Category Archives: History

‘The Hillary Moment?’ Really? Y’all think THAT is a smart move for Democrats at this juncture?

There was a startling op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal today by Pat Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen. I had to look at the bottom to see who Schoen was, but Pat Caddell was Jimmy Carter’s pollster, a member of the team that brought him from obscurity to the White House in 1976. (Schoen was Bill Clinton’s pollster.)

They were urging President Obama to step aside and let Hillary Clinton replace him on the Democratic ticket next year.

It was bizarre. And perhaps no passage in the piece was more bizarre than when they compared the current situation with LBJ’s in 1968, to which I can only say, “Say what?”

I was in the ninth grade at the time, so my political perception was nowhere near what it would be later, but these guys write as though they didn’t live through that time at all.

The convulsions the Democratic Party was going through in ’68, the highs and lows both, were titanic by comparison to what’s happening intraparty now. Everything was bigger. LBJ had had much, much greater success early in his tenure — historic success – but then his re-election ran into the greatest internal conflict that party has suffered in the past century: Vietnam.

Yeah, today Barack Obama presides over an economic situation that is upside-down from the 60s, the worst economy since what FDR faced. But how many Democrats — as opposed to Republicans — actually blame him for that the way the McCarthy faction blamed Lyndon “How Many Kids Did You Kill Today” Johnson? LBJ was blamed specifically for what he had done (escalate the war), not for what he had failed to do (rescue us from the crash that started during the previous administration).

LBJ pulled out after suffering actual primary setbacks (a strong showing by McCarthy in New Hampshire, the decision by Bobby Kennedy to jump in) at the hands of insurgents in his own party. If Obama stepped aside, he’d be doing it because Caddell and Schoen and whoever else they speak for were dissatisfied with him. Which is pretty thin stuff, by comparison.

Finally, let’s look at how that turned out for the Democrats — with the election of Richard “He’s Back!” Nixon.

Caddell should think harder about another example from history: The challenge mounted by Teddy Kennedy to his man Carter in 1980. That insurrection was put down, but it weakened Carter further, and we know how that turned out.

Finally, it gets weirdest of all when the authors twice offer the argument that Barack Obama is… too partisan… and that the cure to that ailment is… and here the mind reels… Hillary Clinton. See this excerpt:

One year ago in these pages, we warned that if President Obama continued down his overly partisan road, the nation would be “guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it.” The result has been exactly as we predicted: stalemate in Washington, fights over the debt ceiling, an inability to tackle the debt and deficit, and paralysis exacerbating market turmoil and economic decline….

What? A year ago was way before Obama turned partisan. Less than a year ago was when he, at least temporarily, gave Republicans what they wanted on continuing tax cuts. I’m really missing something here.

And then there’s this part:

By going down the re-election road and into partisan mode, the president has effectively guaranteed that the remainder of his term will be marred by the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity, common purpose, and most of all, our economic strength. If he continues on this course it is certain that the 2012 campaign will exacerbate the divisions in our country and weaken our national identity to such a degree that the scorched-earth campaign that President George W. Bush ran in the 2002 midterms and the 2004 presidential election will pale in comparison…

Just to review how we got to where we are today… In 2008, Barack Obama was the cure to the hyper, bitter, partisanship of the Clintonistas. The most partisan Democrats didn’t like his conciliatory tone, which is one reason the Clinton campaign was as long-lived as it was: The partisans didn’t want to settle for the nice, reasonable guy.

Those same people have griped about, and undermined, the Obama presidency since Day One. Finally (and I can remember Jimmy Carter doing something similar to please the red-meat crowd in his party), he’s gone on the attack, after extremists in the Republican Party have led us to a downgrade in the U.S. credit rating. So the partisans in his own party are cheering, and these guys pick this moment to turn against their president, and moan about him being too partisan?

These guys can fret over their numbers all day, but the one individual who is actually running for president who has the best chance of being elected right now is Barack Obama. As much dissension as there has been among Democrats, it’s nothing compared to the lurching fragmentation going on in the GOP, which looks good in a poll against the president except when you substitute any of the actual people running for a hypothetical Republican.

Does that mean America is itching to jump on his bandwagon? No. America isn’t itching to jump on anybody’s bandwagon these days. America is bummed out. And the answer to that is to substitute him with one of the most polarizing Democrats of the last 20 years? Really?

Yes, she polls well. People approve of the job she’s doing as secretary of state. And they’re right to. I’ll go further: Hillary Clinton, in my opinion, has never deserved either the hatred of the right, nor the adulation of the most partisan elements of the left. I’ve always seen her as more of a pragmatist, someone who will work hard to get the job done. And people like those qualities in her current job, just as her constituents liked them when she was their senator.

But let her run for president, and you’ll give the hapless opposition something to rally against, something that awakens some of their more atavistic passions. Of course, Obama does that, too. But if you made me bet, I’d bet on the incumbent being better able to push past all that. This is the guy who got Osama bin Laden, and in a subtle piece of maneuvering brought down Qaddafi in Libya. Today, as we speak, he is taking the smart road on the failure of the “supercommittee” to do its job, taking the hard line, refusing to allow any backsliding on the sequester process. All things that only the incumbent can point to.

Obama’s failures are not failures of partisanship, but failures arising from passivity — the partisan Democrats are right about that, and so are the Republicans who accuse him of failing to lead. He let the stimulus package happen without doing enough to shape it, and then he did the same with his chance to make history on healthcare. Both of those grand schemes required a guiding intelligence to render them coherent, and he left the job to… Congress, of all unlikely suspects.

But no one running against him can point to any greater achievements (and poor Mitt Romney has to run from his). The GOP is lost and wandering right now; you can feel the lack of energy and enthusiasm about their field. And they have no one that independents like me can get excited about — well, they do, but they refuse to pay attention to him.

The one great advantage that Democrats have is they don’t have to go through this upheaval; they’ve got their candidate. It’s bizarre that veterans such as these would want to throw away that advantage.

Don’t you dare trash my Uncle Sam!

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This sort of thing has become routine, but I never cease to be disgusted by it.

To begin with, there is one thing that makes America special — “exceptional,” if you will — and that is our system of governing ourselves. It’s not our amber waves of grain or purple mountain majesties, as fine as those are. And it’s not that we are some master race — if anything, our glory is that we are a mongrel people. “We’re mutts” as Bill Murray said in “Stripes.”

What we are, what makes us special is that we are the country that made freedom work, on a grand scale. Over the course of two centuries, we steadily worked to perfect that, and we’re still working on it, to our great credit.

Therefore I cannot abide this constant, incessant, dripping, vituperative hatred hurled at American government by alleged “conservatives” — or for that matter by “progressives” who want us to believe that the system is stacked against the little man. But the attitude that government itself, the very notion of government, is an evil to be fought, overwhelmingly belongs to what we describe as the right these days.

Is there plenty wrong with the way our government functions? You bet. But a huge amount of the blame for that belongs to the extremists who want to possess Washington, and have no use for what anyone who disagrees with them wants. Each side jockeys constantly for absolute control of a system that was designed to accommodate the views of all. And no faction has been as vehement as those who hate government qua government.

That’s our fault, you know. We, the people. We keep voting for that garbage. Which is our right.

And the garbage will continue if we don’t stand against it. Which is not only our right, but our duty.

Today, I stand against something I saw in The Wall Street Journal.

The piece that it went with was unremarkable, the usual stuff you read on the opinion pages of the WSJ, containing such passages as this:

So why is our economy barely growing and unemployment stuck at over 9%? I believe the answer is very simple: Economic freedom is declining in the U.S. In 2000, the U.S. was ranked third in the world behind only Hong Kong and Singapore in the Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by this newspaper and the Heritage Foundation. In 2011, we fell to ninth behind such countries as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland.

That didn’t bother me. Such assertions have become background noise. And while I object to the piece blaming government for everything (yawn!), I agree with the belief it is rooted in: That what America urgently needs right now is strong growth in the private sector. All for it.

No, what got me was the illustration that went with the piece. You can see it above: The shadow of Uncle Sam looming menacingly over ordinary citizens.

My Uncle Sam. Our Uncle Sam. The figure that inspired millions of us to take up arms, literally, against tyranny the world over. The greatest symbolic representation of the blessings of liberal democracy the world has known, with the possible exception of Lady Liberty. Being used to symbolize the “evils” of government. Being used the way cartoonists in this country used to use the shadow of the swastika, the Russian bear, or the hammer and sickle.

Once, Uncle Sam personified the very thing this writer advocates — America rolling up its sleeves, getting to work, exhibiting determined economic vitality in the service of us all.

Utterly disgusting. And yet, something that has become so routine that most won’t even take note of it. Which is why I just did.

