Nicias, Chalabi, and the Prefascists

Yesterday, after posting the bit about Ahmad Chalabi, I was hit hard when I reached Chapter 18 of Thucydides' "The Peloponnesian War."

I have been getting a lot more out of reading that book now than I did in my college days, but in the late 1950's the U.S. was enjoying a break between major wars, and the history of all those conflicts in and around Greece 2,500 years ago didn't strike any sparks. Today Thucydides' book is amazingly contemporary, and it is as if things going on in Iraq and elsewhere are mainly strong reverberations of those events in nearly the same neighborhood of so long ago -- due, I guess, to the glacial change of human nature. Plus I can see half a dozen good TV miniseries in that book.

In 416 B.C., during a war that the Athenians had already been waging against the Lacedaemons or Spartans for 17 years, the Athenians contemplated starting a second war, by staging an invasion of far-off Sicily. A few years earlier they had already engaged in a fracas there and had prudently withdrawn without doing much damage to themselves or others -- to the disgust of the more pugnacious of the Athenians, the neocons of their time, or the prefacists as I less charitably call them, much as the elder George Bush and Colin Powell were castigated for stopping short at the Iraq border in 1991.

Exiles from a city-state in Sicily called Egesta begged the Athenians to come back to Sicily, this time on Egesta's behalf in a dispute with another city, and among other enticements, they said that they had plenty of money to finance an Athenian invasion of not only the offending state but also of all Sicily.

The Athenians had a lot of ambitious men who were all for embarking on what they saw as an easy way to expand their empire. Unluckily for them, they had too few a number of cooler heads who argued against going far across the waters to attack people who hadn't attacked them, and when they were still facing right next door a powerful enemy that nearly every year, like clockwork, invaded their territory in a war that was still far from resolved.

The chief of those cooler heads was a general named Nicias. He said:

Our struggle, therefore, if we are wise, will not be for the barbarous Egesteans in Sicily, but how to defend ourselves most effectually against the oligarchical machinations of Lacedaemon.

We should also remember that we are but now enjoying some respite from a great pestilence [the plague] and from war, to the no small benefit of our estates and persons, and that it is right to employ these at home on our own behalf, instead of using them on behalf of these exiles whose interest it is to lie as fairly as they can, who do nothing but talk themselves and leave the danger to others, who if they succeed will show no proper gratitude, and if they fail will drag down their friends with them.

That's the passage that so struck me, because it is so dead-on descriptive of my perception of Ahmad Chalabi.

Furthermore Nicias said:

I will, therefore, content myself with showing that your ardour is out of season, and you ambition not easy of accomplishment. I affirm, then, that you leave many enemies behind you here to go yonder and bring back more with you.

And that is exactly what happened. Despite this excellent advice, the Athenians did strain their treasury and outfit a huge fleet, which did sail far off to Sicily bringing a big army, only to find that the Egestean exiles had indeed lied, and they had little in the way of cash to contribute to the effort. And three years later the Athenian army was annihilated in Sicily with a thoroughness and a brutality that has rarely been matched. And the crowning irony was that, after weighing so heavily and sensibly against going into this disaster, Nicias was elected to be one of the Athenian generals in Sicily, and he was captured and slaughtered. (In those days generals were killed and captured with awesome frequency, unlike today's generals who can conduct wars while being not even in the same country with their troops or even on the same continent.)

And, as Nicias had prophecized, the victors, the Syracusans, having wiped out the Athenians in Sicily with the help of the Lacedaemons, reciprocated by coming to Greece and playing a big part in the eventual defeat of the Athenians at home, after which Athens lost its democratic form of government and went through several oligarchic reigns of terror.

I hardly need to point out the aptness for today of what Nicias said about "bringing back more enemies with you," of which the terrorists are just one.