous followers in Egypt’s Islamic Group terrorist organization. Stewart, free while awaiting sentencing, spoke at SFSU along with Cindy Sheehan in April. According to an account of the event published on FrontPage Magazine, “Sheehan said then that military recruiters should not be allowed on college campuses, maintaining they trick naïve 18-year-olds with offers of money and scholarships.” At the same event, campus leftists distributed flyers inviting students to debate, “Should we support the Iraqi Resistance?” Dahr Jamail, a supporter of the terrorists in Iraq, and a close associate of Sheehan, spoke at SFSU on April 12. None of the activists complaining about allegedly deceitful tactics by U.S. military recruiters complains that the terrorists deceive children and mentally handicapped persons into carrying remote-controlled “suicide” bombs, nor do they decry the terrorist recruiters’ deceit that 72 virgins will be waiting for the “martyr” who violates Islamic prohibitions of suicide.
On March 9, about 100 anti-American war protesters and members of the International Socialist Organization crowded into a career fair and faced off with five College Republicans military recruiters off SFSU campus. Palestinian protesters are engaged in an ongoing campaign against Jewish students and against College Republicans. SFSU is home to the Islamofascist backbone of Nancy Pelosi’s “liberal” San Francisco.
The so-called “College Not Combat” proposition grew directly from the March 9 attack on SFSU military recruiters. As SF Indymedia explains, “On February 26th, a new group called ‘College not Combat’ formed in San Francisco, drawing in 100 people to its first meeting...On Wednesday, March 9th, the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Navy are coming to San Francisco State University in the hopes of recruiting students to become cannon fodder for the U.S. occupation effort. Student activists with the Campus Anti-War Network (CAN) have a different plan: they have organized a protest to block the recruiters and kick them off their campus.”
In spite of their name, recent events at SFSU show that the activists aren’t against all combat; they are only against the U.S. military engaging in combat against their terrorist allies. They want to continue using an American taxpayer-funded school to train PLO leaders while blocking the U.S. military from even setting foot on campus. Now their campaign has spread beyond SFSU to the entire city.
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November 11, 2005, 8:27 a.m.
Why Did Athens Lose?
The misery of war.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Victor Davis Hanson's latest book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War has recently been released by Random House. This week National Review Online has been excerpting Chapter 10 of the book. Below is the final installment; the first can be read here and the second here; the third here; the fourth here. Check back tomorrow for the final installment and click on Amazon to purchase A War Like No Other here.
Given the absence of resolute action or inspired Spartan leadership in the twenty years before the Ionian War, one asks that question rather than "How did Sparta pull it off ?"Thucydides himself emphasizes how rare capable men like Brasidas, Gylippus, and Lysander were at Sparta, and how Athens, despite the advantages that democratic government brings to war, made mistake after mistake.
In his narrative there emerge four reasons why Sparta triumphed; none of them can be attributable to the oligarchy's strategic insight or imaginative tactics. The plague was nature's bane. Sicily was Athens' own strategic mistake and was compounded by tactical blunders. The creation of a fort at Decelea and the use of Persian capital to build a fleet are attributed by Thucydides and Xenophon to the advice and machinations of Alcibiades, an Athenian. So naturally observers look to what Athens did wrong rather than to what Sparta did right to explain how such a dynamic imperial city was not merely beaten but nearly ruined.
Yet Athens no more lost its war with Sparta than Nazi Germany did its offensive wars with France or Poland. By 425, in the seventh year of the conflict, almost all of Athens' limited objectives had been achieved in line with Pericles' original goal of a temporary stalemate — or perhaps more charitably seen as not losing in a war of exhaustion. Athens' empire was still intact. It exercised continual naval supremacy over all potential enemies and, indeed, would finish the first decade of the war with its fleet still at its prewar level of 300 ships. True, the problems with Sparta were not solved, only postponed; but the city at least had shown that its own destruction might be beyond the capabilities of Sparta's original alliance.
Athens, after all, had proved to Sparta that hoplite invasions of Attica, despite the horri?c plague, would not bring the city to its knees. With the capture and detainment of the Spartiate prisoners from Sphacteria, who were to be executed the moment a Peloponnesian army again crossed the borders of Attica, the general outline of the Peace of Nicias, which would transpire four years later, was already established. Pericles' vision, though tattered and torn, seemed fulfilled. Contemporaries in 421 thought Sparta was checked and demoralized after Pylos and the failure to make headway in Attica. Whether a shaky peace and a return to the status before the war was worth the cost of a decade of fighting and the plague is another matter altogether.
