By the end of the Vietnam War, the American military had learned a good deal about how to fight a counterinsurgency war against a nationalist movement that used both conventional and guerrilla forces. The only problem was that few people wanted to remember either Vietnam or its lessons. There was, said T X. Hammes, a marine colonel who maintained an interest in counterinsurgency “a pretty visceral reaction that we would not do this again.” American military training focused on conventional war; counterinsurgency was not even mentioned in the army’s core strategic planning in the 1970s. Hammes nevertheless studied the small wars in places such as Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan and wrote a book on how to combat guerrilla warfare. A publisher turned it down: “Interesting book, well written, but a subject nobody’s interested in because it’s not going to happen.” The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century finally came out in 2004 as the Americans were painfully learning in Iraq the lessons they had chosen to forget. In 2005, General David Petraeus, one of the few American generals to devise successful tactics in Iraq, set up a counterinsurgency academy there. Back in the United States, he made the study of counterinsurgency compulsory at the army’s advanced training colleges. Two books, T E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, about the Arab revolt against the Turks during World War I, and Counterinsurgency War-fare by the French officer David Galula, became unexpected bestsellers in bookstores near army bases.
History can help us to be wise; it can also suggest to us what the likely outcome of our actions might be. There are no clear blueprints to be discovered in history that can help us shape the future as we wish. Each historical event is a unique congeries of factors, people, or chronology. Yet by examining the past, we can get some useful lessons about how to proceed and some warning about what is or is not likely to happen. We do have to be careful to cast our gaze as widely as possible. If we look only for the lessons that reinforce decisions we have already made, we will run into trouble. In May 1941, as warnings poured in from all quarters that the Germans were getting ready to attack the Soviet Union, Stalin refused to listen to them. He did not want a war with Germany, because he knew just how ill prepared the Soviet Union was. And so he persuaded himself that Germany would not move until it had made peace with Great Britain. “Hitler and his generals are not so stupid as to fight at the same time on two fronts,” Stalin told his inner circle. “That broke the neck of the Germans in the First World War.” A month later, German troops overran the Soviet forces that had been told to take up defensive positions back from the borders. Stalin could have found other lessons from the past if he had wanted. Hitler had shown himself a gambler before when he had seized Austria and Czechoslovakia. His rapid and stunning victory over France in 1940 had served only to convince him that he was always right. Moreover, he had made no secret of his long-term goal of moving east to obtain territory for the German people.
History, if it is used with care, can present us with alternatives, help us to form the questions we need to ask of the present, and warn us about what might go wrong. In the 1920s, T. E. Lawrence criticized the British government for its involvement in what had become the new country of Iraq:
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the responsibility, in this case, is not on the army which has acted only upon the request of the civil authorities.
In 2002, as the American and British governments prepared their plans for the swift invasion and what they confidently assumed would be a short occupation of Iraq, they would have been wise to look at that earlier occupation. The British had assumed then that it would be easy, that the locals would welcome them or at least remain quiescent, and that they would find an obliging Arab ruler to act as their proxy. Moreover, Iraq would pay for itself by exporting wheat and, possibly, the oil that was yet to be exploited. Those illusions barely lasted a year. In the summer of 1920, British forces were stretched to the limit as they tried to contain widespread revolts across the country. Although the British thought they had found their ruler in Faisal, whom they made king the following year, he never proved to be the compliant ruler they wanted. Iraq remained an uneasy and troublesome part of the British sphere of influence right up to the 1950s. Instead, the coalition looked at the wrong occupations—those of Germany and Japan after World War II—or perhaps it is fairer to say that the policy makers of 2002 took the wrong sorts of lessons from those episodes. President Bush confidently said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on February 26, 2003: “There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken.” Yet those earlier occupations worked only because the Allies made thorough plans before their victory; they had thousands of troops on the ground; and they were dealing with an enemy that had admitted defeat.
If those making the crucial decisions in 2002 had wanted to know how Iraqis would respond to a foreign invasion and occupation, then they might have found some instructive ideas and warnings in the British experience there or in other occupations, such as the ones of Germany and Japan at the end of World War II. When we are trying to make sense of a situation (and may well have more information than we can absorb) and to come to a decision, we use analogies to try to discern a pattern and to sort out what is important from what is not. If President Bush or Prime Minister Blair decides that Saddam Hussein is rather like Hitler, then that suggests ways of dealing with him. If the economic crisis of 2008 is like the start of the Great Depression, then governments and central banks may decide to stimulate the economy. If it is more like the crash of the dot-com bubble in the 1990s, it may be wiser to treat it as a short-term correction in the markets. Human beings may not always get the right analogy, but they are almost certainly bound to try to use one.
