Wanted: A Unified Field Theory for a Third World War

The ongoing conflict with ISIS/ISIL/the Islamic State (hereafter called Daesh) has attracted attention and interest around the world.  Pope Francis has weighed in and it is perhaps surprising that he may have come closest to identifying this conflict as the Third World War.  Henry Kissinger reportedly agrees with him.  However, there have been few signs that the US government recognizes this as a single global conflict much less any signs of a coherent coordinated strategy that addresses each local conflict and its links to every other local conflict.

This is a war that is very like wars of the past while yet being something different from what we are accustomed to.  It is the 21st Century under attack by the 15th Century.  It is a war between dogmatic conformity draped in religious trappings claiming for itself the right to impose its beliefs through deadly violence on a modern world that emphasizes diversity, technology, progress, and individual choice.  Like the Seven Years War it is taking place on a global scale in terms of reach with a relatively small and localized geographic context.  It is and will be fought by complex local alliances, marked by competing interests between politics and faith, and religious differences that result in alliance relationships or are overcome in the interests of the nation states participating – a geopolitical stew worthy of The Thirty Years War.

In Nigeria, the enemy calls itself Boko Haram.  Al Qaeda in the Maghreb is active to varying degrees in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, and Tunisia.  Al-Shabaab in Somalia was reportedly responsible for the attack on the Nairobi shopping center.  Al Qaeda in Yemen is losing fighters to Daesh as are the Taliban in Afghanistan and other groups in Pakistan.  The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines is now also reportedly aligning itself with Daesh.  We are confronted simultaneously with disparate enemies at locations spanning half the globe but we appear to be addressing each fight in isolation from the others.

It features full spectrum warfare with combat taking place on open ground, city streets, deep jungles, high mountains, the airspace above all of these places and between them, and in cyberspace.  Do not be fooled into thinking that Daesh’s use of our own technology against us makes them modern thinkers.  Remember, Marx and Lenin promised that they would hang the last capitalist with the rope he sold them.  They doubtless consider it fitting that they will attack us with our own technologies.  As to being professional and sophisticated fighters, if you spend enough time on a battlefield and survive, you get good at it.  This sophistication and professionalism will not necessarily carry over into other parts of their lives, especially where it might clash with their dogma.

This coalition for the 15th Century shares fighters, resources, and know-how in addition to their shared enemy.  They crave for us to identify them as our enemy because it enhances their stature and facilitates their recruiting and fundraising.  Whether of allies or enemies, neither coalition will be in unanimous agreement on many of a whole range of issues relating to why we fight, what we are fighting for, what achievements might cap our respective final victories.  They don’t need to be in agreement on anything other than who is “we” and who is “them”.   As in The Thirty Years War our enemies have in common a number of points of ideological/theological agreement and they agree that we are the enemy, an enemy that must be destroyed even though that is beyond their actual capabilities at the present time.  History shows that we ignore this determined threat at our own risk.

All of that said, we need to understand a number of key things about this Third World War.

We are fighting an idea.  We can kill its adherents but the idea will survive.

We must adapt our approach, our strategy, to each conflict/theater/locality appropriately while not undermining our efforts in other theaters.

We, not just the US but all of our partners, must recognize that it is all one war and we must cooperatively frame a common strategy accordingly.

The US does not need to put its troops, aircraft, etc. into every single one of these fights.

It does, however, need to make sure that one or more of its local allies are in each and every one of these fights with the fullest possible US support.

We also need to understand that whichever of our partners does put boots on the ground, those troops will eventually come to resent taking all of the risks of ground combat while we take none.

If the only tools in our tool box are hammers, all of our problems begin to look like nails.  We need to use resources and take actions beyond the battlefield that will help our local allies shape that battlefield into a desired state.

We need to be able to peel away their supporters by a number of means including seeing that local grievances are addressed.

We need to eliminate (realistically minimize) actions by our own or coalition forces that discourage or drive away our supporters among the populations. 
 
We need to understand and to remember that the war will not end in a way that we can control nor can we dictate the full shape of what comes afterwards.

