Reflections of a stormy petrel

Anyone who thinks that the massive police operations - they barely deserve the name of war - carried out by the USA and its allies since September 11, 2001 could have been avoided are talking total nonsense. What do they propose the USA should have done? Sat there and taken it? The reaction was absolutely inevitable, and indeed the rest of the world saw it coming and ran for cover. All the USA's worst enemies bent over backward to offer sympathy and support, beginning with Fidel Castro - the man who had tried to encourage Nikita Khruschev to atom-bomb the Yanquis. Only two governments openly congratulated the bombers and showed no compunction about the mass murder of civilians: Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Taleban Afghanistan. Why? because they both knew that there would be no point pretending. Saddam may not have been directly involved in the bombing, but his policy ever since his disastrous defeat in the previous war had been so unrelentingly hostile and dedicated to breaking down Anglo-American positions by every possible means that it would not have been safe to let him exist while the Allies were at war elsewhere in the Muslim world; and the Taleban were neck-deep in the conspiracy that had led to the massacre. It was, in fact, driven by largely local Afghani considerations. People don't remember that that was not the only major terrorist act that took place at the same time; one day or two before, the Taleban had murdered Ahmed Shah Massud, the Lion of Panjshir, the legendary hero of the struggle against Russia and the most prestigious leader of internal resistence against them. In Afghani eyes, this murder was at least as significant as the assault on the Twin Towers. The two were part of the same terrorist strategy. Three thousand Americans were butchered at least in part in order to reinforce the image of the Al Qaida-Taleban alliance in Afghanistan and frighten its enemies.

Of course, it went wrong; but anyone who thinks that the Taliban had not intended a war against America, or foreseen American intervention, simply does not understand the fact. That is what they wanted. That they lost it only means that they had overrated themselves and underrated the enemy; well, have I got news for you - that happens. And where America is concerned it happens with particular frequency; everybody from the Confederate rebels of 1860 to the Kaiser to Hitler and Tojo always found the Union more determined, more fierce,and infinitely quicker in action and thought, than they had imagined. The Taleban imagined themselves as the guerrilla hordes of a new Vietnam; within a few months of the masaacre, they had found out the difference.

What happened in Iraq and Afghanistan after the initial campaigns was not a war. A war means Cannae, Waterloo, the Somme. A war means armies clashing on battlefields, men dying by the hundreds every day, units surrendered or destroyed. No such thing has happened practically anywhere in ten years. The drip drip drip of casualties murdered by explosive devices is more typical of what the British forces had to face in Northern Ireland, or, for that matter, Italy's police forces in Sicily. It is grand policing, not war. The frequently-made parallel with Britain in the nineteenth century is absurd: British troops were faced and defeated in vast pitched battles against hordes of tribal warriors welding jezail rifles and knives, which has never happened in the Afghan operations. It is little more than Italy suffers for policing Sicily or Naples.

Finally there is the charge that the war has weakened America and reduced it to a debtor country with its bonds firmly in Chinese hands. Certainly operations have not been well managed: I have long since said that no wartime leader could do anything more stupid than cut taxes in the middle of a campaign, not only because expenditure inevitably rises, but because it undermines the message that the war is a common concern and the country ought to help to pay for it. But to blame the decline and deindustrialization of the USA on the war is beyond ridiculous. These things began almost thirty years ago, in the Ronald Thatcher era, which Bob Dylan welcomed with "Union Sundown" - an ambiguous title that meant both the ruin of unionized labour and the decline of the Union, that is the USA - and Springsteen sang that, in "Your hometown", "Foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back - to your hometown". The war made barely any difference to this process, which has been to a large extent encouraged and welcomed by successive administrations.

The occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq was inevitable; indeed, it was the least that could be done in the circumstances. People who pretend otherwise as good as say that three thousand dead should have been forgotten.

The place of war in human affairs is overestimated. War rarely causes any great change in overall historical trends; nine times out of ten, the great trends of sociology, economics and culture have already decided which party will win, when war is joined. It is rare to find a war where historians are not broadly agreed as to the causes of success and failure, victory and defeat. War is often more in the nature of a notary act sealing an already unstoppable historical development. From the Second Punic War to the Cold War, history is full of conflicts in which the losing side "won every battle except the last", for the simple reason that the victorious side was inherently stronger in both demonstrable and intangible ways. what is more, war, in civilized communities, is only an episode, usually short in time or distant in place; the much longer space of peacetime tends to lay the premises for success or failure in the comparatively rare times of war.

