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Braced
for Jacksonian Ruthlessness
It hasn't lately been fashionable to say so, but when their blood is up, Americans are the fiercest warriors on earth. Look at what happened to Japan. Without even counting the casualties from the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American bombs are estimated to have killed 900,000 Japanese civilians in the last five months of World War II. That is twice the total of all combat deaths sustained by all U.S. forces in all our foreign wars since 1776; one raid on one night alone -- the March 9-10, 1945, incendiary bomb raid on Tokyo -- is believed to have killed more than 83,000 Japanese. That is more than total U.S. combat deaths in World War I -- and more than the total combined U.S. casualties from the Vietnam and Korean wars. Fighting wars ruthlessly, and targeting civilian as well as military targets, is part of what I call Jacksonianism. Called Sharp Knife by the southern Indians he crushed, Andrew Jackson acted quickly and decisively to defend the national interest and prestige. As a general, he crossed international frontiers to capture and hang British subjects inciting American Indians to rebel from the presumed safety of Spanish Florida. As president, he sent the U.S. Navy to Sumatra, where it shelled and burned Quallah Battoo, a settlement whose misguided ruler had insulted the American flag. Like Pearl Harbor, last Tuesday's unprovoked sneak attack could rouse one of the great storms of Jacksonian war fever that periodically change both American and world history. And if so, some of Bush's most demanding challenges will come from the tensions between the kind of war many Americans instinctively want to fight and the kind of war forced on us by international realities. Bush's first and perhaps most dangerous problem is that Jacksonians don't like limited wars. We should fight a war with everything we've got, Jacksonians feel. No weapons and no enemy sanctuaries should be off limits. This is no small point. Limited wars have wrecked three presidencies since 1945. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson were forced out of the White House because they were stuck in limited wars; without the strains of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon almost certainly would have finished his second term. Second, Jacksonians don't like diplomatic niceties. No fine points of international law should deter the United States from hunting down and exterminating these rats. If international law doesn't allow the United States to protect itself against this kind of enemy, then what good is it? The same thing applies to alliances. Allies are okay, say Jacksonians, but alliance politics cannot impose crippling limits on America's war-fighting strategies. The clash between this strong popular feeling and the limits Bush will face as he works with Western and Middle Eastern allies to combat a non-state enemy based, perhaps, in more than one foreign country, may cause great trouble for the administration. Third, Jacksonians believe with Douglas MacArthur that there is no substitute for victory. "Unconditional surrender" is what Jacksonians want from an enemy, and unconditional surrender -- or extermination -- are the only outcomes they will accept. The elder Bush failed to end the Gulf War in this way, and he lost the popularity he'd gained from Desert Storm. Fourth, Jacksonians fear fifth columns. The 1942 internment of Japanese Americans and the Cold War red scares show just how powerful this fear can be. We shall see how the American people and George Bush rise to this challenge. Finally, Jacksonians throw stones. Allegations that the State Department was full of communists and their sympathizers during the Truman administration greatly vexed the conduct of U.S. foreign policy in those years. We are unlikely to get out of this crisis without thorough investigations of real and alleged mismanagement and incompetence; careers will be ended -- perhaps in some cases unfairly -- and some officials could conceivably end up in jail. Such investigations can serve a purpose, but experience suggests that the toll on the effectiveness and morale of key government agencies will be high. "It is a fearful thing to lead this people into war," said Woodrow Wilson in 1917. Now it is George Bush's turn to ride the tiger. We shall see how he does. The writer is senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. © 2001 The Washington Post Company
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