War as punishment

In his masterwork, “On War,” published in 1832 after his death, you can almost feel the Prussian general and life-long soldier Carl von Clausewitz as he searches for logic in the endeavor to which he dedicated his life.  In Chapter One, Section 2, he gives us this definition of war:  War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.  Further along in Section 24, von Clausewitz famously puts war in a political context:  War is a mere continuation of policy by other means…for the political view is the object, War is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.

In the section titled “Utmost Use of Force,” von Clausewitz takes his first stab at the why of war:  Two motives lead men to War: instinctive hostility and hostile intention.  If War is an act of force, it belongs necessarily also to the feelings. If it does not originate in the feelings, it reacts, more or less, upon them, and the extent of this reaction depends not on the degree of civilization, but upon the importance and duration of the interests involved.

Finally, von Clausewitz concludes his introduction to war by attempting to come to grips with war’s ugly underbelly:  War is, as a whole, in relation to the predominant tendencies which are in it, a wonderful trinity, composed of the original violence of its elements, hatred and animosity, which may be looked upon as blind instinct; of the play of probabilities and chance, which make it a free activity of the soul; and of the subordinate nature of a political instrument, by which it belongs purely to the reason.

What made von Clausewitz famous was the deep dive the rest of his book takes into strategy, which he defines almost wholly in terms of achieving the purpose of one side against another.  Strategy is more than plans to win a war, however.  It’s an attempt to impose logic on the madness of war.  But all the strategy in the world cannot, even for von Clausewitz, make sense of war because of the ugliness at its center. Hatred is not rational.  Revenge is not rational.  War is not rational.

Killing another human being cannot be rationalized because it is an act of subtraction, physically, morally, and perhaps most of all, in terms of the future.  Killing disallows the contributions to life on this planet that might have been made by the dead.  What cures for disease lay locked within the bodies lying dead in Ukraine or Israel or Gaza, to mention just three of the dozens of wars being fought right at this moment around the world?

Von Clausewitz is quite good on how wars are brought to an end, with one side the winner and the other the loser.  “The Aim is to Disarm the Enemy” is the title of Section 4.  He is brief and to the point:  If our opponent is to be made to comply with our will, we must place him in a situation which is more oppressive to him than the sacrifice which we demand...As long as the enemy is not defeated, he may defeat me; then I shall be no longer my own master; he will dictate the law to me as I did to him.

If this doesn’t remind you of the situations between Ukraine and Russia, and Israel and Hamas, I don’t know what will.  Historians don’t like to talk about war this way, and you won’t find this conception in “On War,” but most wars end up as punishment of one side by the other.  In fact, seeing war in this way is so distasteful that Abraham Lincoln is celebrated by what happened after he accepted the surrender of Lee at Appomattox.  He issued his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which treated traitors to the Union who fought for the Confederacy with leniency and established rules by which former Confederate soldiers and Confederate states could return to the Union.  The punishment of the South by Union forces happened during the war, with the sacking of Atlanta, Sherman’s march to the sea, the savagery of a war that killed 600,000 Americans.

The bombing of cities like Dresden in Germany and Tokyo in Japan came near the end of both wars.  Dresden was bombed in February of 1945.  More than 1,600 acres of the city center of Dresden were flattened, killing an estimated 25,000 German civilians.  Smaller raids in early March hit railyards and industrial areas outside the city of Dresden.

Tokyo was firebombed on the 9^th and 10^th of March in 1945 in what became known as the most deadly raid on a city in human history.  More than 10,000 acres of central Tokyo were burned to the ground, killing as many as 100,000 civilians and leaving more than one million homeless. 

The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6^th and 9^th of August in 1945 have been argued about ever since the bombs were dropped.  Between 120,000 and 220,000 civilians were killed and much of the infrastructure of both cities simply ceased to exist.

There is a case that can be made that all four of these bombing campaigns carried out late in the war had no real strategic value and were more of a punishment of Germany and Japan than anything else.  The bombings amounted to a lesson to both countries:  don’t do this ever again, or you will suffer the same consequences, or worse.  Both Japan and Germany were occupied by Allied forces for decades.  The U.S. Marshall Plan helped to rebuild Germany, and Douglas MacArthur took over the Supreme Command of Allied Powers immediately after Japan’s surrender and began a campaign of punishing Japanese military and political leaders, reforming Japan’s political structure and working to resuscitate Japan’s economy. Both countries, at least initially, were disarmed.

The Treaty of Versailles after World War I ended military hostilities and burdened Germany and its allies with “accepting responsibility…for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”  It was punishment for having caused and fought the war, and it didn’t work.  Hitler built a culture of grievance out of the way World War I ended, blamed the Jews and other “traitors” and inflicted another war on Europe as retaliation.

So, we – the so-called civilized nations of the West – have engaged in war as retribution against our enemies before.  We have delivered punishment in the form of destruction of cities and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.  We had a strategy of punishment that may as well have been called the “never again strategy” in how we fought and ended the war in Europe and the Pacific.  We had an endgame in that war, and we killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in making our point.  The endgame was a political one, as von Clausewitz saw war’s ultimate purpose.

The problem Israel has with Hamas is, if you want to achieve a victory by fighting and punishing an enemy into submission, who do you punish?  In Gaza and in the West Bank, Palestinians cannot be summed up with the identity “terrorist.”  They are a people, just as the Jews of Israel are a people.  The problem for both sides is, to use von Clausewitz’ concept, if war is the means, what is the object?  Where are the political ends in this war, for either side?

Israel has dropped enough bombs and killed enough civilians that the New York Times has arrived at the conclusion that Israel has lost or is in the process of losing what they are now calling “the information war.”  The New York Times today quoted General Kenneth McKenzie Jr., a former head of the U.S. Central Command, who noted that Israel’s campaign to “reduce parts of Gaza to rubble and kill more than 1,000 Hamas fighters,” not to mention 12,000 Palestinian civilians and in the Times estimation, turn Gaza into “a graveyard for thousands of children,” has not produced a deal to release the hostages Hamas took on Oct. 7.  “Time is not on Israel’s side internationally or domestically,” General McKenzie observed, taking note of how calling up more than 300,000 to serve in the war is already beginning to threaten Israel’s economy.

What was the endgame of Hamas when its soldiers killed 1,200 Israelis in a sneak attack on Oct. 7? Hamas leaders have said in interviews that they wanted their struggle to be back in the headlines, and they have certainly accomplished that.  But their ultimate aim, spelled out in their own charter, to kill every Jew and drive them out of Palestine is and has been a futile hope, not a strategy or an endgame.

And what of Israel’s endgame?  Netanyahu has said over and over it is to achieve the return of the hostages and drive Hamas from Gaza so that they can “never again” threaten Israel.  The Times quoted Jeremy Binnie, a Middle East expert for Janes (formerly Janes Weekly), an open source intelligence and defense think tank in London, and he said something smart: “They [Israel] may not need an endgame because it’ll be imposed on them.  They’ll make it look like they’ve done the best military operation in the time available.”

Von Clausewitz doesn’t offer much hope.  “War is not always to be regarded as absolute. The conquered State often sees in it only a passing evil, which may be repaired in after times by means of political combinations.” 

A nice conclusion if political combinations were seen as possible by either side.  “If you kill ours, we will kill yours” is not politics.  It’s retribution and not any more rational than either hatred or revenge or war itself.