Don't Pollute the Enemy's Water

Of all the wars that America has fought from its fight for independence until the Second World War, the most disastrous war and the most casualty-laden and the most unforgotten was the Civil War between the North and South which ended on 9 April 1865.

Of all the wars that America has fought from its fight for independence until the Second World War, the most disastrous war and the most casualty-laden and the most unforgotten was the Civil War between the North and South which ended on 9 April 1865.

Three years later the commander-in-chief of the newly-constituted Grand Army of the Republic, one General John Logan, decreed what he hoped would become an annual, national custom.

He called on soldiers old and new to decorate soldiers' graves with flowers every 30 May.

Well only 20 years after General Logan's appeal the flowering custom caught on in most states and the name of the festival - Decoration Day - was changed to Memorial Day.

After the turn of the 19th century there were of course other wars and other dates to commemorate, most notably 11 November, which marked the end of the enormous slaughter of the First World War.

But it was not till 1971 that the Congress passed a federal law making Memorial Day a holiday in all the states on the last Monday in May and declaring the day one of commemoration for all the dead in all the services in all the wars.

The effect of this blanket commemoration on the mood, the public style of the holiday, has been not to deepen the sense of a memorial but to weaken it and turn Memorial Day into more of a sort of a family holiday than a funeral service.

But not this year. In more than a hundred towns across the country at least one 20 year old had been lost and only during the past month.

The president laid a wreath at Arlington, the national military cemetery, on the grave of the unknown soldiers.

We did not see on television happy July 4th Thanksgiving-type crowds on the beaches of Florida, we did not see and hear senators making proud, soaring patriotic speeches in most public places.

It seems there was a new decent awareness of the meaning of Memorial Day.

The most striking result or perhaps symptom of this waft of gravity over a public holiday was a Gallup poll taken this week among people, mostly men, in their 20s.

To anyone who remembers the aftermath of the Vietnam of war - the feeling of failure, no celebrating the homecoming soldiers - the figures of this poll are startling.

The question was: How much confidence do you have in the military, the president, in Congress?

Congress came out with no more than 29%. The president maintained the 65% popularity he's had since the last meetings of the United Nations Security Council.

But well over 70% of the young expressed their confidence in the military and its ability "to do the right thing".

Across the wide range of American colleges the teachers, the faculties, in the past 20 years or more, have been heavily liberal left, anti-Reagan, anti both Gulf Wars.

What a staggering change. Now their pupils, students, voted more than two to one in favour of going into Iraq and a solid 70% going so far as to express pride in the military - the soldiers, the sailors, the marines in particular, who always have the scariest, the dirtiest jobs to do.

Why this sudden 180-degree swing against the equally firm viewpoint of their baby boomer fathers?

Is it simply the normal rebellion of the young against what papa thought?

We're on touchy, crumbly ground. I doubt there has been devised a scientific poll capable of explaining the motives of a whole generation.

Since the 19th century several schools of psychiatry have come and gone that tried to do no more than discover the true motives of single human beings.

The late Reverend Dr Sigmund Freud maintained after 40 years of practice that all human motives are quite simple, are single, are in essence childlike - fear, envy, desire to be loved, admired, to be thought smart.

But for many people, especially educated people, this wasn't good enough.

So intellect - what Freud called "the great opportunist" - was recruited to think up a whole raft of motives or excuses for doing anything.

Hence the idiom "first of all" and "another factor to be considered" and "also he may feel that" and so on and so forth.

So all of us are left with a theory which can be no more than a guess.

Nevertheless I have to say that to my generation and the one after that it's been almost a pleasure to hear that the rising generation which has been called "the third generation of the decaying West" still has great numbers of the young who believe there are things for which they would be prepared to lay down their lives.

This pleasure was soon tempered by a second thought.

My guess is that this warm support for the military has much to do with the fact that the second Iraq war was successful and short.

It's 30 years since the woeful failure of the Vietnam war. The student population then had much to do with spreading across the country the bitter feeling that eight interminable years and 58,000 lives had been lost for nothing.

But today, almost two generations - anyway Americans in their mid-30s - have known only two wars. One was a ground war that lasted just 100 hours and the next was essentially won in three weeks.

It's easy in the glow of celebrating such feats - it's easy, it's healthy and normal surely - to forget the dozens of wars that have been going on in Africa and Asia.

When friends say to me "You say the United Nations has no effective international force, what about the peacekeeping forces?" They are voluntary, begged for by the secretary-general, few in numbers and lightly armed.

And the days and years alas are over when two combatants accepted the peacemakers and let them stand unharmed in a demilitarised zone.

After the dread experience of Somalia, when the UN peacekeepers were shot down, not much more than valour can be expected of the lightly-armed UN force which is off to try and subdue the ghastly Congo war.

And let's wipe out of our memories as quickly as possible Rwanda, which is now chronically suspicious of UN peacekeepers since 1994, when it saw them stand helpless and hopeless while 800,000 were massacred.

Some listeners may recall a talk I did only days after American and British troops invaded Iraq and began their advance on Baghdad.

It was a nervous talk - apprehensive anyway. The polls showed well over 65% of Americans for the war and I wondered aloud then how many would be for it if it went on for a year with thousands, say a hundred thousand, casualties.

My fear that the support for any war today would be short-lived was rooted in the fact of television.

For the first time perhaps in the history of war all official censorship of events had been abandoned.

The best of our networks' coverage showed us every setback, showed us the Arab television, showed us the dying children and I wondered what would have been the length and the outcome of the First World War if television had raked its sights along hundreds of thousands of dangling corpses strung on barbed wire.

The reigning Pope's warning that civilian knowledge of what war was like would cause wholesale revolutions would surely have come true.

However, let us thank whatever gods there be for the short war and the comparatively few casualties.

I have never seen a report, and I don't want to, on the number of children in Basra and Baghdad who died from diarrhoea or dysentery. Those are the figures that never appear in the almanac and only rarely in the history books.

In the American War of Independence nine American soldiers died from disease for every one killed by a British bullet.

In a campaign in the American south during that war a British general introduced what he called "a very useful tactic of war". It was the cutting off of the enemy's water supplies and the polluting of his wells, thereby assisting the likelihood of dysentery and typhoid.

I'm afraid it has become during the past 200 years a routine and much-favoured tactic of war.

Just before the invasion of Iraq began one of our anchor men showed on the evening news the model of a small glider that flies under radar and emits an impulse that instantly turns off the electric power of the places it's flying over.

This, he suggested, would be doubly effective in Baghdad because - apart from the enforced nuisance of no light and no air conditioning, no traffic lights, no flushing toilets - it would halt the supply of clean water, since the river at Baghdad is a sewer which requires powerful filters to give the people their drinking water. Dirty water is of course the primary cause of dysentery.

I have a suggestion to make, a very serious suggestion, that at the next big Security Council meeting the United States put up a resolution binding all member nations to renounce from now on one weapon of war - the useful tactic of shutting off or polluting an enemy's supply of drinking water.

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