Britain’s unnecessary wars in 1879-1939-2001 by Moin Ansari

Those who do not learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat it.

Pat Buchanan has written a seminal book about what is calls Britain’s unnecessary war in 1939. Why stop there? Why not rewind a hundred years and peek into the reasons that led to Curzon Expansion Eastwards.The On to the Oxus policy of Lord Curzon was as much a blunder as the invasion of Germany. The defeat at the battle of Maiwand in Pakistan/Afghanistan in 1889 was as much a bell weather of the downfall of the empire as the victory in Berlin.  We would like to extend the logic to other unnecessary war that Britain fought and is fighting.

Afghanistan defeat: British Failures of “the White Man’s burden”

Britain after having failed to recruit America in her wars in the 18th century and in the aftermath of the loss of her American colonies in 1776, Britain America the innocent in the second world war and then Thatcher pretty much forced Bush into the war in Iraq. Blair then moved the earth to convince Bush into joining the crusade against Iraq and Afghanistan.

The dead US soldiers are buried in the sands of Afghan–their deaths a symbol of “The White Man’s Burden” and the folly of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Like Cervantis’ Don Quixote, the current UK kingts are out there chasing windmills–thinking that the windmills represent the Turkish Army.

British Charge of the Light Brigade in Afghanistan AGAIN: Unfortunately the lessons of the unmitigated disaster of “Auckland’s Folly”, (First Anglo-Afghan War 1838–42) have not been taught to the Oxbridge students.

When your last general left the Subcontinent, Pakistanis and Afghans thought  that you would really leave, Indians and Pakistan thought they would remember the Brits for trains  started by Lord delhousie’s. But South Asians are disappointed that the Brits keep coming back to the Middle East and South Asia.

Lord Delhousi did no favors for anyone except the Opioum traders of the British East India companies and the military cantonments.The main purpose of introducing railways was to “immensely increase the striking power of the military forces at every point of the Indian empire, to bring British capital and enterprise to India and to bring into the ports the produce from the interior.”

Even in the 19^th century technology was not the panacea that prevented defeat. Unfortunately the lessons of unmitigated disaster of “Auckland’s Folly”, (First Anglo-Afghan War 1838-42) have not been taught to the Oxbridge students. Perhaps Blair and Brown never saw Lady Butler’s famous painting of Dr William Brydon, the sole survivor, gasping his way to the British outpost in Jalalabad. This painting codified Elphinstone’s retreat from Kabul and established Afghanistan’s reputation as a graveyard for foreign armies.

The lessons learned from the defeat of Lord Curzon’s (1878-1893) “On to the Oxus” policy are not taught to the Eaton and Harrow graduates. Also not at Yale and Harvard.

Will Britannia learn her lessons ever? Does no one in Britain read Robert Fisk anymore? The minority Northern Alliance led non-Pashtun government has been a total failure. The only way out of the Afghan quagmire for NATO is to negotiate with the Talibaan and the Pashtuns. Pakistan’s vital interests in Afghanstan have to be taken into account, and the Hindu Kush mountains cannot be used to launch terrorism into Pakistani Baluchistan.

An American led “Marshall Plan” for Pakistan and Afghanistan will reduce tensions, and provide employment to the  disaffected youth of the area.

An Unnecessary War? by Patrick J. Buchanan October 11, 1999 The Washington Post
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In A Republic, Not An Empire, I take many controversial stands: Indicting Jefferson for naval disarmament, defending Polk’s war with Mexico, decrying U.S. annexation of the Philippines, and supporting Harding’s Washington naval treaty.
But all has been trampled under by the hysterical reaction to two assertions: That Britain’s war guarantee to Poland was a monumental blunder, and that after the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain in 1940, Germany posed no strategic threat to the U.S.A.

Why was Britain’s war guarantee flawed? Because Britain had neither the will nor power to honor it. In 1939, only one nation could save Poland from Hitler: Russia. “Without Russia,” declared Lloyd George, “our [Polish] guarantees are the most reckless commitment any country has ever entered into. I say more, they are demented.”

By threatening war for Poland, Britain impelled Hitler to cut his deal with Stalin. Result: Annihilation of Poland, Stalin’s serial rape of Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as Hitler swallowed Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France.

By mid-1940 Hitler controlled Western Europe, Stalin Eastern Europe; and the British had been routed at Dunkirk and ensnared in a war that would cost 400,000 dead and bring down the empire.

Yet, Poland was not saved! What, then, did the war guarantee accomplish? And why would it have been immoral for Britain to re-direct Hitler’s attack away from the West, toward Stalin’s slave empire, and let the monsters eat each other up as Harry Truman urged?

Had Britain not declared war, Hitler would have attacked an unprepared Stalin in 1940. The result might well have been the liberation of the Gulag and its 12 million souls, the eradication of Bolshevism in Russia and China, no Cold War, no Korea, and no Vietnam. Instead of six years of World War II bloodletting, we may have seen six months of a Hitler-Stalin war, ending with one dead and the other crippled.

But, comes the cry, Hitler sought “world domination.” After Russia he would have seized Western Europe, Britain, and launched his final attack on us. But, would he? According to historian A. J. P. Taylor, “Eastern expansion was the primary purpose of Hitler’s policy, if not the only one.” To Labor Party statesman Roy Denman, “The fear that after Poland Hitler would have attacked Britain was an illusion….Britain was dragged into an unnecessary war.”

On August 11, 1939, Hitler had railed to the Danzig League of Nations commissioner: “Everything I undertake is directed against Russia. If the West is too stupid and too blind to comprehend that, I will be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, to smash the West, and then after its defeat, to turn against the Soviet Union…”

This, writes Henry A. Kissinger, “was certainly an accurate statement of Hitler’s priorities: from Great Britain, he wanted non-interference in Continental affairs, and from the Soviet Union, he wanted Lebensraum, or living space. It was a measure of Stalin’s achievement that he was about to reverse Hitler’s priorities…”

Yes, and an equal measure of Britain’s blunder.

Challenging my contention that the U.S. faced no strategic threat after 1940, critics cite Nazi plans for an “Amerika-Bomber.” Berlin, they say, had “embarked on a campaign to obtain bases in Africa and the Canary Islands as part of what… foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop called a ‘huge program…of an anti-American character.’”

But this is comic-book history. Not only did the Royal Air Force achieve superiority in 1940, the Royal Navy had never lost it, as the French learned, when Churchill ordered his ships to sink the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir in mid-1940, to keep it out of Hitler’s hands.

In November, 1940, the Italian fleet was smashed at Taranto. “By this single stroke,” exulted Churchill, “the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean was decisively altered.” In early ’41 Hitler’s mighty surface raider, Bismarck, was sunk on its maiden voyage; the Graf Spee had been scuttled off Montevideo in 1939.

By Pearl Harbor, Hitler was overextended and blocked at the Channel and Atlantic by the Royal Air Force and Navy, and at Moscow and Leningrad by the Red Army. By 1942, he was finished in Africa.

The idea that Hitler, with no surface navy or fleet of transport ships, no landing craft or seamen who had even served on a carrier, could construct in Africa or the Canary Islands ships to threaten the U,S., on the other side of an ocean the U.S. and British navies had ruled since Trafalgar is a proposition too absurd to require rebuttal.

Gandhi’s feeble attempt to resuscitate life into the British Empire failed dramatically and the empire crumbled