WHERE THE BUCK STOPS!

Rulers Have Failed Us

If hindsight offers the delusion of historical inevitability, the future offers the mirage of infinite possibility. We easily forget that while the past is now "fixed," it never was while options were weighed and choices made. The world then lives with the consequences. What our generation tends to overlook, whether willfully or not, is that our options are inevitably shaped by the past. History matters. Always.

Unfortunately, this gets ignored. Behind the closed doors of deliberations in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, a senior Middle East expert, Dr. Michael Williams, was briefing Prime Minister Tony Blair. He explained the generations-old tensions and deep divisions inherent within Iraqi society, as well as why occupying Westerners might not be altogether welcomed. "Blair casually brushed him aside: 'That's all history, Mike. This is about the future.'"

The major flaws in the Iraq War process were perhaps exposed at that very moment. The prime minister revealed not simply an ignorance but a spurning of history, as if an invasion (to bring "Iraqi freedom") could inaugurate a "Year Zero." A decade later, that sounds naive at best, culpably irresponsible at worst. How can we possibly imagine the past is irrelevant to our present or future? Even a cursory glance at foreign involvement in the Middle East suggests that the arrival of Western tanks might have less than propitious resonances. We despise history at our peril.

That is not to deny the appeal, however. The study of history is fraught with difficulty; its lessons are rarely comforting; it rarely serves simplistic sound bites or ideological agendas. So, as the German Hasselbacher says to his English friend Wormold, protagonist of Graham Greene's exquisite satire Our Man in Havana, "You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced."

Nevertheless, this chapter's purpose is to deliberately face that reality. Contemporary disillusionment with the powerful has not arisen spontaneously. What follows, then, is an arbitrary trawl of a few episodes from what Walker Percy described as "the most scientifically advanced, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history."

Intransigent Leadership: The Officer Class and the Trenches (1914-1918)

The last century dawned with many grounds for optimism. Scientific and technological advances, for example, were gaining momentum. Although United States Commissioner of Patents Charles Duell had reportedly claimed that "everything that can be invented has been invented," his opinion in 1902 was, in fact, very different: "All previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness."

Had he lived, he would not have been disappointed. Consider the wonders of eradicating smallpox, the might of microchips, and the triumph of the moon landings, to name but three. However, the ends to which even these technological innovations would be put were not always so benign.

In 1912, August Bebel, leader of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SDP), made a prophetic speech in the Reichstag:

"There will be a catastrophe ... sixteen to eighteen million men, the flower of different nations, will march against each other, equipped with lethal weapons. But I am convinced that this great march will be followed by the great collapse [at this moment many in the chamber began to laugh]—all right, you have laughed about this before; but it will come ... What will be the result? After this war we shall have mass bankruptcy, mass misery, mass unemployment, and great famine."

The record states that his words were drowned out by mocking laughter. A right-wing deputy called out, "Herr Bebel, things always get better after every war!"

Bebel died the following year. But as historian Frederick Taylor proceeds to comment, "Another year after that, booming, brilliant Berlin would be a city at war. A city of hunger. A city of despair." Bebel had seen that humanity, not just Germany, would suffer.

The statistics from just three key World War I battles prove the point:

• The First Battle of the Marne (September 1914) offered the bitter firstfruits of the reaping to come. Barbara Tuchman described how it had sucked up lives "at the rate of 5,000 and sometimes 50,000 a day, absorbing munitions, energy, money, brains, and trained men."

• The Battle of the Somme (July - November 1916) caused the "prodigal spending of lives by all the belligerents that was to mount and mount in senseless excess." On the opening day alone, the British army suffered its worst day in its history, with 60,000 casualties. By its conclusion, the Allies had suffered over 650,000 casualties and the Central Powers, 450,000.10 And the dividend from this exorbitant expense? An advance of roughly seven miles.

• Calculating the statistics for the Battle of Passchendaele (July – November 1917) is even more fraught than for other battles, but recent studies suggest both sides lost roughly a quarter of a million men.

The difficulty with such figures is that they leave us dazed and uncomprehending. More disturbingly, they even seem paltry compared to the horrors of the next world war: six million Jews killed in the Holocaust; perhaps as many as twenty-seven million perished in the Soviet Union (roughly ninety times the number of United States casualties). We might try to imagine the impact on individual families in order to personalize it a little (for example, members from both sides of my own family were cut down in the trenches). But ultimately, how can we ever grasp the colossal scale of this waste? Such is the horrifying legacy of warfare's industrialization. This slaughter could never have been accomplished by ships of the line and siege engines, let alone by arrows or muskets. Technological advances seemed merely to offer military strategists greater scope for carnage.

No wonder survivors spoke so vociferously against it. Any residual Victorian deference lay slain in the sea of Flanders' freshly dug graves. There genuinely was a sense that "lions had been led by donkeys," no matter how just the war aims might have been or how unfair the...