The behaviour of the key individuals making the decisions leading to the outbreak of war often appears as contradictory, inexplicable or bizarre as the infamous motto, “War is Peace”, in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.1 For example, in 1853, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon became convinced that Russia was using a dispute over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as a pretext for dismembering the Ottoman Empire as a move in the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia for dominance of Eurasia. However, when the Tsar’s emissary, Prince Menshikov, ultimately relented and presented the Turkish Sultanate on May 20th with a final offer that was a watered-down, face-saving proposal that would merely continue the status quo, the Turks, at the behest of the British, rejected it, precipitating the outbreak of the Crimean War several months later.
In the summer of 1914, Sir Edward Grey had the misfortune of being the British Foreign Secretary. An avid amateur ornithologist and the author of a book on the art of fly-fishing, he loathed the prospect of a European war that, with the new technologies of the early twentieth century, he knew would transform the pastoral settings that he loved so much into barren moonscapes. However, during the crucial four weeks after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th, Grey refused to give a clear warning to Germany and Austria that Britain would come to the aid of France and Russia if they were attacked. At the last moment, on August 1st, Grey made Germany the extremely strange offer that Britain and France would remain neutral if Austria and Germany attacked Serbia and Russia, despite the fact that he clearly knew or ought to have known that France and Russia were staunch allies.
Neville Chamberlain, a failed sisal farmer who rose to prominence in politics, was the British Prime Minister in 1938–1939 in the lead-up to the outbreak of World War II. Chamberlain had been stabbed in the back by Hitler, who invaded the rump state of Czechoslovakia less than six months after he signed the Munich Accord, in which he undertook not to do so. However, despite this betrayal, when the crisis concerning the Polish corridor came to a boil several months later, Chamberlain revealed, less than 48 hours prior to the German invasion of Poland on September 1st, that he was “more worried about getting the Poles to be reasonable than the Germans.”2
In July, 1956, when the Egyptian President Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden became convinced that all that would be required to convince Nasser to disgorge his takings would be strong diplomatic efforts by the United States and Britain, backed up by a credible threat of the use of force. When President Eisenhower then indicated publicly that he would be opposed to pursuing the matter through force if diplomacy failed, Eden persisted and concocted a hare-brained, secret scheme for Israel to invade Egypt and then for Britain and France to jointly step in as “peacekeepers” in order to seize the canal. Eden’s foolhardy plot failed when the Americans discovered it soon after the invasion and exerted extensive financial pressure on Britain at the International Monetary Fund to withdraw from Egypt.
In April, 1982, when Argentina invaded the British Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher, known affectionately as the “Iron Lady”, was the British Prime Minister. The determined daughter of a British shopkeeper, she had risen to the leadership of her nation through sheer grit. However, in January and February, Thatcher had sided with her Secretary of Defence, John Nott rather than her Foreign Secretary, Peter Carrington, in supporting the former’s decision to decommission the only Royal Navy ship in the South Atlantic, the HMS Endurance, thus misreading Argentinian resolve and inadvertently encouraging them to invade the Falklands.
The bizarre behaviour of the key individuals involved in these decisions cannot be attributed to the trope of British eccentricity, since the same phenomenon is evident in the decision-making process of Americans. In 1898, when the Spanish-American War occurred, the U.S. President was William McKinley, who was described as having the “backbone of a chocolate éclair”.3 Despite his public persona as a cream-puff who was extremely loath to go to war, McKinley was quick to ask Congress for a war resolution against Spain following the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbour from undetermined causes that are still debated to this day but most likely did not involve the Spanish government at all, but rather Cuban guerrilla insurgents.
In June, 1950, the North Koreans launched a massive invasion of South Korea, taking it and the U.S. completely by surprise, and starting the Korean War. Inexplicably , five months later, the U.S., apparently not chastened by this gross intelligence failure, was blindsided a second time, when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army unexpectedly intervened in the conflict and forced the U.S. 8th Army out of North Korea, causing General MacArthur’s forces to withdraw to the southernmost point on the peninsula, which represents the longest U.S. retreat in its military history.
The Vietnam War was precipitated by a false report of a North Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. President Johnson was fully aware that the alleged incident did not actually occur and, when he committed the U.S. to placing U.S. troops in Vietnam in 1965, he privately expressed some serious doubts that the U.S. would obtain an easy victory there. Strangely, he persisted nonetheless and the war ultimately involved an enormous national sacrifice of American blood and treasure. The huge cost of this quagmire, which lasted until 1973 and represented America’s first military defeat, tragically undermined Johnson’s pursuit of his main goal, which was the transformation of America into the “Great Society” through the elimination of poverty, racism and injustice.
In 1973, during a time of growing tensions between Israel and Egypt and strong advance intelligence indicating the probability of an Egyptian attack, Israeli Major General Eli Zeira bizarrely refused to activate listening devices in the Sinai that would have given Israel irrefutable evidence of the coming massive attack by Egyptian forces that began the Yom Kippur War. According to the orthodox theory, the U.S. also strangely ignored the preliminary intelligence, as it did in advance of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
In August, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed the Emirate of Kuwait, apparently blind-siding both the White House and the U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait, April Glaspie, who sent a notorious cable (now declassified) a few days before the invasion, opining that the “Iraqis are sick of war” and that Saddam would not invade the Emirate. What is extremely puzzling is the official story that the U.S. completely failed to predict the invasion, despite initiating an elaborate computer simulation of it several days before it actually occurred (which ultimately overlapped with the actual events in real time) and obtaining satellite imagery showing that Saddam had massed 100,000 troops on the border.
In the post-millennial period, the massive U.S. invasion of Iraq in March, 2003 was precipitated by the belief that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), which turned out to be incorrect. President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as a well as a majority of members of Congress, all inexplicably subscribed to this erroneous assumption, despite the fact that the CIA’s National Intelligence Report on the matter contained numerous caveats and strong expressions of doubt about the quality of the intelligence that had been gathered.
In this book, I will venture some explanations for these occurrences, deriving the necessary empirical data from the psycholinguistic text mining and semantic analysis of debates, speeches, statements, memos and cables (unclassified or declassified) of leaders, politicians and diplomats, as well as detailed case studies of the origins of twelv...