Sorry- I couldn’t resist using that phrase this morning. I ran across it when doing some research on the massive Allied force that landed in Normandy seventy years ago. There was so much to talk about then- the roundness of the number of the year and the diminishing number of the veterans who participated being the story of the anniversary- that I didn’t get around to it.
Antony Beevor is an excellent war historian, born the year after his father returned from The Big One. His mother “Kinta” Beevor was a talented writer (“A Tuscan Childhood”) and that gift clearly runs in the family. After an education at Sandhurst and a hitch in the 11th Hussars, he started his career as a popular historian with accounts of the flash-bang of what the young men of both sides had to do to survive. His masterful “Stalingrad,” was followed with the incredible Gotterdammerung of “Downfall: Berlin 1945.”
His prose is lively and engaging. He moved on to something else in his tome “The Second World War” to talk not so much about the military campaigns but about what happened when the Generals were done and the Politicians returned to sort out the new world order. The motion of whole civilian populations- the wholesale ethnic cleansing of places like Prussia of their German population- reflected the political will to end centuries of ethnic strife.
Beevor has been criticized for some of the statistics he uses to describe what happened to those vast numbers of DP’s- the ubiquitous “Displaced Persons” of Europe. He is particularly hard on the conduct of the Red Army in occupied Deutschland, which based on the personal testimony of my pal Elsbeth, rest her soul, seems quite believable.
But he also found the conduct of the liberated French to be problematic, particularly the readiness of many French people to settle scores by denouncing neighbors and rivals as collaborators and particularly the head-shaving of Frenchwomen accused of collaboration horizontale with the German occupiers.
I was struck by the starkness of the phrase. It came to me again in the dazzling advance in Iraq of a hitherto obscure bunch of Sunni jihadis from the war-next-door in Syria. I mentioned the fact that it seemed we already had a defacto new Sunni state running from Aleppo in Syria to just north of Baghdad, which itself was now a Shia rump state. The bold Kurds, non-Arabs, asserted themselves by securing strategic Kirkuk, and have essentially rendered themselves independent.
(The ethnic lines of demarcation in the War of Arab diversity. Kurdistan is a blob centered on northern Iraq, and encompassing the NE of Syria and a chuck of Eastern Turkey.)
The argument goes that this is the parallel to what happened in Europe in 1945. Punched out after two enormous bouts, the people were scourged from places they had lived for centuries. There are no longer Sudeten Germans. Some formerly German towns in Poland now have Ukrainian names. The Tito-delayed homogenization of Bosnia-Herzegovina happened in the aftermath of the Cold War. And now it appears to be in progress in the old Ottoman territories divided up by two French and British diplomats on the back of an envelope in 1919.
The Sykes-Picot borders established new states without much rhyme or reason a century ago. And now things are sorting themselves out in spectacularly brutal and bloody fashion. I have heard the argument that “We tried modern methods in the Middle East to create peace, perhaps it is best to let the old ways work themselves out. It is, after all, a local solution.”
That is as true as the saying that “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” It is a repugnant thought to an old Cold Warrior, but perhaps the time has come to cede the spotlight on the world stage to those who still believe they have the moral certainty to lead. Apparently we do not.
I have one caveat to all this. We are a generous people, but under no circumstances should that compassionate inclination draw us into the mass migration of tens of thousands of refugees from the Shia-Sunni war come here. Perhaps we could find a solution to the hemorrhage of refugees across our southern border first.
The old Bush Doctrine was to fight the jihadis over there, so that we would not have to fight them here. I am no xenophobe, but I do believe that there is no percentage in importing the seeds of that violent religious war to our shores.
I guess it is to those ends that Secretary Kerry is requesting a half a billion dollars to train and arm the Syrian “moderates” in an attempt to- I don’t know what. Roll back the gains of the people we armed already? Apparently he thinks there is a counterweight in Syria to the al Qaida franchise of ISIS.
I think that is a pervasive theme in what passes for our foreign policy these days. I don’t think there are any moderates left in this picture. Picking through the warring factions for the closest approximation to the Young Republicans seems like folly. It is the war we abandoned in a sort of victory defeated by the weapons that we funneled to the rebels who became ISIS.
It is a tough call on what can be done now that things have been so completely bungled. They say the Administration has no good choices. Maybe the answer is to just walk away. We could already be accused- and I think justly- of violating General Powell’s Pottery Barn rule. We broke it, we bought it. Instead, we shrugged and walked away.
I don’t have a great answer for this and do not want to go back personally, or by proxy. But it really is beyond the pale that we can also be accused of Collaboration Horizontale with the very men who would cheerily behead us.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303