Right Wing Nut House

It was a bright, sunny late January day in St. Louis with a hint of warmth as I recall. I was sitting at my desk signing the 100 or so checks that had to go out at the end of the month when my wife called. All she could say was “Oh! Those poor kids.” She was referring to the Challenger disaster and the fact that Christa McCauliffe, the first real civilian to go into space and a teacher from a small school in New Hampshire, was killed in full view of her students on national TV.

Living in an apartment literally behind the office complex where I worked, it took me less than a minute to sprint home. For the rest of the day - a day in retrospect much like 9/11 - I was glued to the TV as history unfolded before my eyes. Even 20 years later I have a hard time trying to put my emotions into context. I was sorry for the astronauts of course. But much more than that, I realized that the tragedy signaled the end of the space age as we had come to know it.

By 1986 it had become apparent that NASA had oversold the Shuttle. Thinking back that day to April of 1981 when I snuck out of work and went to the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill to sit in the bar and watch the launch of the very first shuttle, I tried to recapture the feeling of watching the machine as it rose majestically into the air. “Go! Go! Go!” Everyone in the crowded bar was screaming at the top of their lungs as the excitement of the day made me think that I was witnessing a gigantic step forward on mankind’s road to the stars.

It wasn’t to be. Instead, the Shuttle proved to be something of a lemon, a multi billion dollar space truck that the government had to pay corporations to use by charging a pittance for satellite launching compared to what it actually cost the government to launch and maintain. We knew this by January 28, 1986. What we didn’t know and didn’t find out until the Presidential Commission on the disaster returned its damning findings was that NASA had ossified into a glacial bureaucracy that no amount of tinkering could fix because the problems were spiritual, not systemic.

NASA had stopped listening to the music, the siren song coming from the stars. Their thoughts and energies were earthbound. They had lost the “can-do” spirit of the go-go 60’s and become just another incompetent federal bureaucracy.

Dr. Pat Santay was flight surgeon to the Challenger crew and obviously has some poignant, gripping memories from that day. I urge you to read this post in its entirety. Her introduction especially caught my eye:

NASA has evolved into a culture that does not tolerate criticism well. It is a place where being a “team player” means shutting up and doing what you are told, or else you will be marginalized and your career finished. That is not the sort of place where innovation –or safety– thrive.

I still believe that space exploration and colonization is the destiny of humanity and that one day our decendants will fly from star to star the way we drive from city to city. I no longer imagine them flying in NASA spacecraft, however. The astronauts of Challenger and Columbia are some of the pioneers that slowly but surely bring us closer to that dream. To all of them I say, the dream is alive and well…but that NASA stopped dreaming a while back and is now just semi-comatose. We will make it into outer space to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new civilizations and go where noone has gone before–but it will be through the courage of private citizens whose boldness is not limited by a risk-adverse and earth-bound government bureaucracy. I personally look to them to bring the future.

It is not cheap going into space. It costs NASA around $1,500 per pound to put a man into space and keep him alive. Before the kind of future Pat is talking about becomes a reality, that number is going to have to be sliced by 90%. And the corporations that can do it are probably already in existence.

NASA’s current plans call for returning to the moon by 2018. To my mind,, it’s an even money bet to see whether a commercial enterprise beats the government back there or not. Given NASA’s recent track record with making deadlines and having projects come in under budget, I suspect that unless the issue is pressed, NASA would lose that bet.

The American space program actually defined this country for a while. No longer. If nothing else, the fact that NASA has been staffed by small men with small dreams has turned a once proud agency and showcase for US achievement into a shell of its former self. I’m with the Doc; it’s time to look elsewhere for those who dream big dreams and have the drive and determination to make them come true.

A little bit of all of us died that horrible day 20 years ago. But soon…very soon, we may start hearing the music again.

Joseph J. Ellis is one of my favorite historians. The Mount Holyoke professor won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2001 with his fascinating story of the men who created America called Founding Brothers. And his book American Sphinx that looked at the towering figure of Thomas Jefferson with a freshness and vigor that earned him a 1997 National Book Award is also well worth a read.

But in an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times, Ellis makes a mistake made by many historians when he tries to put the events of 9/11 in perspective while the smell of burning jet fuel and charred bodies is still fresh in the nostrils of many Americans. In other words, Ellis is attempting to contextualize an event that for all intents and purposes is still “news” and therefore immune to the kind of analysis that even an excellent historian like Ellis can generate.

I believe it was the Civil War historian Bruce Catton who half-joked that mid 20th century historians of the French L’Académie française declined to study any event later than the Napoleonic Wars. They believed that it took 100 years for all the personal reflections, reminisces, and correspondence to see the light of day hence, it was useless to try and piece together what actually happened during any given time in history without the passage of time.

