2018 Midterms | Churchill and World War I

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory and bonjour, hi, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. Thank you so much for listening to The Hugh Hewitt Show.  

It is that hour of the week—the last radio hour of the week, which is the Hillsdale Dialogue. We devote ourselves to a little bit elevated conversation.  

The breaking news, of course—there is an active shooter in North Carolina. And, if details come in, I will fill you in on that.  

And, of course, the recounts in Florida will not advance in this hour, but we know that Rick Scott has a 15,000-vote lead; Ron DeSantis, a 30,000-vote lead; and the supervisor of elections, Dr. Brenda Snipes, in Broward County, is doing her best to appear to be guilty of election fraud.  

Meanwhile, in Arizona, Martha McSally is down by 9,200 votes with 500,000 votes that are supposedly going to break her way to be counted over two or three days. We'll keep you posted on that.  

But Dr. Larry Arnn joins me as the president of Hillsdale College. He's my friend and has been—that notorious distinction—for close to 30 years now. He's up in his tower in Hillsdale, Michigan, away from civilization in the wilds where deer season is underway. So, be careful.  

Hillsdale College has plenty of online courses that will improve your life, your mind, your weekend at Hillsdale.edu. And you can binge-listen to all the conversations we have had over these many years by going to HughforHillsdale.com. You can also sign up for Imprimis, the free speech digest.  

Larry Arnn, welcome. What's in Imprimis this month?  

LARRY ARNN: I don't know. Isn't that terrible? Yeah, what is in it? I don't know. I'll look it up while we talk.  

HEWITT: All right. Now, I want to cover a couple of things with you. First, mostly I want to talk about Churchill and World War I, since we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of the conclusion of the Great War tomorrow—I mean, Sunday.  

And the president's going off to France with Mike Pompeo to lay a wreath and talk with our allies from the Great War. I want to talk about Churchill and that. That's one of your specialties.  

But, first, what's your assessment of what happened on Tuesday, even with these races in Florida and Arizona not yet known? We know the Republicans are going to have at least 52 senators. So they held the Senate. The Democrats picked up 37 House seats and seven governorships. What say you, Larry Arnn?  

ARNN: Well, so there are some big, dramatic things that are worth focusing on because there's the ones that are likely to persistently be influential. It's very rare—last time was '82 and then again in 1962—for an incumbent president to pick up seats, or for any president at any time to pick up seats in the Senate and lose seats in the House. So that's unusual, and that means surprising strength for the Republicans, for President Trump.  

But warning signs, too. Michael Brown writes this morning that the place that was bad for the Republicans was anywhere people shop at Whole Foods.  

HEWITT: Yup.  

ARNN: So rich, suburban people went the other way this time. And that's worth thinking about. And you could see—you could develop it into a theme: Trump has been ruling for the working class. And the working class doesn't shop at Whole Foods.  

HEWITT: No, it does not. It goes to Costco.  

ARNN: So, and then, of course, urban versus rural—so, in the less populous states, the Republicans did better than in the more populous states, with, of course, important exceptions like Texas and Florida. So, those are the themes. And those are the dividing lines in American politics. And they affect and match up with the constitutional dividing lines that have developed in the country that is part of this long crisis that we're living through.  

HEWITT: It's a realignment, and realignments happen in American politics. And one thing that is decisively realigned is the corridor that begins at Lake Erie and heads south, through Ohio, Kentucky, down the river.  

And Ohio—Mike DeWine walked in. I had him on the morning of the election. And I thought it was going to be a 10,000-vote election. He won by 200,000 votes. He walked in. That's Trump country.  

ARNN: Yeah.  

HEWITT: Josh Hawley walked in. That's Trump country. Arizona—Doug Ducey walked in. I think it's Trump country.  

And so I think he has a path to re-election that requires him to get Pennsylvania back in line. But we didn't have a decent candidate in Pennsylvania. Republicans ran a bozo. And so we didn't get people out to vote in the numbers they needed to be. And the congressional results are part of a jam-down map by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court run by Democrats—that favor Democrats.  

So, I don't really know other than this: I watched the press conference, and then I wrote a column for The Washington Post that begins, Donald Trump is going to win re-election in 2020. Anyone who watched that press conference knows it in his bones. He's getting better as being the combatant-in-chief. And he owned every exchange. Do you agree or disagree with me?  

