Byzantium's Epic Survival and the Balance Between Force and Persuasion

At the public library last night, I happened upon a book called The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. The title immediately reminded me of taped lectures by Edward N. Luttwak that I heard in 1982, when I was a senior at St. Olaf College.

It was still very much a Cold War world back then. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan only three years before. The Berlin Wall seemed as impassable as ever. Gorbachev was a rising Soviet official, but glasnost (openness) was at best a glimmer on a far-off frozen horizon.

In the spring of 1982, my Russian history professor at St. Olaf, Robert Nichols, lent my roommate and me a tape containing lectures by Luttwak on “The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union.” This topic became the subject of his book by that name the following year.

A generation in later, in 2009, Luttwak published his long-planned follow-up book on the Byzantine Empire. In it, he explores the divergent fates of the two halves of the old Roman Empire. How was it, he asks, that the militarily stronger western half succumbed so soon to encroaching tribes, while the far more vulnerable eastern half survived for over 800 years?

His answer is thought provoking. The eastern empire adapted and persisted while Rome was overrun because Byzantium devised a strategy that used:”a minimum of force and a maximum of persuasion.” Rome, by contrast, relied on what the George W. Bush administration, on the eve of the Iraq War, called “shock and awe.”

Shock and awe, however, was little more than a propaganda phrase for excessive reliance on force. And it led to a devastating cascade of calamities in Iraq for Iraqis and Americans alike.

One of those calamities, of course, was the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. In an upcoming post, I’d like to examine what happens when the relationship between force and persuasion gets out of balance in the criminal law.

Looking Back on Baghdad and Paths Not Taken

Pure, unmitigated, raucous, ecastatic joy on the streets of Cairo. The soldarity of the people deposed an entrenched strongman who had spent nearly 30 years consolidating his power.

Could it have been like this in Iraq?

Both President Bushes made sure this would not happen.

In 1991, following the American-led ouster of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, much of Iraq rose in revolt against Saddam Hussein's dictatorial rule. Yet George H.W. Bush, as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces, allowed Hussein to send helicopter gunships to suppress the uprising.



Twelve years later, George W. Blush recklessly blundered into an Iraqi intervention with planning so non-existent as to be criminally negligent. As Garrison Keillor noted, he was like Melville's Ahab - without the grandeur - hell-bent on sinking his own ship for his own incrutable reasons.

Charles Ferguson has documented much of this folly in his powerful 2007 dbocumentary No End in Sight. Unlike the ironic Erasmus, however, there is no praise; only justifiable blame for the clueless W, chicken-hawk Cheney, and arguably insane Rumsfeld.

The Limits of Scripted Stoicism

A day after The Hurt Locker took the Oscar for best picture, I went to see The Messenger, another intense drama in a military setting. One involves bomb disposal in Iraq, the other casualty notification stateside. Neither is afraid of exploring the raw emotions unleashed by war.

The protagonist of The Messenger is a young enlisted soldier (played by Ben Foster) who has received commendations for bravery and also severely wounded in Iraq. He forms a two-man team with an older soldier (played by Woody Harrelson) who seeks to insulate him from the emotional demands of notification duty by instilling a rigid professionalism. Never touch the NOK (next of kin), the older man lectures, lapsing into bureaucratic jargon. The casualty notification officer (CNO) is to mpart the news in person but with scripted stoicism, leaving it to the local CAO (casualty assistance officer) to follow up.



It is scarcely surprising when cracks appear in the casualty notification officers' carefully choreographed ritual. The veteran officer initially claims to be in A.A., but as the film progresses he succumbs to bouts of public drunkeness. The younger soldier eventually confesses to the other about how a drunk driver killed his father - and that his father was that drunk driver. The confession continues in a later scene when the younger, decorated soldier admits to suicidal thoughts while being treated for his war injuries.

Naturally, the fissures in the CNO persona become most vivid when one of them feels genuine sympathy and affection for a woman who must be notified of her husband's death. But introducing this plotline doesn't mean The Messenger is an incipient romantic comedy. It's more like eros and thanatos in a dead heat.

Operation Homecoming

Over one milllion Americans have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. And that figure was as of 2007, when the National Endowment for the Arts released the documentary film Operation Homecoming, which describes NEA's efforts to encourage veterans to write about their war experiences.

Thousands have come home in body bags. Thousands more suffer greviously from PTSD and often terrible physical injuries. No one gets out unscathed.



The film is interspered with quotations from famous writers. Hemingway, for example, urged that no one deny that war, no matter how necessary, isn't a crime. The double negative, and the qualifying phrase, do not take away from the fundamental equation: war = crime, on a massive scale.

Addicted to War's Adrenaline Rush?

"War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," went the title of a book by the journalist Chris Hedges a few years ago. It was a cautionary tale by a veteran war correspondent about the addictive quality of war.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Zone dramatizes this addiction to utterly harrowing effect.



Words fail; go see it.