Neocons and Total War

by Joseph R. Stromberg

Americans are rightly angry about the outrageous murders of September 11. No American wishes to see them unpunished. Neo-conservatives, however, are offering us their usual program as the solution. "Don’t look at the several decades behind that screen!" they order us, although their usual program seems part of the problem. History began all over again, two weeks ago, they grumble, on the day that "changed everything," and therefore, one might think, nothing.

Total War Reflex Kicks In

Michael Ledeen writing in National Review Online (September 20) made the inevitable comparison with World War II. We dealt with suicide attackers in the war with Japan, he wrote, and "improv[ed] our defenses so as to kill them before they hit us, and by destroying the country that launched them. We have to do that again" (my italics). Here Mr. Ledeen has alluded to the ingrained US habit of making total war.

Total war consists of making war on the enemy’s entire society, thereby obliterating the distinction between combatants and civilians, which had been at the center of the notion of civilized warfare. The Declaration of Independence complained about this mode of warmaking, but it has been set US policy since at least 1862, perhaps earlier where Indians were concerned. By now, it is all mere reflex. An enemy appears, US leaders instantly demand unconditional surrender, cities are flattened, and references are made to General Sherman, Hell, American moral greatness, and "collateral damage."

In the present situation, where actual American civilians have been murdered by non-state entities (as the phrase goes), the old reflexes have naturally kicked in. Mr. Ledeen wishes to "kill the terrorists," which seems fair enough, but wishes also to "destroy the regimes" which have helped them. Can total war be far off?

Perpetual War for Perpetual Revolution

Unfortunately, total war is but a part of Mr. Ledeen’s ambitious program of world improvement. He writes: "But we should have no misgivings about our ability to destroy tyrannies. It is what we do best. It comes naturally to us, for we are the one truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically, and that is precisely why the tyrants hate us, and are driven to attack us."

It takes some time to assimilate such a tall order. Around the edges, little questions tug at the mind. This "creative destruction," for example, does Mr. Ledeen derive it from Josef Schumpeter or from Mikhail Bakunin? If it comes from the former, it is merely faulty economics; if from the latter (the craziest of the 19^th-century communist anarchists), Mr. Ledeen is keeping strange company these days. There is in addition the small matter of the neo-cons and Reaganites believing their own Sorelian myth. They believe, as the Athenian ambassadors told the Melians, that "We have the right to rule because we overthrew the Persians."

Persians, Soviets, whatever. But there is a very big problem at the heart of Mr. Ledeen’s revolutionary manifesto, one I shall tease out with a little more help from his essay. "Secretary Powell" must, says Ledeen, "fully support democratic resistance movements in the terrorist countries" – that, or round up the ever-vanishing moderates, wherever they may be. We must, therefore, sponsor a revolution in Iraq and, apparently, in a host of other places.

Just so: "it is time once again to export the democratic revolution," just as we did under dear old Ronnie. Otherwise, our enemies, having waxed under welkin, will once more attack us – and this is supposed to "explain" the horrendous crimes of September 11 – thereby "forcing us to take up our revolutionary burden...." We are met with a fearful threat and a wonderful opportunity.

Friends, Romans, Americans

There are certainly both "fear and vaunting" to be found here, to use Garet Garrett’s phrase. But where, oh where, have we heard this sort of thing before? Our former Soviet adversaries come to mind, but they can wait. Some precedents for the neo-conservatives’ armed doctrine are quite old. Of an Asiatic variant, Professor Eric Voegelin writes:

"The empire of the Lord Genghis Khan is de jure in existence even if it is not yet realized de facto. All human societies are part of the Mongol empire by virtue of the Order of God, even if they are not yet conquered. The actual expansion of the empire, therefore, follows a very strict process of law. Societies whose turn for actual integration into the empire has come must be notified by ambassadors... and requested to make their submission. If they refuse, or perhaps kill the ambassadors, they are rebels, and military sanctions will be taken against them. The Mongol empire, thus, by its own legal order has never conducted a war but only punitive expeditions against rebellious subjects of the empire."

Substitute "US" or "American" for "Mongol" in the above passage and you are well on your way to grasping the enormity of the imperial claim. Especially interesting is the claim that the true empire "has never conducted a war but only punitive expeditions against rebellious subjects." This was Lincoln’s theme-song in 1861 and it has come back to haunt us more than once since World War II.

