As the United States and its allies strive yet again to keep the Red Sea and adjacent waters safe for commerce while struggling to contain an epidemic of Iran-backed violence elsewhere in the Middle East as well, the two greatest obstacles to our success are the Euro-American fantasy that all problems must have a solution, if only we can uncover it, and our whimsical, fickle morality.
Thus, we invent human rights for inhuman monsters; we prefer the self-congratulation of slovenly displays of ill-reasoned mercy to battlefield success; and we consistently halt our forces on the verge of tangible victories.
And yet…we are grindingly and miserably re-inventing history’s most-effective tool of disciplining hostile actors in asymmetric struggles: the punitive expedition. Whether Rome’s legions dealing with eruptions on the empire’s borders, Ottomans controlling a third of Europe for four and a half centuries and the Middle East and North Africa still longer, or the British ultimately learning that the one approach that could bring temporary quiet to the Northwest Frontier was “butcher and bolt,” experience demonstrated that fierce, disproportionate reprisals worked, discouraging stunned enemies from renewing their incursions for a generation or longer.
Therein lies a crucial aspect of our problem: We imagine that we can magically find and cheerfully impose lasting solutions on cultures steeped in hatreds old and new that run so deep they suggest genetic predispositions. As for punishment, we abhor the word, insisting, against all historic evidence, that humanity is inherently pacific and that all persons can be redeemed and rehabilitated, no matter their bloodlust and enthusiasm for savagery.
Our enemies do not share our fantasies.
We almost got it right in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the Bush administration dispatched capable military means to punish our attackers and those who gave them refuge. Then, on the threshold of success, doubts set in: Were we too reliant on violence? If we simply abandoned a reeling Afghanistan, wouldn’t our enemies just reconstitute? Might we not turn that resolutely primitive country into a prosperous, merry democracy that eagerly embraced our obviously superior values?
And so we spent twenty years insisting that the impossible was possible, while spilling more of our own blood in dead and wounded than the attacks on the Twin Towers had cost us, all in a doomed, willfully ignorant effort that corrupted those on whom we hoped to rely and ultimately rewarded those whom we meant to destroy.
Even more costly and equally hallucinatory efforts in Iraq soon followed.
For the moment, we are at least temporarily sober when it comes to occupations of brutal populations immune to our fastidious ethics, but the region’s endemic problems remain. Of necessity, not preference, we are developing techniques for post-modern, as well as neo-traditional, punitive expeditions (although we will not use the word “punitive,” of course). Boots on the ground incursions will be proportionately fewer, but our naval and air response to Yemen-based Houthi attacks in the Red Sea hints at a new willingness to actually punish barbarous opponents. We shall see how far our military has the appetite and our leadership the resolve to go—at present, we are striking only military targets, but successful punitive expeditions spread the pain.
If our enemies do not suffer profoundly, they will continue to inflict all the damage they can upon us. Another lesson—which we refuse to learn—is that superficial humanitarianism that limits military effectiveness in the short term guarantees that violent conflicts will sprawl and continue, with greater losses on all sides in the long term.
If you want to stop the violence, stop the violent.
