Glad We Are Not Fighting Us
What were they thinking?

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
December 21, 2001 10:30 a.m.

merica now enjoys a level of global military and political influence not seen since the Roman Empire in the age of Trajan. Besides the obvious preponderance of carrier battle groups, strategic bomber wings, and tactical fighters unrivaled by any other military, much of the current power of our armed forces is attributable to the Western military tradition itself. The Western way of war is a natural expression of the core values of our European heritage that derive from the Greeks, and have evolved through the Roman imperium, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the European Enlightenment. Consensual government, individual freedom, secular rationalism, free markets, egalitarianism, and self-criticism and self-audit, when applied to the battlefield, result in better-disciplined, better-equipped, better-supplied, and better-spirited armies — whether now or at Salamis, Lepanto, or Midway.

But in the last two decades America, for better or worse, has evolved beyond the traditional Western paradigm, in reaching the theoretical limits of freedom and unbridled capitalism to create a technologically sophisticated, restlessly energetic, and ever-changing society — whose like has never been seen in the history of civilization. Unlike the more staid consensual nations — such as Japan, or those of Europe — America has no real class system. It has transmogrified from a nation of European immigrants into a truly multiracial society. Despite the energy of the contemporary race industry and the efforts at disunity by multiculturalists and separatists, America is emerging more united than ever — if not by a vision of shared values, at least more pragmatically through intermarriage; the vibrant popular culture of music, television, fashion, and sports; and the shared, breakneck quest for material security and affluence.

The result of such an open, pulsating society is a sometimes weirdly insidious civilization that drives our enemies crazy. Write polemical diatribes about the West from your unfree university on the West Bank? As a reward for your anti-Americanism, Harvard or Stanford is likely to offer you a cushy year producing subsidized invective firsthand — making the freedom and affluence of the modern American university campus hard to give up when your annual tenure expires. Do Middle Easterners allege that we are European crusaders? It won't fly when the troops who are blasting apart the al Qaeda terrorists are Americans who look like Asians, Mexicans, Africans, Europeans, and about every combination in between. Need analysis about Iraqi bombs, Russian germs, or Afghani politics? Most likely just those native experts who were knee-deep in such deadly businesses are living right now in northern Virginia or New York, well paid in government, universities, and foundations, and eager to share the insights of their checkered pasts for the benefit of their newly adopted leaders.

Having problems locating an Afghani cave in one of bin Laden's videos? Somewhere there is an American geologist who wrote his thesis on — what else? Afghani caves. And his knowledge will be corroborated, supplemented, challenged, refuted, or modified by an array of botanists, engineers, and anthropologists who will add that the background flora, the type of the terrorists' clothes, and the nature of his video transmission suggest he is not in Place A, but rather at B or even C.

We have seen just such flexibility in the deadly evolution of our military response — a strike force unlike even what we saw in the Gulf or Kosovo. Quite literally the entire nature of our present war-making has been reinvented through a novel four-step formula. In its first stage, indigenous resistance is encouraged by gifts of arms and supplies; these are immediately followed by precision bombing, leading to a third phase of special forces using new laser and GPS technology to "shoot" bombs even more accurately right into the laps of their enemies a few thousand yards away — followed by a fourth step in which larger groups of highly trained Marines and Mountaineers set up base camps to facilitate hunter-killer patrols, launch helicopter attacks, and interrogate and process prisoners.

But — unlike the Soviet infantry and armor doctrine of the 1960s and 1970s, which had changed little from World War II — our new tactics are not static. We are just as likely to see armored divisions on the ground in Iraq, storms of cruise missiles in Lebanon, or covert assassination teams in Somalia — or the return once again of the Afghani mode — depending on the changing nature of our adversaries.

Why are we so deadly? Like European armies, American weaponry and special forces reflect the fruits of secular research, the bounty of capitalism, the discipline of civic militarism, and the spirit of egalitarianism sanctified by America's real concern, both spiritual and legal, for its soldiers in the field. But there is also something rather new in our military that makes it even more lethal than the forces of our European cousins, and it is a dividend of America's much more radical efforts to destroy the barriers of class, race, pedigree, accent, and any other obstacle to the completely free interplay of economic, political, cultural, and military forces.

Our secretary of state and national-security adviser are African Americans; our president is a proud Texan, but also the son of an Ivy-League blue blood. Geraldo, the ultra-liberal defender of Bill Clinton in the dark days of impeachment, is now reinvented as Fox News's new, patriotic Ernie Pyle come alive — to supplement the stories of the once-indicted Ollie North, himself hardly a pariah, but now a national hero beloved by Marines in the field. One's past in America fades before the present, as ideology, degrees, parentage, and breeding mean little in the here and now — the present pulse of the market of ideas and consumption being the sole arbiter of success. No wonder most of the world fears, envies — and is dumbfounded by — us.

I was recently reminded of the unique nature of this topsy-turvy country in a brief car trip to Los Angeles, witnessing first-hand the terrifying energy, resilience, and power of the United States. Driving south down Freeway 99, I passed myriads of self-employed truckers, linoleum installers, plumbers, salesmen, and electricians, their various vans and trucks weaving in and out at high speeds — fleeting reflections of thousands of private agendas scurrying for the next dollar, flags waving — and their drivers of nearly every race on the globe. Arriving at 5 PM in downtown Los Angeles, which purportedly has neither an efficient transportation system nor an impressive skyline, I was instead struck by the beauty of its massive skyscrapers and the ingenuity of the freeways: At rush hour, I drove into concrete canyons, from the orchards of the Central Valley to a dinner at the Jonathan Club, in less than three hours.

There I was asked to speak to a group of Navy and Army alumni. Few countries in the world could collect more educated, disciplined, diverse, and spirited men and women in a single room. Their questions were far more astute than those asked by university professors, their ideas about the present war far from one-dimensionally bellicose, but instead deeply embedded in culture, history, and philosophy. The next morning, on the way home, we stopped at UCLA — and were once again reminded that Los Angeles's premier university is, in fact, a stunningly beautiful place, to the unaccustomed eye more a horticultural park than the nexus of 30,000 students. Across the freeway, we visited the Getty Museum, a strange mix between Hearst Castle, the Gardens of Babylon, and a receptacle of civilization's great work — spotlessly clean, meticulously manicured, staffed by hundreds of professionals from every class, and all privately subsidized for the public good. As we left, a Mexican-American docent was lecturing on the Old Masters in Spanish to a small group of immigrants, while two staffers not over 20 were politely escorting aged German tourists through the museum bookstore, everybody speaking heavily accented English.

Twenty-five hours later we drove into our farm-which, like every one in this area, produces so much fruit that it sells below the cost of production — amazed at the military, cultural, educational, economic, and aesthetic restlessness of this civilization in a period so often pronounced to be in decline. I have seen such unchecked energy eat up open spaces, devour family farms and traditional rural communities alike, and change overnight the way Americans eat, shop, and think; critics of the new economy and culture may lament that at times, such change is godless — but no once can deny its power.

I came away with the impression that September 11 has supercharged rather than short-circuited this multifaceted engine of America. What were bin Laden, the mobs in Pakistan and the West Bank, the nuts in al Qaeda, and their opportunistic supporters in the Middle East drinking? We shall never know, but their attack on a country such as this was pure lunacy. Thank God we do not have to fight anyone like ourselves.