QandO

June 03, 2004

Risky Path for Pacifists
Posted by Dale Franks

Max Boot, the token conservative on the Los Angeles Times op/ed page, writes that much of the anti-war sentiment we are seeing now parrallels the similar sentiments we saw between the Great War of 1914-1918, and World War II.

All we know for sure is that the Great War solved nothing and improved nothing. We know something else as well: The conflict caused the Lost Generation to recoil from war-making altogether. Because one war had been senseless, many concluded that all wars must be senseless. The myopic militarism of the pre-1914 generation produced, in reaction, an equally myopic pacifism among the post-1918 generation that gave free rein to predatory states like Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The children of 1945, in turn, spurned appeasement and held the line against communism for almost half a century.

Now a new generation is in charge in Europe: the children of 1989. Their political sensibility was shaped by the end of the Cold War. Though they will celebrate the 60th anniversary of D-day on Sunday, World War II — a struggle between good and evil — no longer speaks to them. World War I exemplifies their vision of warfare: cruel and senseless. They do not want to fight alongside the United States, in Iraq or anywhere else; they see nothing worth fighting for.

It is a great mistake they are making, but an understandable one. Walking around the neatly tended graveyards of Verdun or the Somme, it is easy to see why Europeans would want to forget about war. But has war forgotten about them?

The Great War, of course, was an absolute disaster and tragedy for everyone involved in it. Even at the time, no one could particularly identify the causes over which it was fought. Theobald von Bethhman Hollweg, the German Chancellor from 1909-1917 was asked in 1916 how the war began, and he answered, "If we only knew."

In point of fact, as Barbara Tuchman makes clear in her masterwork, The Guns of August, the nations of Europe stumbled into a war that none of the particularly wanted. Almost instantly, they were bound together in mutual slaughter of monstrous proportions, and none of the combatants could figure out how to end it. It was both senseless and pointless, yet we're still feeling the effects of the Great War, from the former Yugoslavia to the whole of the Mideast, nearly a century later.

In the interwar years of the 20s and 30s, and idea grew that, because the Great War was foolish, senseless, solved nothing, and proved nothing, that all wars are senseless in the same way. Now, in Europe, and, sadly, much of America, a similar feeling has developed. In many ways, this is completely understandable, yet, as Boot points out, it ignores an inconvenient, but hugely important fact.
No matter how much you desire peace, you will not have it if you are opposed by an enemy who desires war.

The great struggle of our time—not only for the United States, but for the West in general—is a struggle against a viciously intolerant, totalitarian, and oppressive strain of fundamentalist Islam. If they have their way, they will destroy our culture, change our political and religious beliefs, and destroy all those things that make us a free people.

And fighting against that is neither pointless nor senseless.

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