But when you look at it in the context of history, such as the involvement of just about every world power in the various Middle Eastern conflicts, you really have to wonder why governments seem to refuse to learn from the past mistakes of others.
Because those situations are never exactly the same. Because sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Because the definitions for success and failure are different every time.
For three hundred years between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth century, many countries attempted to invade Russia from the west. All failed. Some failed quite spectacularly. If there was any sort of rule about grand strategy by that point, it was 'don't invade Russia'. The country was too big, too poorly developed, too populous. It would swallow up any invader. As tensions between Russia and Germany grew at the dawn of the twentieth century, Germany's military leaders were so terrified of the prospect of invading Russia that they structured their entire army and war plan around avoiding that at all costs until there was no other choice.
War broke out in 1914. And although Germany did not begin by invading Russia, the General Staff found itself reluctantly shipping more and more troops east into the trackless steppe: a certain recipe, they thought, for doom...but an unavoidable one.
Fast forward to March 1918. Germany's armies were triumphant everywhere in Russia. The Russian military had been virtually destroyed, by a combination of battlefield defeat and internal revolution. German legions planted their flags from the Baltic coast through to the Caucasus. It was as comprehensive a defeat as any in Russian history, and the new Soviet government had little choice but to come to terms in the humiliating peace of Brest-Litovsk.
The weight of
history, of endless failed invasions of Russia, had not been on the German military's side; had Germany's leaders "learned from history" in the sort of facile way most people seem to understand, they would not have fought Russia at all. Yet they did fight. And they won. Because things
were different that time, because anybody can get a little lucky, because the advantages that Russia supposedly possessed ended up never accruing properly. Because using a few blurry data points, where there are a thousand causes for everything that are almost impossible to isolate from one another, to define an ironclad Rule of History is stupid.
There is nothing intrinsic to the Middle East, or any other part of the world, that makes some sort of political or military action undertaken there automatically a Bad Idea. But there are many reasons why individual, specific actions taken there,
on their own merits, might be Bad Ideas. If "learning from history" is to have any worth at all, then it should rely on that sort of nuance, not on half-baked sweeping proclamations based on a jaundiced view of the past.
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