‘War in the name of democracy,’ 1775-style

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On this Veteran’s Day (I prefer “Armistice Day,” but whatever), the WSJ had an op-ed piece headlined, “America’s Distinctive Way of War,” by Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University. The headline doesn’t quite give away the topic. The thesis is that much about U.S. military doctrine evolved from our encounters with an enemy that to modern minds may seem unlikely: Canada. While much of it is largely forgotten now, over a 200-year period there was a lot of nasty business along “what Indians called ‘the Great Warpath,’ the 200-mile route of water and woodland paths that connected Albany and Montreal…”

There was a lot in the piece that was interesting, whether you fully accept the Canadian premise or not. Such as this:

War in the name of democracy? In 1775, the rebelling colonies—not even yet the United States — launched an invasion of Canada. The Continental Congress ordered the covert distribution of propaganda pamphlets in what is now Quebec province. The opening line: “You have been conquered into liberty.” Congress subsequently sent Benjamin Franklin north with a few companions to consolidate the conquest of Montreal, spread parliamentary government, and familiarize the baffled habitants of Canada — ruled for over a decade with mild firmness by a British governor—with the doctrines of habeas corpus and a free press.

The American way of war is distinctive. If the armed services have an unofficial motto, it is “Whatever it takes”—a mild phrase with ferocious implications. All that those words imply, including a disregard for military tradition and punctilio, the objective of dismantling an enemy and not merely defeating him, and downright ruthlessness, can be found in the battles of the Great Warpath.

It is often a paradoxical way of war. “Conquering into liberty” sounds absurd or hypocritical. In the case of Canada, it failed (though of course Canada took its own path to free government). In the cases of Germany, Italy and Japan after World War II, it succeeded. In the case of Iraq, who knows? In all of these episodes American motives were deeply mixed — realpolitik and idealism intertwining with one another in ways that even the strategists conceiving these campaigns did not fully grasp. What matters is that the notion of conquering into liberty is rooted deep in the American past, and in the ideas and circumstances that gave this country birth…

There is nothing new, apparently, under the sun.

A little music for this very moment

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Something about this moment, as I write this — the still-hot coffee I’m drinking, the slight remaining chill from the night in my office, contrasting with the crisp mid-morning light coming in the window — brought this song to mind.

So I thought I’d share it, a few minutes before the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month in the 11th year.

A luminous slice of peace on this Armistice Day.

OK, you got me, Bob. Semper Fidelis

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One of the most aggressive email marketers laboring to fill up my Inbox is GoDaddy. The only business I’ve ever conducted with them, or ever plan on conducting with them, was buying the rights to bradwarthen.com. And if I remember correctly, my renewal each year is automatic. This makes all of those notices of special deals pretty superfluous.

But I had to stop and acknowledge this one:

Dear Brad Warthen,

Please join me on November 10, 2011, in wishing the United States Marine Corps a Happy 236th Birthday. I’m proud to honor my fellow Marines past and present on this special day. Please take a moment to watch our birthday tribute by clicking the‘View 2011 Tribute’ button below.

I’d also like to extend this tribute to all of the men and women serving in every branch of the U.S. Military – Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force or Coast Guard. Thank you all for your tireless commitment to keeping our country safe.

Sincerely,

Bob Parsons
CEO and Founder
GoDaddy.com

Several years ago, I had the honor of being a guest at a Marine birthday banquet, out at Embassy Suites. I’ve been to a lot of black-tie affairs, but never have I felt less entitled to sit down with an assemblage as I did with all those Marines in their dress blues. It was really something. No service honors its traditions with greater ceremony the the Corps, and it was a privilege to have the chance to take part.

And I appreciate being reminded of what happened on this date in 1775.

Semper Fidelis, Bob. And thanks for your service.

And to all you gyrenes out there, Happy Birthday.

‘… No! He is RISING!…’ Remembering Smokin’ Joe Frazier

Then they came for the people with good taste…

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I really like this treatment, in The New York Times, of the silly-sounding new film, “Anonymous:”

“Was Shakespeare a fraud?” That’s the question the promotional machinery for Roland Emmerich’s new film, “Anonymous,” wants to usher out of the tiny enclosure of fringe academic conferences into the wider pastures of a Hollywood audience. Shakespeare is finally getting the Oliver Stone/“Da Vinci Code” treatment, with a lurid conspiratorial melodrama involving incest in royal bedchambers, a vapidly simplistic version of court intrigue, nifty costumes and historically inaccurate nonsense. First they came for the Kennedy scholars, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Kennedy scholar. Then they came for Opus Dei, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic scholar. Now they have come for me.

Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious…

No, I haven’t seen it, and don’t intend to. I mean, I saw “The Da Vinci Code,” and I’d like to have that time back. I also read Foucault’s Pendulum, which was essentially the same thing (grand, paranoid conspiracy, involving the Knights Templar, reaching back into ancient times). That one really disappointed me, because I had enjoyed The Name of the Rose.

Bottom line, what does it matter who wrote those plays and poems? Whoever it was was probably the most brilliant writer of English ever, largely responsible for the linguistic and cultural hegemony of the Anglosphere. But so what if it was Will Shakespeare or Joe Blow down the street? What’s in a name, yadda, yadda? It’s not like the actual person can enjoy our adulation today. We can’t shake him by the hand or anything. He can’t make any money out of it. Having that name, and that visage, associated with the works suits fine. And since no one will ever know that it was someone else — even if we found a document with a royal seal attesting to it, that could be a fraud itself — what’s the point?

Would it matter that Julius Caesar was actually someone else using that name? No. Gallia would still have been divisa in partes tres. (Latin scholars, help me out — I suspect that “divisa” is wrong with “would have been.” And to me, that matters.)

It remains most likely that

They may have come for Opus Dei and gotten away with it, but they’re not coming for me, not again.

E.B. White on the “Bonus Army” in 1932

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The Bonus Army protests ended badly for these veterans. Here you see a clash with police. Later, Gen. Douglas MacArthur moved in with tanks and tear gas. Two protesters were killed.

You may find this interesting. In light of what’s going on with Occupy Wall Street, The New Yorker dug up some pieces that E.B. White wrote about the “Bonus Army” demonstrations in 1932. TNY noted that “While deeply sympathetic to the plight of the jobless in the Great Depression (see this Comment from earlier in the year), White was largely dismissive of the Bonus Army.”

The piece went on to quote White directly:

In a democracy, there are a thousand, ten thousand groups…. Each has its own particular sorrow and its grievance; there exists no common tyranny against which to rebel, not even the tyranny of hard times. If you mixed bonus marchers with Kentucky miners, they would probably spend the rest of their lives arguing about what to rebel against.

I could identify with that. With White’s attitude, that is. One of the things that bothers me so much about political parties is that they are aggregations of people who pretend their aims are the same, and mesh perfectly — when they don’t.

But even more pertinent to the protests we see today is this bit: “there exists no common tyranny against which to rebel.” To see the OWS as coherent, as having a point, you have to believe that there is some identifiable They that is oppressing the demonstrators.

But I could also identify with this sympathetic observation from a week later:

Being out of a job perforates the walls of the mind, and thoughts seep off into strange channels. To say that the country is as rich as it ever was is a joke: something is gone that used to be here—the spirit of millions of men is gone, and a man’s spirit is just as real a natural resource as gold or wheat or lumber.

While I don’t see it that darkly, I do see the world as vastly changed from what it was a generation ago. Different for my children than for me. Funny thing was, I felt like things were harder for us than for our parents. Yeah, we had more stuff as a generation — but it took two salaries even to be in the middle class, which had not been true for our parents’ generation.

Anyway, just some tidbits for thought…

A morning ‘rant’ about a borderline word

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Maybe that headline’s wrong. Maybe it’s not a borderline word. Maybe it’s clearly over the border. I don’t know. Y’all decide.

A friend had a bad start to her day this morning, and vented a bit.

I should explain that the friend is black, and she works for a large organization in the Midlands. That’s all I’ll say, since she asked me not to identify her. Here is her self-described “rant,” with all the installments run together:

I can’t even say Good Tuesday bc I’m starting with a rant.

Staff meeting today and co-worker refers to a church as the “colored” church. Really? How do u respond to that?

I know that’s how some of my coworkers think, but they have to verbalize it every so often. Lack of motivation is bad enough.

Ignorance is another story. That is all. Rant is complete.

I don’t even know if he’d get why I’m upset.

I’ll bet he wouldn’t.

In fact, as a Clueless White Guy myself, I really don’t know how my black friends would react if I used the word “colored.” Of course, this not being 1955, it would never occur to me. It’s so…

Well, the first word that strikes me is “anachronistic.” It makes me wonder, first, how old this guy is. I’m getting on up there, and while I remember the old folks using this word in my childhood, I don’t think I had occasion to use it myself. (No, wait! Maybe once… Oh, it’s too long ago to quantify… I was a tiny kid at the time.) For the old white folks, it was then the “polite” word they used to describe black folks.

