When August goes

On June 28, 1914, a bumbling gang of assassins failed to kill Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, on his trip to the troubled region of Bosnia-Herzegovina. One disheartened member lingered at a coffee shop in Sarajevo, when up pulled the archduke's automobile. His driver had made a wrong turn. But Gavrilo Princip pulled his pistol and fatally wounded Francis Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie. By August 1st, this tragedy in a small corner of Europe had ignited the First World War. By its end, at least 37 million soldiers and civilians were dead, three empires had been toppled and a fourth had been lethally wounded. In the imposing ossuary on the Verdun battlefield alone, you can look through recessed windows at the remains of 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers.

For the rest of the 20th century we lived in the dark shadow of the Great War. The bungled peace of the "war to end all wars" led directly to World War II. Germany's dispatch of Lenin in a sealed train, like a deadly bacillus, back to St. Petersburg brought on the Bolshevik Revolution and eventually a nuclear standoff with the Free World that threatened humanity's extinction. The confidence of the West was forever shattered. Nationalism and tribalism were unleashed, usually with deadly consequences.

It was perhaps fitting, then, that the last British veteran of the Great War, Harry Patch, died on the cusp of August, allowed the gift of years that had been denied so large a portion of his generation. (A common inscription found on the war monuments dotting villages in the U.K: "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for their tomorrow, we gave our today.").

Yet the equally fitting verse came from Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in the war: "If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied."

With its trench warfare, massed infantry charges against machine guns and high-explosive artillery rounds, years of stalemate presided over by incompetent, out-of-touch generals and politicians, World War I was the epitome of folly. The European states had no major quarrels; indeed, the royal houses were linked by marriage. To the end of her days, my grandmother -- who was 25 when the guns of August erupted -- held a grudge against "Kaiser Bill." Instead, the war was the result of militarism, colonial competition, Russia's ill-advised pan-Slavic aggressiveness, French desire to avenge the Franco-Prussian War, German arrogance and stupidity, instability in the Balkans, the sickness of Austria-Hungary and the utter failure of British diplomacy. If not for the entry of American forces into the war, Germany might have prevailed -- but by 1917, both sides were near collapse and, especially in the French army, facing mutiny.

World War I was that era's black swan. It happened despite a Pax Britannica that had prevented a general European war for nearly a century. It happened notwithstanding the self-interest of great nations that, excepting Russia, had so much in common and so much to lose. Its bloodshed was made much, much worse by the tactics of the leading experts in their fields. Like the madness that finally seized the Greeks outside the walls of Troy, the war took on an unstoppable momentum of its own.

As its living memory is extinguished, it would be comforting to know we had learned anything. Alas, it was not to be the case. Hitler could have been stopped by a forceful response by the British and French. Thinking they had learned the lessons of the horrors of the trenches, the statesmen of the day tried appeasement instead. Later, charges of appeasement would be flung about to perpetuate needless wars in Vietnam and today in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fathers still lie.

It may be that the legacy of the Great War has at last departed along with its last veterans. Europe is largely at peace and, some historians would argue (unconvincingly, to my mind), in the kind of union envisioned by the German Empire in 1914. Now we have entered an era of "savage wars of peace" (Kipling again) as developed nation-states contend with failed states, tribal conflicts and jihad. It is an open question. Open, too, is whether the Pax Americana that began in 1945 can survive a new century of savage competition for scarce resources by nations that, once again, seem to have so much self-interest in keeping peace. The exhaustion of the American empire raises even more ominous questions.

Today thousands live thoughtlessly near the runways of Luke Air Force Base, complaining about the jet noise of an installation that was there long before their tract houses. The base is named after Frank Luke Jr. A Phoenix native, Luke became the first airman to receive the Medal of Honor, and held the second most kills of an American ace in World War I. His specialty was attacking heavily guarded German observation balloons. The "Arizona Balloon Buster's" luck ran out, as it already had for so many aviators killed in the war, a little more than a month and a half before the armistice. When the Great War began, Arizona had been a state for two years.

Harry Patch was asked decades later if the lives lost were worth it. His reply: “No, it wasn’t worth one.”

Comments

[soleri]

Once we unravel the various threads of blame and responsibility, what do we know? A missed bullet here, a failed diplomatic overture there, and all would be different. Except we can never completely know anything for sure. In the end, it happened and our need to understand only locks us into false patterns of causality and belief.

