We need to learn lessons of wars in the past

I spent Sunday’s Remembrance commemorations in Turriff. They were good; all of them.

Deeply evocative, full of meaning and rich with actions and symbolism that spoke volumes of currentday recognition of those who had died in armed conflict.

From Turriff the scene moved on to the war memorial out in the country at Foreglen. Thirty of us gathered under a sapphireblue Aberdeenshire sky.

There were prayers, Laurence Binyon’s words “They shall grown ot old…” accompanied birdsong from hedgerow and tree. A lone piper played the lament; a tonal anticipation of the following two minutes silence.

In my mind I linked the awful blitz of life in World War I trenches with nuclear devastation in Nagasaki and Hiroshima and onward through Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. All of this was framed against what former President Gorbachev said in Berlin, over the weekend, that we are on the edge of another cold war. A chilling thought.

What have we learned from two world wars and conflicts subsequently? Not much it would seem, for yet again the west is on mission creep back into the Middle East. More aerial and strategic bombing of Isis (Islamic State) targets. More – US, at least – troops returning there, on a training programme we are told. Realisation has to come soon that current conflicts in the Middle East will not be solved by deployment of high- power ordnance whether from the air or boots on the ground.

Isis is a dangerous threat to world freedom. But Isis is a truly modern outfit. We delude ourselves if we think it is a ragtag of disaffected militants united only by their opposition to all things western. Its fighters and operatives have grown up with socialmedia and use it as their command, control and propaganda structure.

The lesson from flawed Middle Eastern conflicts of the last 12 years is military power only makes matters worse. It disperses the enemy out of sight with cached weapons returning to use once we’ve brought our troops home, claiming success. A new and thoroughly modern form of opposition and combat needs to address the threat that Isis poses. One that undermines it from within. And does so with a quiet and subtle electronic sophistication that outsmarts the undoubted skills of Isis.

To fight in this new way will be a real honour to those who died in the course of winning the freedom we enjoy and which Isis seeks to undermine.

During the two minutes silence in St Andrew’s Church in Turriff on Sunday a little baby cried. Sheis both the voice of our concern and of our hope for the future. If we need a reason for remembrance it is to hear her cry. And for her sake, and others like her, heed the lesson to combat terrorism in a quietly more sophisticated way than we currently are.

We need to apply lessons learned from previous world wars to our modern conflicts, writes Right Rev Dr Robert Gillies, Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney