[THS] Adam Hochschild: The Flowery Words of War

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175387/tomgram%3A_adam_ho

Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, War Redux
Posted by Adam Hochschild at 8:07am, May 3, 2011.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: TD has an offer for you that shouldn’t be missed.
Bestselling, prize-winning historian Adam Hochschild has just written To End All Wars:
A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, a unique account of World War I, the
war that set our planet on a path to madness.  He’s told the story by pairing British
war-makers and antiwar activists of that era who were connected in all sorts of
unexpected ways.  It’s an especially revealing way to look at the war that began it all,
and it’s out this very day.  TomDispatch is offering your own signed, personalized
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book will be a pleasure for you as you explore the past.  To take advantage of the
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Someday, when historians look back, they will undoubtedly be struck by the utter
inanity, not to say collective insanity, of the United States fighting what our president
has called a “war of necessity,” now in its tenth year, in Afghanistan, as well as a
“covert” war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.  It will undoubtedly look like a classic
case of a declining empire overextending itself, squandering its treasury, and then, in
its moment of crisis, extending itself yet further. After all, the date to get U.S.
“combat troops” out of Afghanistan has already been officially put off to the end of
2014, more than three years away, and that doesn’t even include U.S. trainers and
other supposedly noncombat troops, possibly numbering in the tens of thousands,
who may remain for years more.

General David Petraeus, the present American war commander, has been a key
figure in pushing that deadline off as well as in pursuing a war that is becoming ever
more destructive, and doing so by ever more violent and covert means.  Leon
Panetta, director of the CIA, has similarly been deeply involved in ratcheting up the
Agency’s covert drone war in Pakistan.  Now, the two of them are part of what’s
being called a “reshuffling” of posts in Washington, with Panetta replacing Robert
Gates as Secretary of Defense, while Petraeus takes over the CIA, and Ryan Crocker,
ambassador to Iraq while Petraeus ran Bush’s war there, is sent to the American
embassy in Kabul.

Think of it as the war shuffle, a version of musical chairs among the war-makers in
whom the urge to surge remains powerful.  Many reporters and commentators have
observed that these changes are symbolic of the post-9/11 militarizing of Washington
and, as the New York Times put it, of “the blurring of lines between soldiers and
spies in secret American missions abroad.”  More important, perhaps, these changes
symbolize the rise of covert war as a dominant way of life.  The men now changing
posts will continue to command vast secret armies cocooned inside our military and
intelligence agencies, and a secret drone air force to go with them (all aided and
abetted by a burgeoning set of private contractors of whom Blackwater, now Xe, is
the best known).  With such “secrecy” increasingly out in the open, the ability to
conduct war in a realm beyond accountability only grows.  It’s a frightening, if little
attended, fact of our moment.

Obama’s latest appointments have another significance as well.  They represent a
clear decision that no new thinking should enter the realm of American war making.
In a command world in which everybody has worked with everyone else, in which
nowhere is there a hint of new blood, in which, by the look of it, all the air is being
squeezed out of Washington, the war shuffle practically ensures that the way we
were is the way we will be.  Elsewhere, from Pakistan to Tunisia, the world is
threatening to turn upside down.  In Washington, as we head into the 2012 election
season, all is as ever (despite Osama bin Laden's death).  Consider this yet another
crippling folly in a season of American decline.

Prize-winning author Adam Hochschild is intimately knowledgeable when it comes to
war’s folly in the twentieth century, having spent years working on his latest book, To
End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, a magnificent history of
World War I (which also focuses on a birthing moment for the citizenly urge to
oppose modern war in all its madness).  As with his classic study King Leopold’s
Ghost, this one is guaranteed to be the must-read history book of the season.  As a
historian, he’s had the strange experience not of looking back, but of looking forward
into our own unnerving, unending world of war.  (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest
TomCast audio interview in which Hochschild discusses the folly of war, his latest
book, and why no one attends to the lessons of history, click here, or download it to
your iPod here.)  Tom

    Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?
    The War That Didn’t End War and Its Unending Successors
    By Adam Hochschild

    What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had
been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public?
Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly if we could see hundreds of
thousands of tombstones, military and civilian, spreading hill after hill, field after field,
across our landscape?

    I found myself thinking about this recently while visiting the narrow strip of
northern France and Belgium that has the densest concentration of young men’s
graves in the world. This is the old Western Front of the First World War. Today, it is
the final resting place for several million soldiers. Nearly half their bodies, blown into
unrecognizable fragments by some 700 million artillery and mortar shells fired here
between 1914 and 1918, lie in unmarked graves; the remainder are in hundreds
upon hundreds of military cemeteries, still carefully groomed and weeded, the
orderly rows of headstones or crosses covering hillsides and meadows.

