Ben Franklin, Ethan Gage, and Libya

It has been 70 years since the U.S. Congress declared war on anyone, and the United States presently finds itself in at least 3.2 wars: one in Iraq we’ve largely ceased hearing about, a grinding one in Afghanistan, an air campaign in Libya, and naval patrols against Somalian pirates.

Benjamin Franklin, the mentor of wayward Ethan Gage in my series of Napoleonic-era novels, would be skeptical.

I don’t know whether to feel prescient or some kind of conduit of bad luck. Ethan’s adventure The Barbary Pirates was published last year as the depredations of the Somali pirates were heating up. As it nears paperback publication the pirates popped into the news again with the murder of four American yacht cruisers, two of them from Seattle near my home.

In another case of life imitating art, or vice versa, the climax of the 1803 novel takes place in, you guessed it, Tripoli. The pirate state was ruled at that time by a mercurial megalomaniac named Yusef Karamanli who murdered his own brother, shot his mother, and imprisoned his in-laws to seize power. Sound familiar?

There’s been an odd echo of contemporary events throughout the Ethan Gage series. In the first, Napoleon’s Pyramids, the French general scores a relatively easy victory over a Muslim army (in Egypt, not Iraq) but then faces guerilla opposition and the difficulty of understanding and manipulating a profoundly foreign culture.

Again, sound familiar? The interplay of west and east continues in The Rosetta Key.

All of this comes from simply using history to tell a good tale. What I’ve learned is that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, and we’ve been struggling to understand and control this region since Napoleon’s day.

Certainly the justification and promises for the intervention in Libya sounds like a broken record that, to me, goes back to Vietnam. Noble cause, at least on the surface. A promise of a war limited, quick, and surgical. An unclear definition of victory. An absence of any exit strategy.

The logic of each of these wars gets ever more tortured. The one person we could kill in Libya to really change the situation – Gadhafi – is the one person we have pledged not to kill. Meanwhile we target a Libyan military which will probably be needed to hold any new regime together, no matter how democratic. I don’t get it. I never get it.

One definition of insanity is making the same mistake over and over and expecting a different result.

Old Ben Franklin saw this one coming. “All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones,” he wrote. Apparently the Libya cost is $100 million and counting already, just in cruise missiles and bombs. We sell a country arms, we use our own arms to blow up their arms, and then sell them more arms. The only losers in all this are the taxpayers who foot the military budget, you and me.

“Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later,” Franklin said.

He was also a great one for keeping cool. “Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame,” he warned.

Maybe Libya will end relatively quickly and/or prove at least somewhat useful like the bombing campaigns that ended some of the slaughter in Bosnia and Kosovo. And maybe not.

The Libyan war Ethan was involved in back in 1803 simmered on for a couple more years, was replaced with other American Barbary Coast interventions extending to 1815, and was followed by European campaigns for fifteen years after that. What finally stopped Barbary piracy was colonization by France and Italy, which in turn led to revolution and unrest, which in turn led to dictators, which in turn led to…

Well, here we are again.

It would just be nice to know where we’re trying to go.