“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” —Winston Churchill, 1939

“If Putin likes Trump, guess what, folks, that’s called an asset, not a liability. Now I don’t know that I’m going to get along with Vladimir Putin. I hope I do. But there’s a good chance I won’t.”     —Donald Trump, 2017

Russia National Interests

Trump-Churchill comparisons are invidious and silly. After all, we’re not working with the same raw material. But their two statements are oddly congruent. Churchill’s Russian experience has something to offer the President as he embarks on his own attempt—fraught as it may be—at a modus operandi with Mr. Putin.

In the 1930s Churchill had to decide which was the greater threat: Stalin’s Soviet Union, whose tyranny was still confined to its borders; or the Greater German Reich, which had by 1939 swallowed the Saarland, the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and was threatening Poland.

Churchill’s study of history held the answer: Britain had always backed the second strongest powers on the European continent: France, of course…and Russia.

“Historic life interests”

Ever the deft rhetorician, Churchill was unafraid to criticize “Soviet” economics, but foresaw the need to appeal to “Russian” national interests in the coming confrontation with Hitler. To paraphrase Churchill, “It cannot be in accordance with the interest or the safety of Russia,” Churchill said in 1939, “that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of South-Eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.”

Accordingly, earlier in 1939, after Prime Minister Chamberlain had issued a belated guarantee to defend Poland, Churchill cornered Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador. Adopting what today seems almost Trumpist language, he asked the ambassador for his support:

Look here Mr. Ambassador, if we are to make a success of this new policy we require the help of Russia. Now I don’t care for your system and I never have, but the Poles and the Romanians like it even less. Although they might be prepared at a pinch to let you in, they would certainly want some assurances that you would eventually get out.

Maisky liked this blunt approach and conveyed Churchill’s views to Moscow. Alas Churchill was out of power, and Chamberlain—not without reason—regarded Stalin as a thug. He sent low-level negotiators to Moscow, to hint at some vague future agreement. Hitler sent his foreign minister. The resultant Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact left Germany free to attack Poland, and World War II was on.

“Favourable reference to the Devil”

When the two tyrants fell out and Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, Churchill, now prime minister, reverted to type, promising Moscow all-out support. An aide reminded him of the dreadful things he’d said about communists. Churchill growled: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” Again he pursued the main objective: victory.

Churchill’s Russian experience was stony. In the war, he failed to save the Balkans and central Europe from the onrushing Red Army. He did save Greece, and foster a semi-independent Yugoslavia. Given the military situation, it was the best he could do with the prevailing situation.

Of the Russians, he said in 1946: “There is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness. But he qualified that in 1951: “I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.”

It’s Still National Interest

Churchill never abandoned his idea of appealing to national interests. After Stalin’s death in 1953, he urged “a meeting at the summit,” but Eisenhower resisted. Russia might have a new dress, the President declared, but “there was the same whore underneath it.” Even Ike spoke like Donald Trump on occasion.

Well, it cannot be in accordance with the interest or the safety of Russia that ISIS should plant itself upon the shores of the Mediterranean, or that it should overrun Syria and subjugate the Iraqi peoples. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia. There lies a Churchillian opportunity.

Mr. Trump believes he can work with the Muscovites. So too did Churchill, when his country’s fate hung in the balance. Churchill met with little enough success. But when he did, it was when he dangled “national interest” in front of the Russians.

In the October 19th presidential debate, Mr. Trump said the U.S. and Iraqis forfeited “the element of surprise” in publicizing the coming offensive against Mosul. This, he insisted, allowed Islamic State ringleaders to remove themselves from the danger zone: “Douglas MacArthur, George Patton [must be] spinning in their graves when they see the stupidity of our country.” Earlier in the week he had asked: “Why don’t we just go in quietly, right? They used to call it a sneak attack.”

The New York Times, ever watchful for gaffes by Mr. Trump, jumped on this comment: “Donald Trump is Wrong on Mosul Attack, Experts Say.” Their article was not all wrong, but I’m not sure its ideas are Churchillian.

I am not comparing Trump with Churchill. (We aren’t working with the same raw materials.)The question I pose is: was Churchill right about keeping mum over operations like Mosul?

Mosul Redux

Here is the essence of the Times’s critique of Trump on Mosul:

• Mr. Trump’s armchair generalship revealed a fundamental lack of understanding of Iraqi politics, military warfare—and even some of the most famous campaigns commanded by MacArthur and Patton.