The Chinese have understood this for centuries. Traditional Chinese civilization invariably drew on the past for moral tales and examples of how to behave wisely. Even Chinese Communists, who represented a forward-looking ideology, could not escape the habits of centuries. Their leaders, from Mao down, repeatedly referred to events in the past, even the long distant past. It would be as though an American president or a Canadian prime minister casually slipped references to Julius Caesar or Charlemagne into his conversations and expected his audiences to understand at once. When, at the end of the 1960s, Mao was contemplating opening up relations with the United States in part as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union, he had in mind the example of the statesman in the third century A.D. who had recommended allying with one of his country’s two enemies to defeat the third—and who had urged his ruler to choose the power farther away as his ally on the grounds that it was dangerous to become too close to an enemy on one’s borders. Seeing the results of Mao’s decision—the expanding relationship between China and the United States and the increased respect with which the Soviet Union and then Russia treated China—it is hard to disagree with his reasoning.
When the United States led a coalition against Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991, its leaders had in mind two analogies. They did not want American forces to get bogged down inside the country as they had in Vietnam, and they wanted to deter Hussein’s regime from further adventures as they had done with containment of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in the Cold War. Although President George H. W. Bush and his chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, were much criticized, especially by the Right, for not invading Iraq and deposing Hussein, in fact they acted wisely. American and coalition forces did not get bogged down in a land war, and although Hussein’s regime survived, its capacity to threaten its neighbors was minimal. (It still, sadly, had the means to kill and repress Iraqi citizens.)
Analogies from history must, of course, be treated with care. Using the wrong one not only can present an oversimplified picture of a complex situation in the present but can lead to wrong decisions. After September 11, 2001, it became fashionable, especially among neoconservatives, to talk about how the West finds itself engaged in World War IV. Norman Podhoretz, a leading neocon thinker, argued that the Cold War was really World War III and that now, after a too-brief period of peace in the 1990s, we are engaged in an equally massive and deadly struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. As in the other world wars, the United States and its allies are the innocent party; others have thrust war upon them. The West is only defending itself, even in wars like the Iraq one where it launches an attack. In such a view, the war is a moral one, of good against bad. A convenient shorthand, the authorship of which is proudly claimed by the Canadian David Frum, is the “axis of evil.” No matter that the Axis in World War II was a working set of alliances among Germany, Italy, and Japan and that this one is said to include Iraq and Iran, countries that waged a long war against each other in the 1980s, and North Korea, whose leaders probably have trouble finding their two reputed partners on the map. No matter, too, that the Cold War was not like the great military struggles of the two world wars and ended not with an armistice on the battlefields but with the collapse of one of the protagonists. Those who criticize the open-ended and ill-defined nature of the “war on terror” or the occupation of Iraq are dismissed as isolationists, cowards, or worse. Reviewing Podhoretz’s recent work, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Ian Buruma wrote: “The book expresses a weird longing for the state of war, for the clarity it brings, and for the chance to divide one’s fellow citizens, or indeed the whole world, neatly into friends and foes, comrades and traitors, warriors and appeasers, those who are with us and those who are against.”
Another analogy that has had a good airing over the years is Munich, shorthand for the appeasement policies the democracies used in the 1930s with the dictators in a vain effort to prevent another war. Named after the Munich conference of 1938, when Britain and France agreed that Hitler’s Germany should have the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, Munich has become the symbol of weakness in the face of aggression. If the democracies had stood up to Hitler, better still even earlier in the 1930s before Germany had rearmed, and to Italy and Japan, they could have prevented, so the critics of appeasement say, World War II. But what exactly does the analogy mean? That you should never talk to your enemies and try to find common ground? In that case, President Dwight Eisenhower when he talked to Nikita Khrushchev or Nixon with Mao might be described as appeasers. Was it wrong of the democracies in the 1930s to try to avoid war? They were haunted by the hideous death tolls in World War I, so very recently over, and by fears that the new technology of the bomber would destroy civilization. Where men such as Neville Chamberlain were mistaken, and it is much easier to see in retrospect, was in believing that Hitler would stop once he satisfied Germany’s “reasonable” goals such as Anschluss with Austria.
