President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to end the war in Iraq and win the one in Afghanistan. In our New Year's Day special, The World's Jeb Sharp looks at how wars end and what lessons can be drawn.
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LISA: From Public Radio International this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. Today is New Year's Day 2009, I'm Lisa Mullins. We kick off this New Year with a special report on how wars end.
STEPHEN: A lot of Americans instinctively think of war as being a lot like a football game.
LISA: But war is no game and has no clock.
MONICA: There's no short-term fix. It's just incredibly messy and incredibly complicated.
LISA: And the victor doesn't always win.
PETER: We're not gonna win wars simply by smashing the enemy.
LISA: A fresh take today on how wars end.
[TECHNICAL]
LISA: I'm Lisa Mullins and from the entire staff of The World, Happy New Year. 2009 is getting off to a pretty busy start. Inauguration day is less than three weeks away and it's gonna be a momentous occasion, but the celebrations can't mask the fact that President-elect Barack Obama is taking over in tumultuous times. He's gonna have his hands full on every front from Wall Street to the Gaza Strip. President Bush's tenure has been defined by war and Barack Obama now inherits those conflicts. The incoming president has vowed to end the war in Iraq and win the one in Afghanistan. So how to bring a war to a close is something Mr. Obama's gonna be thinking about pretty much every day. Over the next hour, The World's Jeb Sharp will explore how conflicts have come to a close in the past. She'll look at the United States Civil War, the First World War and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Now, she begins with this special program with a look at the current war in Iraq.
JEB: In the spring of 2003 U.S. forces invaded Iraq and routed its army. Three weeks after the capture of Baghdad President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared victory.
GEORGE: My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq the United States and her allies have prevailed.
JEB: For a brief moment many Americans bought the idea, the war was over. But why didn't the war end with the fall of Baghdad? And why were we programmed to think it might?
STEPHEN: A lot of Americans instinctively think of war as being a lot like a football game.
JEB: That's Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations.
STEPHEN: There's a goal, the enemy capital. Once you cross the goal line and you capture the enemy Capital you score more points than they did, you're declared the victor, the time runs out, the game ends and you go home to cheers from the adoring fans.
JEB: And, of course, the defeated side plays by the rules and accepts its loss.
STEPHEN: In fact, real war doesn't work that way.
JEB: That's because real war is about politics, not sports. It was the famous 19th Century military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz who said, "War is an extension of politics by other means."
STEPHEN: What that means is that war is way of figuring out who is going to rule, and what policies are going to be adopted, and determining that outcome by a competition in inflicting and receiving violent force.
JEB: But appearances can be deceptive. The defeated side doesn't always lose.
STEPHEN: Just because I've received some violent force, if I'm not yet ready to accept your politics as opposed to my politics, I don't have to stop fighting. I can keep going. I can change the way I fight.
JEB: Which is exactly what happened in Iraq. Instead of accepting defeat the Iraqi Sunnis launched a devastating insurgency. U.S. blunders allowed it to thrive. Widespread looting became the symbol of the Bush Administration's failure to plan for the aftermath of the invasion. At the time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed it as par for the course for a liberated population releasing pent-up feelings. He accused the news media of exaggerating the chaos.
DONALD: I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was, "Henny Penny the sky is falling," I've never seen anything like it.
JEB: Not everyone shrugged it off. Fred Ikle was Undersecretary of Defense during the Reagan Administration. He's known among political scientists for a groundbreaking study of war termination; a book called Every War Must End.
FRED: You couldn't imagine General McArthur moving into Tokyo and tolerating looting. No, he had a long parade of our tanks and guns and clearly established that we had the ability to control the situation.
JEB: Ikle says not only did the U.S. fail to plan properly for the post-war period in Iraq; it was overzealous in its purging of Saddam loyalists. "You want to win over the population you've conquered," Ikle says, "Not alienate it." As we now know Iraq descended into a vicious civil war. A complicated mix of sectarian groups struggled over the country's future. Prospects for an end to the conflict receded. Those who study how civil wars end have suddenly found themselves in demand. One of them is Harvard political scientist Monica Duffy Toft.
MONICA: The most common type of ending is when one side wins so you have a military victory. The second most common is negotiated settlements and that's when the two parties agree to cease hostilities and form a common government. And the third is cease fires or stale mates so the violence ends, but the war itself we don't talk about it having ended because it could reignite at any moment.
