by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/p>\n A prominent Syrian rebel commander with the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar recently appeared on YouTube cutting open the chest of a dead government soldier, pulling something out of it\u2014the heart or perhaps a lung\u2014and taking a bite. Abu Sakkar claimed that such cannibalism was an appropriate psychological payback for the crimes of Bashar Assad’s troops, who have recorded videos of their own atrocities. “I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers,” Abu Sakkar promises in the gruesome clip.<\/p>\n Barbarity is now commonplace in the Syrian war. Some 80,000 Syrians have been killed since the Arab Spring arrived in March 2011, and unknown numbers have been tortured and maimed. Many expected that Assad would follow the relatively rapid demise of fellow Arab kleptocrats like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. But buoyed by Russian arms, Iranian money and agents, and Hezbollah terrorists, Assad has hung on as more than a million Syrians have fled the country.<\/p>\n According to reports, he is close to achieving a stalemate, and he is even capable of launching aggressive counteroffensives, as in the heavy recent fighting for Qusayr near the Lebanon border. Thus atrocities and counter-atrocities grow\u2014and the world wonders why Syrian fighters seem especially prone to premodern brutality.<\/p>\n The truth is that atrocity is common in war, ancient and modern. King Xerxes had the slain Spartan hero Leonidas decapitated after the Greek defeat at Thermopylae and his head impaled on a stake. One of the most chilling passages in William H. Prescott’s classic history of the ruthless Spanish destruction of the Aztec Empire is the sight of 62 captured conquistadors atop the Great Pyramid at Tenochtitlan in ceremonial garb, ready to be sacrificed by having their hearts torn out.<\/p>\n The habit of Vlad III, Prince of Walachia, of impaling his captured enemies inspired Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” E.B. Sledge’s brilliant World War II memoir of island fighting in the Pacific, “With the Old Breed,” cites incidents of lopped off genitals. And while Sledge makes the case that the Japanese were more prone to mutilate the dead than were the Americans, he saw enough barbarity among his fellow Marines to leave him depressed over human depravity.<\/p>\n Some wars are more likely to see routine sadism of the Syrian type than are others. The humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib stirred revulsion among the American public, but on history’s scale of atrocities it was not remotely in the same league as what occurred in the Rwanda genocide in 1994, the Iran-Iraq War or the Soviet fighting in Afghanistan during the 1980s, or the Balkan nightmare of the 1990s.<\/p>\n One way to ensure brutal cycles of violence is to prolong fighting. Mubarak was toppled quickly. Had he turned the army against the protesters and incited a civil war, the grotesque episodes we see in Syria might have become commonplace in Egypt. The Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel fought back against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, lacked the horrendous violence of the drawn-out conflict in South Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, the PLO and others that lasted from 1982 to 2000.<\/p>\n Unconventional and undeclared fighting\u2014marked by terrorism, insurgency and Mogadishu-like irregulars\u2014are also force multipliers of atrocity. Professional soldiers, while adept at industrialized brutality, are still more likely than rebels or militias to accept a rough code of conduct. During trench warfare or armor-led attacks and counterattacks, civilians were not as likely targeted or to take up arms. World War I was far more lethal to American troops than was the much longer Philippine insurrection between 1899 and 1913. Yet the latter’s primitive slaughter outraged the American people in a way that even the horrendous machine-gunning in Belgium and France had not.<\/p>\n Other criteria also influence the levels of atrocity. Consensual societies are more likely to hold their soldiers accountable, given a free electorate and press. The Allies firebombed civilian centers during World War II, but setting up anything like Hitler’s industrial death camps would have been virtually impossible, even if the Allies had, unthinkably, been so disposed. Kaiser Wilhelm II was no liberal reformer, yet even the shadow of a Reichstag in 1914 Germany made imperial soldiers less likely to torture and maim than were their sons in the totalitarian-driven Third Reich.<\/p>\n Finally, “war” is a loose abstraction that can include everything from the Falklands campaign (“a fight between two bald men over a comb” in the famous quip of the Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges) to the horrific 14-year Japanese on-and-off war in Manchuria that eventually saw 10 million perish. When the struggle is not prompted by an uninhabited rocky island, a disputed border, or a soccer match, but rather involves medieval Christian Crusaders versus Muslims for the religious future of the Middle East, the fate of the American or Australian frontier, or the extinction of millions in Europe, these total wars can become totally barbarous given that the alternative to victory is not defeat, but often extinction or slavery.