423. The Force to Go to War: Proposal of a Precise Measurement

Nothing, I think, would be more useful to historians than a precise measurement of the force that will make or let a president go to war.  I propose a scale in which the force on December 8, 1941 is 1.0.  I remember feeling that force around me. "You sneaky guys just killed thousands of my fellow Americans.  You see us Americans quarreling with each other and think we won't stick together, or last the long haul.  You think we're soft and stuck on making money.  Well stand by, you dirty bastards, here we come.  For whatever it takes for as long as it takes."  That's the top.  A president who resists a force like this will be removed from office.

All right, abbreviate the unit and you've got a convenient notation for force on the morning of 9-12-01, say .9PH.  And ahead of you are decimals for every date on which a president proposes war.  Say .6PH for the date of declaration of the Spanish-American War, .8PH for the Civil War, .4PH for the Mexican War, and .5PH for the First Iraq War.  Those are my numbers; the system will be just as useful to those who disagree and want to argue it out. 

In fact, the biggest payoff may be in discussion and argument.  Did Bush Sr. have to war against Saddam Hussein after he entered Kuwait?  "Of course.  Saddam's thumb would be on the world's oil artery in one more move.  Americans knew that.  Bush had .8PH on him."

As with any numerical scale this one needs empirical illustration.  Like "scattered whitecaps" for Force 3 (Gentle Breeze) on the Beaufort Scale. A conference on this would be illuminating.  What would be the political equivalent of a Fresh Breeze ("5, many whitecaps, some spray")?  a Gale? ("8, foam blown in streaks, twigs breaking off trees") a Hurricane? ("12, air filled with foam, sea completely white").  Would the political equivalent of a hurricane be streets filled with demonstrators, rioters, clamoring for military action?  If so, when a president  said, "I couldn't stand up against it"?" we could look out the window, take in the storm, and say to him (or her), "We understand.  We're with you."  He'd know history was going to be with him.

PH is not rigidly fixed.  Being, or being seen as, the nation attacked adds to it.  I'd say .2PH, on average.  Leaders knew this before they had an exact measurement, of course, and we see it in the common efforts to present the other side as the aggressor.  Even Hitler, invading Poland, made an attempt at it, putting bodies in Polish uniforms on the German side of the border, to be "discovered" before his troops crossed it.  It gained him only a very small PH, say .05, and that only with his own people, but it shows leaders' discomfort, and need to calculate such things.

I can hear PH in conversations among advisers.  Tune in Hitler's, pre-Poland, 1939: "Man, we don't need extra PH.  With the Versailles Treaty stoking such outrage and the Jewish commies taking over Hamburg and the Brits still riding high on their horse we've got all we need."

"Yeah, but the Boss, you know, he hates to throw away PH, even if it's only .05."

"OK, OK.  So get some bodies, dress 'em right, and we'll take the .05."

Starting a war you go with the PH you've got but during a war you've got to make adjustments.  Are your atrocities getting more play than the enemy's?  Get your PR people working on it.  Get your troops, if they can't reduce the savagery (ha, during what is essential savagery?), to at least try to hide it better.  Consider who's watching before they torture or demean a prisoner.  The PH differential can go as high here as .15 in favor of the side that does the better job.

Between wars your analysis can go deeper.  PH is so constantly either desired or bucked by leaders that we have a hard time thinking of it as separate from them.  But at some times and in some places we have a PH wind blowing and nobody to take advantage of it.  As in France now, with such big crowds clamoring for a change in government.  But no leader.  Nobody to take advantage of the wind and sail to a goal, and make his or her name.

Maybe the wind there is not strong enough to be worth the risk.  For a really strong, untapped force look to what's left over after the invasion of Afghanistan released the main charge ("Get those bastards who did this") provided by 9-11.  It wasn't like WW2, where we knocked the Japanese and the Germans flat, clearly getting the bastards.  We hadn't really gotten the bastards who destroyed the Twin Towers.  So George W. Bush has a high percentage of the force of 9-11 to call on. 

I can't think of a president with a comparable wind at his back.  His meter probably has it at .7PH.  And, remember, we're measuring mass emotion, never discriminating in its release.  It's OK to drive in the right general direction.  Your choice is an easy sell.

Bush chose to invade Iraq.  A once impossible sell made possible now by high PH and low information.  Other people with impossible sells weren't blind to what was happening.  There were the idealists in the liberal press keen to spread American values.  The glow of Thomas Friedman's vision of a country in the center of the Middle East demonstrating the power of democracy brightened by the day, and was fixed by recognition of his authority — Times columnist, author of a solid book on the region.  There were the Zionists thinking of what a nearby American army would do for their security.  There were the evangelicals sharing that thought, maybe, but clearly aroused by the chance to fight evil (now in the person of Saddam Hussein).  And there were the usual gang of males just eager to fight.  Mostly neocons here.  "Jump on, fellows.  This our chance."

If you doubt the presence and potency of the force I am talking about here you might try picturing these parties trying to sell the invasion of Iraq without it.  No leftover 9-11 PH to take advantage of.  Say it's 9-10.  "I propose that we invade Iraq in order to strengthen democracy in the Middle East."  "Let us invade Iraq in order to protect Israel."  "Let us invade Iraq and make some gains against evil."  Introduce the gale that failed to blow over the 9-11 bastards, put it behind your president, and you've got an invasion of Iraq backed by a majority of the American people, including many you counted on for caution and thought.  All complicit in what now, by consensus of the reflective center, is the dumbest thing America ever did.  (See Foreign Policy, 3-10-12.)