Free War: What is it good for? by Ian Morris Page A

management made states more efficient, safer, and richer, and the resulting efficient, safe, and rich states gave managers the tools they needed to compete with rival states. This, though, forced the managers to turn back into warriors who could put their rivals out of business—violently.
    Can We All Get Along?
    In April 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, just outside Los Angeles, reached a surprising decision. They had watched a videotape showing police landing fifty-six baton blows and six kicks on Rodney King during his arrest after a high-speed car chase. They had heard from doctors that King had suffered a facial fracture and broken ankle. They had listened while nurses reported that the police officers who brought King to the hospital had jokedabout his beating. And then they acquitted three of the defendants and failed to reach a verdict on the fourth.
    That evening, riots broke out in Los Angeles and in the next few days spread across the United States. Fifty-three people were killed, more than two thousand were injured, and a billion dollars’ worth of property was destroyed. On the third day of violence, King went on television and asked one of the most famous questions of the decade: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible?”
    It is a good question, which people must have asked in ancient times too. Instead of working their way toward peace through the violent, wasteland-making process of war, could they not have just sat down together, agreed to create larger organizations, drawn up rules, handed over taxes to fund enforcement, and got along?
    Apparently not. “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” Winston Churchill once said, but in all the archives of ancient history it is hard to find a single convincing case of people agreeing to come together in a larger society without being compelled to do so by violence, actual or feared.
    Take the case of Philip of Pergamum, whose account of how war, piracy, and banditry had ruined the Greek world in the first century B.C. I mentioned a few pages ago. “With my pious hand I delivered this [history] to the Greeks,” he explained, “so that … by observing the sufferings of others, they may live their lives in the right way.” The Greeks, however, were unimpressed and went on killing each other. When they did stop, it was not because of Philip’s jaw-jaw; it was because of Roman war-war.
    In 67 B.C. , the Roman senate sent Gnaeus Pompey (known, with some cause, as “the Great”) to crush the pirates who infested Greek waters. As usual, they did this not out of benevolence but out of self-interest. The raids had gotten so bad that in 77 B.C. one band had kidnapped the young Julius Caesar (who joked with his captors that when he was ransomed, he would come back and crucify them, which, of course, he did). By the early 60s B.C. , other bands were even raiding Italy’s harbors.
    The Greek cities had completely failed to suppress the violence, but Pompey brought Roman organization and a surprisingly modern approach to bear. In 2006, bloodied by reverses in Iraq, the U.S. Army adopted a new counterinsurgency doctrine known as “clear, hold, and build.” Instead of focusing on killing or capturing troublemakers, soldiers switched to sweeping them out of an area, securing it, and reconstructing it, before moving methodically on to the next area. By 2009, violent deaths had fallen morethan 80 percent. Pompey figured out the same strategy two thousand years earlier. He divided the Mediterranean into thirteen sectors and in a single summer worked through them one by one, clearing, holding, and building ( Figure 1.5 ). Instead of crucifying the twenty thousand ex-freebooters he rounded up, Pompey imposed peace on them. “Wild animals,” his biographer wrote, “often lose their fierceness and savagery when subjected to a