By the time I was aware that there was a such a thing as demographic designations, the official, universally-approved word — if you had to refer to a person’s “race,” which I avoided and still avoid when possible (I was reluctant to do so in my second paragraph above, but it seemed essential to the story) — was “negro.” Then, it was “black.” Which I resisted. I preferred, if forced to refer to race, to use a word that sounded clinical, and technical, and less likely to divide people on an emotional level. “Black” sounded to me like, well, like we weren’t fellow human beings. Black and white are opposites, and have nothing in common. It seemed to me, as a teenager, a polarizing word.

But eventually I adopted it. My acceptance was eased by the fact that it was only one syllable. Force me to acknowledge race, and I’d get through it more quickly and move on. I liked that part of it. So I got used to it.

And I’ve stuck with it. I don’t think I’ll ever reconcile to the seven-syllable “African-American,” which is even longer than the “Afro-American” that was briefly popular in my youth. It seems to dwell WAY too long on something that I believe unnecessarily divides people. The only thing worse than that would be “European-American” — eight syllables — which thankfully has never caught on with anyone. (It’s so irrelevant. I never knew a single ancestor who even knew an ancestor who came from Europe. What would be the point?)

Yet, you’ll hear be use “African-American” in an extended discussion of race. Mainly because I get tired of saying “black” after awhile. (When you’re an editorial page editor in South Carolina, or a member of the Columbia Urban League board as I was for a decade, you end up having a LOT of extended discussions of race.)

But it has never occurred to me to say “colored.”

Did that guy think it was cool because he’d heard some of more politically conscious black people say “people of color?” Maybe. But you know, I’m not sure white people are licensed to say that. I’ve heard them try, and it sounds extremely stilted and phony — even more stilted than when black speakers say it. It’s like listening to people who learned a foreign language as adults. The pronunciation may be approximately correct, but the accent is all wrong.

“Colored” used to be a euphemism. Was it for this guy today? Did he use it just because my friend was present? What would he have said otherwise?

Maybe he went home today congratulating himself on his tact. Do you think?

A post-mortem on containment doctrine, from 2003

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I got into sort of a mini-debate with Bud back here on the subject of the old Domino Theory, which in turn led to me running on and on about the Cold War doctrine of containment, which got me to thinking about this old column. That is to say a very brief interchange with Bud, then me weighing back in repeatedly here and here and here and here and here.

It ran in the paper four days after Baghdad fell, which means I wrote it a day or two after, which may be why the lede seems vague — it assumes a lot of immediate knowledge on the parts of readers. If you’ll recall, even though the drive toward Baghdad from Kuwait only took about three weeks, in about the third week, there were already naysaysers saying that our invasion had “bogged down.” Now that Baghdad had just fallen, their political opponents were nyah-nyahing back at them.

I was saying that they should not expect the invasion’s detractors to shut up, nor should they. But I was also noting that the relatively small antiwar factions at that time were somewhat voiceless, as they lacked a coherent narrative for what they wanted to do instead.

That was one theme of the column. Another was to point out something that seemed quite obvious to me then, and still does now: That the most natural opponents of the invasion, if ideology meant anything at all (an idea I often challenge, of course), were conservatives. I mean, paleo-conservatives such as Pat Buchanan.

Because even though it was being pursued by a particularly strong-willed conservative president, it was distinctly a liberal enterprise.

The two elements that I took off on in making these points were a fascinating lecture I had heard on C-SPAN by Prof. Alan Brinkley of Columbia University — a liberal opponent of the invasion, who nevertheless voiced the frustration of intellectuals who had trouble articulating their opposition in a way that he, at least, found satisfactory. That, and some things I had read in The New Republic, which called Bush “the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself.”

As we all know, the invasion did “bog down” — after the technical, Clausewitzian war was over. Which means, the post-war occupation ran into huge problems with multilateral post-war violence, nearly sinking the entire effort in failure (before the Surge). That I attribute to the fact that this effort to harness military power to liberal ends was being conducted by a conservative, one who had assured us before his election did not believe in nation-building. No wonder his administration was so bad at it.

But we didn’t know anything about that then. Remember that as you read this:

DEBATE OVER U.S. ROLE UNDERMINES ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT ‘RIGHT’ AND ‘LEFT’

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, April 13, 2003

Author: BRAD WARTHEN Editorial Page Editor

Enough Acton: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, except when it does not.

-The New Republic

IN THE HEADY thrill of reaching the “tipping point” in Iraq, some people said some silly things on the 24-hour-chatter TV channels. Some even speculated that recent events would shut up all the naysayers with regard to America’s new role in the world.

Don’t look for that to happen. After all, it’s a free country. At the same time, don’t look for critics to come up with any helpful alternative ideas, either. I say that based on excellent authority.

On C-SPAN last weekend, I caught a remarkable presentation by Alan Brinkley, provost and chairman of the history department at Columbia University. Professor Brinkley is erudite, thoughtful and intellectually honest. He is also an opponent of what the United States is doing in Iraq. But to his own frustration, he can’t offer a compelling alternative to that policy.

Addressing a conference on the war in Iraq, he spoke with what I took to be understated nostalgia for the doctrine of containment that dominated U.S. policy during the Cold War. He paid particular attention to the fact that “containment” applied not only to the Soviet Union and other enemies, but to ourselves as well. Faced with a rival superpower, the United States held back its own power. We didn’t, for instance, invade North Vietnam during that war, or even bomb those missile sites in Cuba in October 1962.

Containment still managed to hang on to some extent after the Soviet collapse. “September 11, I think, provided the final blow to this already tottering edifice . . . whose original rationale had long since been removed,” he said.

Under President Bush, he noted, America has been guided by a whole new set of assumptions, along these lines: that Europe has abdicated responsibility for any active role in the world, “that the United States is the only nation in the world capable of dealing with the great crises that face the world,” and that America must act, even if unilaterally.

“(M)y own view is that the real perception in this administration of the threat they are dealing with is not weapons of mass destruction, not the alliance between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, not Saddam Hussein himself even,” but rather “the sense among conservatives in policy positions in Washington that we face now a large if somewhat inchoate threat . . . , and that threat is radical Islam and the . . . inherent instability and danger of the Islamic world to the survival of the world as we know it.”

He worried that Iraq was but the first step, and that the same logic would lead to other wars.

While he considers this to be an “extremely dangerous view of American foreign policy,” he generously posited that it was “not a crazy view,” but rather “the product of a real set of intellectual beliefs” that is “ideologically powerful.” Prof. Brinkley concluded his remarks with this concern:

“(T)here is at the moment no clear and coherent alternative model for American foreign policy. There is an instinctive return to the containment idea among some people, there’s an instinctive embrace of all sorts of idealistic-sounding multilateral slogans, but I have yet to see the production by liberals or people on the left of a coherent alternative foreign policy that would allow those of us who are opposed to the powerful model being presented by this administration to debate effectively. Um, thank you very much.”

It was a remarkable admission, and I respected the professor for making it. But I have to quibble on one point: This is not about the failure of liberals to mount an intellectually vigorous argument against conservative policies. In fact, if language means anything, this is a liberal war.

What President Bush has led us to do in Iraq – and quite successfully so far, although the really hard parts are yet to come – is not about conserving the status quo. It’s about blowing it up. It’s about being open to new possibilities. It’s about promoting liberal democracy in a region that has not known it. It is the greatest liberal policy adventure since the days of John F. Kennedy.

I’m far from the only one who thinks so. “In word if not yet in deed, Bush is becoming the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself,” wrote Lawrence Kaplan in the March 3 edition of The New Republic. “He, more than his left-leaning critics, is harnessing American power to liberal ends.”

In an editorial headlined “The Liberal Power” in that same edition, the “liberal” magazine’s editors rejected the famous dictum of Lord Acton, asserting that “power may also ennoble, when it is employed for good and high ends. The notion that American power has never been so employed and can never be so employed is a sinister lie, and a counsel of despair to the hurting regions of the world.”

The editors continued, “There are terrors of which only American power can rid the world, and blessings that only American power can secure for the world.”

I couldn’t agree more. So does that make me a liberal? Sure. Just like George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Harry Truman, “Scoop” Jackson, Paul Wolfowitz and all the rest of those wild-eyed leftists.

From the other end of the spectrum, the April 7 issue of National Review frets about the “Unpatriotic Conservatives” who not only oppose the war in Iraq, but have even recently taken distinctly anti-American (and, not coincidentally, anti-Israeli) positions. Essayist David Frum dismisses “paleoconservatives” such as Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak and Jospeh Sobran as not representing the conservative mainstream. Nevertheless, wouldn’t it be conservative to avoid this risky undertaking in the Mideast? Not right, but conservative. As in “prudent,” a la the first President Bush.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what you call the likes of Messrs. Novak and Buchanan, as long as you muster the good sense to reject what they are saying.

My point is, this isn’t about liberal and conservative. This is about America doing the right thing in the world.

