The media have reported the death of Australian WWI vet Claude Choules, the last living combatant to fight in that conflict. Only two days ago, this excellent article by Evan Fleischer was posted at The Awl, talking about Choules and the overlapping of generations between the major wars of American history. Whether Fleischer knew something we all didn’t or not, the article is presciently well-timed, but it’s also a really good piece full of interesting tidbits about veterans of a number of wars. Only Florence Green, who served as an RAF canteen girl during the war, is left alive.
A guest post at TomDispatch.com by Adam Hochschild considers some of the parallels between the politics of the First World War and the politics of the Iraq-Afghanistan War. Hochschild is the author of a new history of the war, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918″. Here’s a pullquote from the TomDispatch post:
Was it worth it? Of course not. Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more ruthless German occupation of France.
The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan. Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11 attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead than were killed in the United States on that day — and more than 2,400 American, British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new generation of jihadists.
In the wake of the death of Bin Laden, the question “Was it worth it?” looms large over military action that promises to linger almost indefinitely among the poppy fields of Afghanistan, much as it lingers still over the poppies of Flanders.
