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Islam

Dardanelles Then, Afghanistan Now

4 July 2009

Dardanelles and Gallipoli (Wikimedia Commons)

Writing in the Los Angeles Times (“Obama’s Strategic Blind Spot,” July 6th), Professor Andrew J. Bacevich considered the war in Afghanistan against Churchill’s experience in World War I. Churchill, he says, looked for alternatives to “sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders,” just as we should be looking for alternatives to chewing dust in Afghanistan.

Churchill’s alternative, Bacevich wrote, was to launch “an amphibious assault against the Dardanelles” (a physical impossibility; what Churchill championed was a naval attack on the Dardanelles, followed by an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula), and to “support the infantry with tanks.” (I presume he means supporting the infantry on the Western Front with tanks, since they were not a factor on Galllipoli.)

But the Dardanelles/Gallipoli strategy, Bacevich continues

only prolonged the war and drove up its cost….Churchill and his Cabinet colleagues had spent four years dodging fundamental questions. Fixated with tactical and operational concerns, they ignored matters of strategy and politics. Britain’s true interest lay in ending the war, not in blindly seeing it through to the bitter end. This, few British leaders possessed the imagination to see. A comparable failure of imagination besets present-day Washington.

Professor Bacevich writes thoughtfully. At a minimum, a people that opt for war, like other government enterprises, should pay the bills, rather than foisting the debt onto their grandchildren. But the Churchill examples are not entirely appropriate.

First—with no disrespect to those who died—to compare the butchery of World War I trench warfare with the relatively low casualties of Iraq/Afghanistan is silly. Every village in Britain, Alistair Cooke once reminded us, has its memorial to the fallen in the Great War—to say they were decimated is perhaps an understatement since at many times the losses were greater than one in ten.

Second, Churchill’s Dardanelles adventure was an attempt to end World War I—and might have, had it succeeded. The premise was that the Fleet, which hoped to sail through the Dardanelles and appear off Constantinople (Istanbul), would force Turkey’s surrender and relieve the bottled-up Russians, redoubling the forces deployed in the east against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Churchill’s fault (as he later admitted) was trying to drive a major wartime operation without plenary authority to direct every aspect of it—something he avoided in World War II.

Third, the tank (which Bacevich rightly identifies as a Churchill concept) was never a factor early in World War I. Tanks were not used significantly until 1917, and then only briefly, though they did ease the horrific carnage of “over the top” charges against entrenched artillery—the salient feature that (fourth) made World War I much worse in terms of human losses than World War II.

Churchill drew many more appropriate lessons applicable to the present war in Afghanistan, notably about the features of the terrain and the determination of the enemy, in his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. He also wrote presciently about the nature of Islam, concluding that no people were braver in battle, nor more easily misled by religious fanatics. The Middle East, he remarked in 1921, was

unduly stocked with peppery, pugnacious, proud politicians and theologians, who happen to be at the same time extremely well armed and extremely hard up.

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“Religion of Blood and War”

2 March 2009

in Quotations

The website Weapon of Musical Defense quotes your book Churchill by Himself and records: “After 9-11 we were horrified at the hate & exhortations to violence we read in the Koran so we began learning more about what Winston Churchill called ‘the religion of blood and war.’” Did Churchill refer to Islam in those words? —I.L.

Yes, in his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (London: Longmans Green, 1898). Quoting from the new edition (London: Leo Cooper, 1991), page 27:

But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.

It would be inappropriate to quote these words out of context with respect to modern situations. Churchill was, remember, confronting Muslim warriors at the reaches of the British Empire over 100 years ago; his broad reflections are however interesting.

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