Not that war is irrelevant. War tends to radicalize politics: before 1776 and Tom Paine's war pamphlet Common Sense, no serious American politician would have considered universal suffrage. Long periods of war can distract the attention of nations and devour the resources that might have been used for other important developments: the Napoleonic wars cut off most of continental Europe from England from up to 25 years, just as England was starting the Industrial Revolution, causing a cultural-economic disadvantage that, in the case of Italy, Spain and east-central Europe, lasted for centuries.

One interesting corollary is to do with the Communist movement. Socialist parties in general are very good at winning elections; from India to Sweden and to Spain, Social Democrat groupings have dominated the peaceful politics of the twentieth century. An interesting side effect is their increasingly abandonment of the rhetoric of violence, caused by an increasing confidence in their ability to achieve their goals by legal and electoral means.

Conversely, no Communist party has ever won an election outright. The unfortunate Salvador Allende, in spite of the homicidal and fabulously idiotic American reaction (c'est pire qu'un crime: c'est une betise), was a Socialist heading an incoherent, ineffective, loud-mouthed, quarrelsome left-wing minority government that was heading for the scrap-heap of history until the morons in Washington turned him into a Communist martyr, to the advantage of nobody but Moscow. Real Communists, however, are extraordinarily good at winning wars. Communists insurgencies place the enemy in the disastrous situation of having to resist by curtailing or destroying civil liberties (the trap into which Nixon and Kissinger fell), thus proving that they are exactly the kind of repressive brutes the Communists themselves claim them to be. And Communism is extaordinarily good at motivating people. As I said elsewhere, there was much to admire about the old Communists: everything, in fact, except the central issue - violence and murder. War suits Communism, one might say, because, like war, Communism "takes the best in man to do the worst."

But that is the point. Communism can win wars. Communism, in fact, is so like war that they might almost be identified, and does actually speak of itself as war - class war. But once the war is won, then what? It seemed a catastrophe to the West when Vietnam was lost; but in fact, it was a catastrophe to Vietnam alone. The country collapsed to the bottom of the world prosperity list, while the commanders and officers who had won the war covered their chest in medals and ribbons and proved wholly incapable of running a peaceful society constructively. Their sole positive achievement after 1975 was a nother war - the deiverance of wretched Kampuchea from an even more bestial brand of Communism. Meanwhile, all around them, other countries from Thailand to Taiwan prospered; even huge, messy, terrorist-ridden Indonesia proving more progressive and far more prosperous than united Vietnam.

Unlike democratic Socialism, Communism is wholly incapable of dealing with a peaceful society. Like all creeds built for war, it is not only ruinous but demoralizing when war ends. And war does end. People make compromises, accept defeats, and move on. The Cold War was nothing but one Communist victory after another; and in the end the triumphant army found itself knocking at the doors of the besieged fortress - not to enter in, but to be allowed not to starve.

It is often said that the armies and the generals in World War One were not prepared for the effect of then-modern technology on warfare - that is, the way it made defence prevail over offence and turn the war into a long and bloody slogging match. And I do not say that is wrong. But that really reflects on the ability of humans to extrapolate from the past; because they could have seen it coming, if they had been far-sighted enough. We should remember that one of the features of military development in the nineteenth century is the development of the general staff, as a sort of "university" counterpart of the already invented "high school" of the various war schools. Every general who led in the war, with the possible exception of the worse-trained and worse-promoted specimens in the Austrian and Russian armies (where court and aristocracy had roles that the rest of the West had abandoned for over a century), had studied war at a very high level of competence. It was not that they were too ignorant of modern war to see it coming.

And yet. All through the early to middle nineteenth century, beginning with the last few years of the Napoleonic age, every clash between great European powers had tended to produce battles that were frightful slogging matches dominated by artillery and won, if at all, at the price of rivers of blood on both sides: Wagram (1811), Borodino (1812), Waterloo (1815), Navarino (Turkey vs. England, France and Russia, 1827), Sebastopol (Russia vs. Turkey, Britain, France and Sardinia, 1856), Solferino-San Martino (France and Sardinia vs. Austria-Hungary, 1859), Volturno (Garibaldi vs. the king of Naples, 1860), and the whole bloodstained American four years of war - where Jules Verne, of all people, drew attention to the importance and impact of massed artillery. If I understand correctly, even the monstrous Chinese Tai-Ping convulsion of 1858-1868 had a similar character. If war schools had paid attention to the tendency of war between great powers as a whole, they could have extrapolated that the next great war would have been a slogging match between armies tens of millions strong, dominated by artillery and machine guns, and where every assault would have cost unimaginable amounts of lives.

