THE UNPREDICTABLE NATURE OF WAR

I have recently been re-reading some of my books on World War I, or The Great War as it was known prior to the Second World War. Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, Martin Gilbert's The First World War, Robert K. Massie's Castles of Steel (about the naval history of that war) and so on. I find that the history of that war is somehow neglected in the popular culture, overshadowed by World War II and it's immense personalities and global march of armies, navies and air forces. When the average person thinks of World War I, they think of stagnant, trench warfare involving mass infantry attacks and, ultimately, the futile loss of millions to no apparent purpose.

Yet, World War I changed the political, social and economic structure of the planet more than any other war since the Reformation. In June of 1914, when a young Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, and just before the guns of August began blazing as a result of that atrocity, the world was dominated by Europe and it's empires. Kings, Kaisers, Sultans and Tsars dominated the politics, and social gossip, of that continent and, by extension, the world. The sun, indeed, never set on the British Empire, with the Union Jack flying over colonies in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas. The French Republic had made a remarkable recovery from the defeat and humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Her economy was advancing and her flag flew over much of Africa and parts of South America, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The German Empire dominated Central Europe and, while she had come late to the colonial game, the Imperial Eagle flew over parts of Africa, the Pacific and China. The Austro-Hungarian Empire stretched from the Swiss Border on one end to the Romanian and Russian borders on the other, encompassing dozens of peoples and languages. The Russian Empire stretched from the German border in the West to the Pacific Ocean in the East. The "sick man of Europe", the Ottoman Empire, stretched from Asia Minor down through the Arabian Peninsula. With the exception of France, all of these nations had monarchical forms of government ranging from the almost powerless King George V of Great Britain to the absolute ruler Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

In July of 1919, just five years later, the Russian, German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires were all gone. Tsar Nicholas and his family were dead, executed by the Bolsheviks a year earlier, Kaiser Wilhelm II was living in exile in Holland, the Sultan had fled Constantinople and the Hapsburg monarchs of Austria had been deposed. Austria was now a small nation sandwiched between Germany and Italy, Hungary was independent, and the new nations of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia had been created in the Balkans. A newly independent Poland had re-emerged from Germany and Russia, along with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia on the Baltic. The Ottoman Empire had been replaced by a Turkish Republic, and the French and British were busy dividing up what would later become Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, The United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait. Persia became Iran. The Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Kurds all lost out in their bids to form nations of their own, with serious consequences later. In the Pacific, Japan became the new power, taking over former German-held islands, the names of which would become famous in the next war (Kwajalein, Saipan, Tarawa, etc.). The United States, which in July of 1914 had been a third-rate military power, while it came to the war late, had by it's conclusion built an army of nearly three million men and made a decisive difference in stemming the last gasp of Imperial Germany on the Western Front. While in many ways the refusal to ratify the Versailles treaty brought America back to it's pre-1917 isolationism, the war had made unalterable the fact that the U.S. was an incipient superpower, waiting for the right moment to emerge, which turned out to be a beautiful Sunday morning in the paradise of the island of Oahu in December, 1941.

In July of 1914 women were excluded from political life the world over, including the West. While there was a long-running movement to get women the right to vote in the Western Democracies, it had yet to gain steam. After the debacle of the Great War, where the role of women had, by necessity, expanded onto the factory floor and into the hospital ship and behind-the-lines aid stations, opposition to women's suffrage collapsed in Western Europe and the United States.

In July of 1914 Lenin was an exiled radical. By July of 1919 he was in Moscow, soon to be the new capitol of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the ideological heart of a Communist movement that would dominate much of the 20th Century. In July of 1914 the words Fascist and Nazi did not exist. Benito Mussolini was not yet the front-line soldier and pro-war newspaper editor (supported by British Intelligence) that he would become during the Great War. Adolf Hitler was a struggling Austrian artist living in a hostel for down-and-outers in Munich, soon to petition the King of Bavaria to join a local regiment and go to fight in France. Their subsequent life stories are well known.

In July of 1914 the submarine and airplane were considered little more than toys by the top military brass of all the major powers. Both weapons were seen by some as potentially decisive by war's end. The tank, the flamethrower and chemical weapons would all be introduced during the war.

In July of 1914 the people of France, Britain, Germany, Austria and Russia were chomping at the bit for the opportunity to fight. When war declarations began flying the first week in August, enormous crowds gathered to cheer in London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg and Vienna. By July of 1919 if enormous crowds gathered in any of those cities it was to cheer revolution and damn the governing classes. France's population particularly went from among the most martial and aggressive on Earth to the most pacifistic (losing 1,384,000 men, third in losses behind the more populous nations of Germany and Russia, is more than sufficient explanation).
All of these things and many more were as a result of the decisions made in the Summer of 1914. Almost all of these things were completely unforeseen by the participants who made those decisions.

What are the lessons to be learned? While there are many, from lessons about diplomatic bumbling caused by poor communications and mis-perceptions to the failure of military leaders to alter their tactics when faced with battlefield-altering weapons, the one lesson that is paramount in my estimation is this - When going to war one can never predict, to any reasonable degree, the parameters of the outcome or the unintended consequences that result.

