War & Society
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Roger Chickering, “Imperial Germany’s Peculiar War, 1914–1918,” Georgetown University, October 23, 2014. ↩︎
- Mark R. Stoneman, "Die deutschen Greueltaten im Krieg 1870/71 am Beispiel der Bayern"; in Sönke Neitzel and Daniel Hohrath, eds., Kriegsgreuel: Die Entgrenzung der Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008), 223–39. ↩
Historiographical Impasse
Terence Zuber, Military History, and Culture
Officers, some on horseback, at a Kaiser Maneuver in 1898. Source: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.
I recently noticed that the English translation of Der Schlieffenplan: Analysen und Dokumente, edited by Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans, and Gerhard P. Groß, is now available from the University Press of Kentucky under the title The Schlieffen Plan: International Perspectives on the German Strategy for World War I. Interestingly, Terence Zuber, who sparked much of the debate on German war planning prior to the Great War, declined to allow his chapter from the German original to be included in this English translation.1 It wasn't his best piece anyway, far more peevish than usual, and there is plenty of his work on the supposedly nonexistent Schlieffen Plan already available in English. Be that as it may, if Zuber's thesis about Schlieffen's war planning has been conclusively disproven, the assumptions underlying his work have received less attention.2 That matters because his work on Schlieffen continues to be widely read and discussed, having made a big splash when it first came out. Moreover, he continues to write and publish books on German military history.
Sand Creek
In the New York Times, Ned Blackhawk reminds us, “It’s the 150th anniversary of one of the most appalling massacres of Indians ever.”
In terms of sheer horror, few events matched Sand Creek. Pregnant women were murdered and scalped, genitalia were paraded as trophies, and scores of wanton acts of violence characterize the accounts of the few Army officers who dared to report them. . . .
Sand Creek, Bear River and the Long Walk remain important parts of the Civil War and of American history. But in our popular narrative, the Civil War obscures such campaigns against American Indians. In fact, the war made such violence possible . . .
See the full article here. There are more details in the Smithsonian Magazine, and a few sources from the time here.
Hat tip: @myHNN and @wcronen on Twitter.
Digitized Resources for World War I Research
At Portal Militärgeschichte, Markus Pöhlmann reports that a joint German-Russian digitization project has made available a substantial number of World War One–era German military documents at the Russian defense ministry's central archive. There is also a digitized collection of the German secret services from 1912 to 1945.
Additionally, the multi-volume Der Weltkrieg 1914-1918 (The World War), published by the Reichsarchiv in excruciating detail, is now available digitally thanks to the Upper Austrian State Library in Linz. As Pöhlmann points out, this work continues to be essential for operational history because it was written on the basis of documents that were largely destroyed in World War Two.
Finally, the Austrian-Hungarian counterpart has been digitized in Linz too: Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg 1914-1918 (Austria-Hungary's Last War).
'Not a Military Historian'
At a recent lecture on the Great War, Roger Chickering said, “I’m not a military historian.”1 The phrase stuck in my mind because he said it two more times during the course of the lecture and discussion. I’m sure he was trying to avoid letting the discussion get sidetracked by narrower debates about military operations, which was fair enough in the context of his talk about a series of common structural elements in Germany’s, France’s, and Great Britain’s wars. Nonetheless, his words bothered me.
Of course, there was nothing surprising about the statement. And Chickering really can’t be called a “military historian” in the narrow sense of the term. Nor can I, his former student. But if stating that one is “not a military historian” makes sense in terms of the prejudices of too many academic historians, it also cedes the ground of professional competence to those historians who only focus on the battlefield.
As legitimate as narrower operational and tactical studies of warfare are, their authors cannot be allowed to enjoy a monopoly on the interpretation of the more military-technical aspects of warfare. The broad expertise and perspective of the historian who studies war’s manifestations away from the violence is also needed for the battlefield and everywhere else that people were killing or being killed for ostensibly political aims.
Military History Conference
I went to the annual meeting of the Society of Military History this year, because it was in the DC area, if way out in Crystal City. It was good to see and talk with people, especially a particular outside reader of my dissertation, who I was glad to run into. The book display was also interesting, because I discovered titles that the same publishers had not shown at the AHA meeting in January.
Less interesting were the panels, which are actually the main event of conferences. The problem was not the quality of scholarship but rather the fact that I have a low tolerance for being read to. I try to be patient and grown-up and stuff, but my mind starts to wander in this format. I wish that presenters would let go of the notion that they need to fill their 15 or 20 minutes with as much text as possible and instead just focus on pitching their main points and the central evidence that they are using to make them.
