Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History

by Margaret MacMillan

  The most prominent advocate against sending the troops was George Ball, an undersecretary of state. In the spring of 1965 he warned that even with half a million troops, the United States “may not be able to fight the war successfully enough.” The analogy he used was the French war in Vietnam, which had ended with the surrender of its garrison at Dien Bien Phu. “The French,” he pointed out, “fought a war in Vietnam [sic], and were fully defeated—after seven years of bloody struggle and when they still had 250,000 combat-hardened veterans in the field, supported by an army of 205,000 South Vietnamese.” He also warned that in the eyes of many Vietnamese, the Americans had simply replaced the French as the colonial power. Like President Bush was to do later with the analogy between Algeria and Iraq, Ball’s adversaries concentrated on showing where the Americans were different from the French. France had been divided over the war, and its political leadership was weak and unstable. The American public generally supported the war, except for a few clergymen and academics, and the administration was determined to stay in and win. Furthermore, most “knowledgeable” Vietnamese knew that the United States was there not for its own selfish ends but to defend the independence of South Vietnam. In the battle of the analogies, Ball lost. As Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador in South Vietnam, said to great effect, “I feel there is a greater threat to start World War III if we don’t go in. Can’t you see the similarity to our own indolence at Munich?”

  The Vietnam War in turn was to produce its own set of analogies. Two main ways of drawing lessons came out of that unhappy experience. The lesson that tended to find favor with liberals and Democrats but also with parts of the military was that the United States should never have got involved in the first place. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and then Johnson had allowed the United States to slide into a war without clearly defined aims and where crucial American interests did not appear to be at stake. The result had been a loss of moral authority for the United States as it increasingly found itself cast as an imperialist bully and as its soldiers committed atrocities such as the massacre at My Lai. The important lesson was that the United States should avoid getting drawn into such conflicts again. The other lesson, more appealing to the Right, was that the war in Vietnam could have been won if only the United States had been prepared to go all out, bombing North Vietnam into submission and putting even more troops on the ground. The press and public opinion should have been managed better to prevent the sort of sniping and defeatism that had undermined the war effort at home.

  In 1991, as the Bush Sr. administration contemplated taking action against Hussein, Vietnam came into play as an example of how not to do it. Colin Powell, who had fought in Vietnam, had been drawing lessons ever since. If the United States ever fought another war, it should go in with overwhelming force and with clear goals. It should never again get drawn into an open-ended conflict that bled the armed forces and created dissent at home. Munich was part of the justification. Certainly, in his invasion of Kuwait, Hussein was the undoubted aggressor, and military action did stop any further attempts at meddling with his neighbors. Iraq was left severely weakened and willing to cooperate, if grudgingly, with United Nations arms inspectors.

  When the new Bush administration focused on Iraq after September 11, it, too, used the Munich analogy, but its relevance was much more tenuous. In the 1930s, Hitler headed one of the most powerful countries in the world. As the American scholar Jeffrey Record put it, “Hitler was neither weak nor deterred; Saddam was nothing but weak and deterred.” In 1991, Operation Desert Storm was over almost before it started. In 2003, it took three weeks to defeat Hussein completely with a relatively small force; it had taken four years to defeat Hitler with the combined forces of the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Although both the Bush and the Blair administrations tried to portray Hussein as a menace to the world in the lead-up to the invasion, their evidence, as we now know, that he possessed weapons of mass destruction was flimsy at best. And the assertion that Hussein was somehow allied with Osama bin Laden was absurd to anyone who knew history. Hussein was a secularist, bin Laden a religious fanatic. There had been no love lost between the two men, and indeed bin Laden had repeatedly called upon Iraqis to overthrow Hussein. We can learn from history, but we also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.

  CONCLUSION

  On the evening of September 11, 2001, the American writer Susan Jacoby overheard two men talking in a New York bar. “This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one said. “What is Pearl Harbor?” the other asked. “That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied. Does it matter that they got it so wrong? I would argue that it does, that a citizenry that cannot begin to put the present into context, that has so little knowledge of the past, can too easily be fed stories by those who claim to speak with the knowledge of history and its lessons. History is called in, as we have seen, to strengthen group solidarity, often at the expense of the individual, to justify treating others badly, and to bolster arguments for particular policies and courses of action. Knowledge of the past helps us to challenge dogmatic statements and sweeping generalizations. It helps us all think more clearly.

