WHAT IF?

What if I make a choice... will the outcome be different?

What if I make a decision...will the consequence be different?

What if I am not a Chinese...will my destiny be different?

What if I am not a human...will I still have intellectual capability to think?

What if there is no world war I&II... will we confront volatile war now?

What if the history changed...will we live the way we are living now?

"What If" captured my attention the other day at Borders. It's a book about The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been.

A current fad among historians is the application of “counterfactuals”—"what ifs"—to major figures and events of the past. What if Winston Churchill had died after being hit by a taxicab in New York City in 1931, as he nearly did—would Hitler have won the Second World War? What if fog had not covered Long Island (Brooklyn Heights) on August 29, 1776, permitting the escape of George Washington and the remnants of the Continental forces—would we now be debating the entry of the American Commonwealth into the European Union?

Among the highlights:

· William H. McNeill: What if the King of Assyria had conquered Jerusalem in 701 B.C.—would Jewish monotheism (and the possibility of its daughters, Christianity and Islam) have survived?

· Victor Davis Hanson: What if the Persians had used a different strategy and defeated the Greek fleet at Salamis in 480 B.C.—would Western civilization as we know it have ever developed?

· Geoffrey Parker: What if the winds had been different in the English Channel in August 1588—would Americans now be speaking Spanish?

· James M. McPherson: What if General Lee's famous Special Orders No. 191 had not been lost before the battle of Antietam—would Abraham Lincoln now be known as the man who negotiated the end of the Union?

· Stephen Ambrose: What if the weather on June 6, 1944, had been as bad as that of the previous day, causing the postponement or failure of the Normandy invasion—would the United States have been forced to use atomic bombs to defeat Germany (with the consequent devastation in Central Europe and expansionist opportunities for the Soviet Union)?

As these examples indicate, counterfactuals are particularly intriguing in matters of war. Clausewitz's famous “fog of war” encompasses not only battles themselves, but also the surrounding circumstances. The counterfactual exercise, properly understood, is not an idle parlor game (in E.H. Carr's phrase), but rather a tool to enhance the study of history, to make it come alive. Counterfactuals can reveal the essential stake of human actions, as well as their abiding consequences. Human choice matters greatly, but one must also acknowledge accident and chance. Nor should one automatically exclude other causes. Maybe there was a good reason that King Sennacherib's troops fell victim to a plague while besieging Jerusalem in the eighth century B.C.