In May 2008, President Bush, in a speech to Israel’s Knesset, attacked those who thought they could talk constructively with America’s enemies such as Syria, Iran, and the Hamas organization. Although he did not name them, most people inferred that he meant President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, and perhaps his hosts themselves. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” Bush said, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” Yet are Syria and Iran the same as Nazi Germany? Is talking to them a sign of weakness or a sensible attempt to broker peace? Is it always wrong to talk to even terrorist organizations? The British fought the IRA in Northern Ireland, but they were also willing to negotiate with them. What is appeasement and what is not is often not clear-cut. What is undeniable is that the Munich analogy has had a strong hold over statesmen and stateswomen ever since and has been applied liberally to justify a whole range of policies. Anthony Eden, the British prime minister who succeeded Churchill, employed the analogy to disastrous effect when he tried to deal with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, in 1956. Like many leaders in what was then called the Third World, Nasser was prepared to take assistance from both sides in the Cold War. He bought arms from Communist Czechoslovakia but also tried to get a loan from the United States to build the Aswan Dam on the Nile. John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, was unable to get the loan through Congress. In retaliation and to raise the funds he needed, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which up to that point had been owned and managed by the British. Eden’s reaction was unequivocal. As British foreign secretary in the 1930s, he had dealt with dictators. Now he and the world were facing the same thing again. As he wrote in his memoirs, “Success in a number of adventures involving the breaking of agreements in Abyssinia, in the Rhineland, in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Albania had persuaded Hitler and Mussolini that democracies had not the will to resist, that they could march with the certitude of success from signpost to signpost along the road which led to world dominion … As my colleagues and I surveyed the scene in those autumn months of 1956, we were determined that the like should not come again.” But Nasser was no Hitler intent on conquering his neighbors. Rather, he was a nationalist who badly needed resources to develop his own country and stake out a position of leadership in the Middle East. The British action in collusion with the French and the Israelis to seize the Suez Canal was not only badly conceived; it rallied the Egyptians and the wider Arab world to Nasser’s side. Furthermore, it infuriated the Americans, who, far from seeing a repeat of the 1930s, worried about the moral impact on other Third World countries.
In 1950, when North Korean troops moved into the South, President Harry Truman was clear about the need to take action: “Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, twenty years earlier.” He may well have been right. There is no doubt that Stalin, like Hitler, was gambling on an easy victory; in Stalin’s case, though, he was prepared to pull back his support for North Korea once it became too costly. There is little evidence that Hitler would have dropped his demands in Europe even in the face of stronger opposition from the democracies. He was determined upon war sooner or later. President Kennedy, whose senior thesis and then book, Why England Slept, was on British appeasement, had Munich in mind when he debated with his advisers how to deal with the Soviet Union over its missiles in Cuba. The 1930s, Kennedy said, “taught us a clear lesson; aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” Wisely, though, he used a naval blockade rather than outright war to put pressure on the Soviets. Fortunately, too, he had just read Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August, on the outbreak of World War I, and he was painfully aware of how a series of mistakes and blunders can produce a major catastrophe. A few years later Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, again used the analogy, this time with Vietnam. He did not want to be like Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who dealt with Hitler. He knew that if he got out of Vietnam, he told his biographer, “I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression.”
When Johnson had to decide whether or not to commit ground troops to Vietnam in 1965, the debate within his administration relied heavily on analogies. As Yuen Foong Khong of Oxford University has shown, Munich, the Korean War, and the French defeat in 1954 all were called in to support what were intense arguments. On the one hand were those li
ke Robert McNamara; Dean Rusk, the secretary of state; and William Bundy the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs who argued that both Munich and Korea encouraged a greater American presence in Vietnam. As Bundy put it, the lesson was that “aggression of any sort must be met early and head-on or it will have to be met later and in tougher circumstances. We had relearned the lessons of the 1930s—Manchuria, Ethiopia, the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia.” What they had also learned, and this complicated the decision, was that China was likely to intervene if war came too close to its borders. That, in the end, was to limit the American response in Vietnam in a way that it had not been limited in Korea.
Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Page 14