So why was this conclusion not drawn? I should imagine, for two reasons. After 1865, and until the generation that could remember Sebastopol, Solferino and Antietam had died out, wars between great powers practically ceased. Any time that Germany, France, Russia, Britain, Italy or the USA had an issue with each other, they found ways other than war to settle them. And then the last few wars of great powers had been untypical. In 1867, Prussia had overwhelmed Austria-Hungary in a single day at Sadowa (Koeniggraetz), thanks both to the excellence of Prussian staff work and to the appalling indiscipline of the top Austrian officers, who paid no attention to the instructions of their own commander in chief, Benedek, because he was a commoner. (Benedek was then punctually scapegoated for the defeat he could not have avoided; which insured that Austria-Hungary would learn nothing from the awful lesson of Sadowa, and end up being battered in World War One by both Russia and Italy.) Had the Austrians had less feckless leaders, the battle would have been a lot closer - and might well have turned into another slogging match. Then in 1870-71, the Prussians overcame the French, again thanks to brilliant staff work, with comparatively little bloodshed - indeed, in the first clash at Metz, they emulated Napoleon's breathtaking feat of Ulm in 1805 by forcing the surrender of a whole army with no fighting at all. In 1877, the Russians overcame the Turks in a manoeuvred campaign that began on the Danube and ended at the gates of Istanbul (and only stopped because the British had threatened to intervene on Turkey's side). Finally, in 1904-5 Japan stunned the world by handing the Russian Empire the most comprehensive defeat it had suffered by land and sea in three centuries. In all these campaigns, the losing side grossly underrated the victors, and were practically complicit in their own defeat.

So the picture given of the campaigns of 1867, 1870-71, 1876-77, and 1904-05, was grossly misleading in terms of the larger trends of the time. All those campaigns were exceptions. And they tended to be reinforced as (misleading) examples, by a more insidious influence. Between 1865 and 1914, Western armies were not at rest. They scarcely ever faced each other, but each of them was busy, often almost constantly, in colonial campaigns (I count the American Indian wars as colonial campaigns). Indeed, at no time before or since has the West, as a whole, been so militarized and so continuously committed to military expansion. And these campaigns were fought consistently against opponents that were both technologically and organizationally inferior; the defeats occasionally incurred by Western armies, Little Bighorn, Isandhlwana, Adua, were due to underrating the enemy (an inevitable occasional by-product of the enemy being effectively inferior), rather than to the enemy being in any way systematically able to establish its superiority. Isandhlwana was followed by Rorke's Drift. Indeed, the only colonial war where an European power really found itself with its back to the wall was the Indian Mutiny of 1859, when the British found themselves fighting an army they had trained and organized themselves. Western generals were not so stupid as to assimilate these clashes with war on European opponents; but they insidiously tended to build up the habit of thinking of war as a matter of brilliant manoeuvre and strategic resource, the war of Frederick II of Prussia and of Napoleon in 1805; rather than what had actually been brewing in the "dark satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution - a clash between cannon and machine guns turned out by the million by factories whose like the world had never before seen.

No group of countries ever went to war with a more thoroughly and carefully studied approach to war fighting and its subsidiary features than the European powers in 1914. Every one of them had vast war schools attached to their staff headquarters, where the wars both of the past and of the present were constantly being discussed, analyzed and pondered upon. And no group of countries ever failed more disastrously in understanding the war they were actually called to fight. Both the Germans in their arrogant expectation to be able to overwhelm first France, then Russia, then Italy, by brilliant and audacious coordinated manoeuvering - an expectation that led their strategy again and again, and well into 1918 - and the Allies, led by the French, and committed until well into 1917 to a strategy of great conclusive battles, simply failed to see what lay in front of their eyes. When Russia fell, she fell to internal subversion - a radical revolutionary backed by Germany; otherwise, the republican government of Kerensky was quite willing, and the Russian public quite ready, to fight as far as the Urals. When Germany fell, she fell because she was overwhelmed; after the collapse of Austria and Turkey, she simply lacked the forces to oppose the Italian and Allied forces released by that victory. Decisive victories - the collapse of Russia, the rolling back of the German front throughout the summer and autumn of 1918 - were achieved when the paradigm of the manoeuvred war ending in a single great battle was abandoned. The exceptions were Allenby's conquest of Palestine in 1918, a glorified colonial campaign, and the Italian triumph in October 1918, achieved against an enemy at the end of its strength. And even so these victories were decisive not so much for themselves, as for piling up the pressure against Germany beyond the point where the German public and political leadership felt they could bear it. Meanwhile, ten million people had died; and the horrors of the immediate post-war conflict, were at least as many were to die in Russia, Turkey and elsewhere, were yet to come.

