Terror in Warfare (article)

In the year 100 the Roman historian Tacitus wrote “they make a desert and call it peace” (Agricola, 30). His description of the Roman way of war, at once accurate and rhetorical, could as easily refer to the destruction visited on the American South in 1864/65 by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman characterized his Georgia campaign as “the hard hand of war,” which he believed civilians as well as enemy armed forces should see and feel (Memoirs, 2: 227, 1875).

War is indeed hard, but does it constitute “terrorism”? The definition of terrorism and its companion violence are tricky, but a brief look at provisions of the Geneva Conventions is revealing. Protocol II “declares that neither the civilian population as such, nor individual civilians may be the objects of attacks; moreover, acts of terrorism against them are prohibited. Civilians benefit from this protection as long as they do not take a direct part in hostilities.” Sherman implicitly recognized his campaign as terrorism and so did General Curtis Le May. In 1945, Le May admitted to his staff that if the U.S. were to lose the war with Japan, they would surely be condemned as war criminals for the fire-bombing of Japan, methods used to similar effect on the cities of Germany. Com-

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manders in the ancient world saw the consequences of their campaigns in equally stark terms. Aurelian, a soldier and emperor of Rome’s 3^rd century empire, described his Syrian campaign with brutal clarity: “We have not spared the women, we have slain the children, we have butchered the old men” (Michael H. Dodgeon and Samuel N.C. Lieu, eds., The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars (AD 226-363): A Documentary History, 1991, 102).

In the ancient world, the Assyrians would surely win first prize for the use of terror to supplement a highly specialized and otherwise proficient and deadly military establishment. Numerous Assyrian stelae depict dismembered and impaled bodies of enemies and gruesome torture scenes; Shalmaneser III (British Museum) shows the king participating in these acts, which suggests a ritual dimension and that the king’s role in these comprised part of his royal duties.

Such acts differ only in detail from the conduct of war in the Greek and Roman worlds. Alexander’s campaigns in Afghanistan and India regularly featured atrocities where entire towns were put to the sword; the near extermination of the Malli in 325 BC is just one such example (see further the historian Arrian, books 4-6). Alexander’s destruction of Thebes in 335 BC, a Greek city, should remind us that such practices were not reserved for “barbarians.” The destruction Caesar visited upon Gallic and German tribes in Gaul also featured mass killings and enslavements; Caesar barely acknowledges the death toll among women and children that occurred with the annihilation of the Germanic Usipi in 55 BC (Caesar, Gallic War, 4: 13-15). Such destruction of peoples and their cultures is typical of the Roman way of war.

The Jewish historian Josephus records the Roman assault on Judaea in 1^st century AD; towns like Galilee and Jotapata were crushed, some (like Jotapata) never reoccupied, while the siege of Jerusalem was conducted with such ferocity that some mothers, driven mad by the terror of war, ate their children (book 6). Like the Assyrians before them, the Romans occasionally depicted the hard hand of war in art; Trajan’s Column commemorating that soldier emperor’s conquest of Dacia (modern day Romania) shows scenes of heads presented to the emperor (Spiral 4) as well as the usual scenes of conquest, firing villages (Spiral 8), and finally the defeated Dacians fleeing their lands before incoming Roman colonists (Spiral 23). It is not without interest that the Dacians also decorated their city walls with the heads of defeated enemies, in this

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case Romans felled in an earlier war (also Spirals 4, 8) and tortured prisoners of war (Spiral 7), practices bound to encourage payback from the other side (all references in Rossi, Trajan’s Column and the Dacian Wars, 1971).

War’s hard hand begins with civilization and no less so does “suicidal terrorism,” whether committed by groups or the solitary assassin. While the meaning and origin of “assassin” from the Shiite “Assassins” of 12^th century Syria (and Iran) has been debated at some length (i.e. assassin after “hashish-smoker,” a Fatimid pejorative most likely, more probably assassin after the Asās, or “foundation” of the Ismaili belief), the original assassins struck down Christian and Muslim leaders alike. The great Kurdish sultan Salah-ad-Din (Saladin) survived three such attempts and eventually resorted to various defenses and alliances to escape the assassins’ nefarious plots. Another sultan felled by an assassin was the Ottoman sultan Murad I, killed by a Serb assassin the evening before the epic battle of Kosovo (1389), won by his son and successor Beyazid, which made Serbia part of the Ottoman Empire.

Assassins appear no less among the Greeks and Romans. The Athenian democratic tradition rested on the popular belief that two assassins, Aristogeiton and Harmodius, failed in their heroic attempt on the life of the tyrant Hippias, who ruled Athens in the late 6^th century BC. Their plans foiled, these aristocratic assassins instead killed Hipparchus, the tyrant’s brother. In fact, politics had little to do with the affair; it was the result of a love triangle gone bad! (So Aristotle, or a writer in his school, reports in the “Athenian Constitution.”)

Greek traditions had a way of shaping Roman, so it is no surprise to find tales of Roman assassins similarly striking down tyrants, or at least trying to. As newly independent Rome struggled to remain free, Gaius Mucius went on a suicide mission to kill the Etruscan war lord Lars Porsenna, who threatened to recover Rome for its Etruscan overlords. Foiled, Porsenna condemned Mucius to torture by fire that only inspired the young Roman to thrust his right hand defiantly into the flames. Amazed by this act, Porsenna released Mucius, who became known as “Scaevola,” or the “left-handed one,” a nickname his heirs ever after proudly bore (Livy 2.12-13.5). Likely fiction, the story attests assassination as just another weapon in the toolbox of war.

In brief, terror amidst war is as old as civilization. Assas-

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sins too have long been known, though today’s heirs of Mucius Scaevola may more safely accomplish their missions with duds, C-4, and cell phones, and with a little less fear for their personal safety. A major difference between ancient and modern practices of war is that formerly, commanders and armies cared little for ensuring the security of the peoples among whom they fought. Alexander and Caesar, both widely regarded as the “greatest” commanders of all time, paid little attention to the living hell they brought to those they conquered. (Just to be fair, I imagine that in 1258 Hulagu Khan paid little attention to the Baghdadis about to be slaughtered. Here the image of Salah ad-Din before Jerusalem in 1187 stands in sharp contrast.)

Today, greater care is extended to non-combatants, and as George Packer writes in a recent New Yorker essay (July 20, 2015), there are no My Lais from Iraq, and the bombing of Afghanistan is nothing like that of North Vietnam, Japan, or Germany. While true, who speaks for the hundreds of Iraqi soldiers killed in June 2014 by ISIS forces at former American Camp Speicher? Who today remembers the dead of Haditha or the children of Gaza (in 2006, 2012, 2014)? Drones and smart bombs, increasingly the weapons of choice, lull the American public and their political leaders into imagining that war’s terror and violence can be softened while still achieving military and political objectives. Yet the hard hand of war continues to be felt, its mistakes too often described as only “collateral damage” and too often inciting more terror and violence in response, much to the surprise of so many.

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