Left, right; left, right: You can’t tell one from the other as America marches relentlessly down a promising, and intellectually unchallenged, new path.

I love one of his children, but not the other

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My sons gave me birthday gift cards for Barnes and Noble, my favorite place for hanging out aimlessly and browsing, and I’m there now, contemplating a dilemma.

A couple of days ago, I saw the review in the WSJ about this new biography of James Madison by Richard Brookhiser, and they have it here. Since college — when I took so many electives (to some extent concentrating on that period) that I ended up getting a second major in history when I hadn’t planned to — I’ve been drawn to that period, and the Founders. Particularly the Framers.

But do I really want to use one of my cards for that? The publisher overpriced it a bit, for a book with such large type and so few pages. Nowhere near the heft of McCullough’s John Adams. I could get several paperbacks for this price.

Also… I’m still reading, and fascinated by, Charles Mann’s exploration of the Americas and the world pre- and post-1492.

Do I really want to delve into my mixed attitudes toward Madison right now (I inadvertently typed “Jefferson” just then, a pre-Freudian slip)?

The thing is, I revere the man as the Father of our Constitution, a political achievement I honor as much as any in human history.

But… he’s also the father (note the lower case) of a bastard child — American partisan politics. Or one of the main fathers, anyway (the mother was indiscriminate). Certainly the most successful one. The Federalists (which, if I had to pick a party, would have been my preference then) faded away, but Madison’s Democratic Republicans remain vital, although in different form, under truncated name. (And no, for those who don’t follow such things, it’s not the Republicans, a later invention.)

I love one of his children, but the other is the bane of my life as a political writer.

Another reason to hesitate, and wait until this, too, is marked down or in paperback… I have yet to read the book about his chief rival, the one by Ron Chernow, that Fritz Hollings recommended to me several years ago. Fritz thought it was great, and I asked one of my kids for it for birthday or Christmas, and it sits on my shelf yet.

Of course, if anything, my attitudes toward Hamilton lean even more toward the jaded. Despite my Federalist leanings (which is really more of a reaction to the Democratic Republicans than a love of the Federalists), and despite my great admiration for the role that he, too, played in the Constitution, there’s that nasty partisanship thing.

While Adams and Jefferson were conducting themselves more or less above the fray, Hamilton and Madison were carrying out the nastiest sort of partisan warfare in their behalfs. But at least Madison served Jefferson well in so doing. One thing I respect about Adams is that he truly hated party politics, as much as I do, and his own party worked against him perhaps more than it supported him (to name but one example, there’s the way they blackened his legacy with the Alien and Sedition Acts). Jefferson was more affected in his nonpartisanship, and carried it off well, while Madison more smoothly conducted his dirty work.

As for my decision — oh, I’ll have to read the book at some point. I just haven’t decided whether to get it now. I’ll browse a bit more first…

Great to see Jeff, but I still await that Dole story

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Jeff Miller and Warren Bolton, outside Yesterday's in Five Points.

Yesterday my phone rang, and told me Jeff Miller was calling. This was confirmed when I answered and heard his voice:

“I’ve got that Dole story for you.”

Except that he still didn’t have it. He was just stringing me along…

The background: I pulled Jeff out of The State‘s Newberry bureau in late 1987 to assign him to cover the upcoming Republican presidential primary here — the one that launched George H. W. Bush toward the nomination and the presidency, and did so much to burnish the S.C. primary as the early contest that picked winners.

I had other political reporters — plenty of them, in those days. But Lee Bandy was up in Washington, and my others who could do the job would be busy with the Legislature by the time of the primary. I needed somebody to work this story full-time, and for the duration. We could see it was going to be a big deal, with the nation’s eyes on South Carolina, so I didn’t want to treat it like just another story. Gordon Hirsch, who was then the news editor, suggested Jeff as somebody who, despite lack of political experience, could do the job. I jumped at the offer, and our state editor lost him from then until after the primary. (Actually, the State Desk have lost him permanently — eventually, he joined my governmental affairs staff for good. I just can’t remember whether he went back to Newberry for a while first. It’s been a LONG time.)

He did a great job, and had a great time, I think. I still remember him talking about being on the bus with David Broder, and what a nice guy Broder was. Jeff was young, and new to all this, and he was really impressed that the legendary Broder would just sit and talk with him like a regular person.

But he wasn’t too starry-eyed to do his job well. I was pleased. There’s just this one beef. After the primary was over, I had one more story idea for him. After all these years, I can’t even remember what the specific idea was, but I thought it was a good one — it was an angle about Bob Dole’s defeat here that no one else had done. Jeff wasn’t so sure. He was also pretty exhausted with writing about that stuff, and needed to move on to his other reporting duties. I kept bugging him about it — just this one more story, I kept saying. I was like that as an editor — even when people had been working double-time for a long time, actually even when they were on vacation, truth be told — and I usually got my way, through sheer insufferability. Not this time. Jeff would say, “Yeah, sure…” but I never got it.

So he owed me.

Today, he paid me back by taking Warren Bolton and me to lunch, on his first visit back to Columbia in a decade. We went to Yesterday’s, of course, because I got to pick (see the ad at right). We had a great time talking about the Dole story (neither of us can remember what it was about now — but it was gonna be good). We talked about the Cosmic Ha-Has, the softball team on which both Jeff and I played (I was the last Ha-Ha left at the paper; all gone now). We talked about the county league basketball team that Jeff and Warren played on, and how neither of them plays any more. (I went out to play with them once. For some reason, they never begged me to come back.)

A lot of the intervening years — I was last Jeff’s editor in 1993 — Jeff was still covering politics, but for other papers. Washington became his home base, and when I last saw him, at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 (below), he was in the Washington bureau of the Allentown Morning Call, if I remember correctly. In 2006 he left newspaper work, but has stayed in D.C. Now, he’s the vice president for communications of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

It was great to see him again. Warren, too. But it’s usually not so long between times I get to see Warren.

Jeff and me on the last night of the RNC in NY in '04. The marathon was nearly over (conventions mean 20-hour days for press types). Like my beard? I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

Happy real Columbus Day

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OK, I need to run to a meeting, but I can’t let today pass without acknowledging Columbus Day. Partly to defy political correctness… earlier this week, Kathryn said “Celebrating Columbus is a bit like flying the Confederate flag,” and martin sort of disputed her, and I responded:

Indeed. It’s foolish to get mad at Columbus. If he hadn’t been the one, it would have been the next doofus who thought the world was that much smaller than it was (or perhaps, some Portuguese captain who got blown off course on the way down the coast of Africa, which, if you’re out far enough to start with, can easily carry you to the coast of Brazil)…

Somebody was going to make the voyage that changed the world more profoundly than any other voyage in the history of the world. The one that started the continuous travel between Europe and America, as opposed to the Vikings and St. Brendan and the like. It just happened to be Columbus, because he was so stubborn about his wrong idea, and managed to persuade Isabela to part with some dough.

But there’s another reason. I’m very much looking forward to reading 1493, by Charles C. Mann. I got it for my birthday. And though I have not read it yet, I’m familiar with his thesis, because he summed it up in this remarkable piece in the WSJ recently. An excerpt:

Some 250 million years ago, the Earth contained a single landmass known as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, forever splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals.

Before Columbus sailed the Atlantic, only a few venturesome land creatures, mostly insects and birds, had crossed the oceans and established themselves. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Columbus’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of the historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.

And he means that culturally, certainly. And politically, a concept we’re all familiar with. But also horticulturally, zoologically, economically, genetically, and just about any other way you want to look at it, with the exception of geologically.

Before Columbus, the world was one way. After, it was another way, in realm after realm of human, animal and plant life. The more you dig into it, the more astounding it is.

So… it doesn’t matter whether Columbus was a nice guy, or beastly to the native peoples, or a lousy geographer, or whatever. At least, no matter which of those things is true, the achievement is singular and world-shaking. That one voyage changed the world more than any other voyage, ever. Certainly infinitely more than the previous aborted connections between the continents, by Vikings, and possibly Polynesians, Africans, and Chinese. Because the connection he made was not severed, but followed up on — by quite a host of rather appalling opportunists in many cases, but as I say, this is not about the moral judgments.

It’s about what a big deal this was. And worth marking every year. (Although maybe not worth the Post Office getting a day off when I don’t.)

By the way, Mann is not about shortchanging the Indians. I’m now reading his prequel, 1491, which is about the millennia before Columbus came here. In short, it’s about all the recent research that tells us that there were many more people here than we supposed for most of our history, that they were here far longer, and that their societies were more sophisticated than even the greatest denouncers of eurocentrism would suppose. And other fascinating stuff.

A passage that sort of illustrates the paradigm-busting approach of this book (and, I assume, the new one):

Next year geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or more hunting sites could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the “New World.” Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.

Worth reading.

