[cryout-multi][cryout-column width=”1/4″] [/cryout-column] [cryout-column width=”1/2″]
BS ‘n’ About…
History’s Lessons
Why do we even bother studying history? The answers are right there in front of us yet we never seem to look back far enough, ask any of the right questions, nor connect any of the dots that are laid out for us. Since we never seem to see the bigger picture, we keep repeating the same old mistakes. Problem is the stakes keep getting higher. This time around the stakes are our sons and daughters.
They are on the frontlines in Iraq, in a war the military didn’t want, among a people who doesn’t want them there, in the worst of all military deployments: the old ‘circle the wagons’. We sent them there with false expectations of being showered with flowers and have no realistic plan for getting them out. It is the recipe for a Jihad if history has ever written one.
Iraq is the cradle of western civilization and America is the pre-eminent modern society. It somehow seems fitting that history has brought us full circle. Back to our roots. But what has it taught us and what does that say about where we’re headed? What answers is it screaming at us that we don’t want to hear?
Since it was the bubbling chaos of Old Testament Iraq that spawned the Persian Empire, that ought to be as good a place to start as any. From that point to this day, history emphatically shows that the ‘winners’ were the ones most able to adapt their military and geopolitical actions to the changing times and forces arrayed against them. Every great society has fallen because a lesser culture found their weak point and exploited it.
When 100,000 Persians rolled out of the East, they were whooped by 300 Spartans at Thermopolae. The Greek’s innovation, the Phalanx, inter-locking shields with a bristling wall of 14-foot spears, was the perfect thing to defeat the hordes and heavy cavalry of the Persians. The Greeks went on to become the pre-eminent culture in early Classical times.
Enter Rome and her Legionaries, highly mobile troops equipped with throwing spears and short hacking words. It was the answer to the Phalanx and Rome went on to dominate the Western World for a thousand years. Widespread use of the stirrup would eventually enable cavalry to become more armored and better able to fight from horseback. Rome and her legionaries fade into history and we enter the Age of the Knight. Chivalry would rule the day until the advent of gunpowder.
Gunpowder accelerated everything. New technologies and ways to use them, even in the midst of a war, would often determine the winner. The losers were usually the ones who failed to adapt to these changing technologies. The losers were usually equipped to kick butt in the previous war.
Gunpowder-era European conflicts fought prior to our Revolution were fought by expensive, highly trained, toy armies owned by the various Soldier Kings. The 13 Colonies reintroduced the concept of the common farmer grabbing his weapon from above the mantle and heading off to war. Only this time around the weapon was a gun. They hid behind trees and didn’t play by the Soldier Kings’ rules. Gunpowder was in the hands of the commoners and the days of the toy armies were over.
It took Europe the Napoleonic Wars to learn this lesson but, by their conclusion, French citizen soldiers had carried the concepts of liberty, equality, fraternity, to the farthest corners of Europe. Feudal Europe was finally over. Gunpowder felled the Monarchies.
The death knell would prove to be WWI, a treasury-draining bloodbath fought with 20th Century weaponry and 18th Century tactics. It would prove so costly and attention diverting that it resulted in the breakup of the great European colonial empires into the Third World as we know it today.
World War II was borne out of the political, social, and ethnic tensions unleashed when revolutionary elements took control in the vacuum left by the passing of the monarchies. It was almost lost because the ‘Bad Guys’ figured out what to do with all the new technologies long before the ‘Good Guys’. It was only won because war had become so costly that population and economic might ruled the day. It was a victory that has clouded our thinking ever since.
Like the infamous French Maginot Line, ours is a military perfectly suited for winning the last war, not the next one. The Cold War should have been proof enough that planes, tanks, and bombs weren’t going to win the next one. They didn’t win it for us in Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Somalia, or the Gulf War for that matter. They won’t win it this time around either.
As we Americans search within as a people and a nation for answers to the messes we’ve gotten into, we shouldn’t be ignoring history. A myriad of international considerations have come together to make it almost impossible for one nation to impose its will on another, regardless of their difference in size. This is probably a very good thing. But it is a history lesson we in America haven’t seemed to accept.
The military says it needs more of our sons and daughters in Iraq. And make no mistake about it, it does. But if you listen closely, they’re not talking about victory. They’re asking for the warm bodies necessary to conduct a safe retreat, a last ditch attempt to get back home with even a little of our dignity intact. We no longer have the initiative in Iraq. We are stationary targets completely at the mercy of our enemies’ willingness to die for the cause. And it gets worse every day.
This is a war that cannot be won with tanks, planes, or our children. But “we broke it so now we gotta fix it”. We have to do something. The problem is we are an idealistic, upstart 200-year-old nation up to our eyeballs in religious, ethnic, and cultural tensions going back five millennia. We can ignore history and follow the Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Knights into the dustbin of history. Or we can embrace history, learn from our mistakes, and find 21st Century ways of confronting 21st Century problems. Wars of the future won’t be fought on battlefields. They’ll be fought in our hearts and minds. Let America be the first nation to embrace that notion.
This is a war that cannot be won by us alone. Issues in the Middle East affect the well being of every human being on Earth. They are issues that five thousand years of warfare have taught us can’t be answered on the battlefield. They are issues that the world must come together on and find solutions for. Sons and daughters only die when their Elders can’t reach accord. This time around it is our fight. Not our sons. Not our daughters. Ours.
- [/cryout-column] [cryout-column width=”1/4″] [/cryout-column] [/cryout-multi]