But perhaps it is unfair to bring up Oriental Despotism (politically incorrect, you know), or Voegelin, from whose writings National Review and Young Americans for Freedom once extracted a slogan – especially when other examples lie nearer to hand. The trail leads to our very own New England Puritans, whose millennialist world-outlook is treated in Professor Ernest Lee Tuveson’s Redeemer Nation. As the 19^th century ran its course, the debate amongst millennialists was won by the post-millennialists. The upshot was a never-ending American mission to reform, Christianize, and republicanize the world by means of the central state. There was an end, actually, but it involved the second coming of Christ, once all this reforming and republicanizing had been achieved. By the 20^th century, the Christian bits had largely fallen away from the great US moral crusade, as far as the policy-makers were concerned, even if those themes still play in flyover country.

For 19^th-century American expansionists each new conquest of contiguous land was a great victory for republican liberty. It seems to have been Andrew ("Ruthless") Jackson himself, who in 1843 coined the phrase about "extending the area of freedom." The Mexican War is an interesting test case. In May 1847, the New York Herald wrote, in terms which would please any latter-day neo-conservative Boy Scout, that "The universal Yankee nation can regenerate and disenthrall the people of Mexico in a few years; and we believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country and enable its inhabitants to appreciate some of the many advantages and blessings they enjoy."

Not more than a year thereafter, the United States Democratic Review announced:

"Mexico is in a state of suspended animation. She is in fact dead. She must have resurrection. She must be electrified – restored. This American Republic is strong enough to do anything that requires strength. It is vital enough to inject life even into the dead."

I think that more is involved than my "isolationist" blinders, if I spot a trend in these quotes – and one which has not yet run its course, although it may yet run us into the ground. Repeat after me: Blasphemy, Gnosticism, heresy, secularized post-millennialism, Operation Infinite Justice, can-do, know-how, "we saved the village by destroying it." But, after all, any Redeemer Nation capable of healing the sick and raising the dead, will whip a few Wily Pathans in a trice, whatever problems the British and the Russians had with them.

Fateful Lightning, Terrible Swift Swords

This brings us to Lincoln. Many Americans, especially those in the leadership classes, love nothing so much as a great moral crusade. To be very brief: having "resurrected" parts of Mexico by annexing them, American expansionists fell into dissension about whether or not there should be slavery in these new territories. Twelve years after the extension of liberty to the southwest, Southerners committed the ultimate heresy against the new political religion and left the union.

Mr. Lincoln and his fellow inventors of total war then thrashed the South back into the loving arms of union, all the while striking tragic poses about how much it hurt them to do so. As a man of no known religious views, Lincoln may represent the first secular high priest of US millennialism. As such, he remains in great demand. Professor Harry Jaffa, Lincoln defender and High Cold Warrior, wrote an essay against states rights and in favor of illimitable power for the federal government in 1963. Almost in passing, he commented: "The heart of America’s defenses, in this nuclear age, consists in its ability to destroy sixty, eighty, or one hundred million of a possible enemy’s population with a single stroke."

Now, I know perfectly well that sundry Cold War ghouls like Herman Kahn, Robert MacNamara, and Henry the K, wrote such things all the time and had clever names for them (e.g., "MAD"). But isn’t it a bit casual – in an essay opposing states rights? It would be hard to write those prospective 100 million dead Russians off as collaterals, wouldn’t it? If you can kill off 25% of all Southern white males of military age between 1861 and 1865, why shouldn’t you plan wiping out any Russian or Chinese city bigger than a bread box?

Fortunately, they never used their plan. We are told, indeed, that such plans were all for show, since everyone realized that nuclear bombs were not in fact weapons in any historically useful sense of the term. I leave to one side the little "tactical" ones, about which we have heard so much lately.

I think we have stumbled, here, upon a major disadvantage of moral crusades. I grant it is one of our great traditions to turn our wars into a moral crusades against Ultimate Evil. Woodrow Wilson might be mentioned. Alas, it becomes hard to settle political questions by negotiation or even war, if every foreseeable question takes place in an Eternally Returning 1861 or 1941, haunted by an Eternally Returning Fort Sumter or a (misrepresented) Munich 1938. It becomes harder to end wars short of Unconditional Surrender – the numskull slogan FDR hit upon while reliving the 1860s.