JEB: Iraq, of course, is both civil war and foreign occupation. Its end may not fit into a neat research category. Even Toft says the end of war is ragged and unpredictable.
MONICA: There's no short-term fix. It's just incredibly messy and incredibly complicated. You know, there was a very famous book, Every War Must End, but some don't.
JEB: Nor is there always a winner and loser. If peace does come to Iraq it probably won't be in the form of victory or defeat says Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations.
STEPHEN: To the extent that we eventually get something that looks like an end to the violence as a whole in Iraq, I think it will be because most or all of the many important actors within Iraq have come to accept to less than their most ambitious ideal political solution.
JEB: That's certainly true for the Americans Biddle says, who have long since had to trade rosy
visions of Jeffersonian democracy for some semblance of stability. There's been stunning progress in Iraq in recent months, but those close to the action say the gains could easily be reversed. In any case, the end for Iraqis looks quite different from the end for Americans. Daniel Serwer directs the program on Peace and Stability Operations at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
DANIEL: Talk to Iraqis, I mean they see the situation as so much better today than it was that they almost feel that it's over. But, of course, it's not over for Americans because we're in this unnatural position of having essentially the entire fighting force of our U.S. Army tied up on the ground in Iraq. For America the war isn't over until we're out of there, until the occupation is really over, until Iraq can defend itself.
JEB: And Serwer says even if U.S. troops do pull out in the next few years aspects of the war will linger, perhaps for generations.
DANIEL: You know, the concept of "the end" is wrong. If what we're thinking of is the end as in the end of a movie, uh, it doesn't happen that way.
JEB: It happens in a much more ragged way. In war, true endings are hard to pinpoint.
LISA: As you heard in that report from Jeb Sharp the ends of wars may be difficult to pinpoint, but in the case of the American Civil War our textbooks are pretty clear. The war ended at Appomattox courthouse, Virginia in April 1865. That's where Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his forces to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Sounds cut and dry, but as Jeb Sharp reports even that seemingly clear ending is open to interpretation.
JEB: Start delving into Civil War history and you quickly find out just how contested the memory of the war is. Historian Gary Gallagher of the University of Virginia likes to take people to historical sites to untangle the threads.
GARY: The three main memories that came first were union, emancipation, and lost cause. That's the majority white Northern memory, the African-American abolitionist memory, and the white Southern/Confederate memory. Those all came immediately, reconciliation didn't really gain steam as you get closer to the end of the 20th Century.
JEB: Gallagher is giving a group of school teachers a tour of Civil War memorials in
Charlottesville, Virginia. He stops in front of a towering statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback. Gallagher marvels at how Lee's reputation has fared. Gallagher says the Confederate general ended up on no less than five U.S. postage stamps.
GARY: How weird is that? How many civil wars decide later to put the people who almost ruined the nation on a postage stamp?
JEB: Here's what happened in April 1865. The Union General Ulysses S. Grant had finally encircled Lee's army of Northern Virginia near Richmond. Lee gave up the Confederate Capital and began a rapid retreat. At a critical moment railcars that were supposed to contain food for Lee's starving troops turned out to hold ammunition but no food. The retreat turned into a death march. Lee soon found himself surrounded on three sides. Events reached their climax at Appomattox.
GARY: It looks like it's gonna rain so lets do some outside things first.
JEB: This site is now a national historical park. Gary Gallagher knows it well.
GARY: We get a great view across the river from here toward the fields beyond where the army of the Northern Virginia bivouacked on the last night. And they talked that night about whether the army should be surrendered. Grant had already sent notes to Lee. Grant proposing surrender, Lee didn't think it was time to surrender yet.
JEB: Lee still hoped to punch through Grant's lines the following morning. He ordered some of his men out on what turned out to be a hopeless mission.
GARY: These are guys who are gonna be killed to absolutely no purpose on the morning of April the 9th.
JEB: Lee finally decides to surrender. The historic meeting between Grant and Lee follows that afternoon.
VO: Welcome to the McLean House, uh, this is wear the surrender of the Army in Northern Virginia took place specifically in this room that's over on the left when you go in. It's called the parlor room ...