When I complained about this on Twitter and Facebook, I heard other scholars feeling the same way. We should not be reading our papers, but most of us do. One colleague on Facebook also shared a link to an interesting paper on "How to Give an Academic Talk" (by Paul N. Edwards). The trick, I think, is to adopt as much of the advice in this paper as one can without feeling so intimidated that one resorts to the crutch of reading to an audience. The result won't be perfect, but it will be far better for listeners than the standard alternative.
As boring as the reading format is, though, the panels in this conference were particularly well filled—standing room only in the couple I visited (one with senior historians and one with graduate students, both with papers read to the audience), which I have not seen at any AHA or BHC conferences (where papers, unfortunately, are also read).
A few other impressions: the conference seemed to include both people who call themselves military historians and those who just happen to be doing a related topic. It also included members of the military itself, as well as professors who teach the military at the War College and related institutions. The mix reinforced my opinion that military history and business history share analogous positions within the field of academic history and relative to the occupational fields that they study.
On the other hand, whereas we had the teachers of our future generals at the conference in Crystal City and the teachers of future CEOs at the conference in Philly, I saw practitioners (officers) in Crystal City but no practitioners (business leaders) in Philly. This might have been due to the proximity of the conference to the Pentagon and other military installations in the area, but I wonder if this one difference says anything about different attitudes towards history in the military and business. Few doubt the importance of history for cultivating critical thinking in our military officers, especially not the officers themselves, but I wonder how passionate about history business executives are. It would be interesting to find out.
Who Should Groener’s Schlieffen Plan Matter To?
As I try to write an article about Groener’s understanding of war, which led him to write about Schlieffen’s supposed “recipe for victory,”, I have to keep asking myself, so what? I don’t mean this is in a negative way. I haven’t tired of this topic. But I’m not always sure why it should matter to other people.
If I look at the Schlieffen Plan debate carried out mainly in the pages of War in History, it is clear that Groener’s perspective has something to offer that audience, because the man who initiated the debate, Zuber, accuses him of having "invented" the Schlieffen Plan. That is reason enough to bring up the issue, at least for those interested in the military planning that helped cause and shape what George F. Kennan once called “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century.
When I shift my perspective to understanding the German military’s role in the outbreak of World War One, I find the more nuanced perspective of German military thinking worthwhile for its own sake, but the basic story line of an inflexible plan that offered no diplomatic wiggle room and helped to ensure that Germany played the role of aggressor remains the same. So why should anyone but a specialist in military history care? Why should it matter to a general historian of modern German or European history?
The answer to this question seems to relate to our image of German history and World War I more generally. Do we blame that war on elites wedded to outdated notions about war? Do we turn them into alien “Others” who are impossible to understand in anything but stereotyped terms along the lines that we see for Britain in the wonderful comedy series, Black Adder Goes Forth?
Or do we open our eyes to a less comfortable thought? What if World War I was not an aberration, but rather part and parcel of European (and Western) modernity? And what if the officers who developed and later justified Germany’s war plans were not defenders of a premodern monarchical system nor simply protecting their own reputations after Germany’s defeat, but instead were modern military professionals whose attitudes and efforts might have relevance for our understanding of modern militaries far beyond 1914?
The latter point of view could make the question of Groener’s Schlieffen Plan relevant for modern militaries and, therefore, interesting for a readership like the Journal of Strategic Studies has. But does this story only have something to tell scholars of military history and strategic studies? What about historians of Imperial Germany? I think an answer could relate to the modernity of the officer corps, the Great General Staff, and the war itself. It might also help us to understand a story whose chronological boundaries transcend political regimes, insofar as this one reaches from Wilhelmine Germany until close to the end of the Weimar Republic, if not further.
As I think along these lines, however, I see a journal article grow into something too big for the format. I would like to keep thinking about why Groener's Schlieffen Plan might matter to general historians of Germany, but maybe I first need to concentrate on a narrower, more specialized audience. I have to write a lot more before I can know.
