What Churchill and Kipling could teach Trump about handling ‘wars’

The case for military deployments in Afghanistan and Syria cannot be as attractively and succinctly stated. It is presented by some in terms of cost-benefit analysis. Syria has been, in the words of Washington Post veteran foreign affairs correspondent David Ignatius, a “low-cost, high-impact mission.”

But it can be appreciated more vividly by those with some knowledge of history. Andrew Roberts’ recent splendid biography of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, for example, recalls the time when British military forces were stationed, indefinitely or for many years, at the margins between lands where the rule of law tended to prevail — not all of them British colonies — and lands where it didn’t.

The young Churchill in the 1890s fought in cavalry charges in present-day Pakistan and Sudan. As colonial secretary in 1921-22, Churchill created Iraq and dispatched 40,000 troops there to “establish order.” They weren’t withdrawn until 1928.

There was a significant cost to this policing of much of the world: deaths, injuries and the contempt memorialized in Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy” poem: “For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’/ But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.”

This was a burden, nevertheless, that Britain was willing to bear until 1968, when Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced he was ending British military operations “east of Suez.” It is no coincidence that in the decade that followed, the Middle East saw major wars and a vast increase in oil prices.

The argument for extended or permanent military patrols at the edges of the civilized world is that dangers to the United States and its allies lurk there — dangers whose character and dimension are unknown and unknowable until the damage is done.