JEB: The surrender marks the beginning of a much-loved story about reconciliation between
North and South. Jay Winik wrote a recent bestseller about the end of the war. It's called April 1865: The Month That Saved America. He says what happened that day at Appomattox was critical. Winik says Grant's attitude was key.
JAY: He decides to allow the, the South to keep their side arms and to keep their horses. And, of course, that made no sense if you're worried about guerrilla war taking place, but what Grant was saying quite loudly and forcefully is, "Is we may have defeated you but we honor you. We may have defeated you, but you are to become our brothers again."
JEB: Grant was carrying out the wishes of the president, Abraham Lincoln. Winik says Lincoln believed it was essential the end of the war not be bitter or bloody.
JAY: What was so striking about him is he never hated or demonized the enemy. You know, he would look across the Potomac and he would stretch an arm out and say, "You know, if only those people had behaved over there we wouldn't be in this terrible war." He didn't call them the enemy. He called them, "those people."
JEB: Lincoln saw those people as fellow citizens, fellow Americans, but five days after Appomattox Lincoln was assassinated. It was a terrifying moment. Lee had surrendered his army, but there were other confederate forces in the field still poised to fight. Winik says no one knew what would happen next.
JAY: It was sort of like their 911 of the day. People literally feared being murdered in their beds and seeing their cities being torched. If ever there were a time for the South to be poised to take advantage of the chaos rippling through the Union it would've been then. But quite significantly when a number of Confederates came to Robert E. Lee who at this point was back home in Richmond, and they talked about the possibility of guerrilla war, very decisively and decidedly Lee said no to guerrilla war saying it must not be fought, it probably can't be won and we should not wage it under any circumstances.
JEB: Winik places huge emphasis on Lee's decision to say no to guerrilla war and yes to rejoining the Union.
JAY: Had Robert E. Lee, at the end of the Civil War, instead of doing what he did at Appomattox,
had he with simply with just a wink and nod said yes to guerrilla warfare we would be living in our country today and the war never would've ended.
JEB: In Winik's version of the Civil War that ending was definitive. Not only that, it would prove triumphant for the future of the country.
LISA: And we'll return with Jeb Sharp's exploration of how the Civil War ended in just a minute.
[TECHNICAL]
LISA: I'm Lisa Mullins and this is The World. On this New Year's Day we're looking at how wars end. The World's Jeb Sharp has been describing the events of April 1865, the end of the American Civil War. She picks up the story now with Civil War historian Gary Gallagher at Appomattox National Historical Park in Virginia.
JEB: Back at present-day Appomattox a storm has arrived. Gary Gallagher ducks into the old jail building to get out of the rain. He says Appomattox was the start of reconciliation but not the end of it.
GARY: I think one thing we get wrong is thinking that this had really just after all been a family quarrel where people were upset with each other, but fundamentally not really at odds with another. And that it was easy to put Humpty back together again, but I think there were tremendous divisions and levels of bitterness.
JEB: That bitterness and the political violence it unleashed leads some to conclude that the civil war didn't really end in 1865. Political scientist Stephen Biddle sees war not just as a series of military battles, but as a violent contest for competing political outcomes. He says a big part of the war was about race and rights with the North trying to impose its view of the political rights of Southern blacks on the South.
STEPHEN: So you get an end of nominal active hostilities in 1965. The North then essentially occupies the South militarily in an attempt to enforce its political preferences for the rights of Southern blacks. The South by contrast with the standard grade school narrative doesn't accept this. They keep fighting.
JEB: Like the insurgents in Iraq who weren't happy with the political outcome of the U.S. led
invasion in 2003. Biddle says the Confederates found a way to continue the war.
STEPHEN: It's just they don't keep fighting in serried ranks of gray in big battles with large formations. What they end of doing is they fight a guerrilla war.
JEB: It's not the same as the guerrilla war that Lee rejected in April 1865, but Biddle and others argue that it is guerrilla war nonetheless. It's fought by a variety of militia groups including the Ku Klux Klan. Much of the resistance was directed at the federal government's attempt to enforce black voting rights in the South in the period known as Reconstruction. In Louisiana, for instance, African-Americans enjoyed strong federal protection in the elections of 1868, 1870 and 1872 according to historian Leanna Keith.
