Begetting violence: New Zealand and Australian troops at Gallipoli during World War I. The overwhelming Allied victory in the war may have led inexorably to World War II.Photo/file
Begetting violence: New Zealand and Australian troops at Gallipoli during World War I. The overwhelming Allied victory in the war may have led inexorably to World War II.Photo/file
I am not a historian. A historian collects archival materials, conducts interviews, reads contemporaneous reports, unearths documents -- a social sciences method paralleling that of the sister "hard" sciences.
Then a historian may hesitatingly propound a theory to help explain "what happened". As a student of history, and without that disciplinary restraint, I'm emboldened to conjecture based upon the known facts of recent history.
Proposition 1:
In war, the result of overwhelming victory (as opposed to a tempered victory, or an ambivalent one) is a precursor to ultimate disaster for the victor.
The Allied victory in World War I led them to demand excessive reparation payment from Germany and ultimately to World War II.
The six-day war of Israel in 1967 led to their creation of the settlements whose albatross weight threatens the existence of the whole Zionist project.
Likewise, the 72-hour war against Iraq in 1991 emboldened the Washington hawks and supported the arrogance that underpinned the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its subsequent disasters, both in destroying the tenuous balance of the Middle East and the domestic corrosion of any semblance of unity and consensus in the United States, making a Trump presidency -- normally unthinkable -- inevitable.
World War II may be an exception, at least as far as the US is concerned.
The US confirmed its position as the single biggest economy and the most powerful military as a result. Considering all the destruction caused in Europe and the Soviet Union by the war, the US was the figurative last man standing.
Jay Kuten
However, most thinking leaders in the US understood that the Soviets willingness to sacrifice millions of their citizens in battle had been decisive in the victory over the Nazis. That knowledge alone tempered any ambition towards world hegemony.
And then, in response to the perceived threat from their former Soviet partner, the US engaged itself to rebuild the manufacturing infrastructure and social frameworks of their former enemies, Japan and Germany, making possible the significant economic activity and cooperation of these formerly restive power centres.
Is there a lesson in all this? Perhaps it is better not to beat your foes decisively and, if you do, it's smart to help them to recover, saving the need to repeat the wars and your own degradation. The US, seems to have lost that lesson, hence we're here today, looking down a dark road.
Proposition 2:
One lesson from "ancient" history needs to be relearned. Prolonged conflict results in adversaries coming to resemble each other -- the law of Historic Consanguinity.
The Peloponnesian War saw Athens' democracy yield to Sparta's militarism; the cold war of the West with the Soviet Union has seen both systems, communism and capitalism, yield to oligarchic crony capitalism.
We've now been at war for 16 years, beginning in Afghanistan. The war on terror -- which was declared unilaterally by President George W Bush following Al Qaeda's killing of civilians with airliners used as terror weapons -- has been succeeded by the US use of drones as terror weapons killing civilians.
Afghanistan and the outer regions of Pakistan have long been the place where tribal customs are the prevalent form of justice. A serious violation of the social/religious code is addressed by local leaders pronouncing a fatwa of death sentences in which the notion of offended honour and the need for vengeance are accepted motivations brooking no formal legal objection.
In this atmosphere, when Western governments send their special forces for prolonged battle with unclear purpose, it should come as no surprise when those troops take on the local custom. A death of one of their number, killed by local combatants, may quickly result in counter-attacks at least partly motivated by the need for revenge.
If that is what occurred in 2010, involving New Zealand SAS troops in Afghanistan, it's imperative to hold an inquiry to find the truth. Then, it's necessary to hold responsible those civilian leaders who, for no reasons of national purpose, sent those troops there in the first place.
Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
