The Risks of Victory: An Historian’s Provocation
“Knowledge of history can never tell us exactly what to think or do in a given situation; it only offers a richer reservoir of possibilities to think about.” - Paul W. Schroeder on the analogy between the beginning of the Great War and the events of September 11, 2001.
The following is an excerpt taken from an essay written in 2001 by Paul W. Schroeder, part of a newly released collection of his work - America’s Fatal Leap: 1991-2016.
If it is true, as so many pundits rushed to tell us after the events of September 11, 2001, that everything is different, all is changed, and nothing will ever again be the same, then it follows that the study of history is unlikely to provide any guidance as we navigate our suddenly more uncertain future. But, of course, it is not true. The essential structure of contemporary international politics has not changed, and neither has human nature. That said, there are more and less intelligent ways to engage historical knowledge in service to the present.
The historical analogy most commonly heard after September 11—between the attacks of that sad day and the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor—is worse than useless. It is not just superficial but misleading. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise first blow in what the Japanese government knew would be a conventional war about power and territory. It was informed not at all by the strategy of terrorism, a strategy in which the weak attempt to goad their target into counterproductive reaction. The only thing that the attack on Pearl Harbor and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have in common is that both were directed against the United States.
There is another historical analogy, however, of far greater utility, as long as in using it we know the history cited well and, even more important, that we value differences as well as similarities between past and present circumstances. After all, knowledge of history can never tell us exactly what to think or do in a given situation; it only offers a richer reservoir of possibilities to think about. That more useful analogy is to the events of June–July 1914, the beginning of the Great War.
Three lessons emerge from reasoning by historical analogy from the early summer of 1914 to the late summer of 2001. The first is that a great power must avoid giving terrorists the war they want, but that the great power does not want. The second is that a great power must reckon the effects of its actions not only on its immediate circumstances, but with regard to the larger structure of international politics in which it clearly has a significant stake. The third is that a great power must beware the risks of victory as well as the dangers of defeat. If it is not careful and wise, the United States could find itself enmeshed even deeper in the Middle East and Southwest Asia than it is today, and risk generating greater prospective dangers in the process of containing smaller near-term ones.
After sketching the logic of the analogy between July 1914 and September 2001, I will pass lightly over the first two of these lessons but dwell more on the third. Let me say only before pressing on that the analysis presented here is (by temperament, not ideological formulae) a conservative one, and yet it is most likely to challenge—and perhaps even to annoy—those who think of themselves as conservatives. That this is so may bear another kind of lesson for us to ponder.
The Analogy
The easiest way to present the analogy between what happened in June–July 1914 to the events of September 11, 2001, is simply to describe what happened roughly eighty-eight years ago in language germane to what happened about three months ago.
The 1914 crisis and war resulted directly and immediately from a terrorist action: the assassination in Sarajevo, Bosnia (then part of Austria-Hungary), of the heir-apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a group of terrorists—mostly Bosnian students—led by Gavrilo Princip.[1] A widespread network of organizations, agencies and governments was connected directly or indirectly to this conspiracy. In varying degrees of involvement and complicity, these included: secret revolutionary organizations both within the Habsburg Monarchy and in Serbia; the Serbian military intelligence apparatus led by Col. Dragutin Dimitrijević, which trained, supported, and armed these terrorists; the Serbian government headed by Nikola Pasic, who knew something about all this but chose to remain officially ignorant; the nationalist organization in Serbia promoting pan-Serbism and its goal of Greater Serbia, now aimed principally at the destruction of the Habsburg Monarchy and at the Serbian annexation of large tracts of its territories; the Serbian press, parliament, and political public that supported this radical ideology; and the Russian government, which supported Serbia as part of a policy of isolating and paralyzing Austria-Hungary, and whose minis- ter to Serbia actively encouraged anti-Austrian irredentism and subversive revolutionary activity until his death just before the assassination.
The Austro-Hungarian government knew a good deal about this, though not all the details. It considered the assassination the final outrage in a series of Serbian provocations and attacks directed against the monarchy; believed that the heart of the conspiracy lay in Belgrade; was convinced by experience that combating Serbian state-sponsored terrorism and subversion by means other than military force would prove useless because the Serbian government never kept its promises; and therefore concluded that Austria-Hungary’s existence as a great power required a direct attack that would, as the phrase went, eliminate Serbia as a political factor in the Balkans.