Catch-Up Reading and Article Idea
Am I the only one who can get years behind on relevant readings? Silly me let teaching and editing get in the way of basic readings. But maybe I'm not the only one who gets behind. As much as I appreciate discussions about how digital scholarship could speed up the dissemination of research results, sometimes I'm quite glad these results come out slowly through journals, and that these journals are available online through the library for me to look at as time permits. I'm trying to get caught back up in a more systematic way, so that I can't use earning money as an excuse for missing new scholarship on certain topics. Still, we are talking about dead people who aren't going anywhere, right? And the pace of historical research is slow anyway. Besides, how often are the results of historical research advanced in real time? It's not like cable news channels and NPR are standing in line to review our output. Even blogging, tweeting, facebooking scholars have their own research projects to do, so that they can't pay attention to every new development of their colleagues at the moment it occurs.
The Schlieffen Plan debate has been dragging on for over a decade, so maybe I shouldn't feel too bad that I have only now read Gerhard Gross's excellent intervention (available in both German and English), in which he explains the whereabouts and wherefores of Schlieffen sources better than anyone I have seen (at least for those deeply immersed in the problem), not to mention addresses Zuber on his own chosen operational turf—albeit with politics as well as incredibly thorough archival work and careful, nuanced analysis. Now I need to make time to explore the differences between his Schlieffen and the one I see Zuber's other historiographical opponents offering, especially regarding the question of "preventive war" in 1905. But that will have to wait. Right now, I'm more interested in Schlieffen's image of war, what he imparted to the General Staff, and how. And I'm interested in matching Groener's timeline against this, because what I'm really trying to get at is the evolution of Wilhelm Groener's Schlieffen Plan, that is, how he understood and wrote about Schlieffen over the years.
By the way, how does "Wilhelm Groener's Schlieffen Plan" sound for an article title? That's what I've decided I'll write first.
Terence Zuber’s Image of War and the Schlieffen Plan Debate
Consumption History Again
Park & Shop Shopping Center, Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC, via Library of Congress.
Yesterday I asked how I could integrate the consumption history I’m learning into my teaching, and I pointed to a couple examples where it’s already there. But I missed a glaringly obvious one: the Great War.
Consumption is a vital part of the story in Gerald Feldman’s classic Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914—1918 (1966), insofar as the purchasing power of labor was inextricably linked to Germany’s social and political stability and, therefore, the country’s ability to produce sufficient armaments to continue fighting. The point is more accessible in Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914—1918 (1998 and 2004), which I have used in a course on the Great War and will use again next fall in one on modern Germany. There is also Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (2000), which I will be using in a graduate course on war and society this summer.
I also usually bring up a much earlier aspect of consumption history when I address the Enlightenment and the public sphere: coffee houses. To make this point, there is a delightful reading from before the Enlightenment on the Internet Modern History Sourcebook: “The First English Coffee-Houses, c. 1670—1675.”
Of course, none of this is informed by a specific historiography of consumption history, but it does point out how this topic is already in my teaching. But there’s a difference between including a topic and addressing it systematically. To think about war and society in Europe, I can at least draw on the periodizing nomenclature of “cabinet war,” “people’s war,” and “total war” to help describe the level of societal involvement in interstate conflicts over the past few centuries (Stig Förster et al.). If such language and periodization exists for understanding consumption history, I have not yet learned it.
Perhaps the main point is to recognize modern consumer societies as having a history in the first place, instead of taking them as a direct reflection of human nature and, hence, rendering them ahistorical, as too often happens in simplistic political rhetoric that opposes capitalism and communism—rhetoric that invariably finds its way into student spoken and written comments. I sometimes try to do this with economic thought in the early modern period, but historicizing capitalism should be a central historiographical problem for the modern era, too.
Hist 388-B02, Approaches to European Military History (GMU)
Here’s my syllabus for the summer course. It is different than most I have done, because the class will help plan the content of more than half the sessions. Such collaboration is desirable, I feel, because it will help drive home some key lessons about the methodological and thematic diversity of the field.
Frightened Bushies
The Bush administration seems to have been more freaked out by 9/11 than I realized. Just how far down a paranoid path it had drifted is demonstrated by the newest revelation of a measure it was contemplating back in 2002: using the military to arrest terror suspects in the United States. Bush ultimately went against it, but that it was even contemplated creates an image of a very frightened White House. Of course, Dick Cheney and John Yoo had their hand in this, so legal traditions and our political culture were not major impediments.
Downgrading 'Torture' to 'Harsh Questioning'
On the front page of today’s Washington Post, one can read the following headline:
Effectiveness Of Harsh Questioning Is Unclear
Detainee May Have Faced Few Traditional Tactics
This language bothers me. We are talking about torture here, so why not use the term? Why downgrade it to “harsh questioning” and even make it sound innovative, which comes to mind as the opposite of “traditional”? A story broadcast by On the Media this week shows that the Washington Post is not alone in this. Apparently the media is following the Obama administration’s lead.