Burl’s column about his Dad and the 8th Air Force

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Burl Burlingame says on Facebook that he was contacted by “a documentary crew who reminded me of this piece I wrote some years ago. I miss my father.”

Here’s the piece, from June 15, 2003. If the Star Bulletin gets mad at me for repeating it in its entirety, I’ll boil it down to a quote and a link. But here’s the whole thing:

To England and
back with Dad

Dad doesn’t talk much about the war unless he’s had a couple of drinks, and even then you have to keep him from drifting into the realm of airplanes, which is related but has little to do with real life and family history. There is a period of his life — and my mother’s — that seems boundless and malleable, a mysterious dark forest with little light to illuminate the way, the few years between school days in rural Ohio and a rootless existence as the head of a career Air Force family, a wandering life that eventually settled in Hawaii 38 years ago.

The war came along and swept Dad up, rattled the childhood right out of him, stamped and marked the man who raised me. Like most veterans of his age, the war is likely the most vivid period of his life, and one that is quietly put away in a rarely opened compartment.

In college on a swimming scholarship, Dad joined the Army Air Forces and became a fighter pilot. By the time he was 20, he was flying Mustangs for the 8th Air Force, part of the desperate crusade throwing itself against Hitler’s Europe.

Once, as a adolescent, I was watching an aviation show on television and I asked Dad if he remembered what life was like on an English airfield during the war. Sure, he said, watching smoke curl upward from his cigarette. He described seeing a bomber full of teenage Americans smack into the ground and cartwheel, flinging debris and flames across the green grass. He spotted what appeared to be a parachute pack hanging on a wire fence and, trying to be useful, he trotted over to retrieve it — only to discover that it was actually a young man’s torso, tangled in the wires. I think it was the first time he’d seen a dead body.I shut up and he continued to watch cigarette smoke curl away into nothing.

We shared a love of aviation and Dad introduced me to the exacting craft of building model airplanes. The first model I built on my own was a clunky Aurora P-51 Mustang, the same kind of airplane he flew during the war, and I painted it with a can of lime-green zinc chromate he liberated from the base motor pool. It was hideous; I’m still building models of Mustangs, still trying to get it right.

Dad retired from the Air Force after a long career and went back to school. For a while, we were in college at the same time and, since our names are the same, our transcripts would get mixed up. He got better grades than I did. Eventually he earned a doctorate and taught university classes. The Air Force receded into the past and the war acquired a faint burnish, the rough memory worn down to gleaming daydream.

Like others of Dad’s generation — the generation Tom Brokaw is so impressed by — the 1980s and ’90s were a period in which veterans looked back on the war with perspective and an ability to come to terms with it. My father began attending reunions of the 355th Fighter Group, got involved in creating a memorial commemorating the group’s brief, dangerous liaison with the tiny towns of Steeple Morden and Litlington in faraway Cambridgeshire, north of London. Dad spoke of Steeple Morden with a fondness he doesn’t have for his own hometown.

This spring, it looked like the group association would have its last reunion. All of the members are in their 80s. A last hurrah was planned, a farewell tour, a final addition to the Steeple Morden airfield marker, a closing of the door, a turning off of the lights. Although Dad bought tickets, my mother decided she wasn’t up to the trip. Dad has a pacemaker, and a daily cocktail of heart drugs that makes him unsteady at times. Without backup, he wasn’t sure he was up to the grind of traveling. Would I be interested in filling in for Mom?

Absolutely. It’s impossible to do enough for your parents, and besides, I had not been back to Europe in 20 years. This time, however, I’d be experiencing it through my father’s eyes, seeing the places and people that became touchstones in his life and, by extension, my own. A journey into our shared past.

The traveling turned out to be the easy part, even though I haven’t traveled with a parent in more than two decades. Dad and I preferred the same hard mattresses, the same amount of ventilation in the rooms, falling asleep and waking up at about the same time, a glass of beer before dinner and something harder afterwards, an amused wariness of artery-hardening English breakfasts. On the other hand, I still hold out hope that Europeans will discover the magic of ice cubes in drinks; after 60 years, Dad has given up on them.

In the rolling green farmlands of Cambridgeshire, I discovered that the war was neither far away nor a fading memory.

The tour was organized by retired tractor salesman and aviation enthusiast David Crow, an apple-cheeked bundle of energy and the 355th’s English point of contact. During the war, he was one of the scrawny Brit kids hanging around the airfield, asking, “Got any gum, chum?” In school, when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Crow wrote, “A Yank!”

Instead of simply being lonely teenagers thrown into the maw of combat — the 8th Air Force had the highest casualty rate of any American military organization during the war — the Americans were heartily appreciated, perhaps more so in retrospect. They had a profound effect on the British simply by their presence. These “fields of Little America” that dotted the English countryside created lasting bonds between America and England, and help explain why the English stick up for us when other countries don’t.

Retired sales manager Albert Moore, whom I met in the spectacular 8th Air Force Memorial Library in Norwich, studies the deeds of the 8th Air Force every weekend while his wife goes shopping. Why? His eyes softened. “All those lovely boys sacrificed,” he said. “Mr. Hitler would have taken us, no error, if it had not been for the Americans. It was the Yanks saved our bacon, even though we had no bacon left.”

Another one of the veteran pilots, Bill “Tiger” Lyons, speaking at the rededication of the 355th Memorial at Steeple Morden, pointed out what a near thing it had been. “Imagine what the world would be like now if the Nazis had won,” he said. “Just imagine. Well, I can’t. It took desperate teamwork from the diverse peoples of the world to stop fascism, the political movement that wanted to destroy diversity. Well, it was diversity that made us strong, holding hands across an ocean.”

It was a mighty near thing, the war. Americans sacrificed lives for it, but we never came close to sacrificing our entire culture and history.

The reunion ceremony caused a bit of a news stir in England, as a panel had been added to the memorial commemorating the Royal Air Force — the first time an American military organization had so honored the British — and also because the Duke of Gloucester had asked to be part of the ceremony, reading a religious passage — the first time a royal had participated directly in such a ceremony. It took place beneath a lowering English sky, in an emerald stand of spring wheat, the long-ago vestiges of the Steeple Morden airfield barely visible in the contours of the land.

At the nearby Steeple Morden schoolhouse, which dates back several centuries, the hallways are illustrated with heroic images of flying Mustangs. The English children greeted the shuffling old American aviators as if they were pop stars. They sang hymns like angels; they performed an American cheerleading routine; a little girl sang “America the Beautiful” solo, in a haunting voice that hung in the air. I saw my Dad and others wipe their eyes.

In nearby Litlington, half the village turned out to feed the Americans in the town center. Relationships were renewed that had begun more than half a century before. The Crown, a Litlington pub that stood during the war, still has 8th Air Force pictures on the walls. Americans lifted pints of dark, bitter beer as they did in the days of 1944, and remarked how it still tasted the same.

Inevitably, a group photo was called for. The American veterans, some with walkers and canes, slowly assembled on Litlington’s small public stage. The English folks took snapshots of their heroes and friends. It was likely the last time they’d visit, at least as a group. Even this will pass.

Suddenly the American pilots began to sing:

Off we go into the wild blue yonder

Climbing high into the sun

Here they come, zooming to meet our thunder

At ’em boys, give ‘er the gun!

Even Dad, who never sings in church, was bellowing along, smiling and content. The citizens of Litlington clapped delightedly.

I began to understand how this relationship with the British has helped clear away the darkness of war. It is a flame that continues to burn; it is the light that preserves the world. I am immensely proud of my father, not just for surviving the horrors of the war with honor, but for coming to terms with it over the years.

Burl Burlingame is a Star-Bulletin writer and editor.

Burl’s an awesome writer. But of course, that’s awesome material.

The end (almost) of violence

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In my previous post, I referred to the “peaceful times” in which we live. That’s counterintuitive for many people, for two reasons: First, modern communications make them aware of far more, and more widely spread, instances of violence than they would have known of in previous eras. And second, those things grab our attention — indeed, they are reported in the first place — because they stand out as exceptions to the peaceful rule.

There’s a very good piece in The Wall Street Journal today (there are always so many wonderful pieces in that paper on Saturdays — the only day I take now, after my subscription price more than doubled) taking the long view, and explaining why “we may be living in the most peaceable era in human existence.” None of what it says is surprising or new — except perhaps for the statistics — but it’s nice when someone takes a moment and pulls it all together.

In “Violence Vanquished,” Steven Pinker describes six major declines in violence through human history. The first is one that our friends who believe that government is the worst plague ever visited upon mankind should contemplate:

The first was a process of pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations, with cities and governments, starting about 5,000 years ago.

For centuries, social theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau speculated from their armchairs about what life was like in a “state of nature.” Nowadays we can do better. Forensic archeology—a kind of “CSI: Paleolithic”—can estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in ancient sites with bashed-in skulls, decapitations or arrowheads embedded in bones. And ethnographers can tally the causes of death in tribal peoples that have recently lived outside of state control.

