Special Section: At War - Peace, False and True: The necessity of war

National Review, Oct 1, 2001 by Richard Lowry

In his new book Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson connects the West's prowess at warfare over the last couple of millennia to the fact that it is the right side. Its values, its spirit of free inquiry, its respect for property rights, and its democratic self-governance create the conditions for technologically advanced, prodigiously equipped, high-morale armies. Indeed, it is the cultural superiority of Westernized, democratic Israel that would help ensure its victory over the poor, disorganized kleptocracy of the Palestinian Authority.

And if they don't succeed in advancing Western values, wars at the very least usually bring clarity. In long-running conflicts there is something to be said for one side's finally winning. Edward Luttwak made this point in a July 1999 Foreign Affairs article: "Imposed armistices . . . artificially freeze conflict and perpetuate a state of war indefinitely by shielding the weaker side from the consequences of refusing to make concessions for peace." Yasser Arafat today can direct a terrorist war against Israeli civilians precisely because the West intervened to save him from the consequences of his military defeat in Lebanon in 1982.

The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks should serve to strip away the assumptions of peace-process liberalism, at least for now, at least until this persistent illusion has time to reassert itself. In the meantime, world opinion should give Israel broad latitude if it decides to wage full war on its tormentors. It won't be the war that is immoral, but the conduct that prompted it; it won't be its winners who are blameworthy, but its losers. As for the U.S. response to the September 11 attackers, it should be fierce and unrelenting, serving the cause that animates virtually all just wars: establishing the peace in a way that half-measures and wishful negotiations never can.