ADDENDUM:  I wanted to add a short comment after attending two more sessions at The Brookings Institution this week that touched on this conflict.  I've said for sometime that the US is a status quo power, which in part answers the complaint that we have no national strategy, we are defending the status quo and thus reacting to threats against it.  However, while the US sees itself as defending an established international order, there are many nations who see the democratic free market capitalist USA as a revolutionary expansionist power and a threat.  And, the international order which the US is defending is not simply a matter of nation states, international organizations, and international institutions, it is a process for how all of these interact with each other.  Within this process, a referendum in Scotland - however regrettable it might be - is acceptable.  Sending uniformed armed men (and women) onto the territory of an independent sovereign nation in order to overturn the government of that nation or to steal its territory is not acceptable.

Which of these things is not like the other? America’s Future, The Thirty Years War, and today’s Islamic World

“History is a cruel step-mother, and when it retaliates, it stops at nothing.” Lenin

History is huge, given that by definition it encompasses the story of the human race going back to before the existence of written records.  We grapple with the challenge of history by parsing it into digestible lumps on the basis of time periods, geographic location, linguistic communities, etc.  In order to understand it as something more involved than the simple accretion of facts in sedimentary layers, we use metaphors, such as the turning of a wheel or the flowing of water in a river, my own preferred image.  The message in the metaphor is that change is the singular constant across history even as it may slow down or speed up.

“History is written for schoolmasters and armchair strategists.  Statesmen and warriors pick their war through the dark.” Lord Esher Journal, 15 March 1915

Given the time spanned by human history, it is not surprising that people have long debated, and still do, whether or not history repeats itself.  The English historian G M Trevelyan summed up the debate this way:  ‘‘History repeats itself!’ and ‘History never repeats itself’ are about equally true… We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.”  However, George Bernard Shaw offered an interesting observation when he pointed out that “If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!”  For me personally, the debate is moot because whether or not history repeats itself, it is more than evident from history that people clearly do.  Nations are often seen to behave like people, which might be at least in part attributed to the reality that they are made up of people and are governed or led by people.  Thus nations, like individuals, can be perceived to be engaging in bad behavior which others then try to adjust through punishments and/or rewards.

 “What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”  GWF Hegel

The violence engulfing the Islamic world over the past decade or more, with growing conflict between Shi’ites and Sunnis, long ago brought to mind the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) when the emerging  Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church confronted each other across the courts, cathedrals, and battlefields of Europe.  General Sir John Hackett, in “The Profession of Arms”, described the Thirty Years War as “A period in which fervent Christians were prepared to hang, burn, torture, shoot or poison other fervent Christians with whom they happened to disagree upon the correct approach to eternal life.”  To me the parallel of a religiously fueled, politically complex expanding conflict is self-evident.

As Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus observed of Europe’s version, “all the wars that are on foot in Europe have been fused together and have become a single war.”  A parallel conflict in the Islamic world today might reach from the Atlantic Coast of West Africa to the islands of Indonesia or the Philippines, and from Central Asia to the deep Indian Ocean.

Much has been made of the failure of the United States to show evidence of national strategy in recent decades, and I have been among those critics.  A speaker at the Army War College earlier this year rightly corrected us by pointing out that the US today is a status quo power – and preserving that status quo has been our strategy.  Unfortunately, such an approach places the US in the position of King Canute telling the tide to go out when it’s coming in – both are doomed to failure.

I bought a copy of Peter H. Wilson’s “The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy” to refresh my knowledge of that conflict.  Wilson offers a thorough examination of the Thirty Years War, with excellent elaboration of its background and preliminaries.  He promises to tell the whole story of the war right down to its ending (often only summarized).  With some 850 pages of text plus some 75 pages of notes, I believe he will fulfill that promise.

Whatever happens today need not be an Islamic reenactment of the Thirty Years War, but the complexities of that past conflict resonate in the one potentially confronting us.  They both reflect a complex interaction of religious and geo-political motivations for conflict.  They are contests between both state and non-state actors. Individuals from around the world choose to join the conflict in service of one side or the other, often in contradiction of their own nation’s stance on the war.  Co-religionists end up in conflict with each other for political and geo-political reasons even as they also fight others because they were not of the same faith.

The principal players in Europe’s war were Spain, Holland, France, the German principalities, the Holy Roman Empire and its Electors (both Protestants and Catholics), and Sweden – with Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics all pitted against each other in various and changing combinations.  Many soldiers became mercenaries and fought for pay over religion or country.   How might we look for lessons from their experience to determine which nations might possibly play which original roles?  Is the USA in the role of France or Spain?  Is Russia or China the Ottoman Empire?  There is no papal style structure in the Islamic world, but perhaps Saudi control of the holy places of Mecca and Medina brings them close to such a role.

