We are awash in history. This week the Poles climbed on stage, as they do each time anniversary journalism returns to World War II. It is 70 years since German ships bombarded the fort of Gdansk, then known as the city of Danzig, while Polish lancers turned their horses to face Adolf Hitler’s Panzers in the most romantic and idiotic act of suicide of modern war. Last month we heard the fell tones of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain announcing: “We are at war with Germany.” Next spring we shall be back in Dunkirk.
Meanwhile, we must also take time off to record the 40th anniversary of Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fifth of the Beslan massacre. While gazing at the calendar we might recall the 40th anniversary of vasectomy, the 60th of the chairmanship of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), the 80th of the traffic light and the centenary of the force-feeding of British suffragette protesters demanding votes for women. There is no end to the trough of history at which hungry readers can feed.
History always arrives with its raucous child, lessons to be learned. Today the glib linking of any passing dictator with Hitler continues to pollute analysis of international relations. It is impossible to write against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the so-called war on terror without being accused of guilt by association with 1930s appeasement — usually by Americans, who were the most serious appeasers of all.
The idea that questioning any military adventure, however ill-advised, must be a re-enactment of Chamberlain at Munich is worse than an abuse of history. It is an offense against the millions who died in Europe and Asia in the terrible years before, during and after World War II. To put the war on terror in the same historical basket as the war against Nazism is like equating a single terrorist bomb to Hiroshima. Yet it is currently leading thousands of soldiers and civilians to their deaths, on the pretext that “Western civilization” is being threatened in the sense that it was in 1939.
History is like the law. It offers raw material for anyone who wants to plead a cause or make some money. It will lend its bias to any side of an argument. Earlier this year Russian President Dmitry Medvedev set up a historical truth commission on World War II to accept Soviet guilt over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Katyn massacre. But a member of the commission said on Tuesday that it would not shy from describing the roles of Polish, British and French participants in the Munich conspiracy. The trouble is, the former were facts and the latter a Soviet spin on a Western humiliation.
Parallels with the past are always dangerous, whether in the hands of experts or charlatans. Just as the pro-war party in Afghanistan cites appeasement, so the anti-war party trumpets Britain’s Afghan campaigns in the 19th century and the Russian fiasco in the 1980s. Enlisted against the war is also Vietnam — mesmerizing for students of former US president John F. Kennedy’s intervention in support of then-Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. Then, too, the US was sucked into an Asian imbroglio by assuming “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Then, too, one US general after another declared a war “doable,” if only more troops were sent and more attention paid to hearts and minds.
Vietnam is rich in lessons that appear to have been ignored by both US and British governments in Afghanistan, but they are not precise parallels. The Russians in Afghanistan were largely defeated by a Taliban armed by the CIA with Stinger missiles.
Among other things the US has allies. In Vietnam it was eager to involve Britain. Though the then British prime minister, Harold Wilson, never publicly criticized then US president Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam escalation, he was determined that British troops would not be drawn into a war which he rightly sensed would end in tears, like France’s previous conflict with Ho Chi Minh. Wilson was a better student of history than former British prime minister Tony Blair or his successor, Gordon Brown.
Afghanistan is not Vietnam, any more than it is Iraq, or Kosovo, or Lebanon. Its geography, its politics and its point in history are different. If anything, it is even more intractable as an occupation, since the war in Vietnam was against the expansion of communist dictatorship, which did impinge on Western security. In Afghanistan war can easily be portrayed as a crude assault on Islam.
The rest of Europe, which stayed out of Vietnam, was drawn to Kabul by a reluctant loyalty to NATO, which makes withdrawal harder to contemplate. But the reluctance was not some memory of past appeasement. It was because the peoples of Europe did not see any serious threat to their security from the Taliban brigades or al-Qaeda’s “Af-Pak training camps.” They did not equate the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks with the Nazi Holocaust. They saw it as the work of murderous madmen who evaded the world’s greatest intelligence apparat and got lucky. It was an outrage without historical antecedent and should not be awarded one.
All interventions in the Muslim world tend to ignore all previous interventions, as Lawrence of Arabia said. Each starts as if on a blank sheet of paper and creeps along a painful path from ignorance to wisdom through trial and error. It was scarcely believable that the senior US general in Kabul, Stanley McChrystal, should advise his president after eight years of occupation that it might be a good idea to train the Afghan army and “win hearts and minds.”
Writing of the Great Crash in 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith said the only real lesson such catastrophes could teach is that they happened. They could, therefore, happen again. In that fact lay their lesson. But what is the good when even such facts are ignored?
History is not bunk. It is a glorious seam of human experience from which leaders can seek guidance on their present conduct. But its parallels are never exact and are easy to distort, while its lessons are quarrelsome. Today we are not, anywhere, retreading the same foothills as we did on the outbreak of World War II. If that is the best parallel we can draw to illustrate our discontent, we should ban history from public debate.
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