What If …?

Over a dozen years ago Robert Cowley compiled an intriguing book of essays under the title What If? The essay authors – all outstanding historians of the day – were invited to compose a credible outcome, a “what if” alternative, for a pivotal moment in history if circumstances had taken a different, often minor, turn of events.

For example, in 1889 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show toured Europe featuring Annie Oakley’s famous shooting skills with her Colt .45. Her act concluded with an invitation for a gentleman in the audience to step into the arena and allow her to shoot off the ash from his cigar at a distance far enough away to make it interesting. It was all show because there were never any real takers. Her husband, Frank Butler, was planted in the audience as a stooge. He would bravely step forward with a Havana clenched in his teeth, allowing Annie to bring the crowd to its feet with her keen shot.

When the show made a stop in Berlin for a performance at the Charlottenburg Race Track, Annie offered her customary dare. In the audience was the young and showy Kaiser Wilhelm II who immediately took her offer, much to her shock and the horror of the Kaiser’s security detail. Stepping on to the arena, the local police tried to intervene but Wilhelm waved them off.

Annie couldn’t back out without losing credibility, so she paced off her usual distance and took aim. Sweating under the pressure of shooting at a crowned head of Europe and wishing she hadn’t consumed so much whiskey the night before, she nevertheless shot away the Kaiser’s cigar ash to the crowd’s wild jubilation.

Cowley asks what if she had missed? There would have been no bellicose Kaiser Wilhelm II alive 25 years later to start war in Europe. When World War I did in fact break out, Annie wrote the bombastic Kaiser and asked for a second shot. He never responded.

History offers many “what ifs.”

In the aftermath of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles was more punishment than peace treaty. It forced Germany to admit its ‘guilt” for the war as well as pay reparations for it. The Treaty’s major accomplishment was to invent Hitler.

Hitler rose to power in 1933 and obsessed over undoing the Treaty. He pursued this in a succession of trial provocations each intended to test the resolve of the former allies – primarily Britain and France. In 1934 he ordered the German home guard to arm for war and, the following year, reintroduced conscription – both flagrant violations of the Treaty. With no response forthcoming from the major world powers, Hitler was emboldened. In 1935 he began building tanks, planes, and submarines – further violations of Versailles. Still no intervention by England or France.

In 1936, Hitler ordered troops across the Rhine and created an armed threat in the demilitarized zone of the German Rhineland, the territory between the French border and the Rhine River, an unmistakable violation of the Versailles treaty. There his raw army recruits and 36,000 policemen faced nearly 100 French and Belgian divisions. France and Belgium were within their right to cross the Maginot Line and confront the Germans. But the French and English heads of state said nothing and did nothing. 

One of the Rhineland occupiers, General Heinz Guderian, said after the World War II that if the French had responded to their provocation in 1936, “…we should have been sunk and Hitler would have fallen." Another German officer confessed that the German General Staff considered Hitler’s move tantamount to a suicide mission.

I can tell you that for five days and five nights not one of us closed an eye. We knew that if the French marched, we were done. We had no fortifications, and no army to match the French. If the French had even mobilized, we should have been compelled to retire.

Hitler himself said:

The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.

The head of the French army, General Maurice Gamelin, believed that a confrontation of the German Rhineland occupiers would be unpopular at home, costly, and would lead to war requiring full mobilization of French armed forces. He counseled against action.

In England, not only were there no anti-German Rhineland protests, there were peace demonstrations. One Member of Parliament observed "the feeling in the House [of Commons] is terribly pro-German, which means afraid of war." The Prime Minister during the 1936 crises, Stanley Baldwin, had tears in his eyes when he admitted that British public opinion would not support military intervention in the Rhineland.

Winston Churchill, a backbench Conservative MP in 1936, was the British Jeremiah – one of the few voices raised against German rearmament and its threat to future peace. He wanted his country to reinforce a French challenge of the Rhineland occupation under the coordination of the League of Nations. The League of Nations, however, was as useless then as the United Nations is now and nothing happened. Churchill predicted the Rhineland would become a hinge allowing Germany to swing its forces through Belgium to attack France. And that’s precisely what happened in 1940.

