From Sarajevo to Baghdad: The Lessons of War
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Somewhere along the line, though, some of our politicians and foreign-policy “experts” forgot about, or willfully ignored, the unpredictability of modern warfare. If there’s one thing that almost all accounts of those fateful weeks in 1914 agree upon—from A. J. P. Taylor’s “War By Timetable” to Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914”—it is that the politicians, diplomats, and military planners of the time had no conception of the world-altering catastrophe that was about to unfold. Despite an epic arms race that had developed over the previous ten years, many of them still thought of warfare in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense of pursuing strategic ends by military means.
In Germany, for instance, elements of the Kaiser’s government and the Prussian officer class were convinced that their young and rising country, hemmed in by France and Russia on land, and by the British at sea, needed to establish, once and for all, its right to define and dominate a Mitteleuropa. When turmoil broke out in the Balkans following the Archduke’s assassination, according to the thesis put forward in 1961 by the German historian Fritz Fischer, the Germans exploited the situation for their own ends, hoping that they could knock off France and Russia while keeping Britain out of the conflict.
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Eric Hobsbawm, the late British historian, was surely right to group together the years from 1914 to 1991 as the “Short Twentieth Century.” In an important sense, the period from Princip to the rise of Boris Yeltsin represented the playing out of forces that the Great War unleashed. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and the short century ended. After a brief period of hope and American triumphalism came the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Here is not the place to dwell, at length, on the debates surrounding that folly and its denouement. In scale and ultimate import, the Great War and the Iraq War cannot be compared. The Middle East is but one region of the world, and it was a troubled one well before George W. Bush left Texas. But it is surely apt, on this anniversary, to note one historical analogy. The disastrous aftermath of the Iraq misadventure demonstrated once again the law of unintended consequences.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2014/07/from-sarajevo-to-baghdad-the-lessons-of-war.html