In contrast, the reasons for Athens' later and utter defeat after the failed peace were probably twofold. First, even before the Sicilian expedition Athens had not simply fought Sparta but for a decade of the Archidamian War was holding off Sparta, its entire Peloponnesian alliance, and Corinth and Thebes. These two latter states proved their vehemence by not even becoming signatories of the shaky peace achieved in 421 In the trireme fighting in the Corinthian Gulf, at Solygia, and at Delium both allies had frequently fought Athens mostly on their own, without help from Sparta.
The powers formally allied with Sparta for most of the conflict were not weak. Peloponnesian states like Elis, Tegea, and at times even a reconstituted Mantinea and Argos provided hoplites for a Spartan-led enterprise or later occupation at Decelea. The Boeotian army was as formidable as the Spartan. Its bitter hostility ensured a two-front war, a permanent condition after the failed Athenian effort at Delium. Corinth controlled much of the lateral sea traf?c in and out of the Gulf, and all routes to and from the Peloponnese by land. The continual Athenian failure to take over the Megarid only ensured the Peloponnesians perpetual access to Attica anytime they thought they could devise some better strategy than the earlier failed annual invasions, such as the final occupation of Decelea.
In the first few years of the war Athens conducted massive operations abroad, but quickly learned that the permanent deployment of some 100 to 200 ships was exhausting its treasury without bringing decisive results. But with the capture of Pylos and Sphacteria in 425 it achieved a stunning psychological victory, made all the more so once the Spartans were shamed by the surrender of their crack hoplites and were willing to withdraw from Attica for good.
Once more, by 421 the Athenians had not won; but they had proved that even after suffering horrendous losses to the plague they could find innovative new methods of not losing the war. Yet the city-state's most creative thinkers, from Alcibiades to Demosthenes, gauged stalemate a disappointment rather than a windfall. Thus they began to devise further probing operations in the Peloponnese that might weaken Sparta without taking on her formidable hoplites. The result was a doubly disastrous policy, a renewed war with the Peloponnesians and misplaced faith in expanding the theater of con?ict in lieu of confronting and defeating the Spartan army outright as a way of freeing the helots and dismantling Spartan apartheid.
Second, despite taking on all at once the three largest of the city-states, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes; losing well over a quarter of its population to the plague; and not destroying the hoplite or naval resources of any of its three adversaries, in 415 Athens invaded Syracuse. Immediately it found itself at war with a larger city than its own and almost as democratic. Not only had Athens diverted its precious resources to a far distant campaign at a time when Spartans were soon to be thirteen miles from its walls, but in attacking democratic Syracuse it also weakened its propaganda that its war was in large part ideological, taken up on behalf of democratic peoples and their resistance to foreign-imposed oligarchies.
Sicily drew blood, and the hemorrhaging attracted a whole host of new enemies. Perhaps worst of all, after Sicily Athens was in a war against itself, as the revolution of 411 and the failed oligarchic putsch proved. By 412 Persia was soon to be a de facto belligerent. Without Persia's vast capital for crews and triremes, Sparta could never have prosecuted the Ionian War, which eventually forced Athens to capitulate. In that narrow strategic regard, Athens really was like the Germany of World War II, which fought the old European allies of France and England, took on the vast industrial might of the United States, and tried to invade Soviet Russia. Hitler might have defeated or obtained a draw with any of the three powers individually or in succession, but never two, much less three, in combination.
It was the belief of Thucydides that if democracies brought multifaceted advantages to war, their raucous assemblies, constant second-guessing, grandstanding, and hypercriticism severely hampered military operations. Only a towering figure such as Pericles could rein in the raw emotions unleashed in open forums and, as first citizen, by sheer power of his moral authority run the country by near ?at and still take full advantage of democratic dynamism. Whether that pessimism of the historian was warranted or fair to democracy, it was certainly clear that Sparta had more patience with an occasionally lax Brasidas, Agis, or Lysander than Athens ever did with its own generals.
True, Sparta could execute generals like Thorax and shun the returning prisoners from Pylos, but in comparison to Athens it gave latitude to commanders in a way unknown at Athens. If Thucydides was exiled for failing to save Amphipolis from Brasidas, later in the same theater Brasidas most surely was not recalled to Sparta after failing to reach Torone in time and thus losing the entire city to Cleon. That the Athenian assembly exiled, executed, or fined almost every notable general it ordered on campaign did not make commanders more accountable as much as timid and prone to second-guessing. Thus, after any setback, whether in the Delium campaign or at Arginusae, they would most likely not come back to Athens, in fear of a trial. So the city did not often learn from its mistakes but almost always scared generals into being too cautious or reckless, their decisions based on anticipating what the voters back home might approve on any particular day.
A Possession for All Time?
Whether Thucydides entertained preexisting views about the nature of war and sought to use the events of the Peloponnesian War to confirm his pessimism, whether his philosophy emerged inductively from the mayhem that he witnessed over three decades, or both is not really known. But his history is more than a narrative of now obscure battles and massacres. Instead, as he predicted, it serves as a timeless guide to the tragic nature of war itself, inasmuch as human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable.