  If those two bewildered men in the bar had known about Pearl Harbor, they would have understood that the attack on the World Trade Center was not the same as Japan attacking the United States in 1941. That was a war between two states; this was an act of terrorism. That in turn suggested that the tactics and strategy would have to be different from before. Although many, including the Bush administration, talked about a war on terror, the analogy was misleading. Wars are made on enemies, not on ideas; wars have defined goals—usually forcing the enemy to capitulate—but a war on terror has no clearly defined end. Nor was the attack on the World Trade Center anything like Vietnam. There the United States was carrying the war to the enemy’s country, and, again, it had a solid enemy in North Vietnam and its southern allies.

  In the aftermath of September 11, when Americans were shocked, angry, and frightened, it was crucial that they and their leaders be able to think clearly. Who, to begin with, was the enemy? Here history was helpful because it cast light not only on Al Qaeda and its goals but on the reasons for its anger at the West. History was also there to remind Americans of how their country tended to behave in the world and in the face of threats. Those reminders were largely ignored by the administration as it prepared for war on first Afghanistan and then Iraq. A year after the attack on the World Trade Center, Paul Schroeder, one of the most thoughtful of the United States’ historians of foreign affairs, wrote an article, “What Has Changed Since 9/11? Not Much, and Not for the Better,” in which he urged Americans to put what had happened in a larger historical and global context. Yes, he said, the attack had been frightful, but it had not done long-term damage to the United States. True, the terrorist threat remained a serious one, but it was not as great as those suffered by other states in the present and in the past. Yet the Bush administration was using September 11 to claim the right for the United States to decide whom to attack when it pleased without consulting its allies or world bodies such as the United Nations. “It is hard to grasp and impossible to exaggerate,” Schroeder wrote, “how novel, sweeping, dangerous, and subversive of world order and peace this new Bush doctrine is. It violates the two foundation stones of the international system developed over the last five centuries: the principle of the independence, juridical equality, and coordinate status of its component units (now almost entirely states), and its equally vital counter principle, the need and requirement for such independent units to form and join associations for common purposes and to follow recognized norms and practices, especially in seeking peace and security.” The United States, moreover, was abandoning its own history of working with others to uphold a world order and, in its invasion and occupation of Iraq, its long history of opposition to impe
rialism. Worse, as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo would show, it was going to undermine and compromise its own deep respect for the rule of law.

  History, by giving context and examples, helps when it comes to thinking about the present world. It aids in formulating questions, and without good questions it is difficult to begin to think in a coherent way at all. Knowledge of history suggests what sort of information might be needed to answer those questions. Experience teaches how to assess that information. As they look at the past, historians learn to behave rather like the examining magistrate in the French judicial system. What happened and why? the historian asks. History demands that we treat evidence seriously, especially when that evidence contradicts assumptions we have already made. Are the witnesses telling the truth? How do we weigh one version against another? Have we been asking the right or the only questions? Historians go further and ask what a particular event, thought, or attitude from the past signifies. How important is it? The answers in part will depend on what we in the present ask and what we think is important. History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

  History can help us to make sense of a complicated world, but it also warns of the dangers of assuming that there is only one possible way of looking at things or only one course of action. We must always be prepared to consider alternatives and to raise objections. We should not be impressed when our leaders say firmly “History teaches us” or “History will show that we were right.” They can oversimplify and force inexact comparisons just as much as any of us can. Even the very clever and the powerful (and the two are not necessarily the same) go confidently off down the wrong paths. It is useful, too, to be reminded, as a citizen, that those in positions of authority do not always know better.

  Because history relies on a skeptical frame of mind, whether toward evidence or comprehensive explanations, it can also inculcate a healthy propensity to question our leaders. They are not always right, indeed often the opposite. In 1893, the British naval commander in the Mediterranean, Vice Admiral George Tryon, decided to take personal command of the summer naval maneuvers. When he ordered an about-face of two parallel rows of battleships, his officers tried to point out that there would be a collision. A relatively simple calculation demonstrated that the combined turning circles of the ships were greater than the distance between them. While his officers watched in dismay, his flagship, Victoria, was rammed by the Camperdown. Tryon refused to believe that the damage was serious and ordered the nearby vessels not to send their lifeboats. The Victoria sank, taking him and 357 sailors with it. The Charge of the Light Brigade, when the flower of the British cavalry rode straight into the mouths of the Russian guns, is an equal reminder of human folly, not just of Lord Cardigan, who led the charge, but of the system that allowed him to be in command. As David Halberstam, the American journalist, said in the last piece he ever wrote, “It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude.”

