The Outstater
Gen. Wayne: An ‘Acceptable’ War
“Whoever has a sword should take it.” (Luke 22:36)
SOME OF US acknowledge the concept of a “just war” while realizing that it becomes mere semantics when swords clash and gunpowder ignites. The destruction of Iran’s Islamic regime would fit the definition, though. As would the arrest of Nicolás Maduro and the expulsion of the Communist Party from Cuba.
Still, mankind being mankind, the ultimate outcomes of even victorious wars are uncertain. You will remember that a good many Americans thought Mao Zedong and Stalin were pretty good guys compared with their predecessors. Anyway, it is difficult to identify anyone in Tehran, Caracas or Havana who brings to mind another George Washington.
Historical perspective can help. For a military-averse Washington press to grill commanders on unknowable outcomes and exit strategies is just journalistic theatre. Nonetheless, 63 percent of those answering a Washington Post poll this week said casualties in the Iran “excursion,” as the White House prefers to call it, are “unacceptable.”
Unacceptable? To treat causality rates so low that they resemble those on a stretch of California freeway as a great moral issue is naive to the absurd. That is especially true for an operation that some knowledgeable observers believe will end a tyranny bent on nuclear war, bring peace to a long-troubled region and block the threat of an ever-more-aggressive global power (China).
Perspective on all that will require at least a yeoman reading of history and a nod to patriotic virtues. It was not too long ago, in Vietnam, a most unpopular war, that casualty rates of 10 percent in jungle combat were perfectly “acceptable.” Casualty rates for massed ground troops in Korea and World War II of as high as 30 percent were considered “victories.” And going back in history, the rates get worse, much worse — to a point that the losing side was killed to a man, their women and children enslaved, their homes burned and their fields salted.
So is war ever worth it? Was World War I a success? Monarchies fell, democracies rose, but subsequently millions died in the Soviet Union’s labor camps or starved in the Ukraine. And was England and France saved from fascists (250,000 American dead) so that Europe could be ruled by muslims?
Please know, and this bears repeating slowly out loud, that authoritarian regimes have caused more deaths in peace than those killed in all modern wars. There is even a word for it — “democide.”
There must be an example, then, of how war is done right, where benefit outweighs cost. I have a nomination, right close to home, although the woke aren’t going to like it.
The Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 is roundly viewed today as the beginning of the great oppression of the native tribes, the “stealing” of their ground, a moral stain on our nation equal to or greater than the introduction of slavery. In truth, it was the defeat of a savage adversary, one that had mercilessly taken the same ground from others in earlier wars, one that tortured women and children as ritual and could not be trusted to live in peace with its neighbors.
No more than 60 combatants died in the hour-long battle, about equal numbers on both sides, comparable to a weekend on the street corners of Chicago. Those losses had followed the outright slaughter by some of the same warriors of a thousand American soldiers, including their wives and children in camp, earlier at the Battle of Wabash.
The tribes, the Miami and Shawnee, had joined forces with the British in violation of the Treaty of Paris. To confront them, Gen. Anthony Wayne had spent two years drilling the newly-formed Legion of the United States in Roman linear tactics, marksmanship and discipline, including bayonet charges. He built a chain of fortifications deep into hostile territory, forcing the tribes to react on his terms.
How did that work out for the Miami and Shawnee? The military dominance of Wayne’s Legion in effect ended their internecine warfare along the Maumee Valley. The tribal populations actually increased. The author Dinesh D’Souza speculates that the chiefs must have been surprised to have been offered a treaty after their defeat, fully expecting death for themselves and their families, as would have been the case for their opponents had they won the battle.
But not only were the tribes defeated by superior military tactics, they in time were overwhelmed by a dynamic culture — that of the American settler. And faced with that, they made choices that spent their energy and broke their spirit.
The travail of the defeated understood and even romanticized, General Wayne’s victory nonetheless stands as an example of uncommon courage and brilliant strategy. Moreover, it opened the West to settlement; America was elevated in only a few generations to global stature. The achievement, according to the historian Paul Johnson, was not only acceptable it was “unmatched in history.” — tcl
Comments...