A “what if” opportunity thus passed unexploited in 1936 that could have prevented World War II.

An Austrian German by birth, Hitler provoked the 1938 Anschluss crisis two years after the Rhineland showdown. It was part of his plan to unite all German speakers in one state. "People of the same blood should be in the same Reich" he had written in his autobiography Mein Kampf.  Hitler’s annexation of Austria was accomplished by threatening invasion so convincingly that the Austrian government resigned and Hitler’s armies were invited in.

German-Austrian union was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. Notwithstanding, England and France did not protest, did not mobilize, and did not defend the Treaty.

When an aggressor senses his opponent’s lack of resolve to confront him, he will act without restraint. And that’s precisely what Hitler did. He was now convinced that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin’s successor, and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier were both appeasers – paralyzed by their nightmarish memories of World War I – and therefore loath to confront his militaristic aggressions.

His next move would exploit their fecklessness.

In 1938 Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland – that portion of Czechoslovakia on its north, west, and southwest border which was populated by German speakers. If his demand was not accommodated, he would invade Czechoslovakia.

It was all bluff. At that time Czechoslovakia had one of the strongest armies in Europe. It was well trained and well equipped, thanks to the country’s armaments works – primarily those of Skoda, the Czech equivalent of Ford or GM. Moreover, its military industries were protected by military fortifications on the German and Austrian borders – all in the Sudetenland – which explains why Hitler wanted it.

Czechoslovakia probably could have won a fight with Germany given the poor quality of the German fighting force at the time. In fact, senior German generals were horrified with Hitler’s plans to invade, convinced it would ignite a world war which Germany would lose. So convinced were the German generals of a bad outcome, that one of the earliest conspiracies was plotted to overthrow and arrest Hitler. Representatives were sent to meet with Chamberlain, telling him that the moment Hitler gave the invasion order he would be arrested and imploring Chamberlain to intervene militarily in support of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia had mutual defense treaties with France and Russia, and England was a defense partner of France. Poland too would likely have joined if France and England were in the fight.

But it was not to be. A meeting was held in Munich involving France, England, Germany, and Italy. Czechoslovakia was not invited. Chamberlain followed his appeasement instincts and the Munich Agreement was signed transferring the Sudetenland to Germany. Betrayed by its treaty allies, Czechoslovakia conceded. Hitler agreed not to invade Czechoslovakia – an agreement that lasted six months when Germany troops swallowed up the remainder of the country, now defenseless without its Sudeten armaments and fortresses.

The cowardly Chamberlain flew back to England and landed among the adulation of adoring pacifists. Deplaning, he waved the infamous Munich Agreement, assuring the crowd at the airport that he had won for them “peace in our time.” That phrase has gone down in history as a verbal monument to the gullibility of naïve world leaders who appease international bullies expecting conciliation to preserve peace. Think Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Chamberlain’s surrender to Hitler was criticized by some far-sighted British politicians, among them Winston Churchill who unleashed his rhetorical fury on the worthless document:

We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude...we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road... we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.

Another “what if” moment was lost.

With the fall of Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s territorial ambitions now became apparent even to the western fools of Munich. The English and French publicly assured Poland that they could be relied on to protect it against German aggression. But the time for red lines had passed. Germany could no longer be denied its long sought destiny. Equipped with the armaments stolen in the Munich treaty, Germany was rolling like a juggernaut toward the Polish frontier, which bordered the northern Sudetenland acquisition. Germany was now the best armed military force in Europe, ironically clad in Panzer tanks that had been built for the Czechs by the Skoda works. England and France, Poland’s outfoxed treaty allies, could do no more than watch the eight-month massacre of an ally in 1939.

Sixty million people would die before the German beast was slain in 1945.

History may not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain said, it does rhyme. What can we learn today from this disgraceful episode of serial incompetence? One could certainly argue it teaches that preemptive military action, however unpopular at the time, is usually a winning antidote for an unbridled aggressor. Hitler had made his ambitions abundantly clear in Mein Kampf, assuming any of the western leaders had bothered to read it. And the provocations he initiated in 1936, twice in 1938, and in 1939 were straight out of his play book.

