During the year of 1979/80 I had the privilege of being accepted on to a teacher exchange scheme. I was allotted a teaching role in Norwalk High School in Los Angeles. My family and I, wife and three kids, lived in Downey and spent all our holidays touring around the States (and down to Mexico City) in a VW van. We had a spectacular year. America is a beautiful country with some amazing scenery. The people were friendly and generous.
The High School I taught in was probably 50% Chicano, 10% black and 40% white with a lot of gang problems. I found the kids fabulous, friendly and outgoing even though the American education system was terrible. I was using teaching materials that in England would have been appropriate for twelve-year-olds with my top class seventeen-year-olds.
This was Carter’s election year and also the year of the Iran Hostage scenario. The Iran Revolutionary Guard had stormed the US embassy and was holding all its staff hostage.
My students were on the ceiling. I’d put a large map of the world on the wall and one of them had stuck a pin with a flag in Tehran saying ‘NUKE IRAN’. The prevailing mood was one in which they all wanted the President to storm into Iran, kick ass and teach them a lesson. There were many derogatory terms flying around.
I have no doubt that if Carter had invaded Iran he would have been re-elected.
However, fortunately, he didn’t. The reality of a war with a huge country like Iran with its multitude of tribal ethnicities and religious fervour is highly complex and unpredictable. The effect on the world economy and destabilisation of an already febrile area is substantial.
You roll the dice, throw the cards in the air and try to predict the outcome.
Carter wisely chose not to invade. He sent in an abortive desert rescue mission to free the hostages that crashed and went horribly wrong. He wasn’t elected.
Back in my classrooms there was war fever. As an outsider I tried to organise a rational debate – taking account of the region, Russia, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, oil, economies and unpredictability. My debates turned into hostile shouting matches. All my students wanted to do was bomb these ‘primitive Arabs’ into oblivion. How dare they kidnap Americans, threaten America and burn US flags. They needed nuking and putting in their place.
Forget alliances and the difficulties of attacking a country of that size, they were Americans; the Arabs should kow-tow and know their place. America was the greatest power on the planet. How dare they! Nuke ’em!
I tried pointing out a few home truths – despite America’s huge military power it had not managed to win a single war – got booted out of Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia (later booted out of Iraq and Afghanistan) – for all its fire power it cannot even win against opponents armed with out-of-date rifles and a ball of rice. Taking on the religious fanaticism of a country like Iran was a major undertaking that would drain the resources of even a superpower. American bravado was not going to prevail.
My students did not want to debate these points. In their opinion the USA was so mighty all they needed to do was wade in and wipe out those mad Muslims, free the hostages and blow the Iranian regime to kingdom come. Simple. The USA was all-powerful. NUKE IRAN!! They chanted death like the most fervent Iranian acolytes.
I hadn’t experienced anything quite like it. The war fever was immense. I wondered if it had been like that at the start of the Vietnam war or Korea? How quickly reality sets in. War is death. War is maimed bodies. War is misery. War is destruction. War is incredibly expensive. War is primitive. War is utterly stupid.
I came back from the States lamenting the stupidity of war fever and saying that fortunately it couldn’t happen here. Then, blow me, it did. A short while later I was in English classrooms trying to hold sensible, intelligent debate with enflamed students who wanted to nuke Argentina for daring to take the Falklands.
The only people who benefit from war are the politicians who gain power and the elites who profit from the weapon sales and eventual rebuilding. They get rich and powerful on the blood and agony of others.
The people who pay for it (apart from the dead, maimed, traumatised and homeless soldiers and victims) are ordinary people whose taxes are spent on destruction. They get less money, worse health care and poor education.
What a stupid way for intelligent people to behave.
I greatly admired Jimmy Carter. He put rational intelligence before gung-ho politics.