In the wake of the Great War, many wrote of war's futility not from analytical postscripts and postmortems but from the idea that we can separate ourselves from the passions central to our very nature. This is why America's decline into imperial decrepitude has to be so dispiriting for its citizens. There is nothing we can do to arrest it. Our good intentions are not enough. History passes like falling rocks.

[koreyel]

"The exhaustion of the American empire raises even more ominous questions."

Indeed.

One of which is:

How do exhausted empires usually fizzle out? With a whimper or a bang? What arc does their internal decay usually follow? And how does the rest of the world fill the vacuum?

To that last question, did anyone else notice this paragraph in today's NYT on the election in Japan:

"Mr. Hatoyama, who is expected to assemble a government in two to three weeks, has spoken of the end of American-dominated globalization and of the need to reorient Japan toward Asia. His party’s campaign manifesto calls for an “equal partnership” with the United States and a “reconsidering” of the 50,000-strong American military presence here."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/world/asia/31japan.html

[Emil Pulsifer]

This afternoon I received a news update from the New York Times via email, with the headline "Afghan War is Serious but Winnable, Top General Says". I confess that the stupidity of the headline deterred me from reading the article.

What constitutes "winning" the Afghan War? The war is supposedly being fought to deny the Taliban a "safe haven" but they already have one in the remote, mountainous, untamed border region of Pakistan, whether or not with the tacit sanction of the ISI, Pakistan's main intelligence agency (which seems to regard the Afghan insurgents in much the same light vis a vis India as did the CIA toward the Soviet Union during the 1980s).

Does anyone seriously claim that any outcome of the Afghan War will destroy Muslim fundamentalism? That it will destroy the Taliban? That it will destroy Al Qaida? No. At most, it will establish a tenuous hold, by a corrupt and incompetent government, over mere parts of the country, leaving the insurgent movement to lick its wounds and bide its time, while consolidating its hold over certain areas and regrouping inside Pakistan. At some point the American forces will want or need to draw down or withdraw, and at that point the insurgency will erupt with renewed virulence. And that is the most optimistic viewpoint to be entertained by pragmatists.

The original invasion had the purpose of removing the Taliban as federal government of Afghanistan. It was accomplished with a minimum of American casualties and with comparative speed. Instead of withdrawing, with a promise of more of the same should the Taliban again regain control, while funding, arming, and training its own proxies inside the country, the Americans are playing the insurgents' own game: a guerrilla war of attrition, in which the insurgents have bases inside another soverign nation (Pakistan) which are, for all practical purposes, unattackable, and with funding that comes from the difficult to eradicate opium trade, but which is supplemented by contributions from wealthy Middle Eastern fanatics whose finances are effectively off-limits due to political considerations (e.g., U.S. foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia).

American politicians, oblivious to the realities on the ground or else cynically plying a domestic audience for their own purposes, speak of building western style "democracy" -- and this in a country with the history of Afghanistan! -- and of winning the hearts and minds of its people with economic development: but no serious development has occurred or is likely to, and the only serious money to date that has not found its way into the coffers of corrupt contractors, has gone toward the ever widening military conflict.

The United States has never learned the lesson that it is its own worst enemy: that its heavy-handed tactics -- in which local indigenes are sacrificed (albeit with a flow of crocodile tears in the diplomatic press) to a "greater good" that they cannot understand, by condescending foreigners from another culture, speaking another language and worshiping strange gods, if any -- aren't the best way to make friends and influence people. All along the way, the U.S. intelligence groups on the ground set up toadying, corrupt governments, further angering the locals, and round up suspected insurgents for harsh treatment and imprisonment according to a more-indiscriminate-than-not formula which may be characterized as "better safe than sorry".

The resulting, ongoing series of cultural outrages, civilian deaths and mayhem, unwarranted arrests and detainment of the family breadwinners (who are invariably men), and a corrupt, deceitful, puppet government abetting these abuses, push the population where most of it would never have naturally gone: into the arms of the insurgents, who, though they may be as brutal as the Americans, are at least homegrown. The Taliban, whatever its shortcomings, did bring a kind of pax romana to the country -- something which cannot occur as long as the Americans are there bombing and arresting and torturing and stirring up the hornets' nest which is the insurgency. The Americans, meanwhile, listening only to their own disconnected propaganda, bewail the ingratitude of the local populace, crying "Why, oh, why, do all these little brown-skinned peoples hate us so?!"