After World War II ended Churchill, whose resolve had saved the British, was ousted from office. So much for the thanks of a grateful nation.

However, a relatively unknown school, Westminster College in the small Missouri town of Fulton (population 7,000), wished to bestow an honorary degree on the statesman that got England into the war and kept it there to the end. And because Churchill was indisputably the best rhetorician of the 20th century, he was invited to be the keynote speaker. The audience numbered over 40,000 and his speech, which is often referred to as the “Iron Curtain” speech, alerted the world to a coming “cold war.”

Churchill’s speech presaged many of his thoughts that would later appear in his seminal recollection of the Second World War, most especially its first volume entitled The Gathering Storm. Here is an excerpt from the Iron Curtain speech that verbalizes the many lost “what ifs”:

Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honoured to-day; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again.

We surely must not let that happen again indeed.

Today we are once again confronted by the villainous face of evil. This time it’s Iran. Iranian leaders are as fanatical as Hitler but are many times more dangerous given nuclear weapons. Iran’s mullahs are believers in the 12th imam and hold the apocalyptic theology that bringing the world to an end will usher in the “second coming” of this imam. He will establish the Shia religion as the world religion and begin an unending era of peace. In short, a worldwide nuclear holocaust favors Iran’s theology.

Moreover, the west is once again afflicted with gullible leaders who believe appeasement is the answer to aggression. The recent “agreement” championed by Kerry and Obama does nothing to stop Iranian bomb-making. Worse, it deludes the America people into thinking that something short of military intervention will stop a nation intent on eliminating Israel, whose existence it won’t officially recognize. Israel will be our Poland.

Once again, our leaders believe that peace can be won without victory over disturbers of peace. We are standing aside while a replay of 1936, 1938, and 1939 passes before our eyes … while, as Mark Twain observed, history rhymes.

Once again the Left believes – and tries to convince the rest of us – that our choice is between war and peace when in fact it is, and always will be, a choice between fighting and surrender.

Benghazigate Breadcrumbs

In the movie Conspiracy Theory, actor Mel Gibson plays Jerry Fletcher, a quirky cab driver who believes that inexplicable world events are evidence of government conspiracies. He publishes his conspiracy theories in a newsletter which no one takes seriously, including the theater audience, until it turns out that one theory is correct. Because he has blown their cover, government agents track him down and try to kill him.

Most things are as they appear to be or as we’re told they are. Except conspiracies. They are secreted for a reason. And they remain undercover until someone suspends disbelief in the obvious explanation and considers other interpretations of the evidence that lead to a different conclusion.

I suspect that’s true of the emerging Benghazigate cover-up.

In early January, then former Secretary of State Clinton was called to testify before a Senate hearing looking into the government’s handling of the Benghazi attack before, during, and after it occurred. Her appearance before the Senate panel was destined to turn out badly because (a) Clinton doesn’t feel she is accountable to anyone, and (b) former Senator Clinton’s demeanor during the questioning suggested she was a bit torqued that she had to answer to those who were once her peers.

Her eruption occurred as Senator Ron Johnson questioned Clinton on what she knew and when she knew it. In view of the overwhelming evidence that the Benghazi attack was planned and perpetrated by al-Qaeda, Johnson was more than a tad interested in the cockamamie story floated by UN Ambassador Rice, Obama, and Clinton that the attack was a response to an online video lampooning the prophet Muhammad. A transcript and video of her barely contained fury with Johnson puts the lie to her apologists who claim the now famous “what difference does it make?” fulmination is quoted out of context. See for yourself. Here’s the text.

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.

Hmm. As Hamlet’s mom observed, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Nine months have passed since the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his security detail. We’ve heard the Obama administration’s explanations du jour. They are, like most things Obama, a work in progress. Predictably, no one is to blame for Benghazi. Like the IRS and Associated Press revelations, the people who are in charge strangely never seem in charge when incompetence or scandals are uncovered. Last month we heard the testimony of two whistleblowers who blew the administration’s cover story and were demoted when they unsuccessfully tried to have the Benghazi story told truthfully.