LEANNA: In all three of these elections black voter participation is near 100 percent. The Army acting as, you know, an army of registrars sweeps into black communities and they sign up every age eligible man and these men turn out on Election Day in force.
JEB: But the backlash was fierce. Thousands of blacks were killed during Reconstruction. In her book, The Colfax Massacre, Keith writes about an incident in Louisiana in 1873 where contested election results led to a pitched battle between hundreds of white democrats and black republicans. The blacks had camped out in the courthouse to prevent the other side from installing their candidates. The whites invaded firing a cannon and forcing a black prisoner to set fire to the roof. When the blacks inside the courthouse tried to surrender they were slaughtered. In the aftermath Army troops swooped in to investigate the killings, the perpetrators fled, and their sympathizers refused to cooperate, Keith says.
LEANNA: By resisting the Army, threatening and intimidating them, spitting tobacco in the face of Army officers, all this stuff happens in the aftermath of Colfax and so there is a strong sense that the war continues. And that the Confederacy has not been defeated because local people are thwarting the aims of the U.S. Military in the region.
JEB: In the end three of the killers were prosecuted and convicted, but the Supreme Court threw out the convictions paving the way for violence to triumph over voting rights throughout the South. Colfax and other incidents like it effectively ended Reconstruction. In fact, a historical plaque at
Colfax gloats that the event marked the end of "carpet-bag misrule" in the South. Historian Ed Ayers likens the end of Reconstruction to the departure of the United States from Vietnam.
ED: I can remember what it felt like to see the video of the last helicopter leaving Saigon and people clinging to the runners of the helicopter. Reconstruction was like that, you know, except that there were millions of African-Americans clinging to the helicopter of Reconstruction. It was never actually completed, it was just abandoned.
JEB: Ayers thinks the messy struggle that followed the war is one reason Americans cling to the story of Appomattox. He says the gentlemanly handshake between two great generals gives us the illusion of a clean ending.
ED: Oh, we just love that story not thinking about days after that Abraham Lincoln's assassinated, two years after that military Reconstruction begins, a decade after that Reconstruction finally comes to an end. Americans are most uncomfortable with the period of Reconstruction of anything else in our history, because it's not a story. It doesn't have any kind of shape to it. It just kind of explodes.
JEB: After the invasion of Iraq Ayers was dismayed that in all the public debate over post-war Reconstruction in 21st Century Iraq no one bothered to look at post-war Reconstruction in the 19th Century American South. After all, it involved many of the same elements: military occupation, democracy building, and economic development. But administration officials and pundits alike ignored it.
ED: They said, "Well, look how quickly we reconstructed Japan after World War Two. And look how we reconstructed Germany. That's what we have in mind for Iraq." And I said, "Hmm, well if we look at our own reconstruction, which generally is considered a failure."
JEB: It's helpful to look at Iraq through the prism of the Civil War and the Civil War through the prism of Iraq. Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations says it helps him understand how it's possible to win the war, capture the Capital, but still lose the peace. He notes the North won the big military contest between 1861 and 1865 but that didn't end the struggle. And over time Biddle points out, Southern resistance paid off. In 1877 President Rutherford Hayes
withdrew Northern troops from the South.
STEPHEN: And the South then proceeds to essentially run out the Northern-installed governments of the remaining Southern states, institute what amounted to white one-party rule, removed blacks from voter rolls throughout the South and establish a system of segregation. And that system remains to a significant degree all the way up until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
JEB: Biddle says if you look at the war in political terms it's possible to construct an argument that the South actually won the war. Historian Ed Ayers doesn't go that far, but he certainly agrees with Biddle that you have to take the long view to understand what was at stake.
ED: How really just raggedly brutal the war was, how uncertainly it came to be about slavery, how tenaciously the white South fought for generations to erase as much as they could of what the war had decided. So if you think of the war as being something other than just the battles on the battlefields, but it's what caused it, what it was for, what it's consequences were then it took a very long time for the Civil War to come to anything like an end.
JEB: And the same could well be true in Iraq where a complicated and still violent struggle for power continues. For The World, I'm Jeb Sharp.
LISA: Coming up next, the end of World War One and the Paris Peace Conference that followed.
ZARA: Germany was not destroyed. She is the central figure at the Peace Conference. It is how you are going to treat Germany which is going to determine whether the peace will keep or whether the peace will shatter.
