Posted on 08/09/2014 1:11:18 AM PDT by right-wing agnostic
Clausewitz was a pseudointellectual. Anyone thinking war is nothing but a political animal loses wars. War is brutal.
We didn’t nuke Japan for political policy reasons as Clausewitz might try to explain. We did it to cause unconditional surrender. It worked.
Clausewitz would have approved of the way we fought Vietnam; Hearts and Minds.
“War is Hell.” General Sherman. <-— That guy got it right.
MY FIL was on the Saratoga during Iwo Jima. As he put it: “Anything to stop those bastards because they weren’t going to just quit.”
You have, IMO, a complete misunderstanding of Clausewitz and only a partial understanding of war.
Clausewitz was not a pseudo-intellectual. He is generally considered one of the two or three greatest thinkers and writers on war. He first saw combat at the age of 13.He fought in the Prussian and Russian armies nearly continuously from 1793 to 1815. He led several great cavalry charges.
http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/Bassford/Cworks/Works.htm#AShortBiography
He was most definitely an intellectual, but there was nothing pseudo about him. You may dislike or disagree with his opinions, but I think it’s impossible to read his great work and not recognize its intellectual power.
After the wars he was appointed head of the Prussian West Point. He started the intellectual tradition that resulted in the Prussian and German armies of the next century and a quarter being invariably more efficient than their opponents.
“War is a continuation of politics by other means” is simply a recognition of reality. War occurs when politics (inside a nation) or diplomacy (between nations) breaks down, and both sides feel they can no longer compromise.
It would be equally accurate to say that “Politics and diplomacy are war by other means.”
Politics, diplomacy and war are the three main methods humans have of dealing with interpersonal and intergroup conflict. War almost certainly came first, historically, with less-violent methods developing later. In fact, it’s been proposed that the idea behind elections is that the larger number would usually win the fight anyway, so let’s skip all the killing and just make decisions by counting noses.
Not every war must, or should, involve each nation being totally determined on the invasion, conquest and unconditional surrender of the other. Most wars have been fought over much more limited issues. The British and French fought wars for centuries, but after the Hundred Years War neither side made a real all-out attempt to force the other into unconditional surrender. They’d fight for a while, then have a peace conference, trade various concessions such as colonial territory, and declare peace for a while.
In the Franco-Prussian War the Germans never intended to force France to unconditional surrender, though they were quite capable of doing so. In our own Mexican and Spanish-American Wars we did not attempt to invade, conquer and permanently occupy/annex Spain or Mexico. We had war aims short of that we forced them to agree to, and then declared peace.
WWI, as we all know, was not fought to the unconditional surrender of Germany. Arguably this was a mistake. OTOH, there have been multiple threads on FR recently where people have said we should not have jumped into WWI or we should have negotiated peace with Germany in WWII, short of unconditional surrender.
In Gulf War I our explicit war goal was to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait, not to invade and occupy Iraq, forcing their unconditional surrender. Then that’s exactly what we did in Gulf War II. You can find lots of people who believe both approaches were mistaken.
The truly existential American wars of the WBTS, WWII and the Cold War have, I think, given many Americans a distorted idea of “what war is.”
I’l; cheerfully agree some wars should be fought to the bitter end of unconditional surrender. But they need not all be.
YM, of course, MV.
Which only guaranteed we had to go in again, and made Saddam an even bigger enemy than before.....You cannot leave the vanquished in power.
OTOH, our “unconditional surrender invasions” of Iraq and Afghanistan have both worked out really well, haven’t they?
What Unconditional Surrender?
We occupied what was West Germany for almost 5 years before they became an independent country. We rushed to try to establish a new Iraqi and Afghnistan government before the places were cleaned up.
And they might very well have been right.
Would the US people have supported or continued to support an invasion that potentially could have created as many or even several times as many US casualties as in the whole war to date???
I don’t think that’s a good argument.
Unconditional surrender has to do with how a war ends, not with how post-war issues are handled.
The whole period of Allied occupation of Germany has sort of disappeared down the rabbit hole. Watched a movie recently actually filmed in Germany in 48/49. Quite fasccinating for the scenery, relations between American officers and the locals and police, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Was_a_Male_War_Bride
Also a very good movie as a movie.
Truman returned to Washington from Potsdam on the evening of 7 August and was immediately caught up in a whirlwind of activity generated by Groves, who was determined to proceed as quickly as possible with a second bombing of Japan. He and Admiral William Purnell, Groves writes in his autobiography, 'had often discussed the importance of having the second bomb follow the first one quickly', so that the Japanese would not have time to recover their balance'. This second bomb would have to be of the Fat Man type, there being no chance of assembling another uranium bomb at this stage (in fact, the Little Boy remained one of its kind; the Fat Man design, despite its complicated assembly, being easier to manufacture, safer to transport and more powerful). After the success of the Trinity test, the only thing standing in the way of using a Fat Man bomb in Japan was the availability of plutonium. Groves had originally been advised that a plutonium bomb could be ready to use on August 20. At the end of July, this was revised to 11 August. Groves, however, was too impatient to wait that long and, somewhat against the advice he was given by the scientists, saw to it that the bomb was assembled, loaded and ready to use by the evening of August 8.
...
Everyone felt that the sooner we could get off another mission, the more likely it was that the Japanese would feel that we had large quantities of the devices and would surrender sooner.
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Immediately after the Nagasaki bombing the Allies did not possess any more atomic bombs. It is true, as Groves puts it, 'our entire organization both at Los Alamos and at Tinian was maintained in a state of complete readiness to prepare additional bombs', but, as he himself reported to General Marshall, the earliest data at which the next bomb could be assembled for use was August 17, and almost everybody expected the war to be over by then.
Any idiot can figure that starting a war is usually about extended one’s politics. He wasn’t a very deep thinker for that one; Plato had much more to say on that.
When you are the subject of another’s aggression I hardly think that constitutes your politics have failed, rather their ability to control themselves has failed. When confronted with war or aggression, we have the right to stop aggression by whatever means we desire. Only law prevents us from killing an aggressor in a bar fight, or punching in the nose a street drunk that fondles a woman.
When a country aggresses a war, they are gambling their very existence. War isn’t politics, it is survival. Those that understand that, win wars; those that don’t, lose.
Only since the US has there been kindness shown to the loser, whereby we didn’t keep their lands.
There is nothing intellectual about war that Sun Tzu didn’t already write down about how to win a war.
Again, if you don’t like the risk and outcomes of war then don’t start one.
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