Anyway, we shall soon come back to Mr. Ledeen. I should mention that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were fans of US imperialism. Engels wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, February 15, 1849: "Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?.... All impotent nations must in the last analysis, owe a debt to those who, under the laws of historic necessity, incorporate them into a great empire.... Evidently, such results cannot be obtained without crushing a few sweet little flowers."

More resurrection and revivification by the Forces of History. And why not? Hegel’s system sought to answer a key problem in Protestant theology. Marx sought to answer the same problem in secular terms. It would not be surprising if the Hegelians, the latter-day Marxists, and the US postmillennialists, secularized or otherwise, should all converge in a great gnostic crusade for world betterment by benevolent imperialism. Why not? They all believe in creating the Kingdom of God on Earth by incorporating all of society into the state. Indeed, human freedom is not even possible outside the embrace of the US empire. Just ask Mr. Fukuyama.

Edvard Kardelj, one of the Yugoslav Vice Presidents, wrote an anti-Chinese polemic in favor of "peaceful coexistence" in the 1960s. He attacked as "Trotskyite" the Chinese line of exporting the revolution by force. He ridiculed it as "social Bonapartism." In other words, he questioned as "Trotskyite" precisely the position Mr. Ledeen represents as neo-conservative. Is there a redundancy here?

We will be told that export of a Good Revolution by force is altogether a different matter from export of a Bad Revolution by force. Apparently, anything and everything are permitted those who have good intentions (we must take their word for the good intentions), especially if their political religion involves salvation via US democratic world empire and worship of Abraham Lincoln both as prophet and dying god.

We have the word of Messrs. Ledeen and Fukuyama that it’s all for the best. Those who get in the way in Dresden, Tokyo, Indo-China, or Iraq have merely paid the proper price for failing to come up to our high standards of morality. Civilians or not, their lack of moral collateral justifies the damage done them. If the Cause is just, indeed infinitely so, how dare those blown to smithereens object? As the Redleg officer says in "Outlaw Josie Wales": "Doin’ right ain’t got no end."

It seems possible to make the modest suggestion that Mr. Ledeen’s chiliastic crusade for global democracy and other selfless philanthropies rests on a long-running US morality play with roots deep in the 19^th century. The actors come and go, but the show endures, albeit on the same sorry foundations of bad theology secularized and wedded to the central state. Whether sordid material interests – Open Doors and Central Asian oil fields – enter into the case, is best left to another occasion. The ideological front holds our interest just now.

An Eternal Return to Myth

In crises, the spokesmen for the US state turn to their sources of inspiration. That is understandable. Still, there is something rather strange about David S. Broder’s "Echoes of Lincoln" (Washington Post Online, September 23). He walks us through the honored dead and makes the comparisons between Lincoln and Bush, their determination, etc.

Then he writes that a friend of the President asked him, "Do you realize that he [Bush] is the first president since Lincoln who has given the military an order to fire on fellow Americans?" Broder finds this "riveting." That would not be my word.

One can easily grant that if the fourth plane had to be shot down (and this is still unclear), a case could be made for the decision. But Broder wishes us to admire the toughness, the ruthlessness. I know it is widely assumed that below the Mason Dixon Line we do not read much; but I wonder whether this time of much-heralded emergency, with the corresponding need for "national unity," is the best occasion to praise a President’s proposed toughness by comparing him with someone who ordered the army to fire on Southerners? I do wish these Yankees would quit fighting that old war.

One wonders, in the end, if there is not more wrong with a man who is positively happy at the prospect of a US President firing on Americans than with, say, a man who promoted a man who promoted a communist?

One wonders as well if the world ever needed saving so much from Godless Communism as from the various forms of gnostic, universalist "Imperial Americanism" presently on sale at inflated prices by the usual hucksters. There was one advantage to the Soviets’ crusade. They couldn’t do very much, because of their nonfunctional economy. These new fellows with their slightly different variation on the gnostic, revolutionary theme have a lot more to work with, if we allow them to. They could do a lot of harm.

The Cold War is over. We may forget about the hunt for Red October. The hunt for the Red Conservatives is just beginning.

Note: Readers who find the religious-political connections discussed here doubtful, may wish to look at two essays by the late Murray N. Rothbard: "Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist," in Yuri Maltsev, ed., Requiem for Marx (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993), pp. 221-294, and "Origins of the Welfare State in America," Journal of Libertarian Studies, 12, 1 (Fall 1996), pp. 193-229.

September 27, 2001

Joseph R. Stromberg [send him mail] is the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian in Residence at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for Antiwar.com.

Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com

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