ARNN: Oh yeah. Yeah. And remember, this assault on the system that is present in those press conferences and in the pages of The New York Times every day. And what does that mean, “assault on the system”? We have the oldest way of electing a national government of any nation on Earth, and the longest surviving such way.  

And Trump has been elected, and the Republicans have controlled the Senate under the same way that gave Barack Obama control of all of it—and the House, too—and lost it for him, too. And same as Lincoln. Same as everybody, right?  

And so, the point is, now it's the popular vote. And so, in the Senate and the House, the votes—the senators and representatives should be elected in line with the national popular vote for Senate and House, people. And what that would do is simply centralize the politics of the country and obliterate the constitutional forums. And the claim in favor of that is nothing except that we didn't win.  

HEWITT: And then, I'm embarrassed—and I certainly hope I never hear a Hillsdale student refer to the aggregate Senate vote and the aggregate House vote, because those are both anti-constitutional measures of authority.  

They are, in fact, an invitation to direct rule by democratic plebiscite, which would lead to the various sorts of tyrannies people accuse Donald Trump routinely of pretending to and aspiring to. That's the way to end liberty—is to allow people to win direct plebiscites that are done on a national basis.  

ARNN: And I would hope and expect that Hillsdale students—I'm having class this afternoon, and they'd better know this kind of thing—they would know that the point behind that is a big point, and that is, a thing is not made right or wrong because anybody, or any group of bodies, or a majority of bodies, or the whole of everybody say that it's so.  

And what is so is that we are the same kind of being—all of us humans—and therefore entitled to the rights that go with being that kind of human. And the purpose of government is to protect those rights. And that means that, in the Constitution of the United States—a wonderfully delicate instrument—the most successful thing of its kind, ever—every use of power is checked in some way, including the uses of power by the people.  

And the thing is, in all cases, writes Jefferson, the majority must rule. But, for the rule to be rightful, it must be reasonable and protective of the rights of minorities. And that means the Constitution makes us think.  

So, we've been in this really intense political debate now, it seems, going on since— 

HEWITT: 2015.  

ARNN: Yeah, since 2015. 

HEWITT: Actually since 2008. After the collapse, there wasn't much of a debate. There was rather a concession that we're going to let the Democrats run it because we had a financial panic. And that often happens in this country.  

And the Democrat who happened to be standing there at that moment was Barack Obama, who's particularly charismatic. But the crisis did not begin until they passed Obamacare. So I date the crisis to 2009.  

ARNN: But Barack Obama is very charismatic, but he isn't the greatest in the world at coattails.  

HEWITT: Oh, he was horrible at that.  

ARNN: Isn't that terrible?  

HEWITT: He doesn't even wear a coat.  

ARNN: Sure. But that's right. And so, if we forget, and if you just look at what we're teaching in schools, kids are taught—thank god it's hard to teach them this, and they don't mostly learn it—but they are taught that if you think a thing is so, then that makes it so, as regards you.  

But throw somebody in jail without due process of law—that's wrong. And it doesn't matter what you think about it. And so, the Constitution is written around those great themes that emanate directly from the Declaration of Independence. And those are the themes that are being denied in this name of democracy—we call it.  

HEWITT: By a dumbed-down millennial generation. Sometimes I worry that the media is just plain dumb, Larry Arnn. I hear things that are just plain dumb said out there.  

Very quickly, we have a vacancy in the attorney generalship. Your friend Don McGahn has left the White House Counsel's Office. Pat Cipollone, who I do not know, is supposed to replace him.  

And a new Attorney General—I am lobbying in print for J. Michael Luttig because he is experienced, smart, and sees the battlefield, from the judge who enjoined the XL Pipeline to the border, to the Russia investigation. Do you know Judge Luttig, by chance?  

ARNN: I know about him. I've heard the greatest man I know praise him. So I agree with you.  

HEWITT: All right. All right. That's what I like to hear, when Dr. Larry Arnn agrees with me, we basically end the show. No, we're not ending a show. The Hillsdale Dialogue comes back.  

In the meantime, head over to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for Imprimis. No matter what's in it, it's good. Even if Larry Arnn doesn't know what's in it, it's good. It really is good—Imprimis. And it's free, at Hillsdale.edu. Stay tuned.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt, in the not-ReliefFactor.com studio, which is in D.C. I'm in Arizona participating in the Center for Arizona Policy review of the election with Governor Doug Ducey tomorrow night, and Cathi Herrod, and Jon Kyl, and perhaps Martha McSally, if she's been declared the winner by Saturday. We will see.  