LISA: Our special on how wars end continues after the break, on PRI, Public Radio International.
[TECHNICAL]
LISA: I'm Lisa Mullins, coming up on The World the 1919 Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War One.
MARGARET: I don't think we will ever again get so many powerful people sitting in one place for
so long. Woodrow Wilson, the American President, was out of the United States for six months.
Can you imagine today an American president doing that?
[TECHNICAL]
LISA: I'm Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. We're focusing on this New Year's Day on the issue of how wars end. President-elect Barack Obama campaigned hard on the topic of Iraq. He opposed the war from the beginning and used that anti-war stance to distance himself from his rivals. Mr. Obama vowed to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq and refocus U.S. military efforts on a different war, the one in Afghanistan. In his view that's the more important conflict in the battle against al-Qaeda and terrorism. By the time Mr. Obama was elected on November 4th the nation's troubles seemed exponentially worse than they had been just a few months before. The President-elect alluded to that in his victory speech.
BARACK: We know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime. Two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century, even as we stand here tonight we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq, in the mountains of Afghanistan, to risk their lives for us.
LISA: Barack Obama has vowed to end the war in Iraq and win the war in Afghanistan. That means that he and his administration must think long and hard about how wars end. It's a difficult issue and it's one that our reporter, Jeb Sharp, has been probing. We continue now with a special report on how wars end. In this segment the end of World War One and the Paris Peace Conference that followed.
JEB: The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris is a gleaming, glittering place where the light ricochets off the mirrors and chandeliers. It was here on June 28th, 1919 that world leaders sat down with German officials to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Historian Margaret MacMillan describes in her book, Paris 1919. It was a very formal ceremony, but at the end it was chaos. The world leaders, Lloyd George the British Prime Minister, Clemenceau the French Prime Minister, Woodrow Wilson, um, the American President went out to that gorgeous terrace leading out to that great park and the fountains went off. There was a huge number of people
standing outside. The crowd jostled everyone, and Woodrow Wilson lost his top hat, and Lloyd George was furious, so it was a mixture of ceremony and chaos.
JEB: A mixture MacMillan says that perhaps summed up the state of Europe at that moment. World War One had upended the old order.
HUGH: It's an end and it's a beginning.
JEB: Hugh Strachan is a professor of the History of War at Oxford University.
HUGH: For Western Europe it's an end to the idea that war is an acceptable way of solving your political differences. The First World War on the Western front becomes the definition of the awfulness of war. In the East on the other hand, it is a beginning because new states emerge.
JEB: That sense of upheaval gave the Paris Peace Conference a heady feel. It was modeled on the Congress of Vienna, which marked the end of the Napoleonic wars a century before. But the issues in Paris were far more complex. Historian Zara Steiner says people poured into the French capital to petition the world leaders.
ZARA: You had all of the hotels being besieged by Arabs, by Jews, by Greeks, by Bulgarians, by Macedonians, I mean they really couldn't plan for this kind of peace.
JEB: So the peace makers sometimes made hasty and arbitrary decisions. Over time the conference has become known for the hubris with which statesmen carved up empires and created new countries. Former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith has witnessed the consequences of those decisions in the Balkans and the Middle East.
PETER: If you're gonna engage in that kind of war-ending scenario you really need to know what you're doing.
JEB: His favorite horror story from that time concerns the British diplomat Harold Nicolson. Galbraith says Nicolson was sitting with the British, French, and Italian heads of State one day.
PETER: And they were drawing the line on a map of Anatolia between Turks and Greeks. And there they are drawing the boundary and Nicolson looks at the map and realizes that they have confused a topographic map for an ethnographic map. And they think that the brown are the Turks and the Green are the Greeks when in fact, the brown is the mountains and the green are
valleys.
JEB: Nicolson spoke up and averted that particular disaster, but it wasn't enough to avert war between Turkey and Greece in the years to come. In fact, wars have erupted in many of the places the peace makers thought they were sorting out once and for all. The conference was incredibly ambitious says Margaret MacMillan.
MARGARET: I don't think we will ever again get so many powerful people sitting in one place for so long. You know, Woodrow Wilson the American president, with one brief month when he dashed back to the United States, was out of the United States for six months. I mean, he left at the beginning of December 1918. He didn't come home 'till the middle of July 1919. I mean, can you imagine today an American President doing that?
