Back in Oct. 2002, I asked, in the context of a discussion of the looming Iraq war that still, at that point, seemed like an unimaginable future, “Has anyone in the Bush White House read ‘The Guns of August’?”
The answer then was, “Evidently not.” The same apparently could not be said of the Clinton administration, whose U.N. ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, now writes in the Washington Post about the unsettled chaos spreading from an Iraqi epicenter through the Middle East today. “This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis,” he chillingly declares. Holbrooke explicitly draws the parallel between the one-thing-leads-to-another crisis of August 1914 and the no-one-seems-to-be-on-top-of-things crisis unfolding today.
Barbara Tuchman’s famous and still magnificently readable book is the prototypical description of an international crisis in which, as the saying goes, events “took on a life of their own.” The complex interlocking alliances and mobilization timetables that pushed Europe over the brink, ending a long age of peace and prosperity and ushering in previously unimaginable volumes of slaughter and woe, might not seem on the surface to have much to do with today’s unfolding tragedies. And Holbrooke doesn’t work the parallel through as fully as he might: He sees the prospect of Turkey intervening in Kurdistan and Pakistan and India reigniting their conflict, while America’s colossal mistakes unite its enemies and its Israeli allies sink deeper into the Lebanon swamp. But he doesn’t connect the dots to back up his Cuban missile crisis comparison. It’s hard to see how we get from disastrous regional conflicts to World War-level conflagration.
That doesn’t make today’s situation much less scary, alas. We live in a faster era than our Great War forebears, with their telegrams and trenches, and yet, to me, today’s crisis feels more slow-motion. The disastrous choices compressed into the month of Tuchman’s title have instead in our day played out over the span of years since Bush’s ill-starred invasion of Iraq. How locked into the logic of chaotic confrontation are we? Will the slower pace of this train-wreck make its impact any less destructive? We can only hope and pray.
[tags]iraq, richard holbrooke, guns of august[/tags]