Metro Pulse/Secret History/Doomed Fury

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What makes outnumbered soldiers fight for tyrants?

by Jack Neely

We weren't greeted by grateful surrenders and cheering crowds, as Vice President Cheney suggested we would be. Is that a surprise to anybody?

Picture this hypothetical scenario. A large, powerful nation—let's call it, for the sake of argument, the United States—makes war on a primitive agrarian country. There is an economic motive for war, having to do with control of the smaller country's chief export, but one excuse for war is that the leaders of the primitive agrarian country are morally corrupt and cruelly oppressing their own people. Due to the territorial ambitions of the smaller country's chieftains, there is reason to believe that the oppression could spread beyond their boundaries.

The smaller country is far behind the U.S. in every category from manufacturing to population to firepower to literacy. It's also known to be splintered into racial, class, and political factions opposed to each other, with deep working-class resentments of the tyrants at the top. The U.S. Army's numbers are so great, their industry and technology so advanced, and their cause so obviously just, that many are confident that the fragmented smaller nation will disintegrate and capitulate, perhaps even welcome U.S. troops as liberators. The war will be over in weeks. Some U.S. civilians expect to view it as entertainment.

But once the real fighting starts, the U.S. is astonished at the fury of the resistance. Even peasants take up arms to defend the powerful, those who had recently seemed like resented oppressors. Many, in fact, seem willing to die for the cause. They are fundamentalist religious people who believe that, despite their immoral institutions, God is on their side. They attack the foreigners against impossible odds, running toward the guns in wave after wave, and die by the hundreds, mown down in plain sight.

When asked why they're fighting, the soldiers of the smaller nation are known to respond, "Because you're here."

Things get worse. The U.S. accuses the smaller nation of war crimes, especially of mistreating of U.S. prisoners of war and killing civilians who refuse to fight. The U.S. hammers away at the enemy capital, hoping to decapitate the fragile hierarchy, but the enemy president evades capture. Desperately, the U.S. resorts to unusual tactics, targeting civilian institutions, destroying bridges and residences and communications centers and cities.

The war goes on for four years. Three-quarters of a million people die. It's not over even then. The military occupation lasts 12 years. The nation-building strategies go awry. There is deep resentment of the war's impact on innocent civilians, and of U.S. occupation, which spawns terrorism on a scale never before seen on the continent. Thousands die in postwar assassinations. More than a century after the war, its divisions are still cause for resentment. The colors of the defeated country still fly above its courthouses.

I admit that the comparisons between the American Civil War and the invasion of Iraq are limited. The Southern states were working on no weapons of mass destruction. The Confederates' sin was not genocide, but slavery, which had once been the rule, rather than the exception, in this hemisphere, and was still common in much of the world. I don't know for sure, but I bet Jefferson Davis was overall a nicer guy than Saddam Hussein.

Still, I suspect the Iraqi peasants, fighting for a tyrant who is, at least, their tyrant, have a lot in common with the Confederate infantryman. It is, for better or worse, human nature: no man born of woman takes kindly to foreigners calling their institutions and leaders "evil." They're especially unhappy if those foreigners invade their country for the purpose of improving it.

Southern apologists are known to insist that the Confederate Army wasn't fighting to preserve slavery, even though slavery was the motive their leaders cited for secession. From letters and slavery-ownership statistics, it seems clear that thousands of Confederate soldiers were neutral on the slavery issue. A few, even in the military leadership, were de facto abolitionists. Gen. Pat Cleburne, who was in Knoxville early in the war, made a formal proposal, signed by several other Confederate officers, to abolish slavery. But he didn't stop fighting the Yankee invaders. A few months after his bold proposal, he died for the Southern cause at Franklin.

The rebels knew they were doomed, and some of them knew their cause was wrong, but they fought to the death.

Their doomed fury is relevant not only to the prosecution of the war, but to what comes after, whether it can be called peace or not.

Reconstruction, as costly as it was, was bungled, leaving simmering resentments that lasted for generations. That's the best reason I can think of to explain the fact that the flag of a country that existed for only four years is still so fiercely loved and hated. And of the fact that we still see headlines like the one that appeared in the daily last Wednesday: "Confederate officer reinstated to position." As it turns out, there is still, in 2003, a "commander of the Army of Northern Virginia," and from the sound of it, the position is even more bitterly coveted today than it was when it was held by Robert E. Lee. The Sons of Confederate Veterans is 32,000 strong. To some, after 140 years, the war's not yet over.

We can only hope our latest war's end is more conclusive. And comes sooner.