<\/p>\n The Syrian war meets many of military history’s criteria of barbarism. We are witnessing a third year of the fighting, marked by roving bands rather than a formal duel between uniformed soldiers squared off on either side of no-man’s land.<\/p>\n Neither side\u2014if there are indeed two sides, rather than four or five\u2014is democratic. Both Syrian soldiers and militias know there is scant chance of postwar punishment for their barbarism. The killing is not merely over the future of Syria: It is also a religious struggle between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, framed by a parallel fight between Baathist authoritarianism and theocratic Islamism.<\/p>\n The losers surely expect something worse than defeat\u2014all they need to do is remember Hafez Assad’s 1982 massacre of rebels in Hama and the city’s near-razing to sense what might await. There will be more Abu Sakkars before this savage war is over.<\/p>\n Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His most recent book, “The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost\u2014From Ancient Greece to Iraq,” is just out from Bloomsbury.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Wall Street Journal A prominent Syrian rebel commander with the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar recently appeared on YouTube cutting open the chest of a dead government soldier, pulling something out of it\u2014the heart or perhaps a lung\u2014and taking a bite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[194,576],"tags":[877,249,878,173,1028,228,1041,1016,605,1030],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1yS","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4443,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-noose-tightens\/","url_meta":{"origin":6006,"position":0},"title":"The Noose Tightens","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 28, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services His new Middle East neighborhood cannot make Syria's dictator Bashar Assad very happy. Turkey is democratic to his north. A million Arabs vote in Israel to the south. Palestinians are near civil war to establish democratic rule \u2014 their own terrorists more a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2005"","block_context":{"text":"March 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/march-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":924,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syrian-ironies\/","url_meta":{"origin":6006,"position":1},"title":"Syrian Ironies","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The more Bashar Assad butchers Syrian dissidents, the more the world community expresses outrage \u2014 while it does little to stop the bloodletting. Why? Ironies on top of ironies 1.\u00a0The politics of intervention. Republicans might seem the most likely to push for an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6376,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syrian-surrealities\/","url_meta":{"origin":6006,"position":2},"title":"Syrian Surrealities","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner Once again we are trying to rally the American people about the dangers of purported WMD use; this time around, the Syrians may be doing to their own what Saddam Hussein most certainly did to the Kurds.\u00a0John Kerry gave an impassioned speech that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":902,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/christians-jihadists-and-the-fate-of-syria\/","url_meta":{"origin":6006,"position":3},"title":"Christians, Jihadists, and the Fate of Syria","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Stonegate Institute What is the alternative to Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria? 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Christian minorities, who, at 10% of the Syrian population, have the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6442,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/syrian-knowns-and-unknowns\/","url_meta":{"origin":6006,"position":4},"title":"Syrian Knowns and Unknowns","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media \u00a0 1)\u00a0Red lines:\u00a0Does anyone believe we would be on the eve of a war with Syria had not Barack Obama on two occasions \u2014 echoed on two others by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton \u2014\u00a0warned Bashar Assad of red lines\u00a0surrounding the use of WMD?\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/syria-war_protestor_9-8-13-2-200x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6491,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-box-canyon\/","url_meta":{"origin":6006,"position":5},"title":"Obama’s Box Canyon","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Our Hamlet-in-cheif wanted simultaneously to act and not act. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online The Syrian fiasco arose from two mutually contradictory desires. 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