The Democrat Party leaders point out – at least once a day – that the failure of the Republicans to uncover a conspiracy is proof that there’s not one. Well, that’s the way it is with conspiracies, Sherlock; the breadcrumbs are usually hard to follow. But there are enough of them here to suggest that the entire story, if not the true story, is yet to be known.

Keep in mind that, as the administration’s story morphed from video to terrorist act, the attack on the Benghazi occurred on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. Hardly a coincidence in that date. Also keep in mind that this tragic debacle occurred within two months of the presidential election. Lots of self-serving interests in keeping that unfavorable story off the front pages. And why Benghazi? The Libyan embassy is in Tripoli 400 miles west. Benghazi is a consulate – a ramshackle building with a nearby annex. There are larger, more prestigious embassies throughout the Middle East and surrounding countries. Why not attack one of those?

Last year I blogged about the Benghazi attack and the deaths which Obama called “bumps in the road.” You can read that blog post to get the details. Today I will try to follow the breadcrumbs

The alleged reason for intervening in the Libyan uprising was to prevent a humanitarian crisis – i.e. a large scale loss of civilian lives caught in the crossfire of the uprising. If the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Yemeni uprisings taught anything, however, they taught that there are very few civilians around in an anti-government revolution. Everyone takes sides and there may be more than two sides, although it usually boils down to a ruthless government against everyone else. Everyone else is usually a loose federation of parties whose only common denominator is to get rid of the guy in power.

Such is the modern Middle East which is comprised of ancient tribes and sub-tribes many of whom hate each other. And let’s not forget that the guy in power is no outsider. He was a tribal leader in the bad old days and retains tribal identity once in power. The Arab spring, which Obama laughably calls an outbreak of democracy, is an outbreak of regional civil wars with bad guys on all sides. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to intervene in someone else’s civil war, especially when it’s hard to know who to cheer for. But it is seriously stupid to help destabilize or destroy a stable government without any thought – and certainly no control – concerning the power vacuum that follows … which so far hasn’t produced an outbreak of democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, whose ruler is still in place.

A world yearning to be free is a fanciful if not incorrect belief among western democracies. Democracy and representative government is hard work. Regional stability seems to me to be a more preferable goal even if achieved by means the west finds distasteful. Qaddafi is now gone, with the help of the west, and Libya has been made safe for outside interference, civil unrest, internal power struggles, violence, and the ever-present conflict between secular Sunnis and Shiite zealots. Absent the iron-fisted leaders that kept them in check, the Muslim Brotherhood is free to move about the Middle East – at least most of it.

So, what if humanitarian motives weren’t the real reason for involving ourselves in Libya? Of the more than 30 people rescued from the Benghazi compound only seven were with the State Department. The rest were with the CIA. The CIA, in fact, was the initial presence in Benghazi arriving in February 2011 just after the uprising began. It set up shop in the consulate annex, which it called an office of the State Department consulate. As a practical matter, the State Department presence in Benghazi was simply to provide cover for the CIA. Even Libyan authorities didn’t know the CIA was there.

As the Libyan authority began to collapse so did its weapons arsenal, including a substantial number of shoulder-fired heat-seeking surface to air rocket launchers. It’s estimated that Qaddafi had over 20,000 of them. Since the UN-sanctioned humanitarian effort created an alliance of US, British, and French air forces, the small Libyan air force was suppressed. Thus these weapons, now in the hands of the rebels fighting to topple Qaddafi, were of little value. What the rebels needed was cash and the CIA obligingly supplied it – in return for the weapons. It makes sense that the CIA would have established relations early on with rebel leaders whose palms could be greased to get these weapons.

For what purpose? To get them in the hands of the Syrian rebels who were getting mauled in their effort to topple the Iranian and Russian backed Assad regime. The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship carrying a 400-ton arms cargo docked in a Turkish port. Its cargo would be trucked over the border and into the hands of the Syrian rebels. Shortly after, the Syrian rebels began shooting down Assad’s murderous helicopters and jets – a capability they hadn’t had before.