Try to think of which of their attacks were ballyhooed three weeks in advance. MacArthur’s Inchon landings in the Korean War, Patton’s shortcuts to Palermo and Messina in the battle for Sicily, are examples of campaigns kept very quiet beforehand. They would have been far less successful had they been announced in advance.

We may think of more. Normandy, as the site of the World War II D-Day landings, is of course the biggie. Hitler knew an attack was coming. Thanks to secrecy, he did not know when or where.

• Unlike the top-secret raid by American commandos to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, there are many good reasons to foreshadow an impending ground offensive, like Mosul, mainly to reduce civilian casualties, isolate the enemy and instill fear within its ranks, military scholars and retired commanders said.

There is a difference between a commando raid and a major ground offensive. But the “many good reasons” to pre-announce the attack on Mosul are questionable. Mosul civilians have nowhere to go. It’s not like they’re living next to an on-ramp for I-95 with a BMW in the garage. I.S. fighters are demonstrably afraid of nothing. Advance warnings gave them extra weeks to complete and provision their underground tunnel network.

They and Us

• Ever since Iraq’s second-largest city fell to Islamic State fighters in June 2014, American and Iraqi officials have made no secret of their larger goal to recapture Mosul. It has been a political imperative for Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, to rally public support for an Iraqi-led military campaign to reclaim cities such as Tikrit, Ramadi, Falluja and, the major prize now, Mosul.

This is ivory tower commentary which supposes that “they” are like “us.” And that “Iraqi public support” actually matters. What is remarkably absent from news accounts so far is that so many units we see attacking Mosul are flying Kurdish not Iraqi flags. When so identified, they are glossed over by the implication that Kurds and Iraqis are brothers in arms. They are anything but. What will happen if Mosul falls and they get on to its future administration was perhaps an important question to be considered in advance. What are the odds that it was?

• Moreover, it would be impossible to hide a force of about 30,000 Iraqi and Kurdish troops that have been massing for weeks on the outskirts of Mosul, gradually encircling the city while conducting artillery fire and airstrikes to soften up enemy defenses in advance of the main ground offensive.

How hard would it have been to obscure preparations, given an enemy with no air force, no serious surveillance and no satellites? Obviously, as the circle tightened, they would realize what’s going on. But proclamations weeks in advance only enable the ringleaders to clear out, and the remainder to set up human shields with innocent civilians.

Mixed Messages

• Before this week’s offensive, Iraqi warplanes dropped thousands of leaflets and Mr. Abadi broadcast into the city, urging Mosul residents to hunker down, if they could, to avoid getting caught in the crossfire or adding to the sea of refugees already gathering outside the city and surrounding areas.

As if the poor devils will be walking around the streets when the attack moves to the city. If thought has been given to “escape routes” (believe that when you see them), the idea is commendable. But how does that jibe with dropping leaflets telling civilians to stay put? Seems a conflicted strategy—which is not surprising given the combination of 21st century military operations with what passes for same in the Iraqi army.

Expert Testimony

• “What this shows is Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about military strategy,” said Jeff McCausland, a retired Army colonel and former dean at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

He may be right; I will not reflect on who, exactly, knows about military strategy. But Col. McCausland recently retweeted, “Thank-you Robert Deniro,” who delivered a Trump-like rant that compares nicely with some of Trump’s own. So we know where he’s coming from.

• …the reverence of Patton and MacArthur, and Mr. Trump’s military assessment, do not impress national security historians like Richard H. Kohn, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina: “I don’t think it really demonstrates any understanding of warfare.”

Professor Kohn is a distinguished scholar, but this is his only quote. His presence in the discussion is one reason why I believe the article is worth considering. But it’s another expert who gets most of the ink….

• Robert Scales, a retired Army major general and former commandant of the Army War College, said the unfolding Mosul campaign is a course in Military Operations 101 that American and Iraqi armies have followed for years. A large allied force…peels away the outlying towns and villages, all the while opening an escape route for refugees….

“The American and Iraqi armies” implies that they are equal in resources, ability, leadership, strategy and fortitude. Last March in villages near Mosul, the Iraqi army turned and fled.

• “There are over a million innocents in the city so you want to give them an opportunity to take cover or to leave,” said General Scales. “If you kill too many civilians, the political outcome is a disaster.”

