To have peace, win big Page II

 

by Prof. Paul Eidelberg

 

2^nd  Page 2  

 

Part IV: Destroy the Enemy to Obtain One Hundred Years of Peace. William Tecumseh Sherman

In what follows, virtually every a passage has been extracted from military historian Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle (1999), I have selected these excerpts to illuminate dilemmas involved in Israel's current war in Gaza, but I alone am responsible for the import of this article.

William Tecumseh Sherman of Civil War fame was professor and college president teaching history six months before the Battle of Bull Run. If Sherman was considered a cruel general, "cruelty was necessary to destroy the evil of slavery."

"Men go to war to kill," said Sherman, "and should expect no tenderness." As he said of the Confederacy: "Thousands of people may perish, but they now realize that war means something else than vain glory and boasting."

"Marching through an enemy country and destroying its economic infrastructure and social strata — while losing less than 1% of an army — can instill confidence in soldiers in a way that camp life, entrenchment, and even ferocious set battles cannot."

Sherman's solders "realized that the quickest way to return ... to their families as to follow their mad genius into the heart of the Confederacy and very quickly to wreck its economic and spiritual core."

As George Patton understood (who was also deemed mad): "The directing mind must be at the head of the army — must be seen there, and the effect of his mind and personal energy must be felt by every officer and men present with it, to secure the best results. Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster."

Sherman's soldiers loved and admired their "'Uncle Billy,' who could confess of his troops, 'not a waiver, doubt, or hesitation when I order, and men march to certain death without a murmur if I call on them, because they know I value their lives as much as my own."

"'Don't ride too fast, General,' they would warn him of muddy roads, 'Pretty slippery going, Uncle Billy ..."

One nearly illiterate soldier wrote home: "it is an honor to enney man to have ben on the last campaign with Sherman, you se him a riding a long you would think he was somb plow jogger his head bent a little to one side with an oald stub of a sigar in his mouth."

As for the quality of Sherman's army: "When General Peter Osterhaus's 15th Corp marched past the Washington reviewing stand — they had occupied the southern wing during Sherman's march to the Sea — the German ambassador remarked, 'An army like that could whip all Europe.'"

Hanson contrasts Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant: "Sherman's men had marched, moved hundreds of miles, and survived, whereas too many of Grant's were fixed and had died. The former had sliced through hostile territory and freed slaves, destroyed property, and brought fire and ruin to the enemy; the latter fought not far from home, pitted against like military kind, and had rarely touched the economy that fueled the enemy [italics added]. The South would hate Sherman, whose troops had killed relatively few Confederates, for a century to come, but came to forgive Grant their future president, whose army butchered its best soldiers — a propensity to value property over life [as Machiavelli teaches in The Prince]..."

"Sherman at relatively little human expenditure defeated the very soul of the Confederate citizenry with a force that was mobile, patently ideological, and without experience of defeat." Ideological — for as Hanson discerns, "the act of emancipation [served] as moral counterweight against the necessary brutality of fire and ruin ..."

No Union General liberated more slaves than Sherman. "As blacks themselves acknowledged, Sherman did more to 'cut them loose' than any abolitionist."

This last remark reminds me of a Lebanese journalist who admitted that Lebanon did not breathe the air of freedom until the Israelis expelled the PLO from his country in 1982. With that freedom, he added, the Lebanese experienced the extraordinary humanity of the Jewish state.

Part V: Self-Restraint Prolongs the War.

US Admiral Bull Halsey said, "Hit hard, hit fast, hit often." Rationality and responsibility are qualities quite foreign to those who shape Israel's policy toward its enemy, the Palestinian Authority. Their policy is "Hit softly, hit slowly, and hit seldom."

In Hebrew this policy is called havlaga - "self-restraint". This policy is motivated by fear of world opinion, perhaps also by the desire to display Israel's moral superiority vis-à-vis the cruelty of her Arab enemies. It is an utterly inane and immoral policy.

Havlaga prolongs the war. It therefore increases the number of Jewish as well as Arab casualties... Yet this has been the policy of Israeli prime ministers and their cohorts since the signing of the Israel-PLO Agreement of September 1993. How demoralizing, how revolting! And yet, not a single party in the Knesset protests against this cowardly and self-destructive policy. Even the religious parties, which proclaim the principle of pikuach nefesh - "saving life"...

The Jewish people are known (even by their enemies) for their kindness and mercy, which is why Arabs store weapons in hospitals and schools, and shield themselves behind women and children. In time of war, however, "do not show [your enemy] any pity" (Deuteronomy 7:17), on which verse the Ramban comments: "Through the mercy of fools all justice is lost."

Justice, justice is what Israel stands for: justice has ever been the sacred cause of the Jewish people. Today, however, inasmuch as Israeli governments display no confidence in the justice of Israel's cause, is it any wonder that the Jew-haters of this world now question whether Israel has a right to exist, indeed, call for Israel's eradication?
 

Prof. Paul Eidelberg is a political scientist, author and lecturer. He is the founder and President, Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, a Jerusalem-based think tank for improving Israel's system of governance.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.