Why war comes when no one wants it
This is heavily serious stuff. It takes a bit of committment to read this piece, BUT, it makes some points that can only be ignored at our ultimate peril.
Robert Musil’s great novel The Man Without Qualities portrays Austrian aristocrats preparing the emperor’s semicentenary in the months before August 1914, when their world would come to a ghastly end. [The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (Sophie Wilkins, translator). Random House: New York 1996 (paperbound)] The reader, of course, knows this, but the protagonists don’t. It is hard to read news from Washington these days without recalling Musil’s work. War will come, even though President George W Bush wants it as little as did Emperor Franz Josef.
After a depressing, but insightful and detailed historical recapitulation, the author (writing as Spengler) wends his way to the inevitable, and disquieting conclusion:
None of them wanted war, none of them expected war, yet all of them found war preferable to the consequences of avoiding war. If an Aeschylus were alive today to dramatize the outbreak of World War I, he could lift the chorus’ every line from the private dispatches of European leaders in July 1914. Like the old men of Mycenae observing Agamemnon’s return to the home where his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra would murder him, the old men of Europe watched in horror as peace slipped out of their hands.
If Kaiser Wilhelm II had had the presence of mind to attack France during the First Morocco Crisis of 1906 – while Russia was busy with Japan and England was uncommitted – the horrors of World War I never would have occurred (In praise of premature war, October 19, 2004). By the same token, if Washington waits too long to disarm Iran, the consequence will be a Thirty Years’ War in the Middle East quite as terrible as World War I. Harsh as it might seem, preemption – an aerial attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities – is the most humane solution.(Emphasis added.)
The only question is whether or not anyone in Washington or London has enough solid spinal material left to do what needs to be done. Based on the current domestic and foriegn policy fecklessness of both parties, the Chief is NOT optimistic.