These investigations show that, on average, about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently, compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state or empire imposes control over a territory, leading to the various “paxes” (Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are familiar to readers of history…

Since those days, violent death has shrunk to less than 1 percent, even if you factor in war-caused disease and famine. Oh, and we’re not just talking about good or benevolent government. Even the plunder economy of the Romans had its positive effect:

It’s not that the first kings had a benevolent interest in the welfare of their citizens. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his livestock from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding. From his point of view, such squabbling is a dead loss—forgone opportunities to extract taxes, tributes, soldiers and slaves…

And this is not just about pointing out how wrong the Tea Party is (although deeply wrong it certainly is). Some of our other friends on the left view commerce as though the taking of profit itself were inherently evil and destructive to mankind. Quite the contrary; it is a civilizing force just as is a well-ordered government (which is why the haters of government and the socialists are both wrong):

Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.

Finally, back to that matter of perception. If you wish to be simplistic, you can say it’s “the media’s fault,” for always telling you about the bad things rather than the good. If you ever spent, say, a month having to make decisions for a media outlet, you would realize how foolish that is. Even when times were flush, a newspaper’s or television station’s resources, and claim on your time, were finite. If you’re a town crier, your job is to tell people about the one house that’s on fire, so they can rise up and do something about it. You are useless if you instead say, “99.9 percent of the houses in the village are fine.”

That’s not to say I don’t decry the effect. In the grand scheme, media have had a devastating effect on society simply by playing their rightful role as government watchdogs. Over time, readers have come to the shockingly erroneous conclusion that government is nothing but crooks and waste, and the ability of government to be that civilizing force has been seriously weakened. As for violence — one of the most distressing developments of recent years in media is the rise of 24/7 TV news, which creates unlimited time that has to be filled. Consequently, violent crimes that would have been purely local stories 30 years ago are now thrown in the faces of the world constantly. There’s always something bad happening somewhere. This type of coverage creates the impression that it’s happening everywhere all the time.

If you can gain access to the full piece, it’s worth reading. So might be Mr. Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Full engagement, the only viable, effective and moral stance for the U.S. to take toward the world

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Posting that column last night — the one from 9/23/01 — I realized that I had forgotten to post something else a week earlier.

When I shared with you the hasty column I wrote for the “extra” we put out on 9/11, and the one I turned around immediately and wrote for the next day, I had fully intended also to share a more important piece from several days later — the editorial I wrote for that following Sunday. But the 16th of this month came and went, and I failed to do that.

So I share it now. Being an editorial (an institutional, rather than personal opinion) and being a Sunday piece (when newspapers take a step back from immediate events, and also when they tend to express the views they regard as being of greatest import), it’s different from the other pieces. Less of my voice and style, more formalized. But at the same time, for the purposes of this blog, it also has perhaps greater value as a clear expression of my own views of what the nation should do going forward.

In it, I expressed views I had long held, and still hold, but they were sharpened and set into relief by the events of that week.

Spoiler alert: Basically, this piece is about a couple of things. The first is the need for re-engagement in the world, after a growing isolationism that had worried me all through the 90s. With notable exceptions — our involvement in the Balkans, for instance — we had become more insular, more preoccupied with our own amusements as a fat, happy nation. Up to that point, I had objected on the basis that when you are the world’s richest and most powerful nation (indisputable after the fall of the USSR), it is morally wrong to turn your back on the world, like a rich man behind the walls of his gated community. What 9/11 did was add to that the fact that such disengagement was positively dangerous.

The other main point is something I later learned an interesting term for: DIME, for “Diplomatic,” “Information,” “Military” and “Economic.” Actually, that’s not quite it, either. The DIME term refers to ways of exerting power, and that it certainly part of it, but not all of it. Another piece of the concept I was talking about was what you often hear referred to as “soft power.” Unfortunately, that is often mistakenly expressed as an alternative to “hard power.” But they complement each other. A unipolar power trying to achieve all of its goals through either alone is doomed to fail, ultimately.

No, I have to go back to the earlier, vaguer term: Engagement. On every level you can think of — diplomatic, cultural, mercantile, humanitarian, and yes, military.

Much of this piece, given the moment in which it was written, is occupied with the military part. That’s natural. That’s the hardest to persuade people of in our peaceful times (if you doubt we live in peaceful times, I plan a post after this one to address that). The rest, people just nod about and say, yes, of course we should do those things. (OK, perhaps I’m being a bit sanguine about that. I’ll just say that the people who need convincing on the military part are likely to say that — others are likely to say ‘Hell, no — let them fend for themselves.” And thus we have the two sides of isolationism.) They take more convincing on the tough stuff. (Some of you will object, “Not after 9/11! People’s blood was boiling!” But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about passions of the moment. I was talking about long-term policy. I’m talking about what happens after people calm down and say, Never mind; let’s just withdraw.)

Reading it now, I wish the piece had been longer, with far more explication of the other elements, and how they were integrated. The following years, we saw constant argument between two views, neither of which saw the value of the whole concept. On the one hand, you had the Bushian — really, more the Rumsfeldian — notion that all you had to do was topple a tyrant and things would be fine. On the other, there was the myopic view that soft power was the only kind that was moral and effective.

These ideas are as relevant now as ever. Now that we have employed hard power to topple a tyrant in Libya, will we engage fully on other fronts to help Libya have a better future, one in which it has a chance of being a long-term friend, ally and trading partner? Or will we turn our attention away now that the loud noises have stopped going off?

Anyway, I’ve explained it enough. Here it is:

IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, September 16, 2001

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words “missile defense shield” to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.

That’s about the only way it might have helped.

Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

Essentially, we have wasted a decade.

After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.

We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was “It’s the economy, stupid.” Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s “policeman.”

Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.

Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.

Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.

In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, “When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general.” That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.

At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.

Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.

We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call “humint” – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.

But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.

We must cease to regard “nation-building” as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.

We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

Another snapshot of what we were thinking 10 years ago — what I was thinking, anyway

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I almost forgot that today was the 23rd. Weeks ago, when I was digging up columns from 9/11/01 and the days after, I also hunted for this one, which ran 9/23/01.

It was unusual, because I was trying — rather indirectly, as I look back — to express something about the way I had reacted to the attacks earlier in the month, on a personal level.

I knew there was a lot of emotion in our country — shock, grief, anger, fear. And I realized that I wasn’t feeling those things as sharply as a lot of other people seemed to be. Part of that is my personality, and my habit. When something huge happens in the world, rather than internalizing it, I tend to think, Here’s something to be figured out, and commented on. This causes me to be out of sync with a lot of readers sometimes.

But there was more to it than that. Several months before, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It had already spread to her liver. Pretty much all the emotions I had to deploy were devoted to that, and to what our whole family was going through. I was interacting with the larger world, but in a muted sort of way. (Maybe “muted” isn’t the right word. I just knew my reaction was different from what it otherwise would have been.)

Within our family, we didn’t know what was going to happen, and we were taking it a day at a time. Now, 10 years later, she’s doing great, except for having a nasty cold in the moment. I can hear her in the other room as I type this, talking to her brother on the phone. Thank God, again and again.

Anyway, here is my attempt at the time to wrestle with both that, and what was happening in the wider world. You’ll see emotion in it — some anger, for instance. But also detachment, even with echoes of fatalism, that you might find it hard to relate to. Here it is:

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WERE KILLED BY HOPE – THE WRONG KIND

The State – Sunday, September 23, 2001

YOU KNOW WHAT killed those thousands of innocent people in the World Trade Center, and on the planes that plowed into them?

Hope.

Oh, I know what you’ll say, and you’ll be right: They were killed by murderous, merciless fanatics who hate Americans. But those fanatics couldn’t have succeeded if the crew and passengers aboard those two planes hadn’t been clinging to hope.

There is, of course, no way to know exactly what they were thinking. But it’s reasonable to assume that it’s pretty much what you or I would have thought under similar circumstances:

If I just sit still and do what the hijackers say, maybe they won’t hurt me or anyone else. We outnumber them, and they’re armed only with knives, but there’s no sense in trying to overpower them; somebody could get hurt. They’ll land somewhere, and make their demands, and once we’re on the ground, maybe they’ll let us go.

Their hope was in vain. They had no way of knowing that. And so they, and thousands of others, died – the victims of hope.

I find that thought repugnant. After all, life is nothing without hope. The absence of hope is despair. Isn’t it?

But then I realized there are different kinds of hope. There’s the passive kind, in which you do nothing and hope everything will be all right. Then there’s the active kind, in which you have the courage to do something, even when taking action can be difficult, painful and risky, in the hope that you can make things better – for others if not for yourself. That’s the kind of hope that is more likely to be paired with faith and love. It’s real hope, not the false kind.

