Defense Focus: How wars start -- Part 1

WASHINGTON, June 11 (UPI) -- World wars start differently. World War II was a looming storm that was anything but unexpected. But World War I was a diabolical bolt from the blue. Until Austria-Hungary, with the enthusiastic backing of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, sent its notorious ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914, no one in Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary or Czarist Russia dreamed of the immense conflagration that was about to destroy their worlds.

The war in Iraq that the United States has been engaged in for more than six years was looming since the al-Qaida terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City and mauled the Pentagon in Washington.

Bob Woodward, in his book "Bush at War," recorded that within mere hours of those outrages, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was arguing that the United States should knock out Iraq.

However, among Washington's chattering classes and glib pundits at least, the attitude toward the war in the 18 months that followed was far more like the naive, ignorant, daydreaming optimism of 1914 than the weary, appalled realism of 1939.

It was widely assumed that it would be all over by Easter. And the calls of "To Baghdad" supplanted the old 1914 slogans of "Nach Paris!" and "A Berlin!" Baghdad was indeed reached by the hard-driving U.S. armored columns in less than three weeks of fighting, and the regime of longtime Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein fell soon after.

Wars more often than not start suddenly, even when they have been building up for months. Russia had clearly signaled it was going to invade the former Soviet republic of Georgia in August 2008, and the U.S. government had solemnly warned the Kremlin not to do it. But the administration of President George W. Bush was still taken by surprise when the Russian armored columns started rolling south.

The Korean War and the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait that led to the 1991 Gulf War to liberate the emirate the following year both took U.S. policymakers in Washington entirely by surprise. By contrast, civilian planners in the Department of Defense pushed relentlessly for the second Gulf war in 2003 for at least a year and a half, as Woodward documented.

The left-wing independent journalist I.F. Stone concocted a theory that the U.S. government had actually schemed to bring about the Korean War, and in the following decades his theory became fashionable among the American left. But the opening of the Soviet archives after the collapse of communism in 1991 exposed this theory once and for all as a paranoid fantasy.

By contrast, President Bush and his civilian Pentagon war hawks certainly gave the impression before March 2003 that they were determined to have their war with Iraq come what may.

Like the planners of the German General Staff in 1914 and 1939, U.S. planners of the 2003 war in Iraq and Russian planners of the 2008 war in Georgia were able to count on blitzkrieg, an extraordinarily fast-moving war that wrapped up their enemies in a matter of weeks or even days rather than even months. That is easy to do if you are a militarily well-equipped superpower up against a small and far weaker nation.

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Part 2: The mistakes Bush and Rumsfeld made in launching the 2003 Iraq war