In Son of the Morning Star, his epic account of the Little Bighorn rout, Evan S. Connell reports a last, possibly apocryphal quote from George Armstrong Custer, relayed by an orderly to a subordinate officer. After surveying the four-mile-long village in the valley below, filled with as many as 8,000 Sioux, Cheyennes and other Indians, Custer supposedly bellowed, "Hurrah, boys, we've got them!" Connell observes: "If indeed Custer made such a remark after sighting the greatest concentration of militant Indians in the history of North America, it sounds like a joke from an old vaudeville routine."
It matters little whether or not Custer said it, because he acted as if he had, and paid for it. Connell views his foolhardiness as typical of two ageless traits, reckless bravado and the reluctance to learn. In more recent years, we've seen a similarly ridiculous burlesque unfold on the USS Lincoln, under the banner "Mission Accomplished!"
Hurrah boys, we've got them. For the moment.
Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher to whom The Art of War is attributed, might have smiled bemusedly at either proclamation. As translator Thomas Cleary notes in his preface to the Shambhala Pocket Classics edition, The Art of War teases Taoist principles of paradox; Cleary, in fact, considers it anti-war. More to the point, it espouses victory without fighting, whether by diplomacy or by deranging the opponent. It advises the wise use of intelligence about the foe and keeping the foe guessing about your intentions. And, most basically, it warns against fighting battles you cannot win.
Custer was not one to heed such advice. Connell, who centers his tale in America's sorry relations with its aboriginal population, writes that Custer once shared a peace pipe with two chiefs, who warned him that attacking Cheyennes would produce his death. After the battle, two Cheyenne women pierced Custer's ears so that he might hear better in the next life. Had he minded his Sun Tzu, he might have learned not to attack great formations, and to control his emotions: "Using order to deal with the disorderly, using calm to deal with the clamorous, is mastering the heart."
Our president, sage enough to defend the Gulf of Mexico during the Vietnam conflict, later pitched the nation on Custer's path. A few points from The Art of War he might have heeded:
• "When you do battle, even if you are winning, if you continue for a long time it will dull your forces and blunt your edge ..."
• "... [I]t is better to keep an army intact than to destroy it ..."
• "... [T]hose who win every battle are not really skillful—those who render others' armies helpless without fighting are best of all."
Instead, his enemy, and ours, seems to appreciate that "the few are those on the defensive against others, the many are those who cause others to be on the defensive against themselves." We discovered this again last week, shedding our shampoo with our shoes in airport queues, thanks to a little man in a Pakistani cave.
In the September Atlantic Monthly, published before the British nabbed two dozen terror plotters, James Fallows suggests that we declare victory in the war on terror, "because al-Qaeda's ability to inflict direct damage in America or on Americans has been sharply reduced." The British plot seems to undercut that thesis, until you reflect that it was, after all, thwarted. "Yes, there could be another attack tomorrow, and most authorities assume that some attempts to blow up trains, bridges, buildings or airplanes in America will eventually succeed," Fallows writes. But the longer we accord "war" status to a struggle that requires knowledge, craftiness and diplomacy, the more we strengthen our opponents.
The foreign-policy and anti-terrorism experts Fallows interviews almost unanimously agree that the war in Iraq has exacerbated our problems, by angering moderate Muslims and breeding terrorists. It is precisely the sort of trap Sun Tzu warns about, and nearly the one bin Laden hoped we'd stumble into. He'd hoped we'd mire ourselves, like the Soviets, in Afghanistan. Instead, we wiped out his training camps there, but let him flee as we sauntered into another disaster.
If indeed bin Laden still trains terrorists and directs their actions from his new warren, as some have argued over the past week, why? What have we done in the past five years of this "war"? Why are we bleeding in Iraq while this weasel lives in Pakistan?
As with the questions surrounding Custer's blunder, we might never know the answers to these. But clearly emotion has overruled reason, we've failed to understand our enemies, and we have charged gallantly into catastrophe.
It might not be our last stand, but it could be our last hurrah.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.