War: What is it good for? (67 page)

⁹
Once again, I thank General (retired) Karl Eikenberry for arranging this visit, and the personnel at Nellis and Creech Air Force Bases for making it so informative.

NOTES

All URLs were checked on September 22, 2013.

INTRODUCTION

4      “I am reporting to you”: D. Hoffman 2009, p. 11.

5      You may not be: The phrase is regularly attributed to Trotsky but might in fact be just a mistranslation of a paraphrase of a letter he wrote to Albert Goldman in June 1940 (
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky#Misattributed
).

6      “War!/Huh, good God”: Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, “War” (1969). Whitfield and Strong originally wrote the song for the Temptations, who recorded it on their 1970 album
Psychedelic Shack
but never released it as a single. Edwin Starr rerecorded it later in 1970 and turned it into a number one hit.

7      peace
for
our time: Neville Chamberlain, speech from 10 Downing Street, September 30, 1938, reported in the
Times,
October 1, 1938,
www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/archive/
.

8      “Lord knows, there's got to be a better way”: Whitfield and Strong, “War.”

10    “a noncontradictory linear logic”: Luttwak 2001, p. 2.

11    “war is always”: Liddell Hart 1967, p. 368. Liddell Hart was here playing on Saint Paul's comments on evil (Romans 3:8). I shudder to think what he would have made of Google's corporate motto, “Don't be evil” (Google Code of Conduct, April 8, 2009,
http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html
; Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel originally suggested this motto).

11    captured a terrorist: Professor Chris Bobonich, Stanford University, Fall 1999.

14    “the losses in life”: Richardson 1960, pp. ix–x. These sentences were actually written by Richardson's editors, drawn out of his own more circuitous prose.

16    “In such condition”: Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
(1651), chap. 17.

16    “On earth there is nothing like him”: Job 41:33–34 (King James Version).

16    “The attaining”: Hobbes,
Leviathan,
chap. 17.

17    “an equal stranger”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
A Discourse upon the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind
(1755), pt. 1.

17    “Government … is not the solution”: Ronald Reagan, first inaugural address, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1981,
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43130#axzz1iWuZS4P3
.

17    “the ten most terrifying words”: Ronald Reagan, “Remarks to Representatives of the Future Farmers of America,” July 28, 1988,
www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1988/072888c.htm
. Reagan is often misquoted as saying, “The nine most
terrifying words in the English language are ‘I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'”

18    “One legislator”: Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Republican State Central Committee Convention,” September 7, 1973,
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan
.

18    “war made the state”: Tilly 1975, p. 42.

18    “Hobbes was closer to the truth”: Gat 2006, p. 663.

18    “if Rousseau's primitive golden age”: Keeley 1996, p. 178.

18    “Hobbes was right”: Pinker 2002, p. 56.

19    “is a tale of six trends”: Pinker 2011, p. xxiv.

20    “Generals gathered”: Tony Iommi, “War Pigs,” released on Black Sabbath's album
Paranoid
(Vertigo, 1970; Warner Brothers, 1971).

20    “Well … I did like it”: Kathy St. John, personal communication, October 2008.

21    “O for a Muse of fire”: William Shakespeare,
Henry V
(1599), 1.1.1.

23    “In the long run”: Keynes 1923, p. 80.

23    “I work for a Government”: Keynes to Duncan Grant, December 15, 1917, quoted in Moggridge 1992, p. 279.

23    “The table should be read”: N. Ferguson 2004, p. 11.

25    “All the isms have become wasms”: Cited in Andrew Roberts 2011, p. 10.

1.
THE WASTELAND?

27    “Men of the North!”: My version of Calgacus's speech is a loose and truncated translation of Tacitus's more formal Latin prose in
Agricola
30 (published around
A.D.
98). Tacitus describes his own version as merely being “the substance of what [Calgacus] is reported to have said” (
Agricola
29), so I have felt free to take some liberties. There is no way to tell which, out of my English version and Tacitus's Latin one, is closer to Calgacus's Celtic original.

Roman sources regularly use the word “Caledonia” for what we now call Scotland, but we do not know if the people who lived there thought of themselves as Caledonians. I have therefore had Calgacus call them “Men of the North” (with shades of George R. R. Martin). Tacitus also applied the word “Britanni” indiscriminately to people from what are now England, Wales, and Scotland; again, we do not know if the ancient peoples thought of themselves as Britons. Mattingly 2006; Mattingly 2011, pp. 81–93, 219–36.