JEB: Wilson's idealistic foreign policy was a central feature of the conference. His ideas about self-determination and his proposal for a League of Nations promised a new way forward, but his words also complicated things sending out mixed messages. The confusion over Wilson's position began in the last year of the war. In the spring of 1918 the Germans launched a last-ditch offensive on the Western front. They gained territory but by the summer the allies counterattacked and broke through the German lines. The German army was forced to retreat. It was in bad shape running out of men, and running out of supplies. To make matters worse it's allies were dropping out of the war. At the same time fresh American troops were pouring in. In late September the Germans began asking for peace, but instead of speaking to the British and the French they approached the Americans thinking they would take a softer line.
MARGARET: And I think there was misunderstanding on both sides. The Germans were led to believe that they were being offered peace terms on a Wilsonian basis on a number of statements he'd made about a peace without retributions, a peace without revenge, and a peace that would treat everyone fairly.
JEB: It wasn't realistic, MacMillan says. And it contributed to a feeling that Germany had been promised a peace in which it wasn't going to lose much. That didn't turn out to be true. In October 1918 while the armies were still fighting, a series of letters passed back and forth
between Wilson and the Germans. The Germans were negotiating for an armistice, a truce in effect, that would lead to peace talks. But Wilson and his allies wanted Germany disarmed and they used the armistice to impose a defeat.
MARGARET: What actually happened in the end is the Germans sent an emissary in a very old-fashioned way bearing a white flag, and the car went through the lines and it came to Marshal Foch in the allied headquarters in, in Compiegne and in his railway carriage the armistice was signed. If you look at the terms of that armistice it's really a defeat. The Germans basically gave up all their heavy equipment. They gave up all their tanks, their field artillery, their machine guns. They'd already lost their fleet.
JEB: The armistice went into effect on November 11th. What soldiers remembered was the silence as artillery finally stopped firing. The war was over at least for the moment, but if it was a defeat for the Germans it was an ambiguous defeat. The final Peace Treaty was still months away and this wasn't the sort of ending the men who led the fighting were expecting.
HUGH: Generals in some ways still thought in terms of decisive battlefield success. They still thought that all this fighting was going to lead to the moment when there would be the breakthrough, there would be the moment when allied troops ended up in Germany, and it didn't happen and yet the war was over. They grappled to put a shape on this.
JEB: In that sense the end of the First World War stands in sharp contrast to the end of the Second World War. In 1945 there was no question but that Germany was defeated. It was occupied, troops came in from both East and West. Every German citizen could see and feel the defeat, but after World War One Germany's future was still open. Zara Steiner says the German question loomed over everything else at the Paris talks.
ZARA: The fact is that Germany was not destroyed and this makes it impossible to ignore Germany in any way. She is the central figure at the Peace Conference, if you want, because it is how you are going to treat Germany which is going to determine whether the peace will keep or whether the peace will shatter.
JEB: But the peace makers disagreed on how to treat Germany. They agreed Germany should
be made to pay reparations, but squabbled over the size and share. They agreed Germany's borders needed to shrink, but disagreed on where and why. They had to decide how to control its army and whether to try the Kaiser for war crimes. It took months. It took so long in fact, that once the great powers had agreed among themselves, they didn't dare open the debate up all over again with Germany according to Margaret MacMillan.
MARGARET: They simply said, "Look, with great difficulty and great cost we've put together these terms. We've gotta just give them to the Germans and tell them more or less take it or leave it." And so the Germans, who in the meantime had been preparing for the old style full negotiations and had crates of material arrived in Paris with all their boxes and all their possessions already prepared and found they weren't gonna to negotiate.
JEB: The Germans were humiliated and so the Paris Peace Conference turned into something different from what many had envisioned. Hugh Strachan says the end of the First World War was paradoxical in that sense. He says until then the Napoleonic wars were the model, a short decisive campaign, battle field success, and then a peace settlement.
HUGH: In the First World War that isn't how things go. There isn't a decisive battlefield success. We can't simply say, as in 1815, there is the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon is defeated, he goes into exile, there's a new regime in France and a new international order is established which lasts 'till 1914. What instead we have, is a much messier conclusion, no clear decisive battlefield success and yet we have a series of peace settlements, which create a new world order and which dictate a peace to Germany as though it had been defeated on the battlefield.