On 10 March 2015 General Scales said of the war in Ukraine: “The only way the United States can have any effect in this region and turn the tide is to start killing Russians—killing so many Russians that even Putin’s media can’t hide the fact that Russians are returning to the motherland in body bags.”

What Churchill Thought

The Times article glossed over the heart of the critique—that we are, in general, forever inclined to bloviate in advance on what we’re going to do. It is quite true, in fact, that fighting wars like a CNN broadcast is stupid. 

During World War II, Winston Churchill strongly objected to divulging tactics or strategy in advance of military operations. The Mosul controversy erupted as I was reading proofs of The Churchill Documents, May-December 1944, twentieth document volume in Churchill’s official biography, to be published next year by Hillsdale College Press. I flagged two memoranda by Churchill as pertinent to the discussion above.

I do not like press conferences, even off the record, on the eve of an important battle. Once zero hour has struck, the principles desired…should be inculcated upon the press, who should be allowed to mingle in the fighting. I have recently been perturbed at reported statements from Naples, one in the Corriere, explaining that we are about to attack. Is it really necessary to tell the enemy this? Of course, he may possibly think we are such fools that it is an obvious blind, but this is a dangerous chance to take.

—Winston S. Churchill to General Sir Hastings Ismay on the Italian campaign. Prime Minister’s Personal Minute D.144/4 (Churchill papers, 20/152), 7 May 1944

Tactics and Strategy

I recently made enquiries about a newspaper article which appeared to me to contain very dangerous forecasts about our forthcoming operations. During the course of these my attention was drawn to an official handout by AEAF [Allied Expeditionary Air Force]…which begins as follows:

“Striking again at the European invasion area, approximately 200 Ninth Air Force Marauders carried out a two-pronged attack in mid-morning today against military objectives in Northern France and an important railroad bridge near Rouen, near the northern coast of France.”

The Chief Censor requested the press to delete the first seven words but had it not been for his intervention a very dangerous breach of security would have taken place. I do not understand how such a statement could have been passed.

I shall be glad if you will make enquiries and take special steps to ensure that all those concerned realise the extreme importance of preventing the issue of any statement which might give the enemy any assistance in his efforts to discover our future intentions.

You will report the name and appointments of the officer concerned.

—Winston S. Churchill to Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory on pre-D-Day bombing. Prime Minister’s Personal Minute M.613/4 (Churchill papers, 20/152), 25 May 1944

The reader may decide whether Churchill’s wisdom applies to the fanfare preceding the attack on Mosul. It may be apposite in the future, in the mess that is Iraq. Essentially, Iraq is the former Mesopotamia, which Churchill once referred to as “Messpot.” Rather appropriate in today’s circumstances.

Mr. Daniel Knowles (“Time to scotch the myth of Winston Churchill’s infallibility,” (originally blogged on the Daily Telegraph but since pulled from all the websites where it appeared), wrote that the “national myth” of World War II and Churchill “is being used in an argument about the future of the House of Lords.”

Mr. Knowles quoted Liberal Party leader Nick Clegg, who cited Churchill’s 1910 hope that the Lords “would be fair to all parties.” Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames MP, replied that Churchill “dropped those views and had great reverence and respect for the institution of the House of Lords.” Soames concluded: “But it doesn’t matter. The basis of this argument is mythology, not history.”

Churchill’s view on the Lords was more nuanced than Clegg stated, and certainly did change after passage of the 1911 Parliament Act, which Churchill helped pass. It eliminated the Lords’ veto of money bills, restricted their delay of other bills to two years, and reduced the term of a Parliament to five years. You can look it up.

What to do about the House of Lords is a matter for the British people and their representatives. My task is merely to refute nonsense about Winston Churchill—which I will now respectfully proceed to do, quoting from Mr. Knowles’s treatise:

 • “We idolise Churchill because we don’t really know anything about him.”

Only sycophants idolize Churchill. But if they do, it’s not because they know nothing about him. He has the longest biography in the history of the planet. He has 15-million published words. There are a million documents in the Churchill Archives. One hundred million words were written about him. He gets 37 million Google hits. Don’t be silly.

 • “His finest hours aside, Winston Churchill was hardly a paragon of progressive thought.”

Churchill’s was at times so progressive that he was called a traitor to his class. His own Conservative Party never quite trusted him because they knew he continued to harbor principles of the Liberal Party he had been part of from 1904 to 1922. To cite examples would bore you. So let’s just say that he favored a National Health Service before the Labour Party did, and believed in a system of social security before the Labour Party existed.