Reading Wilson’s chapter Pax Hispanica, it quickly becomes evident that Spain was then, as the United States is today, the principal status quo power – and almost the sole superpower by wealth and military capabilities, attempting to keep things the way they are.  The challenges facing Spain then echo those facing us today.  Both countries are the economic top dogs because of global reach and, for Spain, the influx of silver from the mines in its American colonies.  But this wealth led Spain to neglect development of a balanced economy that promoted both manufacturing and agriculture, and it contributed to inflation.

The US is struggling to deal with economic challenges intertwined with philosophical battles over its social, economic, and even political future.  These ongoing contests are preventing it from effectively applying almost any remedies at the present time.  Both Spain and the US were also spending massive amounts on defense, fighting extended foreign wars, and debates over perceived threats and responses dominated each nation’s strategic thinking.  And both countries were suspected by other nations of ambitious and expansionist intentions as they sought to shape the world into the desired form.  However, the mere hypothesis that the US now is playing a role similar to Spain during the Thirty Years War must be tested against events in the real world and measured against the events of some 600 years ago played out for Spain.  Spain began its decline as it failed to maintain the world order which it had come to dominate and failed to adapt to the new emerging world order.

The hard reality is that the American people have one choice to make (among many decisions facing them):

Will the United States remain the sole superpower and by definition the world’s policeman in pursuit of this imperial role as it seeks to shape the world in its own image?

Or, will the US concede sufficient authority and capability and autonomy to a supranational body that could act around the world without the US or US forces and with the inevitable result of shaping a world to some greater or lesser degree different from what the US might prefer?

“The future is hidden even from the men who made it.”  Anatole France

A Toast to the Bards

Pete Seeger has been there as long as I can remember, like that cousin or uncle who lived somewhere else but would show up from time to time – often rather unexpectedly but always welcome in the end even if sometimes you had to first recover from the surprise.  He seems to have even then been well-established as the paterfamilias of the folk scene that was still around as I became musically aware back in the 1960s and the bonds are still there to be seen if you look just a little bit.  I went to see Inside Llewyn Davis recently and it was a trip back in time.  I also realized that I need to clean up my MP3 player and set up a good folk music playlist.

But the bond I didn’t recognize until it hit me between the eyes as I read through the various print and online articles about our lost troubadour is that he came by it honestly and his reach goes back even beyond his own lifetime.  Almost ironically as we ponder this in 2014 – 100 years from the date of the beginning of the First World War in Europe – I learn that Pete Seeger had an uncle among the soldier poets of that war.

His name was Alan Seeger.  Born in New York City in 1880, he went to Harvard University, graduating in 1910.  Already a poet at Harvard, he moved back to New York City adopting a bohemian lifestyle there before relocating to Paris.  When war was declared in 1914, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion – 2e Régiment étranger (the United States not entering the war until 1917).

As a soldier of France, he was killed by German machine gun fire on July 4, 1916 at Belloy-en-Santerre  during the early days of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.  I’ve known perhaps his most famous poem for years and it was apparently also a favorite of President John F. Kennedy, “I Have  a Rendezvous with Death” but never made the connection to the author of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” before now.

I Have a Rendezvous with Death

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes back with rustling shade

And apple-blossoms fill the air—

I have a rendezvous with Death

When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath—

It may be I shall pass him still.

I have a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope of battered hill

When Spring comes round again this year

And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows ‘twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down,

Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear:

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

The Aisne (1914-1915)

We first saw fire on the tragic slopes

Where the flood-tide of France’s early gain,

Big with wrecked promise and abandoned hopes,

Broke in a surf of blood along the Aisne.

The charge the heroes left us, we assumed,

What, dying, they reconquered, we preserved,

In the chill trenches, harried, shelled, entombed,

Winter came down on us, but no man swerved.

Winter came down on us. The low clouds, torn

In the stark branches of the riven pines,

Blurred the white rockets that from dusk till morn

Traced the wide curve of the close-grappling lines.

In rain, and fog that on that withered hill

Froze before dawn, the lurking foe drew down;

Or light snows fell that made forlorner still

The ravaged country and the ruined town;

Or the long clouds would end.  Intensely fair,

The winter constellations blazing forth---

 Perseus, the Twin, Orion, the Great Bear—

Gleamed on our bayonets pointing to the north.