JEB: But, of course, the end of World War One didn't bring peace for long. There has been much debate over the years about whether the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles led to the Second World War. The historians interviewed here refute the idea. It's too simplistic they say. Certainly times were tough and certainly the bitterness Germans felt about the terms was easily manipulated for propaganda purposes, but they reject drawing a straight line between Versailles and World War Two. Hugh Strachan says there's a lesson in Versailles nonetheless, how not to treat a defeated foe.
HUGH: We have not come away from that saying, "If we're in that situation in the future we must recognize the aspirations of both sides. There needs to be a dialogue. Versailles, from that point of view, is seen as a warning. That you can't have a peace that treats the defeated power as Versailles seems to treat it if you want it to be a lasting solution.
JEB: And if you're not careful the losing side will manufacture victory out of defeat. It turns out concepts such as victory and defeat are oddly mutable, especially when it comes to memory. In London at the Imperial War Museum you can walk through a simulation of life in the trenches. Terry Charman is a historian at the museum. He says the way the war is remembered in Britain has led to a perception, not of victory, but of defeat.
TERRY: You know, it is the suffering, the portrayal of trench warfare. The war poets, Sassoon and Owen especially, that somehow, you know, Britain lost the First World War and, of course, people dwell so much on the enormous casualty figures. So what is interesting I think is the fact that we did win the First World War.
JEB: The war ended 90 years ago, but certain places will forever be defined by it. This is the Belgian town of Ypres on the Western front. The war is still everywhere here. The countryside is saturated with graves. The shop windows display artifacts. A museum on the war occupies the old market hall in the center of town. At 8:00 o'clock in the evening traffic comes to a standstill at the city's Menin Gate. [BUGLES PLAY] Buglers play what's known as the "Last Post" in remembrance of the dead, not just once in awhile but every single night. Here too, there's a sense that loss rather than victory is what pervades. It turns out the end of the First World War holds more than one paradox with consequences we still struggle to understand today. For The World, I'm Jeb Sharp, Ypres Belgium.
LISA: Our special report on how wars end continues in a moment when we reflect on the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
NORMAN: All of us were stunned by the fact that we'd achieved victory so quickly, uh, with, with such a low loss of life on the part of our forces. And, and, and it took a very long time for that to sink in. I mean, we had won a stunning victory at almost no cost, relatively speaking.
LISA: The end of the 1991 Gulf War is next. You can find the entire series on How Wars End including audio, transcripts, and photographs at tHughorld.org.
[TECHNICAL]
LISA: I'm Lisa Mullins and this is The World. In the final part of our New Year's special today The World's Jeb Sharp reports on how the 1991 Gulf War came to an end. At first, it seemed like a pretty clean finish but over time it looked ragged.
JEB: When U.S. troops returned from the Persian Gulf in 1991 they were treated to victory celebrations and a ticker tape parade. It was the parade Vietnam war veterans never got. In his autobiography Colin Powell describes the thrill of riding up Broadway in New York in a 1959 Buick convertible. He and other architects of the Gulf War had cut their teeth in Vietnam. In planning the engagement with Iraq they had one overriding goal, this war would be short and sweet. The crisis began when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990. Over the next few months the United States worked to build an international coalition to take action against Iraq. In January 1991 Operation Desert Storm began.
GEORGE: Just two hours ago allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait.
JEB: President George H. W. Bush stressed that the action had the consent of the United Nations and Congress. He said the goal was to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and he promised that the coalition would act quickly and forcefully.
GEORGE: I've told the American people before that this will not be another Vietnam. And I repeat this here tonight. Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back.
JEB: The President was able to keep his promise. In little over a month he was back in front of the cameras.
GEORGE: Kuwait is liberated. Iraq's army is defeated. Our military objectives are met.
JEB: These were short sentences used to describe a short campaign. Six weeks of air attacks and a mere four days of ground operations. And when he addressed the troops by radio a couple
of days later the President proclaimed that the ghosts of that previous conflict had been exercised.
GEORGE: The scepter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.
JEB: The men who prosecuted the 1991 Gulf War were deeply influenced by Vietnam. At the time Colin Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He played a key role in ensuring the war was brought to a swift end. General Norman Schwarzkopf remembers feeling relieved and surprised by the speed of the conclusion.