The people on those planes that were turned into guided missiles clung to that false hope because they lacked critical information. By contrast, the folks on Flight 93 knew that if they sat still, hoping things would turn out all right, they would die for sure. They knew that because they had heard, via cell phone, what had happened in New York. So they tried to stop the hijackers.

They all died anyway. But not in vain. They prevented the deaths of untold others.

They acted because they had information that helped them understand something soldiers learn in the bitter crucible of combat. The key is to give up the false hope that if you do nothing, you and those around you will be safe. It’s a hard thing to do in combat. It’s a hard thing to do under any circumstances.

When my wife discovered she had breast cancer several months ago, and within three weeks learned it had spread to her liver, we lost that old, familiar false hope – the kind that makes you live your life blithely, thinking you’ve got all the time in the world, as long as you don’t take unnecessary chances.

Now, we know that each day is a gift from God, not some right that we’re entitled to because we’re middle-class Americans. We know that we have to make the most of it, for the sake of others as well as for ourselves. We know that we have to fight. And we have fought. That is, my wife has. She’s the combat soldier here; I’m just support services.

She has held back nothing in this battle. All weapons have been thrown into the fight – chemotherapy, surgery, chemo again. We’re not sure what else will be necessary, but we’re assuming radiation. We have collected invaluable intelligence through a wearying series of tests. And she has terrible scars, most of them hidden.

But the fight has gone well. The cancer is at this point on the run. We rejoice in this, and continue to live our lives – hopefully. But we don’t slide back into the old, deceptive kind of hope. We can’t afford that now. We know there will never be a time when we can be complacent again.

The world has a cancer , and it has struck at the vital organs of this nation. Even when we root out the visible tumors, we’ll know that microscopic bits of it can live on to strike at us again.

A lot of Americans haven’t undergone the necessary change in attitude to fight this cancer. They want guarantees that action won’t lead to further pain. They want to know there’s an exit strategy. They want to cling to false hope, or none at all.

But there are no guarantees. The nation will just have to do the best it can, acting in as decent and humane a manner as possible while doing everything within our power to root out the disease – even when it causes pain and has sickening side effects.

That’s a huge challenge, but we’re going to have to find a way to meet it.

The alternative is to cling to the old, false hope that if we just do nothing, the terrorists won’t hurt us. We now know where that kind of hope leads.

Some of you will notice themes that we would later argue over a great deal on this blog. But I didn’t post this to have another argument.

And I didn’t just post it to reminisce about personal matters. I see it as a sort of artifact, not only of what I was thinking at the time, but to provide a snapshot in time, a time of limbo between the attacks and the beginning of our war in Afghanistan. Before the Patriot Act. Before the anthrax scare.

I was reminded to post this tonight by a documentary my wife was watching about what happened on the actual day of the attacks. We’ve gone over and over that ground in recent weeks. Something I think a lot of us have forgotten is what it was like to be living through the time — the weeks, the months, even the next year or two — after that. The mind naturally amends, in light of facts learned subsequently. I know that when I went looking for this column, I remembered it a little differently from what I actually found when I read it. I found that interesting. I thought you might, too.

Is Lamar Alexander about to do something very cool — from an UnParty perspective?

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I’m puzzling, hopefully, over what this means:

The no. 3 Republican in the Senate will step down from his leadership position early next year, despite having no plans to retire from Congress.

Lamar Alexander informed his fellow GOP colleagues of his rather surprising decision on Tuesday morning in a letter obtained byPolitico, saying that the move was the best decision for him and the Senate.

“Stepping down from leadership will liberate me to spend more time working for results on the issues I care most about,” the 71-year-old former Tennessee governor wrote. “I want to do more to make the Senate a more effective institution so that it can deal better with serious issues. There are different ways to provide leadership within the Senate. After nine years here, this is how I believe I can now make my greatest contribution. For these same reasons I do not plan to seek a leadership position in the next Congress.”…

I’ve respected Lamar Alexander since I covered him in his first successful run for governor in 1978, spending a good bit of time with him on the road (OK, so I was on the road with him 24/7 for one week before switching over to cover his opponent, but it was enough time to form a positive impression).

Lamar was never a guy you get particularly excited about. He was… bland. One of the most striking things about him was how much his speaking voice sounded like Pat Boone’s. (Once, I heard a PSA on the radio by Boone, and I thought it was the governor until he identified himself at the end — or was it the other way around?) His much-publicized walk across Tennessee in the trademark red-and-black shirt was SO contrived, such an earnest bid to be interesting, that I would joke about it, while at the same time appreciating his seriousness. He was what Tennessee needed after the rollicking corruption of Ray Blanton (who had defeated him four years earlier, on the very first election night of my newspaper career, when I was a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal). I would joke that Lamar’s main appeal to the voters was to subliminally project, “I won’t steal the silverware from the governor’s mansion.” But after Blanton, that was progress.

Turned out that there was a lot more progress to come with Alexander. He was different from any Republican governor I have seen since. He started out appointing Democrats to his Cabinet (his chief political adviser was someone who had worked for Democrats), and he reached out to the Democratic majority in the legislature to get his agenda passed, including significant movement toward merit pay for teachers. From day one, he was about raising the incomes of the average Tennessean, and he was for working with whomever it took to get that done. He worked particularly productively with the iconic speaker of the House (and later governor) Ned Ray McWherter.

He has served his state, and now his country, with pragmatic dedication and moderate sensibilities. So I’m sorry to see him leave leadership.

And puzzled. What does he mean he can be more effective outside that role? There’s a hint in the original Politico story:

Alexander says the decision was rooted in his desire to foster consensus in the gridlocked Senate, a role he felt constrained playing while spearheading the partisan Senate GOP messaging machine.

That sounds very cool — and even, despite this being Lamar Alexander, exciting. In an UnParty sense. I’d love to hear an elaboration on that. It would be nice to have back about 15 minutes of that time I spent riding around with him in cars and planes back in the day. I think I’d have more interesting questions now…

On the campaign plane with Alexander, back in the day./Brad Warthen

On Jim Clyburn, earmarks, race, and representing a poor district

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I’ve never liked one thing that traditionally has been core to the makeup of members of Congress: bringing home the bacon.

Yes, I know it’s a particularly honored tradition in South Carolina, from Mendel Rivers through Strom Thurmond and on and on. This state was devastated in The Recent Unpleasantness, and it was sort of natural in subsequent generations for folks to want their elected representatives to bring home Yankee bacon whenever possible.

Doesn’t mean that’s the right way to run a government. The federal government should look at the entire country and decide where it needs to build military bases or roads or bridges or place programs of any sort, according to which locations best suit the needs of the whole nation. Or where the greatest need for a particular service might be at a given time — such as disaster services. Largess should not flow according to which lawmakers has the most pull.

Congress has been so bad about this that when we decided we needed to close some military bases the nation no longer needed, we had to set up BRAC to prevent interference by individual members of Congress. It’s been a successful process, but the need for it testifies to a painful failure of our basic system of government.

Congressional pull is not the way to set priorities for our government. This is particularly obvious to a lot of people when we look at spending, but I’ve always been concerned that it’s just a bad policy all-around for making effective decisions for the country. And it disenfranchises Americans whose representatives have less pull.

So it is that I’ve been pleased (in general) with Jim DeMint’s efforts to stop earmarks (which are actually only a small part of the problem), and have never been much of a fan of Jim Clyburn’s more traditional bring-home-the-bacon approach.

But I’m not without sympathy for Clyburn. To explain why, I’ll share a story that at first may seem unrelated. I did not witness this, but I’ve heard about it.

A large part of why Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, as you will recall, was that he proposed to clean up government. No more Watergates. He promised, although we didn’t yet use this word for it back then, transparency. It was a huge deal; he was never going to lie to us. So after the election, there was a meeting in Columbia of people who had worked in his campaign in South Carolina. Probably a pretty big meeting, since back in those days, we actually had some Democrats in this state. And the Carter guy who was conducting the meeting told them that they shouldn’t expect any inside track on getting positions in the new administration. Everything was going to be open and aboveboard and a level playing field, and there was to be no smoke-filled room patronage.

One of the campaign supporters in the room, a local black leader who was then quite young (I’d want to talk to him and refresh my memory of the story’s details before using his name), protested, “But we just got into the room, and we just started smoking.”

Which was true enough. And more than once have I heard such protests from black politicians — now that we have some political influence, you want to weed such influence out of government.

Well, yes, I do. And I’m sorry some folks just got into the room, but we’ve had enough of that kind of politics.

Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to Jim Clyburn’s desire to get some federal investment into parts of the state that were bypassed when white politicians were grabbing federal resources for South Carolina. This isn’t about unsavory practices; this is about funds that will be distributed somewhere, so why not in your neglected district? Perfectly understandable. Even admirable. So while I am against, for instance, the bridge he wants to build between Lone Star and Rimini, I understand his desire to get some infrastructure into that area that might help economic development flow in behind it.

