Dirty war

In "The Lessons of Terror," Caleb Carr argues that terrorism never succeeds. If only we could believe him.

By Laura Miller

Feb 6, 2002 | Now that the first, purposeful flush of adrenaline has worn off, the war on terrorism has gotten awfully murky. For example, who, exactly, is our opponent -- "the evil one" or an "axis of evil"? How do we fight this protean enemy and how will we know when we've won? Is deposing the Taliban enough or do we need to meddle in the affairs of other nations as we're nation-building in Afghanistan? Should we pull out all the stops to whack Osama bin Laden, or is he merely one head of a beast that will grow nine more as soon as we decapitate it?

Talk about the fog of war -- but here comes Caleb Carr, military historian turned bestselling novelist, to clear things up. His "The Lessons of Terror" is a beefed-up version of an essay about terrorism that ran in World Policy Journal six years ago, and in 274 sparsely printed pages he explains it all to you. The book has an enviable firmness of tone and authoritative manner, yet it's general and sweeping enough to stir faint suspicions that things couldn't possibly be this simple. And, somehow, when you try to apply Carr's forceful dictums to the situation at hand, they tend to become as slippery and elusive as a handful of live minnows.

One thing is absolutely certain: Carr considers us to be at war. The primary assertion of his 1996 World Policy Journal essay is that terrorists ought to be treated as members of an army and not like a bunch of criminals. While some have argued that bin Laden ought to be captured and tried in court, Carr says it's time that we regarded his followers and other international terrorists as "what they have in fact been for almost half a century: organized, highly trained, hugely destructive paramilitary units that were and are conducting offensive campaigns against a variety of nations and social systems." Not that Carr is a priori against the capture and trial model where bin Laden is concerned -- he admires the U.S.'s 1989 invasion of Panama and how efficiently it went about "nullifying" Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega, for example. And it's not that he thinks we should offer the captives at Guantanamo Bay "the same rights that uniformed combatants enjoy under the various Geneva protocols." No, dammit, the important thing is that we understand that we're at war.

Why is it so important that we embrace what some of Carr's critics (before Sept. 11) called "the war paradigm"? Because, it seems, once we accept that we are at war, then we will understand that "military history alone can teach us the lessons that will solve the dilemma of modern terrorism," and Carr is the military historian to supply that instruction. Of course, what we might also realize is that to a hammer everything looks like a nail, but to be fair that doesn't necessarily invalidate what Carr has to say in "The Lessons of Terror."

Laid down early on and reiterated constantly throughout the book is Carr's definition of terrorism itself: "warfare deliberately waged against civilians with the purpose of destroying their will to support either leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectionable." Moreover, terrorism is not some frightening new manifestation of global strife, but "the expression of a constant theme in military history." And with a certified military historian to lead us by the hand through 2000-plus years of armed conflict, we will see clearly and unquestioningly that "the strategy of terror is a spectacularly failed one."

Carr argues that "warfare against civilians, whether inspired by hatred, revenge, greed, or political and psychological insecurity, has been one of the most ultimately self-defeating tactics in all military history." But while in Carr's view military action is the only appropriate response to terrorism, "the nature of that military action is as important as its undertaking ... warfare against civilians must never be answered in kind."

Whereupon Carr launches into a centuries-spanning survey of Western warfare, in theory and practice, with the occasional detour into Asia, Africa and Latin America, all arrayed to demonstrate his ideas. He begins with Rome, whose early success he links to its inclusive attitude toward its conquered peoples. The new subjects, even the slaves, could become citizens eventually, a policy that Carr calls "the central domestic foundation on which the near millennium of Roman hegemony rested."

However, if when they were good the Romans were quite good, when they were bad, alas, they were as bad as anybody else. Carr sees the empire declining when it employed brutal scorched-earth policies in seizing and holding its provinces, proving that "when waged without provocation [warfare against civilians] usually brings on retaliation in kind, and when turned to for retaliatory purposes it only perpetuates a cycle of revenge and outrage." Not only that, but the barbarian soldiers recruited into the Roman army to fill spots left empty by shirking young Romans had a tendency to turn on their rulers, demonstrating a martial truism the U.S. forgot, to its sorrow, with Afghanistan's mujahedin: the proxy who fights for you today will fight against you tomorrow.

The rest of the history of warfare in the West and its outskirts, according to Carr, is a litany of savage, bloodthirsty "destructive war" occasionally brightened by a few great military minds who understood the superior quality of "progressive war." His heroes include, above all, King Frederick II of Prussia, but also Sir Francis Drake and Oliver Cromwell (except when it came to Ireland). These men, Carr asserts, understood that "wars were best fought for particular and realistic political goals by soldiers whose restrained behavior would limit the impact of conflict on civilians and thereby maintain or even win those citizens' loyalty." (Rigorously strict military discipline was essential to prevent soldiers from slipping into the "barbarization" of rape and plunder.) This same strategy, Carr maintains, must be used against modern international terrorism.

Next Page: Does terrorism always fail? What about the U.S. bombing of Japan?

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