Yet one cannot simply link the whole terrorist-subversive conspiracy directly to Austria’s action and thus to the war. For though several organizations and individuals were complicit to some degree in this terrorist act, the only ones directly responsible for deciding on it and carrying it out were Gavrilo Princip and his small group of co-terrorists. None of the others ordered it, knew precisely about it, or wanted it to happen. Indeed, though others complicit in the act also hated the Habsburg Monarchy, they opposed making war against it at that particular time. Many anticipated the monarchy’s downfall with approval, but a gradual downfall caused by internal dissolution was what most had in mind and were working to promote. Some argued and hoped that such a process would not promote an inter- national war but help prevent one. Princip and his fellow conspirators, however, consciously intended to promote an international war through their deed. Princip said during his wartime imprisonment that he had wanted a war because if Serbia won, then Greater Serbia would be achieved; and if it lost, then Austria-Hungary would annex the Kingdom of Serbia—in which case all the Serbs would be united, even though under hated foreign rule. Princip’s act was therefore directed also against his own fellow revolutionaries and sympathizers; it was intended to force them to do what they were as yet unwilling to do—follow the ideology of pan-Serbism and the slogan of “Union or Death”—to its logical, mad conclusion.
Finally, the crowning irony in this ghastly scenario is this: though Princip deliberately tried to start a great war, his terrorist action, which succeeded only by luck, could not in itself produce that war. Only Austria-Hungary could do that by its response, and it did. Yet of all the participants great and small in the 1914 crisis, none more deeply and genuinely feared a great war than the government of Austria-Hungary, or had better reasons to do so. Time and again previously (1904–05, 1908–09, 1912–13) it had considered the war option and rejected it, even when the chances for military victory looked good. One can show that in July 1914, too, though it undoubtedly wanted and aimed for a local war against Serbia, its larger aim was general peace. Its forlorn hope was that Russia would accept a punishment of Serbia for the sake of ending the terrorist-revolutionary threat to all thrones, including Russia’s, and that then Austria and Russia could settle their other differences (above all the Ruthenian question) and restore both good relations and the old Dreikaiser- bund (the “Three Emperors’ League”) as well.
In other words, the terrorists whose action triggered the great war wanted a war but could not start it by themselves; those who helped them prepare the action did not want the war but were to varying degrees dragged into it; and the terrorists’ worst enemy, which had the greatest reasons to avoid war, supplied the war the terrorists wanted.
Anyone can see the parallels suggested here, however imperfect they may be. Bin Laden is Princip, and the countries that abet al-Qaeda’s terrorism compose the conspiracy. Only bin Laden and his chief lieutenants plotted and knew about the attacks of September 11 in advance, not the Taliban leadership or the leadership of any other state or sympathetic Muslim group, particularly Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). Only bin Laden wanted to touch off a war involving the United States; other fundamentalist groups, the Taliban, the Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, Sudanese and Libyan governments surely did not. The US government knew plenty about bin Laden and the network of state support for his activities; it had been attacked by bin Laden before, the World Trade Center had been a target, it knew of the existence of al-Qaeda cells in the United States, and airline hijackings have long been part of the terrorist repertoire— and yet it did little to prevent the terrorist act, which led it in turn to fight a war that it would otherwise not have sought.
But if the analogy is easy to follow, at least in its broad stripes, anyone can also see that it is nonsense to imply that the two situations are exactly alike and that the present one could lead to World War III. 1914 and 2001 are entirely different. Austria- Hungary was weak, almost isolated, surrounded by enemies and opponents, internally divided, and therefore prone to commit a suicidal blunder. Europe was then a tinderbox, locked in hostile alliances and bitter rivalries and caught in a spiraling arms race. The United States today is extremely powerful, surrounded by allies and friends, internally united, and in an ideal position to take strong rational action in its own and the world’s long-range interests. The world is relatively calm, with no hostile alliances or serious great power crises and enmities. Almost every other important government agrees with the American stand against terrorism and wants to support it. They recognize that inter- national terrorism menaces all decent states and societies, and that the current sophisticated, far-flung, fanatical variety is to the crude, primitive organizations and actions of 1914 what atomic warfare is to tribal banditry. Thus, any notion that the United States might provoke another world conflict by declaring war on terrorism—or rather, by recognizing a war that certain terrorists have declared on it and others—is silly.
Do Not Help Your Enemy
But that is not the point. The point is, if one grants the analogy for the sake of widening our intellectual framework, that there is much to learn about our choice of tactics. Some reflection on this analogy may enable us to see what has happened and what we have done and are doing in response to it in a different light.