Against this background, I was interested in Warren Bolton’s column in The State today. I had actually missed it in a cursory skim through the paper this morning (I was conversing with several people while perusing), so I’m glad that my attention was called back to it by a release from, quite naturally, Jim Clyburn’s office. It was headlined, “Earmarks saving grace for Clyburn’s district.” An excerpt:

Frankly, I think the free-wheeling system that has allowed members of Congress to target pet projects for funding is too loosely monitored and arbitrary and, therefore, can be wasteful. But I don’t think that earmarks in general are bad; they can be used to make sure worthwhile projects are funded. In addition to a lack of transparency, the big problem is that the system doesn’t ensure that those important things get done.

But Mr. Clyburn didn’t invent this system. It was in place eons before he even arrived in Congress. Given that those in his district have grave needs that aren’t being met by the state, which has yet to come up with an effective way to address rural challenges that can’t be met by cash-poor local governments, he’s doing what he can.

It’s amazing to me how so many in this state can criticize Mr. Clyburn’s actions when they should be familiar with the challenge of rural South Carolina. While we get many letters to the editor from writers taking issue with Mr. Clyburn on legitimately debatable grounds, such as his positions on issues, his philosophy and even his use of earmarks, many others make statements and accusations that are just plain unfair, false and — quite frankly — racist….

I, like Warren, have fielded some of those calls — and emails, and letters, and blog comments. And while I may often agree with the person commenting that a particular spending proposal is a bad idea, it is disturbing to hear the undertone, the emotion that underlies the complaining. And Warren is right to use what he calls “the ‘R’ word” to describe this thing we hear. It’s the same undertone that I so often hear in the constant attacks on the very idea of public schools, or of government in general — because so many whites in our state, and in other parts of the country as well, have gotten it into their heads that government exists to take money away from honest, hard-working, moral, thrifty, sensible white people and give it, outright, to lazy, shiftless, no-good black people.

Not to put too fine a point on it.

Anyway, I’ve probably given you enough to discuss, but I’d like to point out another passage in Warren’s column:

I get lots of letters and calls from people who try to suggest that Mr. Clyburn can be a big spender and favor increasing taxes on the rich because he is insulated by voters in his “gerrymandered” majority-black district; some all but suggest that the congressman configured the 6th District himself.

But the truth is that Republicans in the S.C. State House gerrymandered the district in an effort to pack as many of the state’s black people together as possible so they could get as many Republicans as possible elected to Congress. That meant creating a majority-black district that has lots of rural areas that are heavily poor, undereducated and undeveloped. They’re areas that lack infrastructure such as water, sewer and roads — or libraries, theaters and bowling allies.

Amen to that Warren, and I’m glad to see you writing that, since I’m not at the paper to do it anymore.

I would amend his characterization of what happened slightly, though. I recall particularly what happened in the early ’90s in the Legislature: Republicans worked with black Democrats to draft a plan, over the resistance of the white Democrats who ran the SC House, that created several more majority-black districts.

Black lawmakers were frustrated with Speaker Bob Sheheen and other Democratic leaders because they were not willing to draw as many “majority-minority” districts as possible. The motivation of the Republicans was less direct. They had figured out that for every district you make majority black, you remove black voters from several other districts, thereby making those seats safe for Republicans, and unsafe for Democrats of any color. So, a tiny gain for those who wanted a few more black lawmakers, but a HUGE, strategic victory for Republicans who wanted to take over South Carolina.

Once that reapportionment plan was in place, the way to power was paved for the GOP. It put them in striking distance. They had big gains in the 1994 election. That, plus some key defections by white Democrats after the election (indeed, the earlier defection of David Beasley to the GOP had given them the head of their ticket), and we saw the Republicans take over the House in January 1995.

But I’ve reminisced enough. Time for y’all to have your say.

What I wrote later in the day on 9/11/01

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Yesterday, I showed y’all what I wrote in the first hour, more or less, after learning of the attacks in New York and Washington 10 years ago. That raw, stream-of-consciousness piece ran in the “extra” that The State put out that day.

As soon as I had handed that to the folks putting that special edition together, I turned to what we would say for the next day’s paper — for Sept. 12. Then, almost as quickly, but with the benefit of a couple of more hours to let the news sink in, I wrote the following column.

Still nothing I would hold up as one of my best pieces of work, but it has its moments. For me. See what you think. And remember again: This is not a piece written with the benefit of years of reflection:

NOW THAT REALITY EXCEEDS FICTION, WHAT SORT OF ENDING WILL WE WRITE?

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Author: BRAD WARTHEN , Editorial Page Editor

WE’RE IN TOM Clancy’s world now.

Mr. Clancy is derided as a writer by critics for many reasons, one of them being the fact that his plots tend to be so fantastic and contrived. Take his novel Executive Orders. It was too much to be believed. It opened with a 747 having been deliberately flown into the U.S. Capitol, shutting down the government. This is followed by a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that result in thousands of civilian deaths on American soil. And for most of the book, no one knows who is doing this to us, or why.

We now know what that’s like. In fact, what we are now facing is worse than Mr. Clancy’s fevered imaginings.

It may seem unbelievably frivolous to be thinking about pulp fiction at a time like this, but my mind keeps returning to it, and partly because this seems so much like something from the realm of fiction – or because I wish it were.

It certainly outstrips anything that’s happened on any one day in this nation’s real-life history.

The comparisons to Pearl Harbor are inevitable. But in so many ways this is different – and worse. The death toll is larger, and the bodies we’re counting – and will continue to count for some time – aren’t wearing uniforms. They didn’t sign up to fight. They were just going to work, in what they thought was a free and peaceful country.

It’s also worse because we don’t know where to go with our grief and our rage. On Dec. 7, 1941, those sailors looking up at the red suns on the wings of the planes that were killing their buddies knew exactly what to do – and so did the rest of the nation.

I wonder if we’ll ever know what to do about this, in the same, ultimately satisfying sense of being able to restore peace and security to our nation and world. Oh, when we find out who did this, there’s no question about what we’ll do in the short term. Give us a target, something to shoot back at, and it will soon be nothing but smoke and ashes.

It will be a very short war. But what will we do when it’s over? How will we deal with the other disaffected, unconnected people around the world who will take inspiration from Tuesday’s events? What can we do, and what will we do, about the fact that there are people who hate us for no better reasons than that we are strong, wealthy and free?

Pearl Harbor isn’t our only comparison. People have mentioned the explosion of the Challenger as being comparable – then, too, the nation watched in helpless horror as fellow human beings died, in real time. But as awful as it was, there were only seven dead. And we figured out how to fix it. It was a simple problem of engineering.

Better O-rings won’t take care of this.

There are no precedents. Nothing in our past was quite like this. Even the Civil War, the most traumatic event in our collective experience, was in a sense less unsettling, in that everyone had a clearer understanding of what was going on.

Just as we can take little comfort from the past, our future offers no solace. It’s certainly not going to be anything like what we expected.

Some of the changes will come only if we’re smart enough to make them happen ourselves. Americans are going to have to start caring more about foreign affairs, if we’re ever going to deal adequately with this challenge. We can’t just fire a few cruise missiles and then hide behind a magical “Star Wars” shield. We’re going to have to engage the world – or at least, we’re going to have to demand that our elected leaders do so. And those political leaders are going to have to set aside a lot of their petty, partisan differences – or we’re going to have to replace them.

In other ways, some kind of change is inevitable, and all we can do is pick between unsavory choices.

From now on, this nation will be either less safe or less free. The openness and the freedom of movement that we take for granted make us enormously vulnerable, a fact that is absurdly obvious today. I suspect that at least in the short term, we’ll choose being a little less free in order to be a little safer. And that’s a sad choice to have to make.

I said we’re in Tom Clancy’s world. That’s true up to a point. The biggest difference is that I know how the book ends – once Jack Ryan and the other fictional protagonists figured out who was attacking the United States, they made war upon them with devastating effectiveness. In the end, the nation emerged stronger than ever.

What will happen in real life? Our capacity to make war is undisputed. But in the long term, how will we ever be the same?

The fact is, we won’t be. Our challenge is to emerge as something better than we were, not something worse.

Dear Brad Warthen, Please join me on November 10, 2011, in wishing the United States Marine Corps a Happy 236th Birthday. I’m proud to honor my fellow Marines past and present on this special day. Please take a moment to watch our birthday tribute by clicking the‘View 2011 Tribute’ button below. I’d also like to extend this tribute to all of the men and women serving in every branch of the U.S. Military – Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force or Coast Guard. Thank you all for your tireless commitment to keeping our country safe. Sincerely,

To England and back with Dad

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WERE KILLED BY HOPE – THE WRONG KIND

NOW THAT REALITY EXCEEDS FICTION, WHAT SORT OF ENDING WILL WE WRITE?

To England and
back with Dad