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The National Interest
The Death of Conquest
by Anna Simons
The first decade of the 21st century, like the first decade of the 20th, is an age of empire. A hundred years ago, however, there were many empires. They included both the overseas empires of the national states of western Europe-particularly those of Britain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands-and the overland empires of the multinational states ruled by the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman dynasties. Today, there is only one empire-the global empire of the United States, a state which is neither national nor multinational in the traditional sense, but which is more accurately described as multicultural and transnational. This new and historically strange American empire is the context and the arena in which all the great and global events of our time are taking place. . . .
Other factors, too, have discounted the relative significance of sheer military force-and one of these is the way today's greatest power, the United States, conceives of military force relative to other forms of power. We are a corporate republic, a capitalist juggernaut whose expansionist impulses are gladly sublimated in capturing markets and extending our economic reach. Like the Hellenes before us, we tend to colonize via commerce and culture, no matter how shamelessly materialist our version of the latter may be.
Whether our particular genius to show others how they, too, can release their inner consumer selves makes us economic imperialists is debatable. But we are clearly not conquerors in the classic imperial sense. We do not seek permanent physical control. We are neither interested in forcibly subjugating nor in forcibly absorbing foreign populations. We do not exact tribute. Nor do we force anyone to labor on our behalf. Perhaps most significant but least appreciated, we also do not militarily seize or appropriate anything without offering compensation. Together, these attitudes and the behaviors they sire reflect as profound a shift in the nature of human relations, never mind the modus operandi of the pre-eminent global power, as any that has occurred since the debut of conquest thousands of years ago.
The fact that literal conquest is no longer an imaginable war aim has had all sorts of unintended consequences. In a cruel twist of irony, there is even a way to connect Al-Qaeda's aims-and its methods-to our abolition of conquest. . . .
Those who do not share our values (since this is what we really mean by "non-Western") hold at least two increasingly powerful advantages.
First, they now know us better than we know them, and have penetrated our world far better than we have penetrated theirs. They understand very well indeed how our states and governments work.
Second, by definition, those who do not ascribe to Western values are not bound by our conventions and constraints. We may prevent them from indulging in cross-border invasions, but this only encourages them to discover new tactics, techniques and procedures that bypass overt conquest. Indeed, not abiding by our conventions frees them to engage in behavior that is not only reprehensible (by our standards), but, even more seriously, that defies easy redress. Here is where real innovation in the realm of warfare has occurred over the past several decades, and where our real challenges lie.
Consider, for instance, the phenomenon of child soldiers. Their prevalence across the African combat belt represents a completely organic development. John Garang reportedly began absorbing orphans into the Sudanese People's Liberation Army in the early 1980s. At first he offered them security, food and shelter in exchange for their help around camp. Before long he was using some as soldiers. Shortly thereafter, Youweri Mouseveni in Uganda also "discovered" orphans, whom he likewise turned into soldiers. Then, less than a decade after their appearance as combatants in Sudan, we find Charles Taylor (of Liberia) and Foday Sankoh (of Sierra Leone) pushing the use of eight, nine, ten and eleven year-olds toward the next logical step: murdering parents in order to create orphan children who can then be turned into soldiers.
If we could suspend our moral sensibilities for a moment, we might marvel at how imaginative people can be and note the horrible irony that has occurred. What some West Africans have achieved with child soldiers is something that Western researchers have sought for years: the Universal Soldier who needs little sleep, can withstand tremendous hardship, and is still able to fight.5 The fear among many military psychiatrists has been that even if pharmaceuticals could be developed to keep American military personnel awake and functioning, these drugs would rob them of their consciences, leaving us with super-soldiers as capable of committing atrocities as of being effective agents of state power. As it happens, this is a good description of what child soldiers are made to do-commit atrocities before they have matured enough to have developed consciences. In the process, of course, there is every likelihood they will never develop consciences, and will remain wedded to violence for life.
Child soldiers represent just one diabolically clever development that has been enabled by the death of conquest. As has been much remarked recently, suicide bombers who, while not children, are also not fully-formed adults, comprise another. They are utterly low-tech yet hugely effective. Indeed, how many billions have we spent on precision-guided smart weapons, compared to how little Hamas or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (ltte) in Sri Lanka has invested in martyr-based munitions delivery systems? The purposes of both systems are roughly similar, and both are, or can be, very effective. They differ, however, in one important regard: precision-guided munitions are technologically sophisticated, most being properly described by the phrase "fire and forget"; suicide bombers, in contrast, iconize memory. With photos of martyred bombers plastered all over bedroom and living room walls, who can forget? . . .
Not only have we failed to study and understand a lot of ruthless tactical brilliance over the past half century, we have also discounted the proliferation and perfection of new strategically destructive means. Although weapons of mass destruction have long worried us, more labor-intensive lesser forms-like amputation, rape and mutilation-really have not. We have dismissed these acts as atavistic behavior of no real strategic significance. We did not see that such forms of destructiveness signified a new logic. We forgot that, thanks to conquest, the vanquished often survived-even if to be enslaved, sold or made to pay tribute. With the death of conquest, that is no longer possible. The unforeseen consequence? Enemies, targeted populations, victims-all might as well be considered of no use, so why not just abuse or eliminate them?
Couple this change with the fact that novel destructive forces, once unleashed, are extremely difficult to rein in, and we suddenly recognize a series of spiraling dangers before us that are much harder to reverse than any associated with conquest. As it is, halting conquest took us two world wars and a cold war to achieve. To do so required us to outwit, outproduce and outlast any that opposed us. Industry, technology, science and ingenuity were our strong suits; and moral argument our idiom. But now what do we do? How do we redeem child soldiers or glue suicide bombers back together? How do we stop this ever more threatening and demonic learning curve?
Worse than just being up against Al-Qaeda and other extremists, we are up against "progress" of a most pernicious sort. Al-Qaeda has managed to marry the local to the global better than any other anti-Western movement so far, and not just in technological and organizational terms, but ideologically as well. Islam is Osama bin Laden's ideological weapon of choice as he urges the umma of the world to unite. But he wields Islam not to conquer or subjugate, or even to convert-the uses to which Islam has historically been put-but to utterly destroy. Al-Qaeda has adopted our opposition to conquest and pushed it to its logical conclusion: can't conquer, so kill.