Having a Bad War

Having a Bad War

Fred Smoler: Having a Bad War

Reviewing a couple of books in the National Interest online, Geoffrey Wheatcroft offers a curious analogy:

…[The] author doesn?t suggest, as he might have done and as many English people feel, that [Tony] Blair was the nearest thing to an English Pétain. If that sounds a little hyperbolic, it?s the theme of The Ghost, Robert Harris?s highly enjoyable thriller-with-attitude which has now been filmed as The Ghost Writer, an undisguised portrait of a prime minister who at all times saw his duty as serving the national interest?of another country.

The book in question is called The Vichy Syndrome, and the joke must have seemed irresistible. It would have been irreproachable had a) Britain been conquered in 2003 by the United States b) Bush been Hitler and c) both Blair and Pétain, or at least one or the other, had seen his (or their) duty as serving the national interest of another country. But Britain hadn?t been conquered by the Nazis–its elected government had made a decision contrary to the wishes of Wheatcroft, a distinction most analysts would accord some moral weight. Wheatcroft is not alone in having difficulty in distinguishing between these two states of affairs (not getting one?s way, and being ruled by Nazis or Quislings), and the thriller he cites is indeed animated by a comparable notion (Cherie Blair is imagined as a CIA mole), but it is a novel, not an analogy; so while irritating, it is not deranged.

The mad comparison of Blair to Pétain is presumably meant to do its work because Pétain collaborated with the worst regime we can remember, and the rhetorical effect requires some version of the almost-forgotten poster inscription ?Bush=Hitler? (one wonders where Wheatcroft locates New Labour?s version of the Drancy internment camp, and what fraction of the 63,000 Pétain?s government deported to death camps he has in mind when he makes his analogy). In light of the traditional efficiency of the Royal Navy, any close comparison of an Englishman to Pétain is admittedly difficult, but a much closer comparison might be to some Whig PM who served William III, or some Saxon Earl who made a very early peace with William I, or between Blair and the Kings of Saxony and Bavaria in 1812. One can see why Wheatcroft does not try for greater accuracy: ?Blair, Britain?s Maximilian I? doesn?t really get the job done.

Is there anything at all to be said for the analogy? Pétain, of course, thought he was serving France?s interest rather than Britain?s (or Germany?s), or at least the interests of the French; De Gaulle observed, with some generosity, that Pétain may have loved the French too well, and France not enough. But Blair may have imagined that in the last analysis his country?s interests depended on its American alliance, and giving Wheatcroft?s analogy its due, Pétain indeed believed something comparable about his government?s relationship (it was not an alliance) to the Reich. On the other hand, Blair does seem to have believed that America?s war in Iraq would be less dangerous for everyone if Britain had a place in making what would otherwise have been solely American decisions. This may have been false, but it is about as far as you can get from serving a foreign power at the expense of one?s own country. Blair also seems to have believed that overthrowing Saddam was the right thing to do. Being unable to imagine that one?s political opponents possess even the modest virtue of sincerity is the mark of a very small mind indeed.

Reviewing the other book, by Dissent contributor Pascal Bruckner, Wheatcroft observes:

As to Bruckner?s saying that ?without American help in 1917, and especially in 1944, [Europe] would have been purely and simply wiped off the map,? this is sheer néo-connerie. The idea that the United States was the savior of Europe in World Wars I and II is popular in some circles on both sides of the Atlantic, but is demonstrably false. Between the formal entry of the United States into the Great War in April 1917 and the last German offensive in March 1918, hundreds of thousands of Entente soldiers were killed, mainly British in the summer and autumn of 1917 after the frightful slaughter of the French army in the spring; and in that period of nearly a year, fewer than two hundred Americans died. In the course of that war, the Frenchmen killed defending their country were twice as numerous as all the Americans who have died in every foreign war taken together from 1776 until today. As a matter of historical fact, the Third Reich was defeated by the Red Army and not by the Western democracies. Even though over one hundred thirty-five thousand American GIs died?a startling figure today?between D day and V-E day, more than half a million Russians were killed.

This is only superficially more plausible. Wheatcroft implies that the casualty list is the same thing as the contribution to victory, even to victory itself, on which theory China routed Japan in the Second World War (the disparity in deaths is uncertain, but something like 10:1 is possible), and Saddam routed the Americans twice, and by much vaster margins. More ominously, even if one absurd premise is granted (that the Red Army defeated the Third Reich more or less on its own), another difficulty remains, which is that a Red Army victory with no contribution by the Americans would have seen Stalin ruling Europe from the Urals to the Bay of Biscay. Since a victorious Hitler would not have ?wiped Europe off the map? in any literal sense, political and moral annihilation is probably what Bruckner has in mind, and a wholly Stalinist Europe seems to fit that bill. As it happens, a plausible counterfactual world in which the Third Reich survives the decision to invade the Soviet Union, while in my view unlikely, nonetheless seems perfectly possible, given durable and absolute American neutrality (although not worth adumbrating here).

I am not in the habit of reading the National Interest?in this instance, I followed a link from a teaser in Arts and Letters Daily. I had always thought it a conservative publication, but if it remains one, conservative thought has evolved in some very strange ways indeed.