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Lieutenant General Josiah Bunting III

Violence, Aggression,
and Domination

EDITORS’ NOTE

Lieutenant General Josiah Bunting, III, assumed his current post in 2004, after serving for eight years as Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, and he serves concurrently as Chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, as President of the Lehrman American Studies Center, and as a board member for The National Endowment of the Humanities. He is a graduate of VMI and studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and at Columbia University as a John Burgess Fellow. Also a published author, he is currently writing a book on General George Marshall, which will be out this year. Bunting served on active duty for eight years in the U.S. Army.

Foundation Brief

Founded by Harry Guggenheim, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (www.hfg.org) sponsors scholarly research on issues of violence, aggression, and dominance in society, by providing research grants to established scholars and dissertation fellowships to graduate students. The foundation also encourages related research in neuroscience, genetics, animal behavior, social sciences, history, criminology, and the humanities. Grants have been made to study aspects of violence related to youth; family relationships; media effects; crime; biological factors; intergroup conflict related to religion, ethnicity, and nationalism; and political violence deployed in war and substate terrorism, as well as processes of peace and the control of aggression.

The Guggenheim name is famous throughout the world.

This is one of the great American families, which has wisely used its fortune for good purposes. The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation was brought into being with a specific mission of investigating the human propensity for violence, aggression, and domination. We are interested not only in diagnoses, but also in prescriptions – finding out how we can ameliorate some of the things we diagnose.

And how can we?

We believe that once the public and people who make policy are informed, eventually, people leaven the lump and do some good. As a private individual educated as a historian, I’m relatively gloomy about the prospects of serious amelioration of international violence. We don’t seem to learn from the lessons of history.

That is not to say we aren’t confident in the foundation. We have done things that have useful and demonstrable results. We recently put on two large conferences in the United States: One was on conscription and the other was called “Imagining The Next War.” We’ll hold a conference this year on the Middle Eastern tribal system and the role it plays in politics in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. At these conferences, we bring together leaders, practitioners, senators, generals, ambassadors, scholars, and independent writers. For three or four days, 20 people who have thought long and hard on an issue take a discussion out of the political arena and say exactly what they think.

Your upcoming conference is one that Middle Eastern leaders might find troubling.

It will be provocative. Among the attendees, we hope to have two or three tribal leaders, active members of the American military, and scholars of the Middle East. The role of tribal leadership in Iraq is something people talk about, but don’t know much about.

You’re going to make a lot of waves.

The more waves, the better. Having served in Vietnam and having been through that uproarious time in our history, I see that the war in Iraq exists as a dull toothache we think we can deal with later on. It has not captured the American public in the way that it should have. The war in Iraq is an off-stage unpleasantness about which most Americans know nowhere near as much as they should.

Violence is seemingly inevitable and has been around since the beginning of time. Can you really make a dent in that?

I’m not certain, but that does not relieve us of the responsibility to keep trying. Corollary to that is the search for strong military leaders who have resisted the temptation to take a country into war. Eisenhower is a wonderful example. When people argued with him about the United States getting involved in Indochina – what would eventually become Vietnam – he said it would be a mistake. Ultimately, an important role of a foundation like ours is to immunize elected leaders against the determination that going to war will solve a problem. It’s a very difficult thing to do.

One could say the United States attacked Iraq without understanding its future enemy.

I don’t know if a better example exists. The United States simply does not have a reflective interest in situations widely different from our own. We tend to make judgments as though we will easily prevail and our advanced, technological society will guarantee our victory. In fact, it ain’t so.

Why don’t those in public office take a different stance?

Most of them are getting their advice from ideological people who have a tendency to identify what they think the views of the President or the Prime Minister should be. Harry Truman had very few political debts after he was elected in 1948 and, as a result, tended to make very wise decisions based on his own objective sense, with far less fear that his decisions would get him into political trouble.

Where are the Harry Trumans of today?

They are running large corporations and universities – doing other important and interesting things. Very few of them are motivated to go into electoral politics. Here’s something really gloomy: At a time when the population of this country was smaller than that of Dayton, Ohio, we simultaneously had leaders like Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Franklin. How about that?

Interview by Henry O. Dormann