On the last day of the Bush administration, a glimpse of an alternate history

I just completed a book by my favorite fiction author, alternate history writer Harry Turtledove, that has a great deal to say to our own timeline.

Those familiar with Turtledove know that he has a penchant for allowing actual history to dictate the outline of events in his own "what-might-have-been" worlds. For example, the eventual liberalization of the victorious Nazi regime he relates in his In the Presence of Mine Enemies is clearly patterned after the Gorbachev/Yeltsen era of the Soviet Union, transferred in some detail from Russia to Germany. And in his alternate World War II (which takes place in a universe in which the Confederacy won the Civil War with support from England and France- earning those two nations the eternal emnity of the United States, and ultimately pitting a democratic USA and its imperial German ally against a Fascist England, France, and Confederacy), the war on the North American front is a virtual replay of the actual events in Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. The major differences are that African-Americans in the South, rather than European Jews, are the victims of the death camps, and that the Battle of Stalingrad is fought in Pittsburgh.

This pattern is both a strength and a weakness. It's a strength because it acknowledges deeply-entrenched patterns in human nature, which come to the fore regardless of the nationality of the people involved. It's a weakness because it sometimes makes it seem that Turtledove is taking the easy way out. One hankers, when reading a tale of an alternate timeline, for strange and different outcomes. It can be a bit of a disappointment when the story turns out to be one we've heard before, only told of a different place and time, with a different cast of characters.

But in The Man with the Iron Heart, Turtledove's sense of inevitable historical patterns which are apt to assert themselves in similar circumstances no matter what the time and place is an unambiguous strength. The "breakpoint" (alternate history lingo for the point at which events diverge from the course they actually took in our own timeline) is the survival of Reinhold Heydrich, the brutal Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, who in the real world was assassinated by resistance fighters on May 27, 1942.

One of the architects of the Final Solution (he chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference, which laid the plans for the removal of all Jews by death or deportation from the German Reich), "Heydrich the Hangman" (pictured above in a photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann from the German Bundesarchiv) was one of the most brutal members of a brutal regime. Hitler considered him as his own possible successor. As efficient as he was ruthless, in Turtledove's story he realizes that the war is lost, and secures Himmler's cooperation in time to prepare a formidable guerilla resistance to the Allied forces which effectively extends World War II for years after Hitler's death and Germany's surrender (in the real world, the "Werewolf" resistance movement was poorly organized and coordinated, and barely survived the end of the war).

You may already have figured out where this is going. No, Harry S Truman isn't foolish enough to land on an aircraft carrier on VE Day and have his picture taken in front of a banner reading "Mission Accomplished." But otherwise, what we have is pretty much a replay of the events following the end of conventional fighting in the Second Gulf War.

American public opinion turns emphatically against the occupation of Germany, to the joy of both Heydrich's Nazi remnant and the Soviets. There's even a Cindy Sheehan figure in the story, the mother of a GI killed on occupation duty well after the signing of the German surrender. Reasoning that Germany is a long way away- and that, besides, we have the atom bomb to protect us- Republican isolationists led, among others, by Sen. Robert A. Taft agitate to bring the boys home. A decisive GOP victory in the 1946 congressional elections and the subsequent cutting off of funds for the occupation ultimately let the National Socialist movement live on even in defeat. The troops are prematurely withdrawn, and at story's end, it is unclear whether the Russians will end up overpowering the prematurely-abandoned West Germany, or whether a resurgent Nazi party will gain the upper hand. What seems clear is that an immature and underdeveloped German democratic culture will likely be stillborn, and that neither the Christian Democratic Union (whose founder, Konrad Adenauer, was assassinated by Heydrich's "Werewolves") or the Social Democratic Party will be able to provide a viable democratic alternative to the two ruthless totalitarian movements to whose mercy Germany- and ultimately Europe itself- has been left by the very same pattern of reasoning which opponents of the Iraq war have espoused, in our own timeline. All the sacrifice and bloodshed of World War II will, in the end, be for nothing- and a war-weary American public is simply to tired and too short-sighted to realize the consequences of its own unwillingness to stay the course.

Nobody but the most ideologically blinded opponent of the war in Iraq questions at this point that the surge worked. Moreover, President-elect Obama has moderated his tone considerably when it comes to just how precipitous he is prepared to be in withdrawing our forces. The Iraqi government itself- which, after all, is made up of people whose necks are on the line- has signed off on a deadline for American withdrawal which it considers feasible. While the American military has its doubts, it might well be that the newborn Iraqi democracy will have a fighting chance to survive after all.

But as is so often the case with his writings, Turtledove's tale of alternate history nevertheless sounds a note of dire warning. It has become a commonplace among the world's bullies that the United States lacks the national will to see a struggle against a determined foreign enemy such as the Iraqi insurgents, the Viet Cong, or Heydrich's "Werewolves" in the novel, through to completion. It's a tale that reminds us just how easy it is to decide that a struggle a long way from home isn't worth the sacrifice and the patience it takes to win it, even when a great deal more is at stake than we're willing to admit.