War and History

The Great War

Perspectives on the First World War

edited by Robert Cowley

Random House, 476 pp., $15.95

The Illusion of Victory

America in World War I

by Thomas Fleming

Basic, 543 pp., $30

Europe's Last Summer

Who Started the Great War in 1914?

by David Fromkin

Knopf, 336 pp., $26.95

A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918

Tragedy and Triumph on The Western Front

by Winston Groom

Atlantic Monthly, 272 pp., $27.50

The First World War

by Michael Howard

Oxford, 147 pp., $14.95

Castles of Steel

Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea

by Robert K. Massie

Random House, 865 pp., $35

Paris 1919

Six Months that Changed the World

by Margaret MacMillan

Random House, 624 pp., $16.95

THE FIRST WORLD WAR isn't called the first modern war for nothing. It's a cliché to say World War I is the root of World War II, the Cold War, even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it's true. The fighting and the diplomacy, both prewar and postwar, of more recent conflicts are similar in many ways.

Even the current Iraq war bears some resemblance to World War I, although, yes, that stretches history a bit. But let's go ahead and stretch. The parallels begin with the decision to fight. War in 1914 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were the result of choices made by a tiny group, who were not responding to a public clamor for war. As the British historian Michael Howard notes in "The First World War," "it cannot be said that during the summer weeks of 1914, while the crisis was ripening toward its bloody solution, the peoples of Europe in general were exercising any pressure on their governments to go to war, but neither did they try to restrain them." Once the war started, Europeans on both sides embraced it enthusiastically. Likewise in the United States last March, when President Bush ordered American forces to move into Iraq, the public was overwhelmingly supportive of the war.

At the outset, military expectations were the same then as now. All sides in 1914 forecast a short, successful war in which troops might be home for Christmas. That might actually have happened, at least for the Germans, if the Schlieffen Plan hadn't been diluted, thus allowing the French to halt the German advance short of Paris. Four years of trench warfare in western Europe followed. Like Schlieffen, General Tommy Franks had a plan to conquer the enemy quickly. It had eight moving parts, in contrast with only one for Schlieffen, but it produced victory in Iraq in three weeks.

Even the motive for war was similar for Germany and the United States: to prevent a fate worse than a short war. The Germans were worried that the military buildup in Russia would soon leave Germany in a vulnerable position. Besides, financial reasons had forced the Germans to slow their attempt to catch up with Great Britain's naval superiority. Bush, of course, had the reasonable fear that Saddam Hussein would slip weapons of mass destruction to terrorists targeting America or use them himself. In Bush's defense, he had other, equally legitimate grounds for going to war. The Germans didn't.

The similarities between Bush and President Woodrow Wilson, who brought America into World War I in spring 1917, are both real and imaginary. Neither came to office with a mandate for war--or anything else. Iraq was not a major issue in the 2000 election, and Wilson's reelection campaign in 1916 trumpeted that he'd kept America out of the European war. Both won by extraordinarily narrow margins in elections whose outcome wasn't known for days. Both became crusaders for spreading democracy around the world. Today Bush's sermons on democracy are often called Wilsonian.

FOR BUSH AND WILSON, the war and, especially, the war's aftermath fostered heated domestic opposition. Neither Republican Bush nor Democrat Wilson could get along civilly with members of the other party. Wilson was often called Britain's poodle for siding with England. "Is this the United States of Great Britain?" an antiwar placard outside the White House asked. In Iraq, the roles are reversed, with British prime minister Tony Blair being attacked as Bush's poodle for joining the invasion of Iraq. Both Wilson and Bush were faulted for mishandling the postwar phase: Wilson for his performance at the 1919 peace conference and later his failure to win Senate approval of the Versailles treaty, Bush for not extinguishing violent Iraqi resistance after Saddam fell.