If the Peloponnesian War still teaches us something about men at war, it is the lesson that interim armistices may quiet down the fighting but cannot with any degree of consistency end the conflict unless they address why one party chose to go to war in the ?rst place. More often resolute action, for good or evil, can bring lasting peace, usually when one side accepts defeat and ceases its grievances through a change of heart or government — in either freedom or tyranny. In that sense of how to make a war end for good, the no-nonsense Lysander understood the nature of this awful conflict far better than the stately Pericles or naive Nicias.
Both states initially went to war unsure of how to defeat the other. Yet after nearly twenty years of futile killing, the war was resolved in about seven years when Sparta realized how Athens could be vanquished (keep its people inside the walls, its tribute and food outside, and sink its fleet). The disturbing message here is that discussions follow the sway of the battlefield, and diplomatic solutions work best when they accurately reflect military weakness or strength.
It is common to label this appreciation for power and its role in state affairs "realism" or "neorealism." But Thucydides — and this is why he is truly a great historian — is too discerning a critic to reduce strife down simply to perceptions about power and its manifestations. War itself is not a mere science but a more fickle sort of thing, often subject to fate or chance, being an entirely human enterprise. The Peloponnesian War, then, is not a mere primer for international relations studies, and the historian does not believe that "might makes right." Tragedy, not melodrama, is his message.
Yet Thucydides does recognize that humans are also subject to other inexplicable emotions that make them do things that do not quite make sense, whether that means Spartans who "fear" Athenian success, the poor Plataeans who choose to resist the siege, the supposedly stern Spartans who panic after the fall of Sphacteria and cease all their invasions into Attica on news that a mere 120 of their elite might be executed, the Melians who in vain hold out for Spartan support, or the once haughty Athenians who sail to Syracuse and persist in folly with the same reliance on "hope" that they had earlier damned the naive Melians for entertaining. If moderns wonder why entire countries of several million people can be held hostage when masked criminals threaten to behead a single one of their citizens on global television, we could do worse than to remember why panicked and shocked Spartans simply abandoned their entire strategy of invading Attica.
For a writer who is supposedly interested in power rather than tragedy, Thucydides misses no occasion to note how heartbreaking the losses of particular armies were. What seems to capture the historian's attention is not, as is so often claimed, the role of force in interstate relations but the misery of war that is unleashed upon the thousands — the subject of this book — who must fight it.
Thucydides sometimes opines that a particular campaign was wise or foolish, but he nearly always adds enough detail and editorializing to convey to us that the soldiers who believed in the cause for which they were dying deserved commemoration in terms that matched their sacrifice. So one discovers that the Thespians who perish at Delium are not around the next year to save their city when their erstwhile allies, the Thebans, tear down the walls. The town of Mycalessus loses not merely its schoolboys but even its animals — and we, his readers, should know that and mull it over. The Athenians are not merely slaughtered at the Assinarus River but perish as they fight one another to drink the blood and mud of the river. Whereas historians search for messages about the "lessons" of Thucydides embedded within his text, the general reader has no problem in sensing immediately what his history is about precisely from those memorable passages that will never go away, reminding us of the passions and furor that are unleashed on otherwise normal men when they go to war.
The young men of Athens, on the eve of the initial Spartan invasion or during the debate about Sicily, are always eager for war, inasmuch as they have had no experience with it. In contrast, "the older men of the city," the more experienced, who know something of plagues, assassinations, terror, and sinking triremes, always are reluctant to invade, and thus often strive to give the enemy some way out during tough negotiations that otherwise might leave war as the only alternative. Thucydidean war can have utility and solve problems, and it often follows a grim logic of sorts; but once it starts, it may well last twenty-seven years over the entire Greek world rather than an anticipated thirty days in Attica and kill thousands at its end who were not born in its beginning.
Such recognition is not necessarily cause for pacifism; rather, to Thucydides it calls for acceptance that thousands will end up rotten in little-known places like the Assinarus River and Aetolia, the logic that follows from decisions made far away in the hallowed assemblies of Sparta or Athens. A wild-eyed Sthenelaidas or sophistic Alcibiades might rouse his volatile assembly to war without good cause, while an Archidamus or Pericles might think that his own sobriety and reason will either preclude or mitigate the killing. But between emotion and logic resides the fate of thousands of the mostly unknown — Astymachus and Lacon executed at Plataea (427), the Tanagran Saugenês cut down at Delium (424), Scirphondas butchered at Mycalessus (413), and the Spartan Xenares falling at Heraclea (419) — who will surely then and now be asked to settle through violence what words alone cannot. Remember them, for the Peloponnesian War was theirs alone.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
