FROM ROBESPIERRE TO ISIS

Gertrude Himmelfarb

The war on terror is over, the president assured us a year ago. Now, we are told, that war is very much with us and will be pursued with all due diligence. The president was obviously responding to the polls reflecting the disapproval of the public, but also to critics in his own party. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sadly commented on his admission that he had “no strategy yet”: “I think I’ve learned one thing about this president, and that is: He’s very cautious—maybe in this instance too cautious.”

The execution of Robespierre

Two centuries ago, in the midst of another “war on terror”—or so he thought of it—Edmund Burke rebuked his prime minister for a similar failing. He had admired William Pitt for his leadership in the war with France, but now, out of excessive caution, Pitt was seeking peace with that “regicide” regime. “There is a courageous wisdom,” Burke wrote in his “Letters on a Regicide Peace,” but “there is also a false reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear. Under misfortunes it often happens that the nerves of the understanding are so relaxed, the pressing peril of the hour so completely confounds all the faculties, that no future danger can be properly provided for, can be justly estimated, can be so much as fully seen.”

That misplaced caution, or false prudence, was all the more serious in the case of a “great state” like England, which had to behave in a manner commensurate with its power.

The rules and definitions of prudence can rarely be exact; never universal. I do not deny that in small truckling states a timely compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means, of drawling out their puny existence; but a great state is too much envied, too much dreaded, to find safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be respected. Power, and eminence, and consideration, are things not to be begged. They must be commanded: and they who supplicate for mercy from others can never hope for justice through themselves.

It is an odd argument to come from Burke, and perhaps the more telling for that. If there is any one political principle associated with Burke, it is prudence. “Letters on a Regicide Peace” was written in 1796. Five years earlier, in his “Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” he had pronounced prudence the first of all virtues. “Prudence is not only first in rank of the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all.” But prudence was associated with a corollary principle, “circumstances,” which determine what is wise and prudent in any particular situation. On this occasion, in a war with an implacable enemy, a misplaced prudence was not a virtue but a fatal flaw.

The war with France was such an occasion, Burke believed, because France was the consummate enemy, the very embodiment of terror. The idea of the “Reign of Terror” (la Grande Terreur) was not, as some have suggested, the invention of disaffected emigrés or hostile historians. “Terror” was the term the revolutionaries publicly and proudly applied to themselves. In December 1793, with the executions well under way (they amounted to 30,000 or more in a two-year period), the “Constitution of the Terror” officially inaugurated the “Government of the Terror.” Robespierre, the head of the Committee of Public Safety, explained why terror was the necessary instrument of the revolution—the “Republic of Virtue,” as he saw it. “If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.” (Robespierre was executed shortly after, one of the notable victims of the Terror.)

Burke agreed with Robespierre about this, if about nothing else: There was a necessary connection between the revolution and terror, as there was between the Revolutionary Wars and terror. Burke’s “Letters on a Regicide Peace” (like his Reflections on the Revolution in France) may be accused of hyperbole. But if his account of the “scourge and terror” of the Revolutionary Wars seems exaggerated, it is not at all exaggerated applied to the current wars waged by the Islamic State. Indeed, it is uncannily prescient. With only slight changes of wording, we can adapt and update Burke’s tract. “Out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France [read: “Out of the womb of the murderous Islamic State”] has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man.” (One can also imagine the Islamic State, as it imposes sharia law upon its terrain, assuming for itself the title of “Republic of Virtue.”)

It was not only a murderous war, Burke insisted, it was a “peculiar” war, and that made it all the more threatening.

We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not with an ordinary community, which is hostile or friendly as passion or as interest may veer about; not with a State which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude. We are at war with a system, which, by its essence, is inimical to all other Governments, and which makes peace or war, as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion, and of interest, and of enthusiasm, in every country. To us it is a Colossus which bestrides our channel. It has one foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil.

Burke’s words can be echoed almost exactly today, for it is just such a peculiar war we are waging against just such a peculiar enemy. The Islamic State is not an ordinary state with which we can negotiate or compromise, not a “manageable problem” we can resolve gradually and temperately, but an “armed doctrine,” a “system,” a “faction of opinion,” which knows no compromise and cannot be managed. With such an enemy, there cannot be a “red line” defining how far, and no further, we may go; a “no troops on the ground” policy, limiting our involvement in the war; an “end-of-war” strategy that prescribes at the outset when and how the war will be terminated. On the contrary, a war with such an enemy is a total war—and, Burke insisted, a “long war” (his italics). “I speak it emphatically, and with a desire that it should be marked, in a long war; because, without such a war, no experience has yet told us, that a dangerous power has ever been reduced to measure or to reason.” The purpose of the war must be nothing less than to “destroy that enemy” or it will “destroy all Europe,” and to do so “the force opposed to it should be made to bear some analogy and resemblance to the force and spirit which that system exerts.”

The pamphlet containing the two “Letters on a Regicide Peace,” published in October 1796, was Burke’s last published work. He died the following year. (Two other letters were published posthumously.) He had described himself to a friend as “a dejected old man, buried in an anticipated grave of a feeble old age, forgetting and forgotten in an obscure and melancholy retreat.” The “Letters on a Regicide Peace” gives no hint of that. It is as bold and vigorous as the Reflections—and it was surprisingly popular, considering the fact that Burke was urging upon England a long, dangerous, and costly war. The mood of the American public today, to judge by the polls, should be receptive to his message, understanding our war on terror as he understood his, and willing to pursue it with the commitment and energy it deserves.