'Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?" During the bitter winter of 1914-15, the first lord of the Admiralty posed this urgent question to Britain's prime minister.
The eighth anniversary of 9/11, now fast approaching, invites attention to a similar question: Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to choke on the dust of Iraq and Afghanistan?
Back in December 1914, the Admiralty's impatient first lord was Winston Churchill, appalled by the slaughter on the Western Front. Intent on breaking the stalemate, Churchill became a font of ideas. Mired in Flanders? Then launch an amphibious assault against the Dardanelles, he urged. Were German machine guns cutting down British Tommies venturing into no man's land? Then support the infantry with tanks.
Yet Churchill's innovations failed to deliver a quick resolution. Instead, they prolonged the war and drove up its cost. When the guns finally fell silent in November 1918, "victory" left Britain economically and spiritually depleted. Revolution wracked much of Europe. And the seeds of totalitarianism had been planted, producing in their maturity an even more horrendous war. Some victory.
Churchill and his Cabinet colleagues had spent four years dodging fundamental questions. Fixated with tactical and operational concerns, they ignored matters of strategy and politics. Britain's true interest lay in ending the war, not in blindly seeing it through to the bitter end. This, few British leaders possessed the imagination to see.
A comparable failure of imagination besets present-day Washington. The Long War launched by George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11 has not gone well. Everyone understands that. Yet in the face of disappointment, what passes for advanced thinking recalls the Churchill who devised Gallipoli and godfathered the tank: In Washington and in the field, a preoccupation with tactics and operations have induced strategic blindness.
As President Obama shifts the main U.S. military effort from Iraq to Afghanistan, and as his commanders embrace counterinsurgency as the new American way of war, the big questions go not only unanswered but unasked. Does perpetuating the Long War make political or strategic sense? As we prepare to enter that war's ninth year, are there no alternatives?
