There has been a great deal of press regarding the now official civil war in Syria. Harrowing reports emerge daily of the mounting casualties and horrific destruction taking place in that country. The U.S., its allies, and any other nation that can be roped into the conflict by the West are decrying the violence and calling for an end to hostilities. The onus for ending the war has been placed firmly on the government in Damascus but Syrian President Bashar Assad has so far rebuffed international calls for a cease fire. He has also rejected the idea of negotiating an end to the fighting. He is determined to end the conflict on his own terms. To that end he continues to pound rebel strongholds, indifferent to the mounting destruction and growing number of civilian casualties.
To contemporary Western sensibilities, the violence in Syria is appalling. Most in the West have become accustomed to the clockwork warfare made possible by advances in science. State of the art technology allows intelligence to be gathered and targets to be selected in real time. Precision munitions allow those targets to be carefully destroyed with minimal collateral damage. For the U.S. anyway, massive artillery barrages, aerial bombardment, and large scale assaults are no longer necessary. In their stead we have a carefully plotted and tightly focused approach to war. Indeed, it is almost sterile. We did not need to carpet bomb Baghdad to achieve our objectives. Laser guided munitions and cruise missiles were quite enough. Easy as it is to be distracted by the technological wizardry available to the U.S., it is understandable if the modern spectator has come to view the siege and bombardment of cities as border line barbarism.
Civil war is hell. The U.S. of all nations should know that. The Civil War was the costliest and bloodiest war the U.S. ever fought. In one day at the Battle of Antietam, 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were injured and killed. It was the bitterest battle in the bitterest war in U.S. history. At the time of the Civil War, the population of the U.S. stood at little over thirty million. Most of those, 22 million, lived in Union states. By the time the war ended in 1865, it has been estimated that over 618,000 soldiers on both sides perished. There is no accurate count of civilian deaths directly attributable to combat, but the number was substantial. Conservative estimates put the number at around 50,000. The fact that most of the civilian deaths during the war were due to disease and hardship rather than the direct result of fighting should be of no solace.
The economic costs of the war were staggering, especially for the rebels. Cities were laid waste. Harbors and factories were destroyed. Rail road track were ripped up. Crops were burned. General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea alone resulted in over $1.3 billion in economic damage to the Confederacy by today's dollar. It was the birth of total war. What are the odds that the Union would have let U.N. inspectors, had the U.N. existed at the time, into Andersonville? How do you suppose the North would have responded to U.N. demands that it lift the siege of Richmond to allow in humanitarian supplies? Indeed, what is the point of a siege if you are going to let supplies in?
There was no television or internet in 1862. If there had been you can be sure that the carnage taking place in the Civil War would have been met with international outcry and urgent calls to end the violence. There was no U.N in 1862. Had there been there would have been resolutions passed calling for the suspension of hostilities and a negotiated end to the conflict. There might even have been economic sanctions placed on the Union. Perhaps there might have even been motions put forward to aid the Confederacy in order to "level the playing field". After all, the world's most powerful nation at the time, Great Britain, stood to gain considerably if the war ended with the Confederacy intact. Naturally, the Union rebuffed all calls for a suspension of hostilities or a negotiated settlement to the war. A government is not obliged to negotiate with rebels. For the Union, there was only one acceptable outcome to the war: total victory. It was willing to kill civilians and burn cities to the ground to obtain it.
After burning his way through the agricultural heartland of Virginia, Union General Phillip Sheridan surveyed the devastation caused by his troops and boasted that so thorough was his campaign that, to fly across the Shenandoah valley, a crow would have to carry its own lunch. The thought of hungry and homeless Confederate women and children only added relish to his victory. Many Union officers and soldiers no doubt looked on in delight as they watched the city of Richmond burn. General William Tecumseh Sherman, a hard drinking and notoriously violent Union commander who, after the war, earned additional laurels for his ethnic cleansing campaigns in the West, famously said "war is hell". That is a notion increasingly foreign to the comfortable Western mind. We forget that to our own peril. The West needs to remember that wars are not always cool, calculated events unfolding along carefully laid out lines. War, especially civil war, is nasty business. It always has been and it always will be.