And the lone sentinel would start and soar

On wings of strong emotion as he knew

That kinship with the stars that only War

Is great enough to lift man’s spirits to.

And ever down the curving front, aglow

With the pale rockets’ intermittent light,

He heard, like distant thunder, grown and grow

The rumble of far battles in the night, --

Rumours, reverberant, indistinct, remote,

Borne from red fields whose martial names have won

The power to thrill like a far trumpet note,--

Vic, Vailly, Soupir, Hurtelise, Craonne…

Craonne, before thy cannon-swept plateau,

Where like sere leaves lay strewn September’s dead,

I found for all things I forfeited

A recompense I would not now forgo.

For that high fellowship was ours then

With those who, championing another’s good,

More than dull Peace or its poor votaries could,

Taught us the dignity of being men.

There we drained deeper the deep cup of life,

And on sublime summits came to learn,

After soft things, the terrible and stern,

After sweet Love, the majesty of Strife;

There we faced under those frowning heights

The blast that maims, the hurricane that kills;

There where the watch-lights on the winter hills

Flickered like balefire through inclement nights;

There where, firm links in the unyielding chain,

Where fell the long-planned blow and fell in vain—

Hearts worthy of the honour and the trail,

We helped to hold the lines along the Aisne.

Champagne, 1914-1915

In the glad revels, in the happy fetes,

  When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled

With the sweet wine of France that concentrates

  The sunshine and the beauty of the world,

Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread

  The undisturbed, delightful paths of Earth,

To those whose blood, in pious duty shed,

  Hallows the soil where the same wine had birth.

Here, by devoted comrades laid away,

  Along our lines they slumber where they fell,

Besides the crater at the Ferme d’Alger

  And up the bloody slopes of La Pompelle,

And around the city whose cathedral towers

  The enemies of Beauty dared profane,

And in the mat of multicolored flowers

  That clothe the sunny chalk-fields of Champagne.

Under the little crosses where they rise

  The soldier rests.  Now round him undismayed

The cannon thunders, and at night he lies

  At peace beneath the eternal fusillade…

That other generations might possess—

  From shame and menace free in years to come—

A richer heritage of happiness,

  He marched to that heroic martyrdom.

Esteeming less the forfeit that he paid

  Than undishonored that his flag might float

Over the towers of liberty, he made

  His breast the bulwark and his blood the moat.

Obscurely sacrificed, his nameless tomb,

  Bare of the sculptor’s art, the poet’s lines,

Summer shall flush with poppy-fields in bloom,

  And Autumn yellow with maturing vines.

There the grape-pickers at their harvesting

  Shall lightly tread and load their wicker trays,

Blessing his memory as they toil and sing

  In the slant sunshine of October days…

I love to think that if my blood should be

  So privileged to sink where his has sunk,

I shall not pass from Earth entirely

  But when banquet rings, when healths are drunk,

And faces that the joys of living fill

  Glow radiant with laughter and good cheer,

In beaming cups some spark of me shall still

  Brim toward the lips that once I held so dear.

So shall one coveting no higher plane

  Than nature clothes in color and flesh and tone,

Even from the grave put forward to attain

  The dreams youth cherished and missed and might have known,

And that strong need that strove unsatisfied

  Toward earthly beauty in all forms it wore,

Not death itself shall utterly divide

  From the beloved shapes it thirsted for.

Alas, how many an adept for whose arms

  Life held delicious offerings perished here,

How many in the prime of all that charms,

  Crowned with all gifts that conquer and endear!

Honor them not so much with tears and flowers,

  But you with whom the sweet fulfillment lies,

Where in the anguish of atrocious hours

  Turned their last thoughts and closed their dying eyes,

Rather when music or bright gathering lays

  Its tender spell, and joy is uppermost,

Be mindful of the men they were, and raise

  Your glasses to them in one silent toast.

Drink to them—amorous of dear Earth as well,

  They asked no tribute lovelier than this—

And in the wine that ripened where they fell,

  Oh, frame your lips as though it were a kiss.

Champagne, France, July, 1915

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Pete Seeger (as performed by Peter, Paul, and Mary)

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone, long time passing?
Where have all the young girls gone, long time ago?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Gone for husbands everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the husbands gone, long time passing?
Where have all the husbands gone, long time ago?
Where have all the husbands gone?
Gone for soldiers everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Thanks, Peter – thank you for everything, Alan .