Victor Davis Hanson: Pelopennesian War Analogized To Present Iraq War
[Victor Davis Hanson, VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is a classicist and military historian and the author of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War," published by Random House this month.]
Modernists like to believe that we have entered an entirely new era of armed conflict. To some military thinkers, it's the primordial nature of the terrorists' beheadings, suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices that has marked a completely new form of "asymmetrical warfare" in which the two sides are terribly mismatched.
Others have a different argument. They say it is our own high-tech, computer-enhanced munitions that have reinvented the very nature of conflict into something called "4th-generational war."
But neither argument could be further from the truth. War is like water -- its fundamental character remains unchanging precisely because the nature of the humans who fight it is constant over the centuries. True, the pump -- the delivery system of flint, arrows, firearms, nuclear bombs, guided missiles and satellite weapons -- radically changes the face of battle with each generation. But the essence of war nevertheless stays the same, as we are reminded when we study the distant past.
More than 2,400 years ago, the Spartans fought the Athenians in a bloody 27-year war that nearly wrecked the Greek city-state in its greatest age. Almost every horror we have experienced since 9/11 had a counterpart centuries earlier in that awful Peloponnesian War.
Limb-lopping? The Athenians ordered the right hands of captured Spartan seamen cut off.
Terrorism? On the island of Corcyra, factions burned innocents alive and executed civilians by running them through a gantlet.
Disease and fear of biological attack? The Athenians lost a quarter to a third of their population to a mysterious plague, and they blamed the outbreak on the Spartans.
Roadside executions? The Spartans rounded up 2,000 of their Helot serfs and butchered them all.
Kidnapped diplomats? The Athenians captured Spartan envoys on the way to Persia, ignored their diplomatic immunity, killed them and cast their corpses in a pit.
We recoiled in horror last September when Chechen terrorists stormed a school in Beslan and more than 150 children were killed in a bloody shootout. But in 413 BC, the Athenians unleashed their Thracian mercenaries on the tiny Boeotian town of Mycalessus. The killers slaughtered men, women and children, burst into a schoolhouse and butchered all the students. They even attacked livestock and, according to the historian Thucydides, "whatever living thing they saw."
But the Peloponnesian War not only reminds us of how thin the veneer of civilization is when war, plague or natural disaster rips it off, it also shows that the reasons states fight each other have remained mostly the same over the years.
Modernists like to believe that we have entered an entirely new era of armed conflict. To some military thinkers, it's the primordial nature of the terrorists' beheadings, suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices that has marked a completely new form of "asymmetrical warfare" in which the two sides are terribly mismatched.
Others have a different argument. They say it is our own high-tech, computer-enhanced munitions that have reinvented the very nature of conflict into something called "4th-generational war."
But neither argument could be further from the truth. War is like water -- its fundamental character remains unchanging precisely because the nature of the humans who fight it is constant over the centuries. True, the pump -- the delivery system of flint, arrows, firearms, nuclear bombs, guided missiles and satellite weapons -- radically changes the face of battle with each generation. But the essence of war nevertheless stays the same, as we are reminded when we study the distant past.
More than 2,400 years ago, the Spartans fought the Athenians in a bloody 27-year war that nearly wrecked the Greek city-state in its greatest age. Almost every horror we have experienced since 9/11 had a counterpart centuries earlier in that awful Peloponnesian War.
Limb-lopping? The Athenians ordered the right hands of captured Spartan seamen cut off.
Terrorism? On the island of Corcyra, factions burned innocents alive and executed civilians by running them through a gantlet.
Disease and fear of biological attack? The Athenians lost a quarter to a third of their population to a mysterious plague, and they blamed the outbreak on the Spartans.
Roadside executions? The Spartans rounded up 2,000 of their Helot serfs and butchered them all.
Kidnapped diplomats? The Athenians captured Spartan envoys on the way to Persia, ignored their diplomatic immunity, killed them and cast their corpses in a pit.
We recoiled in horror last September when Chechen terrorists stormed a school in Beslan and more than 150 children were killed in a bloody shootout. But in 413 BC, the Athenians unleashed their Thracian mercenaries on the tiny Boeotian town of Mycalessus. The killers slaughtered men, women and children, burst into a schoolhouse and butchered all the students. They even attacked livestock and, according to the historian Thucydides, "whatever living thing they saw."
But the Peloponnesian War not only reminds us of how thin the veneer of civilization is when war, plague or natural disaster rips it off, it also shows that the reasons states fight each other have remained mostly the same over the years.