By David Stockman at Brownstone dot org.

A few months after the horrendous slaughter of World War I had been unleashed by the "guns of August 1914," soldiers along the Western Front famously broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas celebration, song, and even exchange of gifts.

For a brief moment they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of hell. As Will Griggs once described it,

A sudden cold snap had left the battlefield frozen, which was actually a relief for troops wallowing in sodden mire. Along the Front, troops extracted themselves from their trenches and dugouts, approaching each other warily, and then eagerly, across No Man's Land. Greetings and handshakes were exchanged, as were gifts scavenged from care packages sent from home. German souvenirs that ordinarily would have been obtained only through bloodshed - such as spiked pickelhaube helmets, or Gott mit uns belt buckles - were bartered for similar British trinkets. Carols were sung in German, English, and French. A few photographs were taken of British and German officers standing alongside each other, unarmed, in No Man's Land.



The truth is, there was no good reason for the Great War. The world had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances, and treaties arrayed into a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century until the end of the Cold War in 1991 and disappearance of the Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history for all the consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet.

The peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time, however. And for the same reasons.

So those reasons and culprits need to be named once again-just as historians can readily name the culprits from 111 years ago.

The latter include the German general staff's plan for a lightning mobilization and strike on the Western Front called the Schlieffen Plan; the incompetence and intrigue in the court at St. Petersburg; the lifelong obsession of Austrian chief of staff Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf with the conquest of Serbia; French President Raymond Poincare's anti-German irredentism owing to the 1871 loss of his home province, Alsace-Lorraine; and the bloodthirsty cabal around Winston Churchill, who forced England into an unnecessary war, among countless others.

Since these casus belli of 1914 were criminally trivial in light of all that metastasized thereafter, it might do well to name the institutions and false narratives that block the return of peace today. The fact is, these impediments are even more contemptible than the forces that crushed the Christmas truces one century ago.

Imperial Washington-The New Global Menace

There is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington-not Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, or the rubble of what remains of the Donbas. Imperial Washington has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991.

At that crucial inflection point, Bush the Elder should have declared "mission accomplished" and parachuted into the great Ramstein air base in Germany to begin the demobilization of America's vast war machine.

So doing, he could have slashed the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $300 billion (2015 $); demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement, and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; reduced the United States' standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world-disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s.

Unfortunately, George H. W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision, or even middling intelligence.

To the contrary, he was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who single...