So then grant, for argument’s sake, that al-Qaeda planned and organized the September 11 attack independently of the wishes and control of the organizations, movements, and governments, including the Taliban and the ISI, which were in some ways complicit with them, and that this terrorist action was intended among other things to drag them into bin Laden’s fanatical campaign. Grant that he wanted a war against the United States while they did not, and also that the actions he took, terrible though they were, could not by themselves achieve his goal of war with the United States, because his organization not only could not declare war as a regular state could, but at first dared not even to openly acknowledge the deed. Grant then that he could thus only hope to gain his goal of a great war between the United States and the Muslim world, overthrowing in the process those corrupt governments that supposedly had betrayed Islam by collaborating with the West, if the US government helped by declaring war on him and his cause in response. Grant finally, in the spirit of “know thine enemy,” a certain consistency and rationale to this line of reasoning and course of action.
Could this not suggest some questions about the tactics, if not the basic strategy, of the American government’s response to this attack from the first moment? That response was to declare immediately that these acts of terrorism were acts of war against the United States, and to answer with a public, solemn, dramatic declaration of war on terrorism, a mobilization for it, a commitment to total victory as the only thinkable outcome, and the demand for total support for this “crusade” (a remarkable, if subsequently retracted, choice of words by President Bush) from every ally, friend, neutral, and even opponent, at the risk of facing the “full wrath” of the United States (Vice President Cheney’s phrase) if they declined.
Now, granted that the terrorist action was unquestionably an attack upon the United States as a nation, rather than merely on certain individuals or particular authorities; granted that the deed and its perpetrators deserve the execration universally heaped on them; granted that the American government, for fully understandable and justifiable reasons of domestic politics, international policy and normal human sensibilities, had to respond quickly and strongly to the attack; granted that any appropriate response had to include the use of military force. Yet even granting all this, one should also recognize that this response, even if forced upon us by circumstances, may have given the terrorists just what they wanted but could not achieve on their own: an international stature as a formidable enemy of the United States and the Western world that their actual deeds and power do not deserve, and the open wider war they want. If, as seems clear, they are fanatical ideologues and criminals but not fools or madmen in any clinical sense, and show a high degree of purposive rationality in pursuit of their goal, the safest assumption is that they anticipated and desired this reaction from the United States. Their willingness to make martyrs of themselves for their cause should tell us that they also are ready to make unwilling martyrs of many thousands of their fellow believers and countrymen as well by getting the United States and its allies to come after them with military force. This is a standard tactic for terrorist and guerrilla fighters: provoke an enemy into bloody reprisals so as to destroy the vital center and force everyone to choose between them and the national or religious enemy. It was Gavrilo Princip’s calculation, and he was far less clever than these terrorists.
The first reflection to be gained from this parallel and from general historical experience is this: “Try not to give your worst enemies what they want but cannot achieve without your help; or, if you cannot help doing so, at least be aware of the danger and try to limit it.” In retrospect, it might have been wiser to treat the attack from the outset as a horrible criminal action (which it also was) that had to be answered by a major inter- national police action against the criminals (which the current operation also is), but without declaring war on terrorism and thereby giving an inflated importance to both the threat and the perpetrators. Many countries have had to combat long-term terrorist threats and campaigns more dangerous to their security than this one is to ours without declaring a general war on terrorism as a phenomenon and on all terrorists in general. This latter, more limited tactic may work better, in any case, on behalf of the goal of separating terrorists from whatever base they may enjoy among the general populace.
To be sure, as the first wave of shock and anger has subsided, so has—somewhat at least—the “all-out war for a total victory over international terrorism” rhetoric. The administration now seems clearly aware of this danger and is working to narrow the target of its operations to specific terrorist organizations, or at least to put its targets in a sober sequential order for a methodical and protracted campaign. Its consistent effort not to make the conflict a war against Islam or against the Arab world is also very commendable, but given the nature of Middle Eastern cultures it may also be futile. In any event, the big questions are, can this narrower and more patient strategy be effectively pursued without expanding inadvertently into a wider war and, even if it can, will the American public understand and accept the limits this must place on both the kinds of operations undertaken and the kind of victory possible? Not everyone will agree with this point of view, but few among us will argue that it is not worth thinking about.
America’s Fatal Leap: 1991-2016 by Paul W. Schroeder is out now. See all his work here.
Notes:
1: If one objects that assassinating a single political leader and potential head of state is not the same as killing thousands of civilians, the answer is that the goal of both terrorist actions was the same: to sow confusion and division within the enemy state and bring it down. Assassination of monarchs and other