Earlier today, a friend of mine made a very thoughtful and insightful post about Anzac Day, with a lot of intriguing comments about all sides of the dispute and its historical ramifications, even playing with the counterfactual historical questions attached to the Galipoli campaign [1].  I highly recommend the read, if Anzac Day is a subject of interest.

On this day in 1915, troops from England, Australia, and New Zealand, in a mission masterminded (if such a word can be used) by Winston Churchill, designed to help ease pressure on Russia by opening a front on the “soft underbelly” of the Ottomon Empire.  Unfortunately, the British spectacularly failed in terms of terrain intelligence.  British and Commonwealth troops failed to take key (and lightly defended) objectives early on that became impossible to take later on when the Turkish garrisons were reinforced by a rare Turkish skillful general, Mustafa Kemal, who ended up ending the Ottoman Empire and establishing the Turkish Republic.

In one of the horrible coincidences of history, it turns out that Kemal was particularly skilled in this battle because he had fought on the ground before.  As it happens, Kemal was one of the leaders of the Ottoman armies that had fought on the ground of Galipoli against the Bulgarians, holding the coasts while the Bulgarians attacked from the landside, and the Bulgarians were victorious.  The experience gave Kemal an insight on how that particular ground was particularly powerful on the land-side and weak on the coast side.  Terrain is a vitally important element in military operations, and Kemal was an intelligent enough military leader to avoid making the same mistakes twice.  The British and Commonwealth troops, in seeing and fighting on the ground for the first time, were fighting an unfair battle because their opponent had detailed knowledge of how to exploit the terrain from personal (and recent) experience only two or three years before.

The outcomes of this battle were massive and long-term.  The Armenian, Kurdish, Jewish, Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese problems all stem in part from the way that the Ottoman Empire collapsed in ethnic hatreds and French and English perfidity, promising the Hashemites control of the Middle East while adding to their colonial domains and proving unable to stop the spread of radical Isalm via the House of Saud into the Hejaz (and thereby the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina) while promising (and being unable to deliver) on a free Kurdish state, and simultaneously promising control of the Holy Land to both Arabs and Jews.  These problems still continue to haunt our world.

However, among the few positive results of this debacle, aside from the fact that Turkey was able, however shakily, to become a reasonably stable republic in the crucible of warfare, was the fact that it marked the entrance into the company of nations for Australia and New Zealand.  Once a nation has suffered the baptism of fire and made the firm commitment on its own to overcome folly, disaster, and errors of others, without coercion from a metropolitan power, then one is no longer a colony but is a nation.  That moment happened for the United States (unknowingly to Great Britain, and with momentous consequences, during the French & Indian War).  That moment happened for Australia and New Zealand in World War I in a way that allowed them to become nations without a war against Great Britain, but rather a cutting of the apron springs and an acceptance of their entrance as nations.

Therefore, however foolish and lamentable the consequences of the failure at Galipoli, the entrance of Australia and New Zealand as nations was at least some small positive gains on the ledger to counterbalance the great evils of that failure.  It certainly could have gone differently, but folly and error are far more common than wisdom when it comes to military campaigns.  If people were less intoxicated with their own wisdom and the supposed righteousness of their causes and were more aware of the fog of war, the massive absence of strategic thinking among most civilian and military leaders, and the way in which blind optimism triumphs over sound thinking, and the way in which well-laid plans inevitably run up against blunders, accidents, errors, hesitations, and the often unexpected strengths of one’s enemies, then fights and wars would be much less common.  But sadly, we are not a wise species, merely a delusional one.

[1] http://www.facebook.com/notes/alexander-zajac/anzac-day/10150171253309660