The Guns of November

By Neil Earle

As a pastor, one of my delightful extracurricular tasks is to teach World History as an Adjunct at Citrus College in Glendora.

Presently we are covering the origins and effects of World War (1914-1918) and how timely since November 11 will be our regular holiday. As we know, it is called Remembrance Day in honor of the end of that most bloody war. Last week we showed a scene from the Australian movie "Gallipoli" recreating the events where a generation of fine, dashing young Aussies were cut down charging Turkish machine gun nests. You could hear a pin drop in class after the scene ended. I mentioned that World War I was supposed to be "the war to end war" but less than 21 years after 1918 the nations were back at it again.

In America we are still stunned and shocked by the grim statistics of 9/11 as we should be, but those two world wars of the last century were something else indeed. According to Paul Kennedy, the total casualties for World War I counting uprisings, pogroms such as the Armenian massacre, and the worldwide influence epidemic in 1919, may well have added up to 60 million. In just one battle, at Verdun, on the Western Front the Germans and French inflicted over a million casualties on each other. It makes the angels weep.

In my class, I passed out a copy of Barbara Tuchman's classic 1960s work, "The Guns of August." This grand American lady historian explained how a series of lock-step alliances led the Great Powers – England, Germany, Russia, Austria – into the snake pit of war. "Western civilization would never be the same" our textbook summarized, and that is right.

All this helped my class of fine young people get some perspective on the events of 9/11 – as tragic as they were. And thus the title – the Guns of November, the rumors of wars swirling around concerning Iraq and the drums we have heard beating along the Potomac all summer.

I don't know, it's just my educated opinion but are we really sure about all this?

Bernard Lewis, Yale's Arab expert, claims that 9/11 was payback for the Gulf War, the fact that Islamic fanatics such as Osama bin Laden and his gang of cutthroats considered Western troops in Saudia Arabia in 1991 as defilers of the sacred soil of Arabia, home of the prophet. If this is so, what repercussions might be felt from yet another invasion of Iraq? And we are really so sure that it will be such a cakewalk as we seem to be saying? And as a history teacher I have to ask: What happened to the New World order we were supposed to see after 1991?

I had no sooner been looking for a good book to aid me in teaching the history of modern Iraq and was despairing at finding one when two turned up at the Citrus Library. One by the British journalist, Geoff Simons, whose works have been translated into 12 languages, offers some out-of-the-box thinking on the Gulf War. In "Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam," even Simons maverick, left-of-center views are supported by well-documented facts that were hard to get in the popular media:

— First, when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 to launch a ten-year war that would see almost a million casualties, no Western power sought to activate the Security Council of the United Nations in response. Indeed, the Western powers, including the United States developed a manifest tilt towards Iraq.

— Most of the casualties in the Gulf War were Iraqis, 153,000 to 200,000 by some counts and most were civilians.

— Simons: "Tens of thousands of hapless Iraqi conscripts, many of them from groups known to be persecuted by Saddam Hussein, were forced to suffer napalm, cluster bombs that shred human flesh, the air-fuel explosives (virtual mini atom bombs) that incinerate some and asphyxiate others – all the paraphernalia that killed perhaps three million people in Korea, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam."

— Simons cites the "Guardian" suggesting that the deliberate massacre of thousands of fleeing soldiers in 1991 might qualify as a war crime; quotes a British MP who refuses to consider fuel-air explosives as conventional weapons; references former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (no pacifist!) raising the question in The New York Times as to whether the casualties inflicted on fleeing Iraqi soldiers raises "the moral question of the proportionality of the response."

— The Washington Post mentions that 70% of the total of "precision-guided" bombs did not hit on target – this in stark contrast to the first claims made by hyped-up pilots.

— Both the British and American governments have been reluctant to publish final casualty figures. Indeed, Beth Osborne Daponte of the U.S. Census Bureau, was threatened with removal for publishing her estimates of 158,000 Iraqi fatalities, half of them women and children.

— Then there was my own interview in Vancouver, BC in 1993 with two tense-lipped Red Cross nurses who tried to offer help to the Kurds in the aftermath of the Gulf War. They were not elated by this "splendid little war," not at all.

The Guns of November. The perfectly understandable and even long overdue War on Terror threatens to veer off onto the sands of Iraq? Do the real politickers in Washington feel Iraq was so decimated by 1991 that a war there will be an object lesson designed to impress the other Arab states with the New World Order, one where the New World will be giving the orders. Time will tell. Without better information we cannot say for sure. But I am truly startled by the lack of real depth in thus summer's debate, or any inkling of how this might affect the Iraqi people and what they could be expected to suffer next time around.

I do pray, along with other pastors I know, that we here in the West really know what we are doing. War has consequences. By all means get the terrorists yet we sit here awaiting the outcome of the Congressional elections with an uneasy sense, perhaps, that the case has not yet been satisfactorily made that a war with Iraq will make us safer in North America. There are plenty of responsible voices saying just the opposite.

And so "The Guns of August" image yields to the memory of today's Guns of November, and yet another War to end War. Christians know this: The Church of Jesus Christ functions best when she is not captured by any specific ideology, she is at her best when she is strong where men want her to be weak and weak where men want her to be strong. There has always been something fishy about the media-blanked-out Gulf War and its triumphalist aftermath. What were the real lessons? Where is the New World order we were promised? It is the calling of historians to probe through the entrails of the past and see what they indicate for the future. It's when we ask "Whatever happened to the New World Order?" that we realize we have to walk very circumspectly in a world where we are drowning in data yet not appreciably growing in wisdom.

He loves his country best who wants it better.