On "winning the war".

• Author: Higgs, Robert

With fire and sword the country round Was wasted far and wide, And many a childing mother then, And new-born baby died; But things like that, you know, must be At every famous victory. --Robert Southey (1774-1843), "The Battle of Blenheim"

General Thomas Power, commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) from 1957 to 1964 and director of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff from 1960 to 1964, ranked near the top of the U.S. armed forces waging the Cold War. An ardent warrior, he did not subscribe to the Aristotelian maxim of moderation in all things. In 1960, while being briefed on counterforce strategy, he reacted petulantly to the idea of exercising restraint in the conduct of nuclear war: "Restraint!" he retorted. "Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards.... Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!" (qtd. in Kaplan [1983] 1991, 246). Everyone who knew Power seems to have thought he was crazy.

Even the man he replaced as SAC commander, General Curtis LeMay, regarded him as unstable--and everybody knew that LeMay himself was, as Dr. Strangelove's Group Captain Lionel Mandrake would have put it, "as mad as a bloody March hare." After LeMay left his command at SAC, he became vice chief of staff of the air force in 1957 and chief of staff in 1961. He is most often remembered as a tireless advocate of an all-out, nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union and its allies, and as the most likely inspiration for General Buck Turgidson in Strangelove. Either Power or LeMay might have served as a model for the Strangelove character General Jack D. Ripper, whose own nuclear first strike on the Ruskies came straight out of the LeMay-Power playbook.

It is chilling to recall that such men once held--and may still hold--the fate of the world in their hot hands. In Power's day, heaven be thanked, the civilian leadership had slightly more sense than the military leadership, but in more recent times that relationship seems to have been reversed, and now men such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their zealous, bloodthirsty subordinates vividly attest to F.A. Hayek's observation that "the worst get on top."

Winning

Whatever else one might say about our glorious leaders throughout our history, it must be admitted that they have had, just as the current gang claims to have, a dedication to "winning" the wars they set out to fight. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush spoke repeatedly of "victory," especially in the ongoing "long war" that "we did nothing to invite" against terrorists who espouse "radical Islam." Undismayed by the fresh carnage and further devastation that each new day brings to the people of Iraq, the president assured his listeners that "[w]e're on the offensive in Iraq, with a clear plan for victory ... [W]e are in this fight to win, and we are winning." (1) Indeed, winning a war strikes most people as a splendid idea until they stop to think about it.

Given an option to fight and win a war a la Thomas Power, however, with just two Americans and one Russian (Iraqi, Iranian, Chinese, or other foreign devil du jour) left alive at the end, sane people recoil. Such "winning" seems all too clearly absurd. As we back away from...