I understand the administration’s position, because it is hoping this dark cloud will go away and not overshadow its policy agenda. Nonetheless, I do not understand how the administration could possibly believe that it will go away. The administration needs to get ahead of the story, even if it feels it can’t prejudice any possible criminal cases by calling it torture.
Meanwhile, there is no reason why newspapers have to toe the line on what language to use. The mere existence of definitions of what could and could not be done does not mean that the interrogation techniques used by the CIA were any less torture.
Honor and Violence
America’s heartless terrorism
Killing people like insects
But honor doesn’t fear power.
These sobering lines making the rounds in some parts of Pakistan raise troubling questions about our use of drones to bomb extremists in that country’s tribal regions. (See Mark Mazzetti’s “The Downside of Letting Robots Do the Bombing” in today’s New York Times.) While I am not sure how to interpret them, I am reminded of how effective the rhetoric of honor was for the insurgency in Iraq, until the U.S. developed a more hands-on approach under General Petraeus. I’m not trying to make a policy suggestion, mind you. Iraq and Afghanistan are two very different places. I am simply struck by the powerful role that an injured sense of honor can play among populations that might feel like David in the face of Goliath.
A Different Approach to History 100?
George Mason’s Hist 100 courses are supposed to cover Western Civilization in one semester. To manage this Sisyphean task, I switched from a chronological to a thematic approach. While this makes sense from an analytic point of view, covering themes seems to alienate some students, because the themes appear in the foreground, not the events and personalities. Moreover, the themes tend to bridge larger periods of time. With “Religion and Society,” for instance, I cover the Investiture Conflict, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Wars of Religion, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. And “War and Society” goes from the French Revolution through the Second World War into the Cold War.
The material in my thematic courses has been organized in a more meaningful way than was possible under a broad chronological approach, but it has not held students' attention. That is why I am thinking about covering a selection of specific episodes the next time around. I could put these up front and use the people, ideas, and issues involved as a vehicle to understand the broader themes that I want them to learn. A possible subtitle for such a course might be “Select Events and Ideas,” which might also make the history feel more manageable to the students.
Politics and Scholarship: U. S. Army War College
I am disappointed by the news Tom Ricks shares in “Fiasco at the Army War College." In it he asks, “Did faculty members at the Army War College curtail their criticism of the Iraq war for fear of institutional retaliation?” In fact, they did more, even blackballing Ricks. I’m almost surprised, because I think highly of that institution, but I also recall how little respect the Bush administration has shown for professionalism in so many areas of government.
Thirteen more days.
Al-Qaeda and Gaza
Marc Lynch offers an enlightening and disheartening article at Foreign Policy Magazine called “Zawahiri can’t believe his luck." In it he points out how good Israel’s attack has been for Al-Qaeda. The piece reminds us of the divisions among radical Islamic politics and shows how the current crisis offers Al-Qaeda a possible opening in Gaza. The piece also takes a swipe at U.S. public diplomacy, which seems to have devolved into an oxymoron under President Bush.
Meanwhile, “Ahmadinejad is having the best week ever."
Juan Cole on Israel’s Wars
Juan Cole offers some interesting historical perspective on Israel’s wars in a piece called “Gaza 2008: Micro-Wars and Macro-Wars.” Here is one of his more provocative assessments:
Israel’s political tradition seeks expansion if possible; if not possible, it seeks a balance of power with its enemies. If that is not possible, it seeks to be held harmless from its avowed foes. If that is not possible, it is willing to wage total war to punish the enemy population until it accepts at least a cold peace. Where necessary, Israel is willing to give up territorial expansion to get the cold peace.
If only I knew what “total war” means here. In modern European history it was when the distinction between soldiers and civilians was increasingly erased during the First and Second World Wars. If Israel sometimes erases such distinctions in urban situations, I am not aware of a policy that accepts this erasure, especially not for its own civilians. Presumably Cole has something else in mind or is using hyperbole, either way demonstrating how slippery the term “total war” can be.
And “cold peace”? Well, the Cold War was a rhetorical war in the metropoles and a shooting war in other countries by proxy; however, it was otherwise a peace, albeit one punctuated by extreme levels of militarization that the push of a button could have transformed into the first real total war. Perhaps then “cold war” in a generic sense means a war with no shooting. Does “cold peace” mean a peace marked by periodic violence? If so, I have not noticed any particular willingness by Israel to accept this violence. Or is this about an icy peace punctuated by the permanent threat of violence? Wouldn’t that be a cold war then?
