90 years since the War to End All Wars...

"If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied."

This was Rudyard Kipling's shortest poem - his angry and anguished response to the death of his son in the First World War.
It's been 90 years since "the guns of August" began the process of tearing Europe apart that lasted most of the last century, and Adam Gropnick has a chilling essay in The New Yorker that looks at some new scholarship and some old truths.
As we approach the 1,000-casualty mark in Iraq, and revisit Kerry and W's war in which 50,000 Americans died, it's chilling to contemplate the reality of that earlier conflict:

"The war began on August 4th. By August 29th, there were two hundred and sixty thousand French dead...
On one day during the Battle of the Somme, in the summer of 1916, more than fifty thousand British troops died walking directly into German fire, without advancing the front by a single foot."

There are also disquieting resonances of our own time: the rush to war, the seeming inevitabity of it, the leaders who expected easy victories and think about or plan for what they would do if things didn't go the way they expected...
As we contemplate the prospect of a failed Iraqi state and a new Shia militancy spreading across the Islamic world, it's worth considering some of Gropnick's closing words:

"And so the question remains: Were they right to fight? What would have happened if the British neutrals had held fast on August 3rd and not gone in? A Europe overrun by a triumphant German militarism is only one possibility. A Communist revolution in France is a secondary possibility, with unknowable consequences...
"Yet it is hard to see even a victorious German Reich costing liberal civilization quite as much as its defeat did. Wilhelmine Germany was, if not liberal, at least plural... The logic of German militarism may have meant that there would be a war sooner or later. But, just conceivably, the force of German civil society — of science and reason, in that age of Einstein and Freud and Planck and Warburg — would have tempered the force of militarism. The experiment never had a chance. What is hard to imagine is a worse consequence: Britain and France demoralized and depleted, Germany humiliated but not vanquished, Russia robbed of any chance of liberal reform and turned over to a gang of psychopathic fanatics. What exactly would have been worse than that?"

Reading this piece, I am filled with fear - that we are heading into another storm like that one... and that the long-term consequences of W's splendid little war will be as unexpected, and as debilitating.