A very Roman lesson for
today
Pro- and anti-war passions have been aroused over Iraq. It was much the
same 2,000 years ago
Henry Porter
Sunday April 6, 2003
The
Observer
When Agricola's legions stormed to the north of Britain to face the
tribes of Caledonia nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman governor of Britain
used exactly the same strategy as the Pentagon in Iraq. He sent his fleet
ahead to spread uncertainty and terror - for which read the aerial
bombardment of Baghdad - and then marched north with a highly mobile and
lightly equipped army.
His son-in-law, the historian Tacitus, recorded that the Scottish tribes
greatly outnumbered the Romans yet when they saw Agricola's ability to
regroup his army in battle they turned and ran. By the end of the
engagement Agricola had lost just 360 men, against the enemy's 10,000
casualties.
The parallels between the Roman and American actions are striking, not
just in the daring tactics, the relative losses and superior organisation
but also in their motivation. Agricola undertook the campaign to prevent
a 'general rising of the northern nations' - ie to provide security for
the region and ultimately for Rome even though it lay 1,000 miles away.
At the time the reaction to the Romans was much the same as the passion
and fear inspired by the Americans today. According to Tacitus, the
leader of the Caledonian forces, Calgacus, described the Romans thus:
'Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their
indiscriminate plunder ... The only people on Earth to whose covetousness
both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchering, and
rapine, they give the lying name of government; they create desolation
and call it peace.'
Few Arabs would have any difficulty with that if it was applied to the
Americans; indeed it is precisely the kind of thing heard in mosques all
over the Middle East. Most Europeans would not go that far yet this war
has provoked extraordinary passions.
Pro- and anti-war sentiments stir from the depths of each personality in
a way that cannot always be explained by an individual's age, class,
gender or ethnic background. And those that have found certainty have not
easily relinquished their conviction as events unfold. For example, the
peace party has been unwilling to concede the following: the ecological
disaster in the southern oil fields has not materialised; up to this
point casualties have been far fewer on both sides than expected; the
Arab street has not risen to threaten regimes all over the Middle East;
the rapid advance across has not proved the military catastrophe so many
predicted.
Equally unyielding is the enthusiasm of the hawks who have generally
dismissed the destruction and loss of life as being a regrettable but
necessary sacrifice on the way to a number of geostrategic goals - a new
world order, greater security for Israel and America and democratic
reform in the Arab world.
They have a passion for the design and execution of a plan, whatever its
risks, and they tend to inflate the benefits that will accrue. For their
part they do not concede these points: the plan was a gamble; no
substantial evidence of the production and retention of weapons of mass
destruction has yet come to light; success in Afghanistan and Iraq may
lead US hawks to plan a series of ever more perilous campaigns; the
long-term damage to Arab pride and the likelihood of increased terrorist
attacks.
The level of feeling is unlikely to be dampened by a victory in Baghdad.
For example Matthew Parris in the Spectator talked of 'his cold anger at
the stupidity of it all, the awful miscalculations being made and the
damage being done and feelings of useless despair of a quite personal
sort'.
Last week Parris was joined by the novelists Arundhati Roy and Rachel
Cusk, who wrote in the Guardian of the suffering and shame involved in
the Iraq war. Roy observed: 'Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so
It's more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your
Knees.' Taken to its logical conclusion this means Roy objects to the war
because more men from the coalition forces aren't being killed, a
position which suggests more than just simple pacifism, I would suggest.
Jemima Khan announced in the Independent that she was ashamed of being
British, which is odd in at least one regard since British forces seem to
have behaved with good judgment and impeccable restraint.
Again we should agree that neither the authenticity of these feelings nor
the motives of the two principal anti-war newspapers, the Daily Mirror
and the Independent , should be questioned. However, there is a
hysterical note to some of the commentary and writers have paraded a
moral rectitude that has never at any stage absorbed the true darkness of
Saddam's regime.
This war has many more antecedents apart from Agricola's campaign on the
Forth. One is particularly reminded of the daring and speed of the
Israeli military in June 1967 and in October 1973, after it recovered
from a surprise attack during Yom Kippur. But in other respects what we
are seeing is totally new and this may account for the levels of shock
and dread being voiced.
American power, restrained for so long by hesitant generals and cautious
politicians, has now been welded to a strategic culture that is prepared
to contemplate the loss of American lives on the way to certain goals.
The unapologetically proactive approach is new and its is clear from the
performance of the US military that the deadliness, organisation and
speed of its forces are all considerably greater than they were in the
1991 Gulf war.
The alliance of might and ideas represent a new kind of dominance which
causes equal anxiety in the Middle East and Europe, but for different
reasons. The Arab states have suffered a blow to their self-esteem
equivalent to that of 1967, but this time it is not Israeli tanks
outflanking and outgunning Arab forces, but American armour.
The fear and helplessness that the last few weeks engender in Arabs will
not die away when order is restored to Iraq. Their leaders are worried
that democratic reform in Iraq will cause turmoil in neighbouring states
- which, by the way, it should - while the general populations believe a
victory in Iraq will make resolution of the Palestine-Israel conflict
less rather than more likely.
In Europe the peace party has been inspired by some genuine pacifism but
also by the offence caused to the liberal consensus and its faith in
liberal institutions such as the UN. A few American hawks and a President
who has almost no experience of Europe or the Middle East have brushed
aside the United Nations, the prudent counsels of European leaders and
the motivated qualms of the Chinese and Russians with very little obvious
soul searching.
Where this leads is difficult to say, which in itself is one of causes of
the unprecedented anti-American mood. At base the peace movement is
fuelled by a thoroughly human fear of the unknown and it is perhaps up to
the hawks to acknowledge this reality with slightly more tact than has
been displayed so far. What none of us needs is the triumphalist parades
of US military and diplomatic supremacy. When Agricola returned to Rome
after his successful campaign in the Britain, he stole into the city by
night to avoid his friends and supporters.
� Empire State, a novel by Henry Porter about a US/UK
counter-terrorist operation, is published by Orion in September.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,930844,00.html
