Military Matters: Road to Armageddon

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WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 (UPI) -- I don't think it possible for any historian to visit the Baltic countries or the rest of Central Europe and not reflect on the catastrophes World War I brought to that part of the world. Communism, World War II, National Socialism, the extinction of some communities and the expulsion of others, wholesale alteration of national boundaries, all these and more flowed from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. One pebble touched off an avalanche.

It did so because it occurred, not as an isolated incident, but as one more in a series of crises that rocked Europe in its last 10 years of peace, 1904-1914. Each of those crises had the potential to touch off a general European war, and each further destabilized the region, making the next incident all the more dangerous.

The years 1905-06 witnessed the First Moroccan Crisis, when the German Foreign Office -- whose motto, after Prince Otto von Bismarck, might well be, "Clowns unto ages of ages" -- compelled a very reluctant Kaiser Wilhelm II to land at Tangier as a challenge to France; 1908 brought the Bosnian Annexation Crisis, when Austria humiliated Russia and left her anxious for revenge.

Then came the Second Moroccan Crisis of 1911, the Tripolitan War of 1911-1912 -- a war Italy actually won, against the tottering Ottoman Empire -- and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. By 1914, it had become a question more of which crisis would finally set all Europe ablaze than of whether peace would endure. This was true despite the fact that, in the abstract, no major European state wanted war.

If this downward spiral of events in Europe reminds us of the Middle East today, it should. There too we see a series of crises, each holding the potential of kicking off a much larger war. There are almost too many to list: the war in Iraq, the United States vs. Iran, Israel vs. Syria, the United States. vs. Syria, Syria vs. Lebanon, Turkey vs. Kurdistan, the war in Afghanistan, the destabilization of Pakistan, Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaida, and the permanent crisis of Israel vs. the Palestinians.

Each is a tick of the bomb, bringing us closer and closer to the explosion no one wants.

A basic rule of history is that the inevitable eventually happens. If you keep on smoking in the powder magazine, you will at some point blow it up. No one can predict the specific event or its timing, but everyone can see the trend and where it is leading.

In the Middle East today, as in Europe in the decade before World War I, the desperate need is for a country or a leader to reverse the trend. Then, the two European leaders most opposed to war, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, were able to do little more than drag their feet, trying to slow the train of events down. That was not enough, and it will not be enough today in the Middle East either.

Where do we see a leader who can turn aside the march toward war? Not in the Middle East itself, nor among American presidential candidates, only two of whom, Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, represent a real change of direction. Not in Europe, whose heads of government are terrified of breaking with the Americans. Not in Moscow or Beijing, both of which are happy to see America digging its own grave. No matter where we look, the horizon is empty.

Where vision is wanting, the people perish. As they did in Central Europe in the 20th century, by the tens of millions.

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(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.)