Casus Belli

You know you are getting old when an evening's entertainment consists of decaffeinated tea and a book by a noted historian.

In "A History of Warfare" John Keegan examines the notion of war as a continuation of politics - an idea formulated by Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz. World War One already discredited this idea - Europeans simply went starkers, and slaughtered each other wholesale after a century of Clauswitzian militarization. But Keegan's asserts that war is more accurately a continuation of culture.

He analyzes the Zulus, the Easter Island people, and samurai Japan, and finds evidence that these warlike nations fought to extend or preserve their culture, often with brutal finality.

Reading along, I sometimes had to stop myself. Politics and culture appear identical in a Red vs. Blue State era. Is our "culture war" a continuation of irreconcilable politics? If a Schnauzer and a Great Dane have more in common than Barbara Boxer and Tom Delay, is it only a matter of time before we pick up weapons?

Keegan's does better with history than recent events. The book, written in the mid-1990s, imagines an end to war, and has little to say about the asymmetrical nature of terrorism. But the template is easily applied. Do we choose to view the Western-Islamicist conflict as a matter of politics and policy, or a battle between cultures?