Analysis: August is the month for wars

WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- These are the lazy dog day afternoons of August. And as U.S. leaders ponderously deploy the rhetoric of war against Iraq, they unconsciously echo an alarming pattern: At least five times in the past century, the Guns of August have brought indescribable suffering

and grief, terror and death, to the entire world.

World War I broke out at the beginning of August 1914. World War II broke outright after the end of August 1939. North Korea invaded South Korea right

before the beginning of August in 1950. And 40 years later, plus literally only two days, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

World War II ended in the middle of an August. But there was a darkly sobering aspect to that too. The first two atomic bombs ever used to destroy cities -- and the only ones so far in history to be used to kill people -- annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the first weeks of August 1945.

It has often been remarked that there is a dark, bitter irony to the fact that huge wars this century have tended to break out in August at the height of the summer vacation season in the Northern Hemisphere. The weather is often idyllic. Millions of families are on holiday in the countryside or by the beach. The governing classes of most major nations take the time to enjoy vacations of their own and often have to be summoned back to the capital when the crisis erupts.

World War II was a looming storm that was anything but unexpected. But World War I was a diabolical bolt from the blue. Until Austria-Hungary, with the enthusiastic backing of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, sent its notorious ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914, no one in Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary or Czarist Russia dreamed of the immense conflagration that was about to destroy their worlds.

The Korean War and the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait that led to the 1991 Gulf War to liberate the emirate the following year both took U.S. policymakers in Washington entirely by surprise.

The left-wing independent journalist I.F. Stone concocted a theory that the U.S. government had actually schemed to bring about the Korean War and

in the following decades his theory became fashionable among the American Left. But the opening of the Soviet archives after the collapse of communism in 1991 exposed this theory once and for all as paranoid fantasy.