31    No plan survives: Attributed to Helmuth von Moltke (also known as Moltke the Elder). His actual wording was more convoluted. Hughes 1995, pp. 43–45.

32    “the Britons scattered”: Tacitus,
Agricola
38.

33    “Let Asia think on this”: Cicero,
Letters to My Brother Quintus
1.1.34 (60/59
B.C.
).

34    “Germans have no taste for peace”: Tacitus,
Germania
14 (
A.D.
98).

35    “a narrative of recent events”: Philip of Pergamum,
FGrH
95 T1 (30s
B.C.
). Translation modified from Chaniotis 2005, p. 16. Other than this fragment, Philip's
History
has not survived.

37    “to exterminate”: Polybius 10.15.

38    “went on killing”: Jerusalem Talmud (composed ca.
A.D.
200–400), Ta'anit 4:5.

39    “no one should count himself rich”: Crassus, quoted in Plutarch,
Life of Crassus
2 (published ca.
A.D.
120).

39    “The readier men were”: Tacitus,
Annals
1.2 (left unfinished at Tacitus's death in
A.D.
117).

39    “The ox roams”: Horace,
Odes
4.5.17–19 (published ca. 15
B.C.
).

39    Rome “has provided us”: Epictetus,
Discourses
3.13.9 (published around
A.D.
108).

39    “if a man were called”: Edward Gibbon,
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(London, 1776), vol. 1, chap. 3.

40    “During an exchange”: Tacitus,
Annals
14.17.

40    “we [had] lived in peace and harmony”: Bosnian Croat informant, cited in Goldhagen 2009, p. 212.

40    “commonwealth by
acquisition”:
Hobbes,
Leviathan,
chap. 17.

41    “Formerly we suffered”: Tacitus,
Annals
3.25.

41    needed three years: Cicero,
Against Verres
1.40 (published 70
B.C.
).

43    “Who does not now recognize”: Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
14.2 (published
A.D.
79).

43    “over-paid by the immense reward”: Gibbon,
Decline and Fall,
vol. 1, chap. 3.

44    rulers are
stationary
bandits: Olson 2000, pp. 6–14.

45    “I came, I saw, I conquered”: Julius Caesar, probably written in a letter to a friend in Rome, 47
B.C.
(quoted in Plutarch,
Life of Caesar
50. Suetonius,
The Deified Julius
37, has a slightly different account).

45    “freed the inhabitants of Lagash”: Uru'inimgina of Lagash, ca. 2360
B.C.
, trans. in J. Cooper 1986, no. 9.

46    “I, even I”:
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
11.11284 (ca.
A.D.
250–260), trans. in MacMullen 1974, p. 43.

47    “People”: Rodney King, May 1, 1992,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pbyi0JwNug&playnext=1&list=PLB874144170217AF6&index=15
.

47    “To jaw-jaw”: Winston Churchill, speech at the White House, June 26, 1954, published in
The New York Times,
June 27, 1954, p. 1.

47    “With my pious hand”: Philip of Pergamum,
FGrH
95 T1 (30s
B.C.
). Translation modified from Chaniotis 2005, p. 16.

47    “clear, hold, and build”: Taken from the discussion in Ricks 2009, pp. 50–51.

48    “Wild animals”: Plutarch,
Life of Pompey
28 (ca.
A.D.
120).

49    “people living”: Tacitus,
Agricola
21.

49    “intangible factors”: Nye 2011, p. 21.

49    “Grab 'em by the balls”: Unnamed American officer in Vietnam (1965), cited in Karnow 1986, p. 435.

50    “Render therefore unto Caesar”: Matthew 22:21 (King James Version).

50    “for … there is no power”: Paul, Romans 13:1 (King James Version).

50    “What most men call ‘peace'”: Plato,
The Laws
626a (ca. 355
B.C.
).

52    “Fancy thinking”: Golding 1954, chap. 8.

53    “As the dawn begins”: Mead 1928, pp. 14, 16, 19.

54    “Samoa … is a place”: Ibid., p. 198.