Putting aside the overly generous use of unexplained labels, Cole’s article is worth reading, whether or not you agree with his take on “Israel’s old expansionist tendencies.” The historical context is useful, and the term “micro-wars” is at least consistent with the metaphor upon which “asymmetric war” depends, though it encompasses more dimensions than merely partisan warfare. Cole points to four specific factors in the twenty-first century: (1) the integration of the religious political parties Hamas and Hizbullah with the population around them via the parties' social services; (2) suicide bombs, tank-piercing capabilities, and small rocket fire; (3) the support of a regional power (a common feature of other guerilla wars); and (4) “Israel’s Achilles heel, its demographic vulnerability”—a violent environment encourages emigration. Cole uses these factors as the backdrop for his narrative of Israel’s conflicts in Southern Lebanon and Gaza.
In the end, though, he wonders if global opinion might prove a bigger problem for Israel, albeit only in the long term. Public opinion is the one thing I’ve been wondering about as well.
And “macro-war”? Does Cole mean the old conventional wars that Israel used to fight with its neighbors? Or is he talking about global public opinion, which is the focus of Israel’s and its enemies' propaganda wars and public diplomacy?
A Christmas Short Film from 1898
The British Film Institute has a YouTube channel that offers a lot of historic films. Here is “Santa Claus' by G. A. Smith in 1898. Apparently the special effects were quite a feat 110 years ago.
Update: I've removed my YouTube embeds because I don't want to set up consent notices for their trackers. Clicking the above screenshots will take you to the videos on their site. (June 2, 2024)
And a slightly longer film from 1941
For something longer and more in tune with this blog’s recurring theme of war and society, see “Christmas Under Fire” (1941), which looks at Britain at war on Christmas Eve. This film from the Ministry of Information has an American narrator for an American audience. It was made before Pearl Harbor, when the American public had no stomach for going to war in Europe.
Atrocities in the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–71
Illustration of peasants in the Vosges shooting at German soldiers, titled “Paysans des Vosges faisant le coup de feu.” Source: L’Illustration Européenne 1870, p. xvii, via Wikimedia Commons.
An essay on the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) that I wrote last year appeared in print this fall in a book about war atrocities from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.1 The essay focuses on German soldiers and French civilians using the example of the Bavarians. It examines why soldiers sometimes departed from generally accepted standards in Europe about sparing civilians the effects of war as much as possible.
The war began as a "cabinet war" that the German leadership hoped to win quickly through a series of decisive battles of annihilation. In this way the state, led by the king and his cabinet, would maintain control over the war effort and not face any undue influence from civilians, whether its own or those of the enemy. After destroying the Second Empire's army at Sedan, however, France refused to capitulate. Its people toppled the empire and vowed to fight on. The German leadership had a "people's war" on its hands that it took five more months to win. While the French and Germans fought most of this war with conventional means between armed forces organized by the state, the war also saw substantial civilian involvement that had the potential to lead to an ever deepening spiral of violence.
The most extensive contact between soldiers and civilians occurred as a result of the German military policy of living off the land, which made German forces more mobile. To maintain discipline, officers were supposed to take small details of soldiers to requisition what animals, fodder, and food their units required. Requisitioning resembled theft in that those whose property the German officers took had no choice in the matter, but it differed insofar as the German officers issued receipts for what they took. These would be paid off by whichever side lost. German forces were also quartered on civilian households. These circumstances enabled soldiers to pursue their own private initiatives. If their "hosts" would not give them what they needed, the soldiers often took it.
More famous, however, were reports of armed French civilians called francs-tireurs. While their number was not great enough to present a strategic threat, the German forces did have to devote some 120,000 soldiers to their lines of communication. Armed incidents led the invading soldiers to shoot suspected partisans summarily, burn down houses and even villages where such incidents occurred, and use hostages, most famously on locomotives. While some reactions had an ad hoc quality to them, the common thread was the notion of "military necessity." The German forces found the actions regrettable but necessary, in order to prevent the war from lasting longer than necessary. The idea was to counter French "terror" with measures so harsh that the French would see the error of their ways and refrain from any further resistance.
References for these incidents and the historiography of the Franco-Prussian War are available in this new essay as well as the following related one, in which I devote a lot of space to the events in Bazailles, which the Bavarians infamously burned down during the Battle of Sedan: "The Bavarian Army and French Civilians in the War of 1870–1871: A Cultural Interpretation," War in History 8.3 (2001): 271–93.