Dr. Larry Arnn let us turn our attention now to World War I—the 100th anniversary of the Great War. Your subject of the biography that you were on—the official biography of Winston Churchill—himself wrote a number of books about the Great War, did he not?  

ARNN: He did.  

HEWITT: What were they called?  

ARNN: Well, the great one is called The World Crisis. And it's one, two—I'm looking at them—three, four, five, six, seven volumes. And, well, it's his first great multi-volume work and one of his, say, three best books.  

And it's a tremendous account of how this worst thing that has ever happened in history up to that time, and exceeded in war only by the Second World War, came to be. And it is a wonderful, magisterial, brilliant, fun, and terrible account of the whole thing.  

And I'm reading—this is the first paragraph of Winston Churchill that I ever read. And it's the first paragraph and the first chapter of The World Crisis, which is called “The Vials of Wrath.” And what that means is—vials are like— 

HEWITT: Test tubes.  

ARNN: —tubes. And they're full of wrath. And he explains in the first chapter what it was. He says—this is the first chapter: 

“It was the custom in the palmy days of Queen Victoria for statesmen to expatiate upon the glories of the British Empire, and to rejoice in that protecting Providence which had preserved us through so many dangers and brought us at length into a secure and prosperous age. Little did they know that the worst perils had still to be encountered and that the greatest triumphs were yet to be won.”  

So the whole of British history is at play. And that's hundreds of years.  

HEWITT: Beautifully written. Well, I've never read The World Crisis.  

ARNN: It's just awesome. And most of what Churchill thinks about war and politics emerges full-blown, although it's hinted at—or explained, actually—right from the beginning—but full-blown in this.  

And what does he think? He thinks that this is an age in which war could consume everything, and it's a mass age, an age dominated by the strengths and organizations made possible by modern science—and, by the way, representative, free government, which gives everybody a stake in the government and means that we can be really fierce when we fight our wars.  

And so, this war that comes—the Second World War greatly surpassed the death count in the First World War, which was beyond anything that had ever happened. But it did that mainly because it just was much more efficient at killing civilians than in the First World War.  

HEWITT: And let me ask you, do you think the savagery of the trenches was anywhere reproduced in World War II, outside of the concentration camps?  

ARNN: Well, Stalingrad.  

HEWITT: Ah. That was it, yeah.  

ARNN: Yeah. Because they were fighting around a river, back and forth across a river, and street-to-street in cities. So it wasn't trenches, but it was dug in behind the rubble into which they had turned that city. And the death counts were incredibly high.  

And it went on for what? The better part of a year. So yeah, the fierceness of both wars.  

But the First World War was different from the Second World War in this: My wife's father and grandfather both had what we call “difficult wars.” But my wife's grandfather was in the Lancashire Artillery—my wife's father, the commander of it. He was a territorial army officer and a lawyer. And he was in all of the battles of Ypres in the First World War.  

HEWITT: Oh, wow.  

ARNN: And those are the most destructive battles in history. And my wife didn't know him very well. But the story in the family is that he was never the same man after he went through all that.  

HEWITT: Of course not. And the interesting thing about PTSD is it was unknown at the time. And it would have obviously been a burden on anyone who came back from the trenches. More on Churchill and the trenches and at Gallipoli and Dardanelles when we return with—and munitions—Dr. Larry Arnn on The Hugh Hewitt Show.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt in the ReliefFactor.com studio—not. That's in D.C. I'm in Arizona today to talk to the Center for Arizona Policy about the elections with Governor Doug Ducey, Senator Jon Kyl, maybe-senator-elect Martha McSally. We'll learn more in the recount today. She's down by 9,200 votes with about a half million to come in that are supposed to favor her. So we will see.  

Dr. Larry Arnn is my guest. He is president of Hillsdale College. The last radio hour of each week is devoted to the Hillsdale Dialogue, about matters of great importance.  

We celebrate, or we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I, the Great War, on Sunday. Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, the president and secretary of state, are off to meet with our allies then and now—the French and the English—to do the solemn duties of commemorating the millions of lives that were lost.  

Dr. Arnn is an expert on Churchill in those years. He's now also an expert on what is actually in Imprimis, the free speech digest, available if you'll go to Hillsdale.edu and just sign up for it. What is this month's offering, Dr. Arnn?  

ARNN: Well, let me explain to our listeners first, that the reason I don't know what's in Imprimis is that, in almost all cases, I have heard the speech.  

And so this speech is by Charles Kesler, an old friend of mine and yours, a very wise man. And it's called the “Cold Civil War.”  

And it's about this divide in America that we began talking about at the beginning of the show, and the fact that there really are two Americas in outlook and direction. And one of them has its locus of power in the administrative state. And one of them has its locus of power—when it has a locus of power—in the representative bodies.  

And I'll just add my little twist on it of the morning, and that is—and the mastery of the nation—who is going to eventually win this civil war—it's hard to see how it can be reconciled. And Charles makes this point. But this combination of the votes that happened in the rural areas, and the votes that happened in the suburbs, and how they break out looks to me like where the battle is going to be fought out for the next few elections.  

HEWITT: Let me ask you if Imprimis is available online, or do you have to get it? I have to go read that. Charles is a friend. A lot of people say we look alike.  

Not many people know the story of our meeting, which was my first night at Harvard College, wet-behind-the-ears Ohio kid. And I believe Charles is from West Virginia.  

ARNN: Yeah.  

HEWITT: And he came by Stoughton, my dorm, to say hello to me, because he had been directed to do so. And I had been directed to find him via letters from one William F. Buckley, neither of whom of us had met, but with whom both of us had corresponded in our teenage hubris. And he always answered letters. He said, pray tell, you must meet my friend Kesler.  

So I've known Kesler since 1974. And he's way too smart for me to argue with. And so I tend to lay back and just read his things and throw a bomb over the wall sometimes when I see something I don't agree with. But, more often than not, I agree with everything.  

ARNN: Well, he's a very old, close friend of mine. And so I'm reluctant to praise him unduly. But— 

HEWITT: Please don't. Please don't.  

ARNN: —he is a pretty smart guy, let's put it that way.  

HEWITT: Yeah, the Straussians—I was never smart enough to be a Straussian, so I became a lawyer. But occasionally, he would deign to talk to me. And I think maybe, if he gave an Imprimis speech, I might understand that.  

ARNN: Yeah, yeah. You would. It's at Imprimis.Hillsdale.edu. And they're all there for free, all the way back to—44 years, I think, of them it is now.  

HEWITT: That's amazing. Really?  

ARNN: Yeah.  

HEWITT: All of the Imprimises—what's the plural of Imprimis?  

LARRY ARNN: We don't know. Imprimi.  

HEWITT: You know, so much of the evil in the world would be avoided if people could say, I don't know, or we don't know.  

ARNN: Nobody knows.  

HEWITT: OK. Let's go back and talk about Churchill. There are three distinct phases to the war: his admiralty career, his trench career, his munitions career. Let's make sure we get through them as a lens to understand what it meant to be a person of certain standing in the British upper class when the great calamity descends.  

ARNN: So, when the war opens, Churchill is First Lord of the Admiralty—the great British Navy. And dramatic things in 1911 brought him into that office. The war broke out in 1914. And he spent the three years getting ready for the war.  

He favored a strategy. And the strategy—he didn't really want—he came around to it. Everybody did. But he was very reluctant to land a major British army on the continent, because that's not Britain's way, he thought.  

Our way is we hold our ten…twelve divisions—it grew to a lot more than that, but always a small fraction of the French or German armies—we hold them back, and we control the seas and shipping and trade on the seas. And we insert our forces wherever we please.  

And he wanted the war to be like that. And it was not like that. And he had forecast in 1901—and he's 27 years old—he had been elected to Parliament the year earlier when he was 26—he had forecast that you could get this big kind of world war that would be something we'd never seen before, and as exhausting and destructive to the victors as to the vanquished, he said.  

So, in the first phase, he wants an open war. What happens instead is that the Germans do their Schlieffen Plan up through Belgium. And, in the beginning, in the first three months of the war, it's a war of movement. And they're in an open field, right?  

And the Germans manage to flank the British and French armies and sweep down through Belgium, moving south and then east. And their idea was to take Paris. That was the Schlieffen Plan, which was developed from the 1890s in Germany.  

And they didn't quite do it. They veered a bit of the north—to the north of Paris because they had more resistance than they thought, and because they took two army corps out of their sweeping army. The great saw, whether it's true or not, is that Von Schlieffen died saying, Strengthen the right, as his last words.  

And they didn't. They weakened it because they panicked about the very furious attack by the Czar, which was eventually—devastatingly—overcome. And so, they took two army corps out, and they put them on trains, and they shipped them east. And they were sort of between the two battles and didn't play a part.  

So then, the French army and the British army reformed, and actually made their way through the streets of Paris, some of them in buses and taxicabs. And they organized an attack on the German flank, which had gone a bit north and a little past toward the east of Paris. And that caused the German line to recoil. And it reformed and eventually formed a line—and these armies are huge—that basically went from the Alps to the beaches of the North Sea.  

And so you've got two huge armies facing each other. And they're digging ditches to hide in. And so, the war started on August 3, if I remember correctly. By the end of October, that's what it all looks like.  

And then there are two new things that had not happened before. The size of the armies—remember, that's a new thing. And Churchill, in that chapter, “The Vials of Wrath,” explains that, look how rich we've become. And, of course, we could use that money killing each other if we want to.  

HEWITT: Yup.  

ARNN: And so you just couldn't sustain armies of that size in previous times, even though the populations were big in medieval or renaissance times. And so, you've just got a lot of spare wealth around.  

And then they've got two new things, which is much better artillery, and much greater plenitude, and much more powerful explosive shells—so they don't just shoot a bullet at you, they shoot a bomb at you. And then, they've got the machine gun.  

And so they dig these trenches. And they put barbed wire in between them. And they have the trenches three lines back. And these are basically like subways that they're building. They're just very intricate and deep.  

And so, if you attack, you go over the top. And you go through artillery and machine-gun fire and crossing barbed wire. And, if you take the first trench, which often you do, then there you are. And you have to do it again toward the second trench.  

And, by the time of the third—I think the British lost 10,000 men one day. The British lost about 900,000 killed in the First World War—about half again as many as in the Second World War. And the list of the dead is on the walls of every Oxford college, because in the beginning battles, it was an all-volunteer army. And it was patriotic duty. It was very popular.  

HEWITT: Like our Civil War, it transcended class.  

ARNN: It did. It did. And it was conscription, and nearly every male went. One of the things Churchill condemns—he condemns the statesmanship and generalship of the First World War and went about it very differently in the Second World War.  

But what he thought was, if you sit in a room, and you're looking at the demographics and counting up how many young men the various combatants are to put into battle and trying to decide who the victor is by the attrition rates, then you have lost the art of generalship and statesmanship. And that's what the First World War descended into.  

HEWITT: Because his initial move—we have a minute till the break—failed. His genius move did not work.  

ARNN: Well, he tried to go around. And that meant, because the flanks are so wide—because the battlefield is so wide—the only way to go around is to go around Europe. And there was a northern way through the Baltic. And there was a southern way up through Turkey and the Balkans. And he favored the northern way.  

But more people favored the southern way. And they tried that. And that led to the Dardanelles campaign to try to force the Dardanelles by ships, and then the Gallipoli Peninsula battles—both of which were terrible and didn't work.  

And Churchill reproached himself for that later for a specific reason that he learned, and that was, don't take responsibility for things you don't have authority over, because he kept pushing, even when the going was tough, and everybody who had initially supported it, earlier than Churchill, stepped back and left him holding the bag.  

HEWITT: What a great rule for everyone. If you're going to be responsible, have the authority to make the judgment of your action appropriate to the level of authority that you hold.  

You have authority over Hillsdale College. If that college goes bankrupt, that will be Larry Arnn's fault, right?  

ARNN: Yeah. There you go.  

HEWITT: And so I think it's a great rule of war. But, in not having that, he failed and was sacked. And he went to the trenches.  

And, when we come back from break, what did he learn in the trenches? He need not have gone, but he did. And we learned from Andrew Roberts earlier this week, he often was within hearing, as he crawled into no man's land, oblivious—valiantly —as Andrew Roberts said, he could hear the Germans chatting.  

We'll talk about what that did and then the return to munitions minister when we return with Dr. Larry Arnn after the break. You are listening to The Hugh Hewitt Show.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. The Relief Factor Studio is not where I am. I'm in Arizona. And I'll be speaking at the Center for Arizona Policy tomorrow night. Come on out. Go to azpolicy.org, and see Cathi Herrod and I talk with Doug Ducey, Senator Kyl, and others about the future of the Desert State and the country.  