The study of war had failed. It had provided no sensible strategy to survive and win the next war. Why? Possibly because of the inborn optimism of the human heart - the strategists preferred to pay attention to the positive examples of brilliant manoeuvre and decisive battles of annihilation provided by the recent past, than to the darker underlying trends. But there might be a deeper reason.

One of the deeper lessons of the Prussian triumphs of 1867 and 1871 was the immense importance of staff work. Everyone had noticed that, with troops at a roughly equal level of efficiency and courage, the Prussians/Germans had proved infinitely superior in all the functions of command and coordination. In the words of a contemporary military genius, they had consistently got there fastest with the mostest men. And this was the lesson everyone took home. In the decades that followed, every European army set up a staff headquarters on the Prussian-German model, dedicated to studying war at the highest possible level of scientific insight. Now, what this new kind of military organization promised to politicians, citizens, soldiers, was this: if you follow our discipline sufficiently well, you will - like the Prussians in 1867 and 1871 - win wars, bloodily perhaps, but swiftly and decisively. The new doctrine of war is the way to win wars, not by luck or application, but by academic discipline. Since this was the claim that validated their whole work, the high priests of the new science of war could not easily challenge it. The Allies only abandoned the paradigm of the war of manoeuvre and the final battle of annihilation in the last year of war, when Foch put in place the alternative strategy of small, varied, continuous blows at various parts of the front. The Germans, who had invented it, could not abandon it at all; and in the end, it meant their defeat.

EDITED IN I would also add that the German military's unbroken obsession with the doctrine of the decisive battle, which had shaped their whole war-fighting effort from the assault of 1914 to Ludendorff's final gambles, may also have had a pernicious effect on later politics. As everyone knows, the myth of the "undefeated army" was the main leaven of right-wing politics in the post-war Reich, and eventually gave a major boost to the rise of the war veteran Hitler. But the myth of the "undefeated army", looking at it from the point of view of this essay, seems an almost inevitable by-product of the doctrine of the decisive battle. The German generals were defeated without a battle, without an Austerlitz or a Waterloo, without the final denouement that their doctrine led them to expect. From that to feeling that they had not been defeated at all was a very short step indeed; and the Allied negotiators were to find already before Versailles that both military and civilian German leaders were very convinced of that indeed.

Some people credit Putin with some sort of scoundrelly brilliance for managing an international crime that nobody seems able or willing to stop. That is nonsense. In terms of Putin's own international policy goals, he has done himself an immense amount of no good.

What are Putin's goals? Roughly speaking, they amount to the reconstruction of the Soviet Union, at least at its European end. He evidently regards Western links, not only with old parts of the Soviet Union like the Ukraine and the Baltic states, but even in former client states such as Poland, as an intrusion. And here is the first bit of stupidity: where these freshly independent nations already have good reason to distrust Russian influence, he does not even try to woo them. Or if he does, he is not very good at it. Where Europe and America come with fistfuls of euros and dollars, big smiles, warm friendly talk of common heritage and mutual respect, Putin has tended to bully and has, on the whole, very little to offer. His oil and gas come at market prices, and are so handled as to give a sense, not of civilized mutual exchange and mutual advantage, but of blackmail. There is no visible attempt to rebuild the relationship about an idea of rationality and mutual respect. No doubt, the immensely rich West Europeans and the Americans with their colossal armaments do have their own interests to push, and no doubt their polite manners do imply a certain amount of self-serving. But Russia never shows anything but the naked knife. Which, in countries in which attempted genocide (the HOlodmor in the Ukraine, the Russification and mass deportation of locals in the Baltics) is a living memory, is not a clever kind of behaviour. When you add that Western Europe and America stand, in the eyes of East Europeans, for wealth, progress, freedom, even religious freedom and respect for tradition - for a culture that is admirable and admired in nearly every way - Russia stands both for a long tradition of tyranny and for social and economic backwardness. For anyone in Warsaw, Talinn or Kyiv, the choice between the West and Russia is a no-brainer. (Except of course for the large pro-Russian party in Ukraine, which is based not on such views, but on a sense of shared nationhood and history.)

In this context, the invasion of Georgia is something so colossally stupid as to seriously force doubts as to Putin's sanity. It is, to begin with, pathetically poorly concealed. When a country starts an attempt to bring a violent breakaway province back under control, and within twenty-four hours has its army completely smashed by a massive invasion from the third party that had been fostering the rebellion, it does not take genius to realize that it has fallen into an already prepared trap. Anyone who knows anything about the functioning of armies knows that you simply cannot gather together (over mountain terrain!) and send into action forces so enormous, with their supplies and weapons all ready for action, unless weeks of preparation had been carried out. When the Western heads of state and government ask for an opinion from their defence and intelligence staff, the answer will come back unanimous: it was a Russian trap. Russia wanted war and got it. Instead of dividing the West between people willing to believe Putin and people who see him for what he is, this transparent trap will have driven them closer together.