This brings me to the so-called "War on Terrorism" and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. When Osama Bin Laden and his people planned the 9/11 attacks, they had a vision, as all military planners do, of how the attack would unfold and what they would accomplish if they achieved their goals. Clearly, they hoped that the attack teams would be able to seize control of four commercial jet aircraft, fly those planes to New York City and Washington, D.C. and destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol Building. By any objective military measure, their attack was a success. They lost only one aircraft which failed to reach it's target (crashing in Pennsylvania after a counter-attack by the passengers and crew). The others succeeded in destroying the World Trade Center and heavily damaging the Pentagon.
What were they hoping to accomplish by achieving military success? Like all military planners, they were hoping to achieve some political goal, either in the short-term or the long run.

For example, the Germans hoped to force France to surrender after their victorious right-wing sweep through Belgium and into Paris in August 1914, at which time they could then turn and defeat Russia, leaving Great Britain to make an accommodation with the new superpower of Europe. Likewise, the Japanese hoped to cripple the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, leaving America powerless to stop their advance in the Pacific and, shrinking from a long, bloody war, to make an accommodation with the new superpower of the Pacific. Each of these instances can be compared to Bin Laden's decision to attack on 9/11. The German sweep in France failed at the Marne, leading to a long, destructive stalemate on the Western Front, with the Germans finally succumbing in 1918. The Japanese attack succeeded, but it still led to a long, destructive war with the Japanese finally surrendering in 1945. One might reasonably expect, from a military planning perspective, that if one's plans fail, one will lose the battle or even the war. But, and this is reflected again and again throughout human history, one would reasonably expect that military success should lead to the achievement of one's political goals. So often, however, that is not the case. War is like the Djinni let out of his bottle. His actions are as unpredictable as his power is immense.

So, Bin Laden's attack succeeded, but his victims did not react as he had expected. Instead, he found himself driven from his sanctuary in Afghanistan, with many of his comrades killed and captured and his protectors, the Taliban government, driven from power. Clearly, the world has changed for Bin Laden in ways he could never have predicted when he set the 9/11 operation in motion.

Which leads me to the invasion of Iraq. In March, 2003, the U.S. military had a plan for the invasion, which they executed brilliantly. In three weeks time a combined Army-Marine Corps force, with considerable assistance from the British Army, and covered by an unchallenged air armada, conquered Iraq, taking down Saddam Hussein's military forces and chasing him into hiding, to eventually be captured like most other members of his government. From that point on, however, almost nothing seemed to go according to plan. Almost all the pre-war assumptions about Iraq were shown to be false, except those that predicted a swift conventional military victory. Even many anti-war assumptions, like those that predicted a conventional quagmire, or the direct military involvement of neighboring nations like Israel, turned out to be untrue. While some people correctly predicted one or another small slice of the truth as it exists today, no one, to my knowledge, correctly predicted the total picture, especially no one in the decision-making loop in Washington.

The Djinni, released by Bin Laden on 9/11 (much the way Princip released it in June of 1914 in Sarajevo) is now behaving in completely unpredictable ways. Bin Laden has not achieved any of his goals (neither did Princip, who did not live to see his vision of Greater Serbia dashed, first by Austrian conquest, then by immersion in the country of Yugoslavia in 1919). Instead, there is a pro-American government in Kabul and Bin Laden is still in hiding. Meanwhile, the U.S. is fighting back with an aggressive policy that has caused it to move into Iraq with more than 100,000 men, causing still more unforeseen consequences.

The only prediction that I would dare make about how this scenario will play out is that no prediction will come true, even generally speaking. Bin Laden's vision of a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East, the destruction of Israel, the restoration of the Caliphate in Baghdad, will not happen. President Bush's vision of a swath of democracies throughout the Islamic world, will not happen. Instead, expect something entirely different. A nuclear weapon may detonate in mid-town Manhattan, planted by former Iraqi intelligence officers, now made into Sunni radicals, with the weapon provided by North Korea. A radicalized America might then give itself over to a nearly fascistic central government that would reinstate the draft and send it's armies to crush the Islamic world, or order it's submarine captains to launch their nuclear-tipped missiles against Tehran, or Pyongyang, or Mecca, leading to even more unpredictable actions.

Preposterous? If you had told anyone in Europe in June of 1914 that five years later the Hohenzollern, Hapsburg and Romanov dynasties would all be on the ash-heap of history, most if not all would have called that a preposterous prediction. Like the saying goes, the truth is stranger than fiction. Osama bin Laden unleashed a global war on September 11, 2001. It's a war unlike any previous war (as World War I was unlike the wars of the 19th Century, and World War II was unlike World War I). It could escalate into a nightmarish conflagration (along the lines of my scenario in the above paragraph) or it could simmer for years with flashes of action, or slowly peter out. Iraq could develop into a real democracy, but Saudi Arabia might descend into civil war or be taken over by Islamic radicals. Or the reverse could happen.

Once the Djinni of war is free the power of men to control the consequences of their decisions becomes weaker and weaker. Neither the best intentions nor well-considered plan, to paraphrase Clausewitz, ever survives contact with the enemy. The battle is joined. The structure of global affairs hangs in the balance. How the lines that connect our human relations will be redrawn by the conflict, we cannot know. This is the lesson men should learn, but never seem to, about the consequences of using war as a redress for their grievances.