Dr. Arnn and I are looking back 100 years at the conclusion of the war, many months of which—if not years of which—Winston Churchill spent in the trenches as a colonel, often leading patrols into no man's land, and often going over the top. It's remarkable, actually, Larry, when we consider the amount of combat that the future leader of the free world endured as a younger man.  

ARNN: Oh yeah. So, where did he fight? He fought in Cuba. He fought in Afghanistan. He fought in Sudan. He fought in South Africa. And then he fought in the First World War. And then he was, in the Second World War, always in a quarrel with the king and other powerful people about how close to the front he could get when he would go across and visit. And he got really close, often.  

And then you've got to remember, he took 25 dangerous trips during the war—a multiple of what any other world leader did—an often-risky, always-uncomfortable old man, sick—nearly died twice. But he got to know Roosevelt and Stalin better than either of them knew each other. And so, he was a man who enrolled in the list when he was a young man, and he never got out.  

HEWITT: It's really remarkable as well that the government brings him back. He must be impressive in his talents that they bring him back when the world is locked into a mortal struggle that Britain is losing. Because they're running out of time. They're running out everything. And they bring him back to make what, Larry?  

ARNN: Well, so at the beginning of both world wars, we always talked about—he's—historians say the worst things. By the way, Andrew Robert's book is very good. And everybody should buy it—Walking with Destiny. But it's an exception to the rule because the rule is so full of second-guessing and stuff.  

But in the First World War and the Second World War, first Herbert Henry Asquith, Liberal Party's prime minister, and then Neville Chamberlain, within three months of the war breaking out, placed Winston Churchill as chair of the committee that ran the whole war.  

Now, why did they do that? They did that because everybody mistrusted him because he was just too right. So he could talk fast, and he was a very assertive human being and all that. But he had the energy to do it. And every day, he showed up with some definite things to say according to a plan that he could articulate. And so, the next thing you know, he's in charge of it all.  

Now, him becoming prime minister—that was a narrow run thing. He did that on May 10th, 1940. And there was a lot of reluctance about that. But there was no reluctance about—just these guys. They're politicians, and they've got a job to do. They've got to fight the worst war in history. And so they looked to the guy who seems to know how to do it.  

HEWITT: And they find out that he does.  

ARNN: Oh yeah.  

HEWITT: And he produces. And, later, he takes that experience of being munitions minister when he goes off and hires his irrepressible friend Lord Beaverbrook to do basically the same job, right?  

ARNN: That's right. And so, in the First World War, he goes to the trenches. He's there six months. I bet Andrew told a bunch of stories about it. They're really great.  

HEWITT: Yeah.  

ARNN: He and Douglas MacArthur are the only people I've ever read about who fought—only famous people—who fought the First World War with a sense of elan. MacArthur wore a white scarf and carried a cane— 

HEWITT: Yes.  

ARNN: —in these charges across no man's land. Churchill would go out in the middle of the night with a bunch of people and explore, like little boys. And they get heard, and then they get fired upon. And there's just a lot of stories like that.  

And so anyway, yeah. But then David Lloyd George, who's a very significant man and was with Churchill before the founder of—they were called Radical Liberals. And they had a love-hate relationship forever and ever. Lloyd George said that Churchill is like the greatest barrister. And that means the kind of lawyer in Britain who goes and argues in court.  

HEWITT: Yes.  

ARNN: And the really great ones. And he said, he's like the greatest barrister. You might hire him just to keep your enemies from hiring him.  

HEWITT: And we've got one minute left. Yeah, the war didn't settle anything, Larry? It didn't settle a thing.  

ARNN: No. And it didn't for so many reasons. It's kind of like politics today, right? The causes of the war were very deeply seated. And it might have helped if General Pershing, the American commander, who was quite a man—he didn't want to have an armistice in November 1918, when the Germans appealed for one. He wanted to carry on the attack—the Germans were, by then, being routed, and their army was mutinied—and go and drive them out of France and invade Germany, so everybody could see who won. And that's one reason why there was a Second World War—that we didn't do that.  

HEWITT: Iraq, 1991. Dr. Larry Arnn, always a pleasure. The Hillsdale Dialogues are available at HughforHillsdale.com. All things Hillsdale at Hillsdale.edu.  

Monday is our Veterans Day show. Have a wonderful Veterans Day weekend. Thanks to those of you who have served, are serving, and will serve.  

Let that resolve take very firm hold of your heart. Churchill did. And I will talk to you on the next Hugh Hewitt Show.