My source base for this research was published personal narratives, that is, letters, diaries, and memoirs. Most of them came from Bavarian soldiers and officers, though I drew on other German narratives by way of comparison. It is in some ways surprising how freely the fighting men wrote about these events, but what they were describing was either acceptable in their minds or told in relation to what lines they believed the French had crossed.
One phenomenon I found little mention of was the hostage-taking. This might be because the Bavarian veterans felt they had crossed a line, although it is also worth noting that their units were not as heavily involved in maintaining lines of communication in the rear, which is where the hostage-taking occurred. Recently I learned more about this subject from Heidi Mehrkens' new book, which includes a section on the German military using hostages on locomotives. Mehrkens' book is also helpful, because it uses archival sources that confirm the impressions I gained about relations between soldiers and civilians from the published primary sources.
Ninety Years Ago
Today is Veterans Day in the United States. Today also marks the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the Great War, in which 9 to 10 million soldiers died. To make that more comprehensible, try 1,303 German soldiers per day on average. By way of comparison, Americans lost 123 soldiers daily on average during the Second World War.1 The numbers are even more startling when all casualties—killed and wounded—are considered for the First World War: 12.4% of the prewar male population in the United Kingdom, 16.1% for France, 19.3% for Germany, 25.2% for Austria-Hungary, and 6.9% for Russia. 2 If it sounds like Russia got off easy by comparison, remember that this war touched off the Bolshevik Revolution, which brought civil war, famine, and Stalin.
My 9/11
A lot of people get angry or sad or both on 9/11. Of course, the loss of life in this country was horrible, but for me that date always brings up the manner in which Bush used Americans' sentiments to go to war against a country that had nothing to do with the attack, Iraq. And in this political season, it brings to mind how McCain was ahead of the curve in calling for that war.
Call these sentiments mean-spirited, if you will. How dare I politick on this day of remembrance? Fair enough, but these sentiments have been with me for many years now. They are part of my 9/11, just as are the worries about friends in New York, the story of a colleague’s husband who missed work that day and whose general was killed in the Pentagon office my colleague’s husband usually also occupied, the tales told by people in my building streaming in from downtown reporting alleged bombs in cars around the city, the military helicopters and jets over the skies of DC and the absence of the usual noisy commercial airliners, a child sick at home and a wife working downtown, the activation of a friend in the DC National Guard for years of active duty in this city and Afghanistan, the quiet evening streets for weeks after the attack, the sudden departure of Arab students from my building because their parents back home feared for their safety, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the color-coded warnings, and the never-ending rhetoric and politics of fear.
Or talk about hindsight being twenty-twenty. Thing is, Bush didn’t need hindsight. All he and his advisors needed was a sense of how countries have reacted to attacks in the past. As a historian, I claim no special insights into the future, but I frequently have a fair idea of what we should be paying attention to in the present. I’m good at asking questions, even if my answers aren’t always right. Here’s what I told my shaken students in Washington, DC seven years ago. And still we don’t teach war and society as a fundamental aspect of the human experience in required undergraduate history courses. What a shame.
What Russia should have learned from Iraq
At the beginning of the week I suggested that Russia might have learned a lesson from the American invasion of Iraq.[^1] One lesson that Russia clearly did not learn was the importance of world opinion. The Bush administration paid a high price for thumbing its nose at allies and friends who opposed the invasion. It did not believe in soft power, but its significant diminution was real nonetheless. Russia’s actions will cost it dearly if it continues to allow its armored vehicles to rumble around Georgia, far away from South Ossetia. Remember that breakaway province? Wasn’t defending it Russia’s casus belli? Sometimes states have to ignore international opinion, but it is important to balance whatever one hopes thereby to gain against what one is going to lose. Russia has more to lose because of its pugnacious behavior than it thinks. It might believe that its interests lie in observing a “jail house yard” code of behavior, and following this model might net it some short-term gains; however, in the long run it will lose more than it can gain. Naked force is a poor substitute for hearts and minds. It is an even worse substitute if those hearts and minds stand behind an opposing force. Hubris is a dangerous thing, Mr. Putin. That’s the real lesson of Iraq.
[^1:] The post I reference here has gone missing. – MRS, 11/3/2024
In Brief: Georgia and Russia Again
This post is better viewed on [the Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/20080922205825/http://markstoneman.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/in-brief-georgia-and-russia-again/) because of all the links and some discussion.