Chistopher Hitchens reviews Adam Hocschild’s new account of WWI, “To End All Wars.”:

Without President Wilson’s intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later. In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor.

The history of World War I should be much better known in America. President Wilson, who had run on keeping America out of Europe’s conflagration, sold the war to Americans in the highest of high ideals. There would be peace without victory, victory without spoils, and freedom would once again reign. The Germany people were not to blame, only their government. And besides, the Allies were about to win anyway, he thought. America would only have to send over some ships, drop some depth charges on U-Boats, and then Wilson would help to shape the peace. Little did he know that once he committed the Republic to war, Britain and France would inform him that they were about broke and that without some kind of help soon, the Germans would be occupying Paris. Oh and by the way, we have all sorts of secret agreements dividing up German land and colonies among the victors. Send the Sammies over soon!

In America, dissidents were jailed under new sedition acts, and the war fever got so hot that President Wilson had to publicly disapprove of the lynching of German-Americans. Robert Prager, a German-born bakery worker in Illinois had even tried to enlist in the U.S. Army. After his unsuccessful bid to join a local union, he was stripped by a mob and wrapped in the American flag and beaten. The police put him in jail partly for his protection, but they yielded to the mob who dragged him out into the countryside, allowed him to write a farewell letter to his German parents and then lynched him. The New York Times condemned the act. But the Washington post remarked that it was a “healthful and wholesome awakening” to the evils of German-sown dissent in the heartland.

Wellington House propaganda had convinced Americans that German soldiers were spearing Belgium’s babies and cutting off the hands of those poor defenseless democrats. No journalist actually discovered a Belgian whose arm had been sawn-off by a Hun, but it hardly mattered. American’s fell in love for “poor, democratic Belgium,” even if the Belgians themselves actually were sawing off arms in the Congo.

Wilson’s high idealism constantly ran against the desire to revenge Germany. Even as Herbert Hoover was reporting from Germany after the armistice that the Germans were starving to death because of the British blockade, Winston Churchill was coldly suggesting that there were 20 million too many Germans after all. Certain economic-minded members of Britain’s delegation to Versailles suggested calculating the number of calories a German needed to survive and measuring them against Germany’s ability to pay reparations. The New York Times’ editorialized during the  peace talks  that “The punishment Germany must endure for centuries will be one of the greatest deterrents to the war spirit.”

I know these are all random observations about WWI, but they are all a way of saying that I’m glad Hitchens could find at least one war to oppose.

This FoxNews story about Osama Bin Laden is enough to make me re-evaluate almost everything I had thought about terrorism. Here is OBL, safely ensconced with his journal, watching the BBC, or watching videos of himself. He writes down ideas for plots, none of which seem to have been in any stage of operation. He kept tabs with people and tried to micromanage the plots that toher AQ affiliates might convince themselves they are hatching.

“He was like a prisoner at the compound,” the official said.

How odd, no?

The 9/11 terrorist attacks were utterly spectacular successes for Bin Laden and his terrorists. And the train and bus bombings in Europe, while smaller were also successful. But are we really supposed to be afraid of this anymore?

It is actually relatively easy for any one of us to imagine a campaign of terrorist attacks that would be cheap and easy to execute, and utterly devastating to life in the U.S. All  you need are people willing to die for their trouble, and maybe a few guns. I find it unlikely that Islamic terrorists haven’t thought of these themselves. After all, terrorists have occasionally blown up cafes and pizza shops in Europe.

And yet after nearly a decade of the Great Satan’s depredations in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Pakistan and now Libya, this hasn’t happened. Isn’t that remarkable? For all the worries about winning hearts and minds over there, and the Peter King-style fantasies of radical Muslims near Detroit or whatever: nothing. It is as ginned up as the threats of German-American sabotage during the Great War.

For a while I wanted to argue with the apologists for “regional transformation” that we weren’t fighting the Soviets, who had nukes they could deliver by the bushel, we were fighting people living in caves. Well, it’s more pathetic than that: we were fighting someone living in his man-cave. You can almost respect an enemy flinty enough to live in caves. But we were fighting a cable-news fanatic. And who got especially lucky to meet Khalid Sheik Mohammed a man with enough kinetic energy to pull of a major disaster. Whereas Bin Laden had gone after soft targets in rather crude way in the 90′s, KSM was able to organize crude tactics into a kind of masterpiece of destruction and chaos.

Even though our wars haven’t produced a wave of blowback attacks, I still believe that provoking these people is a fantastic waste of our resources and the lives of our servicemen. Does anyone really think Iraq is so utterly changed that it has reduced the chance of terrorism in the United States? I didn’t think so.