54    “Warfare … is just an invention”: Mead 1940.

55    “The excitement” … “looked up and gasped”: Chagnon 1997, pp. 11–13.

55    “
Yanomamö
is the term”: Borofsky 2005, p. 4.

55    “a good many incidents”: Chagnon 1997, p. 9.

57    “A stunned silence”: Ibid., p. 20.

58    “speaking their language”: Mead 1928, p. 10.

58    “we just fibbed”: Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, interview with Galea'i Poumele, November 13, 1987, trans. in Freeman 1989, p. 1020, with the original Samoan text at p. 1021n5.

59    “a happy, enthusiastic, sociable person”: Diamond 2008, p. 75.

60    “disastrous war”: Williams 1984 (1832), p. 128.

60    “All the districts”: Ibid., p. 131.

60    “a mythical place”: Fukuyama 2011, p. 14.

2.
CAGING THE BEAST

64    “The Greeks had a word for it”: Best known from the title of Zoë Akins's 1930 play, renamed
The Greeks Had a Word for Them
in the 1932 film version (which is also sometimes known as
The Three Broadway Girls
).

64    “The Persians were as brave”: Herodotus,
The Histories
9.62–63 (published ca. 430
B.C.
).

65    “the Persians … had many men”: Ibid., 7.210 (he actually makes this judgment in his account of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480
B.C.
).

65    “For the past 2,500 years”: V. D. Hanson 2001, p. 5.

66    “It is this Western desire”: V. D. Hanson 1989, p. 9.

66    “a line of division”: Keegan 1993, pp. 332–33.

69    “When one has questioned”: From
Models on Sealing and Investigation
(late third century
B.C.
), trans. in Lewis 1990, p. 247.

71    “on conquering Kalinga” … “victory on all his frontiers”: Ashoka, Major Rock Edict XIII, trans. in Thapar 1973, p. 256.

71    “good behavior”: Ashoka, Major Rock Edict XI, trans. in Thapar 1973, pp. 254–55.

71    “officers of
dhamma”:
Ashoka, Major Rock Edict V, trans. in Thapar 1973, p. 252.

71    “legislation has been less effective”: Ashoka, Pillar Edict VII, trans. in Thapar 1973, p. 266.

71    “since [
dhamma
had been instituted], evil”: Ashoka, Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription, Aramaic text, trans. in Thapar 1973, p. 260.

73    “the Chinese Pompeii”:
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jan-feb/89
.

73    Pliny grumbled: Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
6.20.

74    “In no year”: Ibid., 12.41.

78    “≠Gau grabbed his people”: R. Lee 1979, p. 390.

79    “their earth scorched”: Caesar,
Gallic War
1.1, 11, 18.

80    “circumscription”: Carneiro 1970.

80    “caging”: M. Mann 1986, pp. 39–40.

81    “is what occurs”: Krepinevich 1994, pp. 30–31.

81    “Is there any thing”: Ecclesiastes 1:9–10 (King James Version).

83    “Just as the sky”: Hopi story, trans. in Lomatuway'ma et al. 1993, pp. 275–97.

84    “so fast”: Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
(1871), chap. 2.

86    “Alas! … that day of mine”: Trans. in Jacobsen 1976, pp. 77–78.

89    “next to death”: Muhammad Ali, interview in Manila, October 1, 1975, quoted in
www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/specials/ali-price.html
.

90    “5,400 men” … “the cities”: Sargon of Akkad (2330
B.C.
), trans. in Kuhrt 1995, pp. 55, 53.

94    “the sun disappeared” … “the chariot fighters”:
Mahabharata
4 (47) 31.6–7, 18–20, cited in Drews 1992, p. 125.

96    “some swearing”: William Shakespeare,
Henry V
(ca. 1599), 4.1.

106  “At the end of ten years”: Sima Qian,
Shiji,
trans. in Bloodworth and Bloodworth 1981, p. 74.

107  “A king relies”:
Arthashastra
2.2.13 and 10.5.54, trans. in Rangarajan 1992, pp. 657, 659.

108  “the law of the fishes”:
Mahabharata,
Shanti Parvan 67.16 (compiled between 400
B.C.
and
A.D.
450; discussed in Thapar 1984, pp. 117–18).