Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (23 page)

In contrast, the democratization of the Peloponnese was a longer-

term project. If successful, it meant the slow recession of the Spartan

oligarchic empire, as it could never reconstruct its Peloponnesian alli-

ance under its own auspices, given the presence of three huge fortified

rivals and its own ineptness in the art of siegecraft.25

Second, the end to Messenian helotage would eventually require

the Spartans to produce more of their own food and would insidiously

erode the notion of a state-supported military caste, whose preemi-

nence in hoplite battle had in the past substituted for a lack of man-

power. The vestiges of local Laconian helotage apparently did not

supply enough food to ensure successful continuation of the tradi-

tional elite Spartan military culture.

When Epaminondas died, his military goals had been largely achieved,

even though there was no longer much Boeotian support, after his

death, for once more invading the Peloponnese to complete his original

intention of destroying Sparta itself. This suggests that the tragedy of

Epaminondas may have been his inability to recognize that by 362, the

Thebans had already achieved his objectives in permanently weakening

Spartan influence. In some sense, Epaminondas’s continued efforts in

the Peloponnese were merely trying to hasten, in somewhat dangerous

and ultimately unnecessary fashion, the end of Spartan hegemony that

was already inevitable given his prior labors. If Thebes was unable to

continue its military preeminence after the death of Epaminondas, at

least the diminution of Sparta proved permanent.

Means and Ends

The initial failure to destroy Sparta itself in 369 meant that a short

preemptive war transmogrified into a decade-long slog, requiring far

more resources than originally envisioned. The beguiling attraction

of preemptive war is that it is seen as an economical means to solve

a problem of a dangerous and disadvantageous peace, without lead-

ing to a drawn-out, exhausting war. So it is unlikely that Epaminondas

108 Hanson

envisioned in 370 that his initial winter invasion would almost immedi-

ately be followed by a second late summer return in 369, and two more

within the next seven years, with the endpoint his own death in battle

against the Spartans eight years later at Mantineia.

Similarly, after the 2003 war, the United States and its allies appar-

ently understood that their preemptive effort to remove Saddam

Hussein would immediately require some sort of occupation. The co-

alition’s fostering of civil, democratic society was designed to preclude

the reemergence of a similarly autocratic leader like Saddam Hussein

who might likewise translate Iraqi’s enormous petroleum wealth into

military arsenals, regional aggression, and threats to a great deal of the

world’s oil reserves.

The premise at first appeared sound. But the calculation of the de-

gree of difficulty in bringing the first constitutional government to

the Arab Islamic Middle East, in the heart of the ancient caliphate,

was overly optimistic, for neither Iraq nor the Middle East in general

proved immediately receptive to foreign-imposed democratic govern-

ment following the end of Saddam Hussein. Given the nature of the

modern democratic consumer capitalist society, the American public

and its European allies were far less willing to tolerate a five-year oc-

cupation, costing more than 4,200 dead and nearly a trillion dollars in

expenditures, than a tiny Boeotia was to support the nine-year plan

of Epaminondas, which, from the victory at Leuctra to the defeat at

Mantineia, meant nearly constant fighting and an endless financial and

human drain on a poor agricultural state. The enemies of Epaminon-

das no doubt made some of the identical arguments against a foreign

preemptive war that antiwar opponents brought against the Iraq con-

flict, among them that the long-term gains were uncertain, while the

immediate costs were undeniable.

To be successful, then, preemption, like preventive wars, must change

the conditions for the original hostility, and rather promptly, either by

destroying an enemy altogether, as was the case of Carthage in Rome’s

Third Punic War, or by altering its politics to create an al y in place of an

enemy. And while a preemptive strike may weaken an enemy, it is risky

to leave a wounded target, angry and with a desire and a legal basis for

retaliation.

The Doctrine of Preemptive War
109

In the end, preemptive war is a paradox. It is attractive because it

offers a quick, sudden means of eliminating a threat and assumes that

the enemy will not have the military means to withstand attack, but to

be successful in the long run, it often involves a postwar investment at

odds with its original attraction of quick, surprise, and limited attacks.

Democratic Irony

In both the ancient Peloponnese and contemporary Iraq, preemptive

war was intended to lead to the creation of new democratic states that

in turn would enhance regional stability and evolve into like-minded

democratic parties. To a large extent this was true of the consequences

of Epaminondas’s invasion of 370–369, as Mantineia, Megalopolis, and

Messene for a time became the fetters that prevented the Spartan army

from either reconstituting the Spartan land empire or marching north-

ward toward the isthmus. That said, as democratic autonomous states,

their own foreign policies reflected local concerns that sometimes

could transcend ideological solidarity and hinge more on balance-of-

power considerations. By 362 Mantineia, for example, was back on the

side of oligarchic Sparta and fighting kindred democratic Thebes.

Again, the irony is that unleashing the democratic genie hardly

ensures perpetual allegiance to its liberator, as the United States dis-

covered through much of 2008 in acrimonious negotiations with the

Iraqi government over everything from future security guarantees to

relations with Iran. That said, it was a truism in the ancient world, as

it is in the modern world, that democratic states are less likely than oli-

garchies to fight other democracies, a fact that eventually works to the

long-term advantage of democratic liberators
.