 • “He believed that women shouldn’t vote – telling the House of Commons that they are ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.’”

Churchill never said that in the Commons. It’s a private note pasted into his copy of the 1874 Annual Register in 1897, when he was 23. At that time the majority of British women themselves were opposed to having the vote. Churchill changed his view on women’s suffrage after observing the role women played in World War I—and when he realized, as his daughter said, “how many women would vote for him.”

 • “He was fiercely opposed to self-determination for the people of the Empire….”

Was the fierce independence Churchill admired in Canadians, Boers, Zulus, Australians, Sudanese, New Zealanders and Maoris a sham and a façade, then? Churchill did have a tic about the early Indian independence movement, with its Brahmin roots. Yet in 1935 he declared that Gandhi had “gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” And Churchill was proven right that a premature British exit from India would result in a Hindu-Muslim bloodbath—how many died is still unknown.

 • “….advocating the use of poisoned gas against ‘uncivilized tribes’ in Mesopotamia in 1919.”

That Golden Oldie has been refuted repeatedly for twenty years. The specific term he used was “lachrymatory gas” (tear gas). He was not referring to a killer gas like chlorine.

 • “Even his distrust of Hitler was probably motivated mostly by a hatred of Germans.”

Is this the same Churchill who urged that shiploads of food be sent to blockaded Germany after the 1918 armistice, incurring the wrath of his colleagues, who wished to “squeeze Germany until the pips squeaked”? Is this the man who wrote to his wife in 1945: “…my heart is saddened by the tales of masses of German women and children flying along the roads everywhere in 40-mile long columns to the West before the advancing Armies”? Really, Mr. Knowles should be ashamed of himself.

 • “In 1927, he said that Mussolini’s fascism ‘had rendered service to the whole world,’ while Il Duce himself was a ‘Roman genius.’”

Lots of politicians said favorable things about Mussolini after he restored order to a reeling Italy in the 1920s. Churchill was among the first to realize and to say publicly what Mussolini really was. Churchill wasn’t always right the first time—but he was usually right in the long run.

 • “In 1915, he had to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty after the disaster of Gallipoli.”

He had to resign because of the Dardanelles, not Gallipoli, which was someone else’s idea (and hadn’t yet become a disaster). Churchill initially was even doubtful about the plan to force the Dardanelles, but he defended it and was a handy scapegoat. He vowed never again to champion “a cardinal operation of war” without plenary authority; hence his assumption of the title “Minister of Defence” in World War II.

 • “His decision in 1925 to restore Britain to the Gold Standard caused a deep and unnecessary recession.”

There was already a recession. Churchill, Keynes and the Gold Standard comprise a far more complicated subject than Mr. Knowles represents. Among other things, the Gold Standard was insisted upon by the Bank of England. Churchill was certainly wrong to buy their arguments, and saw many of its effects coming; he was also incredibly unlucky in the way things transpired.

 • ”That led directly to the general strike in 1926, in which he was reported to have suggested using machine guns on the miners.”

Mr. Knowles confused his red herrings. It was the Welsh miners at Tonypandy in 1910 against whom Churchill is mythologically supposed to have sent troops—but top marks for the machine guns, a new twist on the old myth. (In fact, Churchill opposed the use of troops, in Tonypandy and in the General Strike.)

Mr. Knowles concluded:

Yes, he was, in the most part, a brilliant war leader. His role in the creation of the modern welfare state is also worth remembering. But his views on Lords reform are as irrelevant today as his views on India or female suffrage. This is a debate we should have based on principle, and on a practical evaluation of how well the House of Lords works. Citing dead men only muddies it.

Well, it is my instinctive feeling anyone who fails to do basic research can produce only what amounts to a national myth, divorced from reality.

Churchill was not always “a brilliant war leader.” He did help create what became the welfare state–and warned against its excesses. His views on Lords reform are not irrelevant, but they do require more study than we read in the Telegraph Blogpost. His views on India are still relevant to certain Indians who have written on the subject. (As one wrote, the Axis Powers had quite different ideas in mind for India than the old British Raj).

As for female suffrage, ask all the women who voted for him. Citing live Telegraph bloggers only muddies the waters.

Mr. Knowles has tweeted that “The whole point of the post was to take down Clegg. That piece is bizarre.” I certainly agree his piece is bizarre. But Mr. Clegg lasted until 2015.