What would Patton say about the war in Iraq?

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2005 by Victor Davis Hanson

WHAT CAN WE IMAGINE Gen. George S. Patton might say about the present war? Based on what he himself said and wrote, his record in the field, and what scholars have written about him, I think we have some reasonable ideas. I will begin with Patton's strategic thinking, then follow with suppositions about tactical and operational doctrine.

Patton listened to the BBC almost nightly, spoke French fluently, and was an insatiable reader of history: German Field Marshal Erwin Pommel, French General (and then Emperor) Napoleon Bonaparte, and Roman Emperor Julius Caesar were among his favorite topics. He was a learned person despite purportedly being dyslexic. In any case, based on news reports, his extensive studies of European history, and meetings with those who had worked with the Soviets, he firmly believed that the Allies were making a horrible mistake by not driving on to Berlin to bring all of Germany behind Anglo-American lines. If we could paraphrase his thinking it might go something like this: We had fought World War II in part to ensure that Eastern Europe, i.e., Poland and Czechoslovakia, did not remain under the domination of Adolph Hitler's totalitarian regime; yet our policies at war's end were guaranteeing that those countries would fall under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's equally evil domination.

In a famous exchange, Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower asked of Patton's request to move eastward immediately, "What in the world for?" Patton, without hesitation, replied, "You shouldn't have to ask that. History will answer for you, Ike." Eisenhower's righthand man, Gen. Omar Bradley, protested and offered up the standard American fear of sustaining 100,000 casualties. Of course, the Soviets did take over 100,000 casualties storming Berlin, a fact later used to argue for Eisenhower's prescience. Again, however, the Soviets suffered such losses because the Germans were fighting ferociously in order that everybody behind them might surrender to the West. Had the Germans known that the Allies were going to take Berlin, the city might have fallen after brief resistance in the same manner as other German strongpoints in the West.

Patton had the further notion that, after defeating the Nazis, we should not destroy Germany's armored forces and dismantle its strategic forces, but instead use them as a basis to rearm for the purpose of stopping the Soviets, who enjoyed an enormous superiority in respective land forces on the continent. This was blasphemy to most experts in the U.S., made worse by Patron's often puerile and offensive slurs about Russian primitivism and barbarity. As a result of his uncouth pronouncements, Patton's otherwise astute and vocal anti-communist rhetoric found little support, and indeed gave him very little margin of tolerance when his proconsulship of Bavaria later ran into trouble. Yet, this very idea of German rehabilitation would--within months after his dismissal--turn out to be the basis of NATO.

Patton always realized that armed forces serve political ends and create an immediate reality on the battlefield that politicians argue over for years--that there are times when audacious commanders can create favorable diplomatic situations impossible to achieve by politicians even after years of negotiations. Well before Pres. Franklin Roosevelt or Eisenhower, he understood that the new Germany was an ally, and the old Soviets were now the new enemy of freedom.

Applying Patton's thinking to today's situation, we first can recognize the so-called "war on terror" as a misnomer. There never really has been a war against a method other than something like Pompey's crusade against the pirates or the British effort to stifle the slave trade. In fact, we no more are in a war against terror than Patton was fighting against Tiger and Panzer tanks. Patton, who understood the hold of a radically triumphalist Nazism on a previously demoralized German people, would have the intellectual honesty to realize that we are at war with Islamic fascists, mostly from the Middle East, who have played on the frustrations of mostly male, unemployed young people, whose autocratic governments cannot provide the conditions for decent employment and family life. A small group of Islamists appeals to the angst of the disaffected through a nostalgic and reactionary turn to a mythical Caliphate, in which religious purity trumps the material advantages of a decadent West and protects Islamic youth from the contamination of foreign gadgetry and pernicious ideas. In some ways, Hitler had created the same pathology in Germany in the 1930s.

Because of the Internet and globalization. Islamic youth have firsthand knowledge of the U.S.--its splendor, power, and luxury--that simultaneously attracts and repels them, creating appetites forbidden in traditional and tribal society. Thus, the fascist terrorists, to be successful, and cognizant of this paradoxical envy and desire, offer a mythical solution in lieu of real social, political, and economic reform that, in short order, would doom the power of the patriarch, mullah, and autocrat: Blame the imperialist Americans and the Zionist Israelis who cause this self-induced misery. Even those who do not join the extremists, like most Germans of the late 1930s, do not mind--albeit on the cheap--seeing their perceived enemies take a fall, as long as the consequences of terrorism mostly are positive in a psychological sense without bringing them material suffering in recompense.