[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] How Good Was the Good War?

[Bill Totten]

by Andrew J Bacevich

The American Conservative (July 14 2008 Issue)


For historians, World War II revisionism is likely to remain a tough
sell. The process of enshrining the conflict of 1939-45 as the "Good
War" has now advanced to the point of being all but irreversible. The
war's canonical lessons, especially those relating to the perils of
appeasement, have permanently etched themselves in our collective
consciousness.

The problem with this orthodox interpretation is not that it's wrong but
that it is inadequate. The reflexive tendency to see every antagonist as
another Hitler (or Stalin) and every sensitive diplomatic encounter as a
potential Munich (or Yalta) has produced an approach to statecraft that
is excessively militarized, needlessly inflexible, and insufficiently
imaginative. The remedy is not to engage in a vain effort to change the
way Americans remember World War II, however, but to restore that
conflict to its proper context.

Ripped out of context, the war, especially the struggle against Nazi
Germany, has become a parable. Whatever their value as a source of moral
instruction, parables offer less help when it comes to understanding
international politics. Parables simplify - and to simplify the past is
necessarily to distort it.

The neoconservative writer Norman Podhoretz illustrates how this
penchant for treating World War II as a parable yields distorted and
even mischievous results. Since 9/11, he has insistently argued that the
correct name for the conflict commonly known as the global war on terror
is actually "World War IV". Podhoretz's logic runs like this: the Cold
War was really "World War III", essentially a replay of World War II,
the threat posed by communism serving as a variant of the old threat
posed by fascism. For Podhoretz, the horrific events of September 2001
thrust the West back to the days of September 1939. The imperative of
the moment was to launch yet another crusade on behalf of freedom and
democracy, this time against a third totalitarian ideology that
Podhoretz labeled "Islamofascism". All that was needed was a new Winston
Churchill to lead this crusade, and Podhoretz found his man, however
improbably, in George W Bush.

Strangely absent from Podhoretz's narrative is the event that actually
touched off this sequence of global conflicts and without which World
Wars II and III - not to mention IV - would never have occurred. I refer
here, of course, to the epic bloodletting of 1914-18, for a time known
as "the Great War".

Podhoretz gets away with ignoring World War I because the vast majority
of his fellow citizens are similarly predisposed. For present-day
Americans, the enterprise once fervently, then derisively, referred to
as "the war to end all wars" possesses about as much political and
cultural salience as Shays' Rebellion.

This marginalization of World War I is unfortunate. In fact, that
conflagration and the peacemaking process that followed offer a mother
lode of instruction for American policymakers today.

World War I does not easily reduce to a parable. Even a polemicist as
talented as Podhoretz would be hard pressed to render it as a story
pitting good against evil or freedom against totalitarianism. It was
instead a vast, complex, and utterly avoidable tragedy, a war of empires
on behalf of empire. A handful of naïve and stupid statesmen, who
fancied that in war lay the solution to all manner of problems,
inflicted incalculable moral and material damage upon Western
civilization, while accelerating the decline of European power and
leaving a poisonous legacy.

Doing his part to spread those poisons was none other than Winston
Churchill, celebrated by Norman Podhoretz as the central figure in the
reduction of World War II to a parable. As a member of the war cabinet,
Churchill made contributions to British policy in World War I that are
at least as worthy of study today as his contributions to World War II.

For example, as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, Churchill conceived
of the Gallipoli campaign. To appropriate a term from our own day, this
amphibious invasion of Turkey was expected to be a "cakewalk" opening up
any number of additional opportunities. It turned out to be a disaster
that consumed the lives of tens of thousands of British, French, and
Anzac soldiers while accomplishing nothing. Gallipoli still stands as a
warning to those who fancy that military power offers the means to
transform the Islamic world.

After the armistice of 1918, as secretary of state for the colonies,
Churchill played an important role in redrawing the map of the Middle
East. The purpose of this exercise was not to advance the cause of
freedom and democracy but to extend British hegemony and control of
Persian Gulf oil. One result of this effort was to invent the
nation-state of Iraq, which soon became and remains a source of
instability and disorder, although these days the United States rather
than Great Britain foots most of the bills.

So let us by all means venerate the Winston Churchill who warned of the
threat posed by Hitler and who inspired Britons to make their lonely
stand against Nazi Germany in 1940, thereby stirring so many American
hearts as well. Yet let us also remember the Churchill who did so much
to bollix up the Middle East and to create the conditions that gave rise
to the utterly avoidable tragedy that is Podhoretz's World War IV.

We can learn much not only from the Good Winston but from the Bad
Winston as well.
_____

Andrew J Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at
Boston University. His new book is The Limits of Power, published by
Metropolitan Books.

Copyright (c) 2008 The American Conservative

http://amconmag.com/2008/2008_07_14/cover3.html


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