On wars of choice

I’m just back from a few days on the western front—Ypres, to be exact, where hundreds of thousands of British and German troops perished between l9l4 and l9l8, in some of the bloodiest fighting in the bloodiest war to date. There are over 140 British cemeteries in the salient, with some 40,000 burials. Over 50,000 German soldiers lie buried in two dark, rather dank cemeteries. The rest of the casualties can be found on the walls of the cemeteries or on the ceremonial Menin Gate in the city of Ypres. Over 2/3 of the dead throughout the war are permanently missing. They have no known grave.
It’s all quiet there now on the western front, as they say, but since it is August, and we are now beginning to hear about how we have to take out Iran by force, it’s worth remembering what we all got out of the Great War. Here is a partial listing:

--industrial strength slaughter, when l9th century warfare met the machine gun and the high-intensity shell

--the first deployment of WMD, when the Germans gassed Allied troops on the Ypres salient in April l9l5

--the first mass ethnic murder—Armenians by Turks in the Ottoman Empire, l9l5.

--the mutiny of individuals against mass death in the trenches, and the mutiny of a nation, Russia, against unbearable incompetence, loss and privation

--the successful Communist revolution in Russia, enormously destructive unsuccessful Communist revolutions in Germany and Hungary

--the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when the British authorities essentially promised the same piece of land to Jews and their Muslim neighbors

--the death of four empires, the Austrian, German, Ottoman and Russian

--the death of nine million civilians and soldiers

--the worst peace treaty in human history, the Versailles settlement, which helped bring us a second world war.

The thing is, the Great War was a war of choice. No one was really opposed to it, and some people actively sought it. What they, and everyone else, found out was that the only thing you control in war is the first shot. No one would have predicted the above in the heady days when the German Kaiser promised “Paris for lunch, St. Petersburg for dinner.” How many times, how many ways do you have to say it: you NEVER, EVER CHOOSE war, as people are proposing we do in Iran as well as Iraq. Is it really imperative to roll those dice?!