The CIA, of course, denies its involvement in the Syrian uprising, which would be expected of a government agency whose business is spying. But questions are beginning to be asked by those in Congress who are following the breadcrumbs. Was the CIA the core of the US operations in Benghazi with the State Department as its cover, and was it involved in gun-running? The breadcrumbs indicate yes on both counts.

Conspicuously absent when the four caskets arrived at Andrews Air Force Base was David Petraeus, then the head of the CIA, even though two caskets contained the remains of his men. He says he stayed away to avoid revealing a CIA connection in the Benghazi tragedy. CIA careerists despised him for it.

The cover on the CIA’s role in supplying Syrian rebels was blown a year ago and the CIA most surely concocted the fantasy of the lampooning video, which Clinton, Rice, and Obama so willingly peddled as co-conspirators in the cover-up.

Those asking the breadcrumb questions are mostly Republicans. Those deflecting the questions as a non-issue are mostly Democrats intent on protecting Clinton, who will undoubtedly run for President in 2016.

But there is no way that Clinton’s ambassador, Chris Stevens, did not know about the weapons transfer. He was the face of the US government to the anti-Qaddafi rebels and he therefore had to know that al-Qaeda was fighting with the rebels – contrary to Obama’s recent assertion that al-Qaeda wasn’t involved in Benghazi. Stevens’ principal contact with the Libyan rebels was known to have met with Syrian rebel leaders after Qaddafi was killed. The Syrians crossed into Turkey for the meeting whose purpose was to negotiate how Libya could supply money, arms, and fighters to aid Syrian rebels. Stevens' last meeting on the day he was killed was with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, most likely in connection with weapon shipments through Turkey. How could Clinton not have known what Stevens, her subordinate, knew?

Democrats on investigative committees and the media are trying mightily to divert attention away from Obama – what he knew and when he knew it. He may have broken the law unless he can establish plausible deniability that he knew anything about the weapons shipments to the Syrian rebels. The exposure of the weapons transfer, therefore, raises serious problems for him. The transfer of weapons to al-Qaeda, who are known to be among the fighters in the Syrian uprising, is prevented under a UN arms embargo, which is binding on all member countries.

Moreover, Vladimir Putin has accused the US – Obama – of supplying weapons to “terrorists” who are trying to overthrow the president of a sovereign country. Obama has, of course, denied the charge, claiming US aid in Syria was limited to humanitarian help. What do you call something someone says knowing it’s not true?

The great imponderable here is why the Benghazi attack occurred. The existence of the CIA was unknown in Libya. Posing as State Department staff, the CIA pumped $40 million into Libyan rebel pockets to buy arms from the Qaddafi arsenal for Syria. Thus, the attack could not have been aimed at the CIA.
 

Was Stevens the target? Chris Stevens was very popular among Libyans, many of whom wanted their picture taken with him when he traveled in public. He refused a visible security detail when he was in public places making him more accessible. Those who say he wasn’t the target of the attack, that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, ignore the larger question of the attack itself – why it happened at all.

This week, Obama announced that the US would begin supplying arms to the Syrian rebels because Assad had used chemical weapons against them. That’s a ruse allowing the US to do overtly what it has been doing covertly. For those who think outside the dots, a dot worth considering is this one. The Benghazi attack was a hit job – a Middle East tit-for-tat.

The Russians, Iranians, and Syrian government privately knew arms were flowing to the rebels from Libya. They knew the American CIA was involved, at least in Turkey. And they may have known that Stevens was involved in the illegal gun-running. It would not have taken a lot of effort to organize a hit squad in Syria and send them to Libya to do the deed. As fluid as Middle East borders are, a Syrian al-Qaeda group would have blended in with local Libyan militia and perhaps even been welcomed, whether the Syrian’s mission was known or not. The state sponsors of the hit squad would surely have known the gravity of their act. Wars have started over less. Maybe one has already started.

Those are some breadcrumbs worth following.