Ancient Preemption and Modern Iraq

By 2004 many observers were citing the infamous Athenian expedi-

tion to Sicily of 415–413, launched during a lull in the Peloponnesian

War—200 Athenian imperial ships lost, tens of thousands of coalition

troops lost or unaccounted for—as the proper warning about the Iraq

War. Both the United States and ancient Athens, it was argued, with

110 Hanson

plenty of enemies in an ongoing war, had foolishly “taken their eye

off the ball” and had preempted and unilaterally begun yet another

optional conflict, this time unnecessarily against an enemy that posed

no elemental threat. Many commentators pointed to the hysterical

warmongering in the Athenian assembly on the eve of the war, graphi-

cally related by the historian Thucydides, as an eerie reminder of how

rhetors, generals, and politicians can whip up public sentiment for fool-

hardy disastrous imperial schemes.26

But on closer examination, many of the apparent similarities col-

lapse. The democratic Athenians attacked the largest democracy in the

ancient world, at a time when Syracuse had a larger resident popula-

tion than Athens itself. To keep such a dubious ancient–modern anal-

ogy proper, it would be instead as if the United States, in a relative

truce with radical Islam, suddenly invaded a distant and democratic

India, a multi-religious state that was not a threat but was far distant,

and larger than the United States itself.

More problematic still is Thucydides’ analytical assessment of the

Sicilian disaster, in some ways at odds with his own prior narrative of

events. Defeat at Syracuse, he says, was not preordained. It arose not

necessarily from poor planning or flawed thinking, although his own

history in books VI and VII often suggests just that. The real culprit,

the historian argues in his summation, was the inability of the Athe-

nians at home to fully support the war they had authorized—a theme

he sounds frequently in his history, especially in the speeches of the

Athenian statesman Pericles, who chastised the fickle Athenians for be-

ing for the Peloponnesian War when they thought it would be easy and

short, and then blaming him for sole responsibility when the struggle

proved difficult and long.27

Instead, for rough paral els in the ancient world that better serve as

reminders about the complexities of the preemptive war and its after-

math—with special reference to Iraq in particular—none is more tel ing

than Epaminondas’s invasion of 370–369. The Boeotians’ preemptive war

was aimed at eliminating a longstanding hostile regime in hopes of en-

suring stability and al iance by fostering democracy in the region. Prior

to the preemptive attack, Boeotia had been in an on-and-off war with

Sparta even longer than the twelve-year hostility between the United

The Doctrine of Preemptive War
111

States and Iraq that began in 1990 with the Iraqi attack on Kuwait and

continued with the subsequent American enforcement of no-fly zones

within Iraqi airspace. Epaminondas and his advisers, both at home and

abroad, were seen to have been democratic zealots, eager to enact far-

reaching goals that were both beyond the resources of Boeotia and

without reliable long-term public support. Indeed, Pythagorean utopian

zealots supposedly surrounded Epaminondas in the same manner that

neoconservative idealists purportedly influenced George W. Bush.28

To judge whether either the American or Boeotian efforts were

wise, or achieved results that justified the ensuing expense, in some

sense depends on how one adjudicates the ensuing strategic calculus,

the relative human and material costs of the respective invasions, and

the number of lives that were helped or hurt by the enterprise. Before

Epaminondas, the Peloponnese was largely oligarchic and at the mercy

of Spartan influence, a hundred thousand or more Messenian helots

were enslaved, and Sparta had a long record of invading democratic

states in northern Greece. After nine years of a long and expensive war

(we have no records of the aggregate numbers of Boeotian dead and

wounded), the Peloponnese emerged largely democratic, the helots of

Messenia enjoyed an autonomous and democratic state, Sparta was

permanently emasculated, and the Greek city-states to the north stayed

free from Spartan attack.29

By the end of 2008, the long ordeal in Iraq had tragically cost more

than 4,200 American dead, along with hundreds of allied casualties,

nearly a trillion dollars, and thousands more wounded—and seemingly

had led to a relatively quiet and democratic Iraq whose beleaguered

people were free, and elected a government as friendly to the United

States as it was hostile to radical Islamic terrorists. Long after contem-

porary political furor over Iraq has quieted, history alone will judge in

the modern instance, as it has in the ancient, whether such an expen-

sive preemptive gamble ever justified the cost.30

Further Reading

What little we know about the career of Epaminondas and his preemptive attack in

370–369 on the Peloponnese is found in Xenophon’s
Hel enica
and
Agesilaus
, the history of

112 Hanson

Diodorus, and Plutarch’s
Pelopidas
and
Agesilaus
, supplemented by information in Pausa-

nias and Nepos (see the notes for the specific references). John Buckler in various works

has serial y discussed the rise of Boeotia under Epaminondas; see J. Buckler and H. Beck
,

Central Greece and the Politics of Power in the Fourth Century bc
(Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2008); J. Buckler,
Aegean Greece in the Fourth Century
(Leiden: Bril , 2003),

and idem,
The Theban Hegemony
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

For the career of Epaminondas as a democratic liberator, see Victor Hanson,
The

Soul of Battle
(New York: Anchor Paperbacks, 2001). There is a good description of

Leuctra that has references to the major secondary and primary sources in J. K. An-

derson,
Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon
(Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1993). Epaminondas is discussed at length from a Spartan

perspective in P. Cartledge,
Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1987), and C. Hamilton,
Agesilaus and the Failure of Spartan Hegemony

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). For a larger narrative of events surround-