    Stand on a hilltop in one of the sites of greatest slaughter -- Ypres, the Somme,
Verdun -- and you can see up to half-a-dozen cemeteries, large and small,
surrounding you. In just one, Tyn Cot in Belgium, there are nearly 12,000 British,
Canadian, South African, Australian, New Zealander, and West Indian graves.

    Every year, millions of people visit the Western Front’s cemeteries and memorials,
leaving behind flowers and photographs of long-dead relatives. The plaques and
monuments are often subdued and remarkably unmartial.  At least two of those
memorials celebrate soldiers from both sides who emerged from the trenches and,
without the permission of their top commanders, took part in the famous informal
Christmas Truce of 1914, marked by soccer games in no-man’s-land.

    In a curious way, the death toll of that war almost a century gone, in which more
than 100,000 Americans died, has become so much more visible than the deaths in
our wars today. Is that why the First World War is almost always seen, unlike our
present wars, not just as tragic, but as a murderous folly that swept away part of a
generation and in every way remade the world for the worse?

    To Paris -- or Baghdad

    For the last half-dozen years, I’ve been mentally living in that 1914-1918 world,
writing a book about the war that killed some 20 million people, military and civilian,
and left large parts of Europe in smoldering ruins. I’ve haunted battlefields and
graveyards, asked a Belgian farmer if I could step inside a wartime concrete bunker
that now houses his goats, and walked through reconstructed trenches and an
underground tunnel which protected Canadian troops moving their ammunition to
the front line.

    In government archives, I’ve looked at laconic reports by officers who survived
battles in which most of their troops died; I’ve listened to recordings of veterans and
talked to a man whose labor-activist grandfather was court-martialed because he
wrote a letter to the Daily Mail complaining that every British officer was assigned a
private servant. In a heartbreakingly beautiful tree-shaded cemetery full of British
soldiers mowed down with their commanding officer (as he had predicted they would
be) by a single German machine gun on the opening day of the Battle of the
Somme, I found a comment in the visitors’ book: “Never Again.”

    I can’t help but wonder: Where are the public places for mourning the mounting
toll of today’s wars?  Where is that feeling of never again?

    The eerie thing about studying the First World War is the way you can’t help but
be reminded of today’s headlines. Consider, for example, how it started. High officials
of the rickety Austro-Hungarian Empire, frightened by ethnic nationalism among
Serbs within its borders, wanted to dismember neighboring Serbia, whose very
existence as an independent state they regarded as a threat. Austro-Hungarian
military commanders had even drawn up invasion plans.

    When a 20-year-old ethnic Serb fired two fatal shots at Austrian Archduke Franz
Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo in the summer of 1914, those commanders had
the perfect excuse to put their plans into action -- even though the killer was an
Austro-Hungarian citizen and there was no evidence Serbia’s cabinet knew of his
plot. Although the war quickly drew in many other countries, its first shots were fired
by Austro-Hungarian gunboats on the Danube shelling Serbia.

    The more I learned about the war’s opening, the more I thought about the U.S.
invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush and his key advisors had long hungered
to dislodge Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. Like the archduke’s
assassination, the attacks of September 11, 2001, gave them the excuse they had
been waiting for -- even though there was no connection whatsoever between the
hijackers, mainly Saudis, and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

    Other parallels between World War I and today’s wars abound. You can see
photographs from 1914 of German soldiers climbing into railway cars with “To Paris”
jauntily chalked on their sides, and French soldiers boarding similar cars labeled “To
Berlin.”

    “You will be home,” Kaiser Wilhelm II confidently told his troops that August,
“before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Doesn’t that bring to mind Bush
landing on an aircraft carrier in 2003 to declare, in front of a White House-produced
banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” that "major combat operations in Iraq have
ended"? A trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives later, whatever mission there
may have been remains anything but accomplished. Similarly, in Afghanistan, where
Washington expected (and thought it had achieved) the most rapid and decisive of
victories, the U.S. military remains mired in one of the longest wars in American
history.

    The Flowery Words of War

    As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead
nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably
enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious. In 1914,
for instance, no country planned for the other side’s machine guns, a weapon which
Europe’s colonial powers had used for decades mainly as a tool for suppressing
uppity natives.

