Only time can reveal the true meaning of a war.
Historian-novelist Shelby Foote, who has spent much of his life making sense of the Civil War, said he ”felt like an idiot” last week as he watched reports of the Persian Gulf war.
”I watch C-Span and it`s strange, like looking through a knothole. I don`t know what`s gone on in various rooms, what George Bush`s people and Saddam Hussein`s people are telling them,” says Foote, the writer who served as guiding voice for public television`s impressive 12-hour ”The Civil War” series last year.
Making immediate sense of a cataclysmic event, such as the gulf war, may not be possible, caution historians. The need for patience was underscored last week as Chicago television viewers could play what amounted to Pick-A-War.
By coincidence there was live coverage of Iraqi Scud missiles on ABC, CBS NBC and CNN at the same time PBS was recounting the bloody Battle of Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln`s Gettysburg Address in a replay of the series based partly on Foote`s three-volume Civil War history.
One was reminded that Lincoln`s address at the cemetery dedication in Gettysburg was less than 300 words. Lincoln followed another speaker who held the podium for two hours, and the president`s address was considered a dud.
We now know that the Gettysburg Address was more than it seemed at the time, aided by the likes of Foote, people whose labors can underline our frequent conceit in assuming full comprehension. It is an arrogance heightened in an age of satellite transmissions of live war images.
There`s footage of laser-guided bombs; news conferences in Saudi Arabia;
Dan Rather interviewing Saddam Hussein; a parade of military analysts-turned- TV pundits; and Libya`s Moammar Gadhafi throwing in his two cents, in English, no less, to make life easier for his CNN audience.
It`s all there in front of us. Isn`t it?
”The sheer volume of information available is not terribly helpful in understanding what`s going on,” said Michael Sherry, a historian at Northwestern University and author of ”Rise of American Air Power,” a study of the role of bombing in World War II.
”The details that come through to us, especially now on TV, can be a distraction from understanding the longer-range meaning,” said William McNeill, a retired University of Chicago historian whose primary field was world history.
As you mull the likely length of the current gulf conflict-it can`t possibly go more than two, three or four months, at the most, right?-be reminded that early wisdom about duration has proved dead wrong for virtually every war.
McNeill ticked off example after example, beginning for no particular reason with the Crimean War and continuing through the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
Typically, McNeill said, ”absolutely everybody” thought World War I, which started Aug. 3, 1914, would be done by Christmas. It lasted four years. In 1939 Hitler assumed he`d whip through Poland and, six weeks later, the Western powers would make peace. Protagonists similarly misjudged the length of wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Public perceptions may naturally ape the warring parties` frequent misperceptions and faulty intelligence, noted Robert Ferrell, a professor emeritus of history at Indiana University.
He cited President Harry Truman being caught off-guard in 1950 by the communist invasion of South Korea, in part because he was concentrating on the Middle East where he was convinced the Soviet Union might stage an attack in search of oil.
Then there is the huge body of relevant information about a conflict hidden not just from most citizens, but from many elected representatives.
Rep. Frank McCloskey (D.-Ind.), Ferrell`s congressman and a former student, last week asked Ferrell for an asssessment of the gulf war. Ferrell told McCloskey, who has sat in on briefings by the military, that the congressman had to know more than his former teacher in Bloomington. It wasn`t so.
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were lauded by some journalists for disclosures during a one-hour news conference last Wednesday. But historians know that critical data concerning their dealings in the first week of the war won`t be available for years.
It helps explain why Foote, who published his three Civil War volumes in 1958, 1963 and 1974, maintains that one needs that much time to pass before coming to terms with the war.
Old animosities between the warring sides had to end. Private papers of participants, and even useful third-hand studies of individual military campaigns had to surface.
It wasn`t so much that early histories lacked detachment as they did perspective. Thumbnail sketches of key participants, too often gross caricatures of a good-guy/bad-guy variety, became part of simplistic legend.
An example among hundreds: Many early war historians, especially Southerners, believed that Confederate Gen. James Longstreet had blown the Battle of Gettysburg. Now it`s clear that he was ”the one guy who was right
(in understanding the conflict) on the whole battlefield,” Foote says.
”When reconstructing the origins of a war, you need to see the whole paper trail,” said Steven Miner, a member of the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University.
”In this case, did the U.S. give sufficient warning to Hussein not to invade Kuwait? What were our Arab allies telling us in private? What were we telling them? What were our intelligence assessments about his intentions?
It`s too early to declare that we essentially gave him a green light.”
Adolf Hitler`s 1939 pact with Joseph Stalin once generally was viewed as the Soviets buying time against a possible Nazi invasion. But it contained secret codicils.
The world discovered later that it directly led to the forced annexation of the Baltics by the Soviets, a ”land grab,” as Miner puts it, at the heart of much of Mikhail Gorbachev`s current travail.
Diane Clemens, an American diplomatic historian at the University of California at Berkeley, offers the Yalta Conference of 1945, among Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, as a ”classic case” of errant assumptions.
”I was a Taft Republican from Cincinnati who was taught in school that Yalta was a U.S. sellout,” she said, alluding to Robert Taft (1889-1953), the senator from Ohio and the personification of GOP conservatism.
But for a doctoral dissertation, Clemens spent two years studying a conference that lasted several days and realized that she was wrong. Roosevelt was not a traitor.
When she pored over conference documents, and the bargaining process, it was clear that the Soviets made compromise after compromise.
Her 1970 book, ”Yalta,” concluded that a formidable body of evidence, including memoirs of Soviet participants, affirmed that ”there was no foundation to the sellout claim.”
Clemens said she would love to be a fly on the wall in the White House and Pentagon. What were Cheney and Powell saying before they went to the podium at that news conference? What advice were the different branches of the armed services giving them?
After scrutinizing World War II bombing, Northwestern`s Sherry also departed from the early assessments of that conflict. The bombing of Japan was not just a means of achieving military victory; it was a means of exhibiting a form of ”racial revenge” and of punishing the Japanese, he concluded.
As for U.S. bombing of Iraq, Sherry said, ”I`d want to know about the deliberations inside the circle of power on whether and how to avoid civilian casualties; and whether such deliberations are taking place in a sustained way. I don`t know how our policy toward civilians evolved and how deeply felt it is.”
Ultimately, there are questions that can`t be resolved now-not by network anchors, masters of ceremonies for this televised war-nor by lesser mortals.
”Will this sort of multinational operation be part of an enduring, stabilizing pattern? Could that lead to the freezing of national boundaries?” McNeill wonders.
”More important, how will the war affect the relationship between the Muslim world, Arabs especially, and the rest of humanity? The relationship may become more embittered, or maybe not.”
But, ”don`t assume that history will come to a clear verdict,” Miner said. ”The arguments of historians aren`t much different than those of editorialists.”
Lest we forget, he said, they still argue about the causes of the French Revolution.
