DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Why the 'big push' sounds
horribly familiar By Adam Hochschild
If we needed more evidence that those
surrounding US President George W Bush have a tin
ear for the lessons of history, it came this month
when National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley
referred to increasing the number of US troops in
Iraq as "the big push" that would bring victory
closer.
"The Big Push" is a phrase that
came into the language with another troop surge
that was supposed to bring another war to victory.
For months beforehand, the Big Push was how
British cabinet ministers, propagandists,
generals, and foot soldiers
talked about the 1916 Battle
of the Somme. (It is even the title of a later
book on the subject.)
World War I had been
in a deadly stalemate for the better part of two
years. A string of horrific battles had revealed
the huge toll of trench warfare: defenders could
partially protect themselves by building deeper
trenches, concrete pillboxes, and reinforced
dugouts far underground. But when you went "over
the top" of the trench to attack, you were
disastrously vulnerable - out in the open, exposed
to deadly, sweeping machine-gun fire as you
clambered slowly across barbed wire and bypassed
water-filled artillery-shell craters.
So
what did the Allies do? They attacked. At the
time, in numbers of men involved, it was history's
largest battle. The plan was to break open the
German defense line, send the cavalry gloriously
charging through the gap, and turn the tide of the
war. The result was a catastrophe.
The
British army lost nearly 20,000 killed and some
40,000 wounded or missing on the first day alone.
German machine-gunners, after waiting out the long
preliminary bombardment in their fortified bunkers
underground, returned to the surface in time to
mow down the advancing soldiers. After four and a
half months of fighting, British and French troops
had suffered more than 600,000 casualties. The Big
Push had gained them roughly 8 kilometers of
muddy, shell-pocked wasteland.
Like the
Big Push of the Somme, the Big Push in Iraq is a
reapplication of tactics that have already proved
a calamitous failure. As the outspoken retired US
Army Lieutenant-General William Odom, former
director of the National Security Agency, puts it,
it's like finding yourself in a hole and then
digging deeper.
Every piece of evidence
from these past nearly four bloody years makes
clear that many Sunnis and Shi'ites alike are
driven to rage by the very presence of American
soldiers walking Iraqi streets, barging into Iraqi
homes, and arresting or killing people who may or
may not be insurgents. Furthermore, the people
arrested or killed, however unsavory, are
sometimes the only force protecting their
communities against attacks from the opposite side
in an extremely bitter civil war. Therefore, as
sociologist Michael Schwartz explained the matter
some six weeks ago, a previous joint US-Iraqi
counterinsurgency drive in Baghdad, of exactly the
type now being planned, actually increased
civilian casualties.
There are huge
differences, of course, between World War I and
the current fighting in Iraq. But even beyond the
optimistic talk of the Big Push, there is another
eerie resemblance between the two conflicts. In
both cases, a great power was itching to launch an
invasion, and seized on a handy excuse to do so.
For the Bush administration, of course, the excuse
was September 11, 2001. From a long string of
insider revelations, we know that its top
officials were hungry to invade Iraq, looked
eagerly for the most far-fetched connections
between Saddam Hussein and September 11, and -
even then not finding them - invaded anyway, while
continuing to imply vaguely that the connections
were there.
Something remarkably similar
happened in 1914. Austria-Hungary was a shaky
empire of restless ethnic minorities ruled by a
German-speaking elite in Vienna. Nearly half the
population was Slavic, including many Serbs. As a
result, the imperial rulers in Vienna felt
threatened by the very existence on their border
of the independent nation of Serbia, small though
it was. They were determined to invade it,
possibly partition it, and so stamp out pan-Slavic
and Serb nationalism once and for all.
They drew up detailed invasion plans.
Then, most conveniently, Archduke Franz Ferdinand
of Austria-Hungary, the emperor's nephew and heir
to the throne, was assassinated while on a visit
to the provincial city of Sarajevo. Like the White
House after September 11, the imperial palace in
Vienna promptly began an eager search for a
connection to the Serbian government.
Frustratingly, however, the archduke had been
killed on Austro-Hungarian soil by Gavrilo
Princip, an Austro-Hungarian citizen. The
assassin, an ethnic Serb, had indeed had help from
a shadowy secret organization of Serb
nationalists, but no connection to the government
of Serbia was ever proved. No matter.
Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia anyway.
Other countries quickly jumped in on both sides,
and a conflagration began that remade the world.
Part of that remaking, ironically, was the
postwar cobbling together of three provinces of
the defeated Ottoman Empire into what was first a
British protectorate and then, after 1932,
independent Iraq.
There is a final
resemblance between the present bloodshed there
and World War I. Both conflicts were fought for a
curiously shifting set of noble-sounding goals.
With Iraq, the Bush administration has tried on
for size finding weapons of mass destruction,
liberating the Iraqis, combating Islamist
terrorism, and installing democracy in the Arab
world. In World War I, the Allies initially talked
of coming to the defense of innocent, invaded
little Belgium, then of defeating German
militarism and defending the British and French
way of life. Once president Woodrow Wilson brought
the United States into the conflict, he spoke of
"the war to end all wars".
It didn't. The
humiliation of the losers and the catastrophic
loss of life on both sides did nothing to end all
wars and much to light the fuses of later ones -
especially the Russian Civil War and World War II.
The longer the war in Iraq goes on, and the more
US troops are planted by Big Pushes in a highly
combustible part of the world, the more we
Americans will continue to stoke a widespread
humiliation and anger whose consequences are
already guaranteed to haunt us for decades to
come.
Adam Hochschild is the San
Francisco-based author of six books, including
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight
to Free an Empire's Slaves, a finalist for the
National Book Award, and King Leopold's Ghost.
He is writing a book on World War I.
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