Second, there is the incredible imbalance between the goal achieved (if it has been achieved) and the damage it does. In terms of Putin's ultimate goals, probably the most important target would be the Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe and the only one with a large and consistent pro-Russian party. The assault upon Georgia, with the help of hired Ossete thugs unleashed to commit all the kind of terrorist outrages that the world most fears and hates, will result in an immediate recoil. It would have been clear to anyone that if Georgia had been admitted to NATO as they had asked for, Putin would never have dared invade it. All the fears of the Ukraine - which, like Georgia, is an Orthodox country - will have been reinforced; let alone those of less Russophile countries. One day after Putin unleashed his troops and his government allowed itself such language as "scum" for the Georgian government and that "Georgia's territorial integrity is no longer an issue", Poland signed a nuclear weapons agreement with the United States - with not a word of disagreement from even the most anti-American groups in Europe. The context was too obvious to everyone. This signature is a diplomatic disaster of the first magnitude for Putin: it seals Poland, Russia's gate to Europe, against him, and threatens similar developments in the Ukraine. Poland and Ukraine are politically quite close and tend to act together.

All this for Georgia? And were the conquest of Georgia at least certain! The unanimous reaction of America and all the Europeans seems to have made an impact in Moscow. The demand that the democratically elected Georgian president, Michael Saakhashvili, should resign, has been silently dropped, and even the talk of partitioning the country is no longer as confident as it was. Behaviour on the ground is equally nervous and indecisive, suggesting that the bear has realized that it has got its paw very much into a trap of its own making. In spite of their complete military victory, the Russian troops seem terrified of seizing the moment: they crawl forward a few miles, then stop, then crawl forward again. There is no military reason for them to do so: Georgian resistance, for all practical purposes, no longer exist. And in the occupied areas it is the same story: the Russians unleashed the Ossete paramilitaries they had armed and backed - at the same time as they denied responsibility for their atrocities and actually begged the Georgian police to return to the city of Gori and restore order. This is all is evidence of nervousness, confusion, and a general lack of direction from the top. Putin and his associates must be wondering: "What do we do now?"

In this context, the worst thing anyone could possibly do would be to show any yielding to Putin's brutality and demands. Show a stony face to the bully, and he will crumble. Give him space to bully further - and you will be the next victim. And if you think that is a remote possiblity, just ask the shareholders in BP and other companies who had been unwise enough to invest in Russia.

EDITED IN: Now Angela Merkel, Chancellor of GErmany, who had been the most important opponent of admitting Georgia to NATO, has stated in front of a crowd in Tbilisi that she favours it. Does anyone need more evidence to show that Putin has been a fool?

EDITED IN AGAIN: And yet more Georgia bills come flooding in. http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/08/ukraine_acts.html. This one could be even more damaging than Poland's, since it seriously compromises the Russian fleet.

AND AGAIN - ANOTHER BODY BLOW From the Miami Herald:
Criticized by the West, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday asked China and four ex-Soviet nations to sign a declaration of support for Russia's role in the conflict in Georgia.

But Russia's hopes of gathering support were dealt a huge blow when the five countries denounced the use of force and called for respect for every country's territorial integrity. The joint declaration from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization deepens Russia's international isolation.

Medvedev had appealed to the alliance - which consists of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - for unanimous support of Russia's response to Georgia's "aggression."

Medvedev's appeal had raised fears in Western capitals of the emergence of a competing strategic alliance to NATO forming around Russia - but the other Asian nations may have been reluctant to strain their relations with Europe and the United States.

Medvedev also discussed the situation in Georgia's breakaway regions with Chinese President Hu Jintao. China has traditionally been wary of supporting separatist movements, mindful of its own problems with Tibet and Muslims in the western territory of Xinjiang.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang was quoted by state news agency Xinhua as saying "the situation in the region ... should be resolved in dialogue."

Did Putin seriously think that China, with its own problems in Tibet and Uighur Sinkiang, would support this sort of border redrawing? Or that they would be grateful to him for raining on their beautiful Olympic parade? And that four countries which share Georgia's past and memories of Russian rule would be so eager to make a rod for their own backs? Well, if he really needs friends, I dare say that Robert Mugabe is still available.