  Humility is one of the most useful lessons the past can provide the present. As John Carey, the distinguished British man of letters, puts it, “One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.” Slavery once had its defenders. Think of the arguments over the position of the earth and the sun, of the conviction, apparently supported by science, that so many Victorians had that there were superior and inferior races, or the calm assumptions even a few decades ago that women and blacks could not make good engineers or doctors.

  History also encourages people in the present to reflect on themselves. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the English novelist L. P. Hartley once wrote. Knowing that classical Chinese civilization valued scholars above soldiers or that the Roman family was very different from the nuclear one of the modern West suggests other values and other ways of organizing society. That is not to say that all values are relative; rather, we should be prepared to examine our own and not merely take them for granted as somehow being the best. John Arnold, the British historian, put it elegantly: “Visiting the past is something like visiting a foreign country: they do some things the same and some things differently, but above all else they make us more aware of what we call ‘home.’“

  If the study of history does nothing more than teach us humility, skepticism, and awareness of ourselves, then it has done something useful. We must continue to examine our own assumptions and those of others and ask, where’s the evidence? Or, is there another explanation? We should be wary of grand claims in history’s name or those who claim to have uncovered the truth once and for all. In the end, my only advice is use it, enjoy it, but always handle history with care.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book grew out of an invitation I received from the History Department at the University of Western Ontario to give the Joanne Goodman lectures in the fall of 2007. The series, named in memory of a history student who was tragically killed in a car accident, dates back to 1966 and has had a distinguished roster of lecturers. It was an honor to be among their number and also a wonderful opportunity to reflect on a subject of my own choosing. I am grateful to the faculty and students at Western who sat through my lectures and helped me to refine my thinking through their questions and comments.

  I was very lucky to have found in Jonathan Weier an outstanding research assistant who in the end became more of a collaborator. I am also grateful, as always, to those friends and family members who discussed my ideas with me and who read my drafts with such patience. They make a long list, but I should single out for special mention my brothers, Tom and David; my sister, Ann; my brother-in-law, Peter Snow; and my nephews, Dan and Alex; as well as my agent, Caroline Dawnay, and her Canadian counterpart, Michael Levine. My mother, Eluned, as usual was an excellent critic and proofreader. Bob Bothwell has taught me so much about history over the years that it is difficult to thank him adequately. Yet again, he was kind enough to read my manuscript and give me his advice. I have also benefited greatly from being at Oxford University and talking to my many new colleagues who are interested in the ways in which history is used. I owe particular thanks to Anne Deighton, Rosemary Foot, Yuen Foong Khong, Kalypso Nicholaïdis, and Avi Shlaim and to the students at St. Antony’s who have patiently listened to me talk and sent me much valuable information. Finally, but not last, are those at Random House who brought this book into being: Kate Medina, Frankie Jones, and Steve Messina. Thank you all.

  FURTHER READING

  There is a large and growing literature on the uses and abuses of both history and memory. The following is a list of some of the works I found most useful.

  Abu El-Haj, Nadia. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

  Appleby, R. Scott. “History in the Fundamentalist Imagination.” Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (2002).

  Arnold, John H. History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  Bacevich, Andrew J. “The Real World War IV.” Wilson Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Winter 2005).

  Bell, Duncan, ed. Memory, Trauma, and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present. Basingstoke, U.K: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

  Black, Jeremy. The Curse of History. London: Social Affairs Unit, 2008.

  Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. The Southern Past. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.

  Cannadine, David, ed. What Is History Now? Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

  Carr, E. H. What Is History? London: Macmillan, 1961.

  Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  Delisle, Esther. Myths, Memory, and Lies: Quebec�
�s Intelligentsia and the Fascist Temptation, 1939–1960. Westmount, Q.C.: Robert Davies, 1998.

  Evans, Richard. In Defence of History. London: Granta, 2000.

  Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

  Gardner, Lloyd C, and Marilyn B. Young. Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam; or, How Not to Learn from the Past. New York: New Press, 2007.

  Geary, Patrick J. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

  Gillis, John R., ed. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

  Halberstam, David. “The History Boys.” Vanity Fair, Aug. 2007.

  History & Memory (journal).

  Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

  Howard, Michael. Captain Professor: The Memoirs of Sir Michael Howard. London: Continuum, 2006.

  ______. “The Use and Abuse of Military History.” RUSI Journal 107 (Feb. 1962).

  Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

  Karlsson, Klas-Göran, and Ulf Zander, eds. Echoes of the Holocaust: Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe. Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press, 2003.

  Khong, Yuen Foong. Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

  Lebow, Richard Ned, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds. The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.