NORMAN: We had won a stunning victory at almost no cost, relatively speaking. And every one of us was kind of walking around weeks later still shaking our head--were afraid that you were gonna wake up from this wonderful dream you were having and find yourself in a nightmare.
JEB: The end game was not a nightmare for the Americans, but it turned into one for the Iraqis. During the conflict President Bush had encouraged the Iraqi people to overthrow the Saddam Hussein. Now, at the end of the war Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi Shiites tried to do so, but having called for the Iraqi to rise up the First Bush Administration then abandoned them. Saddam's forces crushed the rebellions killing tens of thousands of people. U.S. forces still on the ground in Iraq stood by and watched. Peter Galbraith is a former U.S. diplomat and the author of two books about Iraq.
PETER: So, what had been a brilliant military campaign and a great success at the end of February began to look like a fiasco at the end of March.
JEB: Galbraith should know, in the late 1980s he was instrumental in documenting Saddam Hussein's atrocities against his own citizens. At the end of the Gulf War the Iraqi leader's ability to crush the internal rebellions was made easier by a fatal mistake on the part of the Americans. During cease fire talks Iraqi military leaders asked General Schwarzkopf for an exemption in order to use their helicopters. Their bridges were all destroyed they argued, and they needed to ferry officials around the country. Schwarzkopf was later interviewed about it.
NORMAN: That seemed like a reasonable request and I, within my charter I felt that that was
something that it was perfectly all right to grant.
JEB: But instead of using the helicopters to transport government officials the Iraqis used them to gun down civilians. Schwarzkopf said he felt used.
NORMAN: I think I was suckered, because I think they intended right then when they asked that question, to use those helicopters against the insurrections.
JEB: But Peter Galbraith says Schwarzkopf's justifications were absurd. He says U.S. commanders should've responded as soon as they realized what was happening.
PETER: After all, uh, for a victorious power dictating the terms to allow an exception for helicopters to fly government officials around doesn't mean that you made an exception to allow them to, uh, use those helicopters to gun down civilians. That really was inexcusable. I think it was inattention, their minds were someplace else; that they wanted this thing to be over.
JEB: Several weeks after he'd announced the war over President Bush found himself on the defensive.
GEORGE: Of course I feel a frustration and a, a sense of grief for the innocents that are being killed brutally. But, uh, we are not there to intervene and, uh, that is not our purpose. It never was our purpose, because I do not want to see us get sucked into the internal civil war inside of Iraq.
JEB: But in the end the humanitarian catastrophe proved too large to ignore. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds fled over the border into Turkey where they struggled to survive in refugee camps. The United States launched Operation Provide Comfort to deliver aid to them. Months after the war was officially over the U.S. used its troops to carve out safe havens in Northern Iraq so that the Kurds could return to their homes, here was the mission creep that President Bush had sought so hard to avoid. It was certainly a much messier ending than promised, but political scientist Stephen Biddle says we shouldn't expect neat endings in war. He himself even shies away from using words like victory or defeat.
STEPHEN: Most wars don't end with this kind of extreme binary one-sided outcome. They generally end up in some sort of negotiated deal, which secures neither sides war aims
completely. Our most important war aim was unambiguously secured. I mean, Saddam Hussein did not have control of Kuwaiti oil fields after 1991, but there were a variety of other war aims that lots of Americans felt were worthwhile that were not secured. And the, the result wasn't as happy for us as many had expected it to be.
JEB: The United States ended up maintaining forces in the region for years to come. It also patrolled the skies over Iraq launching sporadic air strikes against Iraqi targets. Twelve years after the Gulf conflict, it went to war against Iraq again. For Peter Galbraith there's an eerie parallel between the two wars. In his view both Bush Administrations paid too much attention to their military campaigns and not enough to securing important political objectives in the aftermath.
PETER: We're not gonna win wars simply by smashing the enemy. We need to think about, and, and be able to play and put resources into what follows. And, and that's really the great failure and it's, it's an incredibly costly failure.
JEB: And one that ultimately made Iraq feel a lot more like Vietnam than the Gulf War planners of 1991 ever intended. For The World, I'm Jeb Sharp.
LISA: Our series on How Wars End was edited by Patrick Cox with engineering by Ray Fallon.
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