    Both sides sent huge forces of cavalry to the Western Front -- the Germans eight
divisions with 40,000 horses. But the machine gun and barbed wire were destined to
end the days of glorious cavalry charges forever. As for plans like the famous German
one to defeat the French in exactly 42 days, they were full of holes. Internal
combustion engines were in their infancy, and in the opening weeks of the war, 60%
of the invading German army’s trucks broke down. This meant supplies had to be
pulled by horse and wagon.  For those horses, not to mention all the useless cavalry
chargers, the French countryside simply could not supply enough feed. Eating unripe
green corn, they sickened and died by the tens of thousands, slowing the advance
yet more.

    Similarly, Bush and his top officials were so sure of success and of Iraqis
welcoming their “liberation” that they gave remarkably little thought to what they
should do once in Baghdad.  They took over a country with an enormous army,
which they promptly and thoughtlessly dissolved with disastrous results. In the same
way, despite a long, painfully instructive history to guide them, administration officials
somehow never managed to consider that, however much most Afghans loathed the
Taliban, they might come to despise foreign invaders who didn’t go home even more.

    As World War I reminds us, however understandable the motives of those who
enter the fight, the definition of war is “unplanned consequences.” It’s hard to fault a
young Frenchman who marched off to battle in August 1914. After all, Germany had
just sent millions of troops to invade France and Belgium, where they rapidly proved
to be quite brutal occupiers. Wasn’t that worth resisting? Yet by the time the
Germans were finally forced to surrender and withdraw four and a half years later,
half of all French men aged 20 to 32 in 1914 had been killed. There were similarly
horrific casualties among the other combatant nations.  The war also left 21 million
wounded, many of them missing hands, arms, legs, eyes, genitals.

    Was it worth it?  Of course not.  Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its
humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise
of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more
ruthless German occupation of France.

    The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan.
Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the
Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11
attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead
than were killed in the United States on that day -- and more than 2,400 American,
British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned
consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s
establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new
generation of jihadists.

    If you need a final resemblance between the First World War and ours of the
present moment, consider the soaring rhetoric. The cataclysm of 1914-1918 is
sometimes called the first modern war which, among other things, meant that gone
forever was the era when “manifest destiny” or “the white man’s burden” would be
satisfactory justifications for going into battle. In an age of conscription and
increasing democracy, war could only be waged -- officially -- for higher, less self-
interested motives.

    As a result, once the conflict broke out, lofty ideals filled the air: a “holy war of
civilization against barbarity,” as one leading French newspaper put it; a war to stop
Russia from crushing “the culture of all of Western Europe,” claimed a German
paper; a war to resist “the Germanic yoke,” insisted a manifesto by Russian writers,
including leftists. Kaiser Wilhelm II avowed that he was fighting for “Right, Freedom,
Honor, Morality” (and in those days, they were capitalized) and against a British
victory which would enthrone “the worship of gold.” For English Prime Minster
Herbert Asquith, Britain was fighting not for “the advancement of its own interests,
but for principles whose maintenance is vital to the civilized world.” And so it went.

    So it still goes.  Today’s high-flown war rhetoric naturally cites only the most noble
of goals: stopping terrorists for humanity’s sake, finding weapons of mass destruction
(remember them?), spreading a “democracy agenda,” protecting women from the
Taliban. But beneath the flowery words, national self-interest is as powerful as it was
almost a hundred years ago.

    From 1914 to 1918, nowhere was this more naked than in competition for
protectorates and colonies. In Africa, for instance, Germany dreamed of establishing
Mittelafrika, a grand, unbroken belt of territory stretching across the continent. And
the British cabinet set up the Territorial Desiderata Committee, charged with choosing
the most lucrative of the other side’s possessions to acquire in the postwar division of
spoils. Near the top of the list of desiderata: the oil-rich provinces of Ottoman Turkey
that, after the war, would be fatefully cobbled together into the British protectorate
of Iraq.

    When it comes to that territory, does anyone think that Washington would have
gotten quite so righteously worked up in 2003 if, instead of massive amounts of oil, its
principal export was turnips?

    Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar
sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the
cemeteries of France and Belgium -- and tens of millions of Americans will feel a
similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others’
lives.  But here’s the question that haunts me: What will it take to bring us to that
point?

    Adam Hochschild is the San Francisco-based author of seven books, including King
Leopold’s Ghost.  His new book To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion,
1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published.  To listen to Timothy
MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Hochschild discusses the folly of
war, his latest book, and why no one attends to the lessons of history, click here, or
download it to your iPod here.

    Copyright 2011 Adam Hochschild