Global Policy Forum

By Andrew Greeley

The trouble with war is the unintended consequences. Consider August 1914. No one wanted a long war in which 15 million to 20 million people would die. The wars in Europe after the end of Napoleon's empire were all quickie conflicts. Two armies came together and fought a single battle. The winner of the battle was the winner of the war. Some territories were exchanged and everyone went home. The classic example was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Emperor Napoleon III took on the Prussians at Sedan, was soundly defeated and surrendered. The Prussians went home with Alsace and Lorraine, the emperor abdicated, and that was that, except for the sanguinary uprising of the Paris commune.

In 1914, the Austrians wanted to teach the Serbs a lesson. The Russians wanted to protect their fellow Slavs. The Germans assumed they would roll through France just as they had in 1870. The Russians assumed they would overwhelm the Germans by sheer weight of numbers.

They were all wrong. The Serbs kept fighting for four more years. The Germans virtually destroyed the Russian army at the battle of the Masurian Lakes, a prelude to the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917. The Germans almost made it to Paris.

Or consider our War Between the States. The hotheads in Charleston figured they'd teach the Yankees a lesson by taking Fort Sumter. President Lincoln figured he could defeat the South in three months with his 75,000 volunteers. After the first battle of Bull Run (or Manassas Junction, if you wish), the two sides locked themselves into an orgy of destruction that would last another four years. Obviously the Confederacy won. The South is running the country now, isn't it?

Human nature seems doomed to underestimate the consequences of war, to take for granted that it will be easy and short when in fact it often is not.

It is now reasonably clear that the American government had inadequate intelligence not only about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but about what would happen after the war was won. Although there were warnings about the number of troops necessary for occupation, the costs of the occupation and the reactions of the Iraqi people, these warnings were dismissed. The brilliant ''neocons'' in the Defense Department did not foresee the looting, the sabotage, the hostility to Americans. They did not anticipate the power of Shiite clerics. They did not expect that the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime would be able to mount a guerrilla war. They did not expect the Iraqis to cheer when American soldiers were killed. Apparently, they had never heard about the guerrilla war that ancestors of the Iraqis had fought against the British in the 1920s. In those days the Arabs were glad to be rid of the Turks, whom the British had driven out, but they didn't feel enough gratitude to enter quietly the British Empire. Yet men like Paul Wolfowitz thought the Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims would let the hated Americans set up a democratic--and pro-Israel--state.

This intelligence mistake cannot be blamed on the CIA or on 10 Downing Street.

So now the United States has trapped itself in a quagmire in Iraq, and the end game is not clear. When Arabs in Lebanon blew up a Marine barracks, President Ronald Reagan withdrew our forces. But Texans don't run away, so that option is not available. We might finally decide to turn the whole game over to the United Nations, but that would involve national humiliation.

So we will be trapped in the quagmire indefinitely as the president's approval rating plummets. What will the administration do? My guess is that it will turn mean--though that will only make matters worse. The soldiers from the 3rd Division who complained to ABC News are under threat of punishment. The ABC reporter is dismissed as a homosexual Canadian. These punitive actions are likely to be only the beginning. The ultimate unintended consequences could be a police state.

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