How the Empire Tells Itself It Was Robbed of the Wars It Lost
A Word the War Party Does Not Want Spoken
There is a story the empire tells itself whenever the body bags come home and the flags are folded and the maps are quietly redrawn. It is a tender story, and a flattering one, and like most flattering stories it is a lie. The story goes like this: America does not lose its wars on the battlefield. It loses them at the negotiating table. It loses them to timid presidents, to faithless diplomats, to a press that would not cheer loudly enough, to a people who grew weary of the killing before the killing had done its work. Had we only struck harder, stayed longer, dropped more, killed more, the story says, we would have won. The soldier was never beaten. He was betrayed.
I want to take this story seriously, because it is doing enormous work in our public life, and because the men who tell it are not fools. They are, many of them, sincere. They believe that force unfinished is force wasted, and that the only sin in war is the sin of restraint. The neoconservative voices who have shaped a generation of American foreign policy have made this argument the load-bearing wall of their whole project. When the realists answered the catastrophe of Iraq by counseling diplomacy, the neoconservatives accused them of wishing to “appease the aggressors who threaten us with bribes that reward their aggression.” The diplomat, in this telling, is not a peacemaker. He is a defeatist in a good suit.
So let us examine the story, not with the bitterness it deserves but with the patience the Gospel requires. For I am persuaded that the doctrine of the unfinished victory is not merely mistaken about history. It is a spiritual sickness, and it has a name, and we have seen where it leads before.
The Oldest Lie in the Armory
The argument that a nation was never truly defeated, only betrayed from within, is not an American invention. It is the Dolchstoßlegende, the “stab-in-the-back” legend, and it was forged in the ashes of the German defeat in 1918. The generals who had spent four years feeding their countrymen into the machinery of the Western Front could not bear to say that they had lost. So, they said instead that the army had been “undefeated in the field” and stabbed in the back by socialists, by pacifists, by Jews, by a defeatist home front that signed the armistice the generals themselves had requested. The legend was a deliberate fabrication, disseminated by the very military leadership most responsible for the disaster, who were seeking to avoid the consequences of their own policies.
It was also, as every serious historian now agrees, completely false. Germany had been ground down by blockade and exhaustion and the arrival of fresh American manpower; its high command knew the war could no longer be won and said so privately even as it blamed the home front publicly. The lie endured anyway, because it answered a need deeper than truth. The historian Richard N. Hunt observed that behind the myth lay not shame for starting the war but shame for losing it, the shame of weakness, and it was this poison that helped strangle the Weimar Republic in its cradle and lift up the man who promised that Germany would never be stabbed again.
I do not raise this to call the neoconservatives Nazis; that would be slander and I will not stoop to it. The American version, scholars are careful to note, generally lacks the murderous antisemitism of its German ancestor. But the shape of the argument is identical, and shapes have consequences. The historian Jeffrey Kimball wrote plainly that the American defeat in Vietnam produced a powerful myth of betrayal analogous to the archetypal Dolchstoßlegende of post-World War I Germany. The same hand reaches for the same dagger. We should know it when we see it, as I suspect we shall see it regarding Iran.
Vietnam, and the War That Was “Won”
Nowhere has the myth taken deeper root than in the long argument over Vietnam. Here the claim reached its purest form: that the American military never lost a battle, that South Vietnam was a viable state by 1972, and that the final collapse in 1975 was caused not by any failure of arms but by a faithless Congress that cut off aid and a public that lost its nerve. Revisionist historians such as Lewis Sorley have insisted, in the title phrase that launched a thousand op-eds, that “there came a time when the war was won. The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won.”
It is a seductive thesis, and we owe it an honest hearing. But the honest hearing does not survive contact with the evidence. Even sympathetic critics concede that Sorley’s case overlooks the central fact that South Vietnam depended on a permanent American crutch it could never throw away. The historian Fredrik Logevall, no propagandist, put the matter with devastating economy: “The war had to be won politically or not at all.” North Vietnam never faced a popular uprising, never struggled to collect its taxes or fill its ranks; South Vietnam could not command the loyalty of its own people, no matter how many of America’s sons died trying to purchase it for them. Colonel Harry Rothmann, examining the newly declassified files, the official army histories, and the captured communist documents, concluded that the war was “hardly won by 1972”; what looked like victory was a pause, during which Hanoi rebuilt its forces for the offensive that would finish the job.
John Prados, surveying the whole bitter record, framed the question that ought to chasten every armchair general: the military never lost a battle, so how did it not win the war? The answer is that battles are not wars, and tonnage is not victory, and a people determined to govern themselves cannot be bombed into loving their occupiers. The United States dropped more ordnance on Indochina than all sides dropped in all of the Second World War. It killed more than a million people. If more force were the missing ingredient, there was force in abundance, and it did not avail. The dagger was never in the back. The wound was in the strategy, and in the soul.
What the Doctrine Cannot See
This is the heart of the matter, and it is finally a matter of the heart. The doctrine of the unfinished victory cannot conceive that some wars are unwinnable by their nature, that the thing being sought, a stable, legitimate government held up by foreign bayonets in a land that does not want it, simply does not exist to be won, however hard one strikes for it. C. Dale Walton, even in defending the war’s winnability, was forced to concede that it was lost through a long chain of decisions, each one a choice. The myth answers every defeat with a single prescription, more, because it cannot bear the alternative, which is to ask whether the war should have been fought at all.
And here the scholar of war and the disciple of the Lamb arrive, by different roads, at the same crossroad. There is a recent and sober warning from the academy that “wars are rarely lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders’ minds, when leaders misread what they and their adversaries can do, when their confidence substitutes for comprehension.” The deadliest force in any war is not the enemy’s. It is the overconfidence of the man who believes that one more turn of the screw will deliver the surrender that has eluded him all along. The doctrine of the unfinished victory is overconfidence raised to a creed. It guarantees the next war by refusing to learn from the last.
The Sword That Devours
Now I must speak as what I am, which is not a strategist, but a citizen of the empire commanded by his Lord to tell the truth about the violence his nation funds and blesses. The neoconservative claim is not only bad history. It is a temptation, of the most ancient kind, and Scripture named it long before the think tanks did. “All who draw the sword will die by the sword,” our Lord said to Peter in the garden. The myth of the unfinished victory is the precise inversion of that teaching. It says: all who draw the sword have not drawn it hard enough. It promises that the sword’s failures are always failures of insufficient sword.
But the sword does not run out of victims before it runs out of victories. The desire within the war party is the desire never to have been wrong, never to have spent those lives for nothing, and so it must always insist that the next expenditure will redeem the last. This is not the arithmetic of the Kingdom. It is the arithmetic of the gambler at the table at three in the morning, certain that the winning hand is the very next one, who cannot leave because leaving means admitting all that has already been lost.
The Prince of Peace offers us another way, and it begins with the hardest confession a powerful nation can make, that there are wars no amount of force could have won, because they ought never to have been begun, and that the negotiating table is not where victory is stolen but where the bleeding is at last allowed to stop. “He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth,” sings the Psalmist, and He has appointed for that work no missile and no occupation, but a people willing to lay the sword down, and to say without shame that they were not betrayed at the table. They were saved there, from the deeper defeat of fighting on.
Let us be those people. Let us refuse the flattering lie and tell the truth that sets humanity free.
Praise Be to God.
