In one of the best books I’ve ever read, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell wrote, “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.” And yet, I would add, wars continue.
Fussell’s observation comes to mind because we are now at a confluence of war-related anniversaries and incidents that are ironically and tragically connected.
We’re currently in the midst of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, which raged from April 1861 to April 1865; and so the 150th anniversary of Lee surrendering at Appomattox will be next April. Ironically, neither side wanted war, but nevertheless, as President Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural, “the war came.”
Again, ironically, both sides thought the war would be short. It wasn’t, and its scale and carnage were far beyond what either side could have imagined.
This summer also marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. It’s been said that in 1914 Europe sleep-walked into a war no one wanted. But while they may not have wanted war, again “war came.”
A century later, consequences of World War I are still with us. We may now be watching the violent collapse of Iraq, one of several artificially defined states created after World War I from the former Ottoman Empire - states with borders bearing little relation to historical, ethnic, or tribal boundaries. Iraq had been held together by imperialist and then dictatorial power before we invaded and removed that brutal dictator. Now, perhaps, as Othello said, “Chaos is come again.”
Another irony is that i t was fifty years ago today that Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving President Lyndon Johnson virtually carte blanch to wage war in Vietnam. Again ironically, one of the two alleged North Vietnamese attacks on American naval vessels that precipitated the Tonkin Resolution never happened - any more than Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction existed.
Nonetheless, nearly nine years would pass between the Tonkin Resolution and the end of the war.
The final irony is that since Vietnam, our nation has worried that a military conflict might turn into “another Vietnam,” famously referred to as a “quagmire.” And yet our military was in Iraq for almost exactly the same length of time we were in Vietnam - actually about 5 weeks longer. And if our troops leave Afghanistan at the end of this year, as planned, they will have been there more than thirteen years.
Four wars, each exactly fifty years apart, all speak to our ironic tendency to underestimate how long and how terrible war will be. They should remind us, hawks and doves alike, how comparatively easy it is to get into war and how difficult it often is to get out - even when it’s worse than we’d ever imagined.