There is something to be said for that kind of attitude toward history. And when looking at the events of 9/11, it is tempting to draw lessons and make historical analogies that a good historian like Ellis would normally eschew. Allowing a single event to ripen and age in the minds of the people ordinarily brings a kind of consensus as to where it fits into the national narrative. This is when “perspective” can be imprinted on the national psyche and give depth and meaning to a single event. History is all about having 20-20 hindsight. And the time and distance we move from any single point allows for emotions to settle and memory to fade so that the historian can then place into a context relevant to our personal experience events that when they occurred generated passions that could cloud the judgment and roil the emotions of both the historian and reader.

It’s bad enough that Ellis is attempting such a feat of legerdemain regarding 9/11 itself. But he also attempts to place the Administration’s efforts at homeland security in context with other measures taken by Presidents during national crisis and finds the comparison with Bush wanting. It may be that someday (and let’s hope that for America there will in fact be a “someday”) future historians will find much to criticize regarding the President’s aggressive domestic security policies. But with so much hidden from the average citizen by necessity, it seems to me to be a futile exercise to attempt such analogies now. We know quite a bit about what went into Adam’s decision to introduce the hated Alien and Sedition Acts. I daresay we don’t know squat about the NSA intercept program compared to what we will know in 100 years.

Simply put, Ellis is dead wrong in trying to train his historian’s eye on 9/11:

Whether or not we can regard Sept. 11 as history, I would like to raise two historical questions about the terrorist attacks of that horrific day. My goal is not to offer definitive answers but rather to invite a serious debate about whether Sept. 11 deserves the historical significance it has achieved.

My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.

I appreciate Professor Ellis’s disclaimer regarding “definitive answers” about ranking 9/11 as a threat to our survival. And if it is debate he wants, he’s got it.

Ellis takes several historical events - the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the Cold War - as events that were more of a threat to our survival than 9/11. I find the choices made by the professor interesting but would argue that only the Cold War was a true threat to American survival. There is a school of thought that argues there was no way American independence could have been denied, that even if Washington’s Continental army had been destroyed, resistance would have continued until the British gave up and went home.

A similar argument can be made about the War of 1812. The British may have temporarily been able to hang on to the Northwest territories and perhaps even have occupied the mid-Atlantic states for a while. But as the Treaty of Ghent proved, the British were not interested in reestablishing colonies or maintaining much of a presence in North America. The question of New England secession is an interesting one, best dealt with by author Orson Scott Card in his Tales of Alvin Maker series. But for the same reason that even if the northern states had given up at some point during the Civil War the United States would have come back together at some point. The ties of history, commerce, and culture were too natural and too strong to break, even by war.

That leaves the Cold War where the United States could have been destroyed in less than a day. Ellis specifically calls to mind the Cuban Missile Crisis which in many ways marked the apogee of Cold War tensions. I can’t argue that 9/11 was a greater threat to national security than the Cuban missile crisis. But I can certainly point out that the professor is comparing apples and oranges by failing to differentiate between an event like the Cuban missile crisis and the ongoing threat posed by those who perpetrated the attack on the Trade Centers. Taking the Cold War in its totality and putting it into the context of an existential threat to the survival of the United States is all well and good. But even here, given the implacable nature of our enemies compared to the Russians who after all were not willing to destroy themselves in order to defeat us, one has to take into account the fanaticism of the jihadists in order to appreciate the current threat - something I don’t believe the professor does.

Not content however to rank the threats to our national life, Professor Ellis then really gets my goat by pointing out other security responses of the government to different crisis in our history:

My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the “quasi-war” with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950’s, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.

In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing. Some very distinguished American presidents, including John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, succumbed to quite genuine and widespread popular fears. No historian or biographer has argued that these were their finest hours.

I will defer to the professor’s superior knowledge and judgment about how “lamentable” each of these reactions to crisis was in “retrospect.” He’s a better man than I if he can judge Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus (which I’m sure the professor is aware was only one in a series of actions President Lincoln took that violated the Bill of Rights). I prefer to look at Lincoln and FDR doing what they honestly believed must be done to safeguard the Republic. Does that make them immune from criticism? Not from a distance with that 20-20 hindsight I referred to earlier.

But the same historians and biographers who take those illustrious Americans to task for their actions initiated in the name of “national security,” rarely fail to point out the context in which those decisions were made. Can a decision like Lincoln’s to abandon 4th Amendment protections in areas of the country in rebellion be seen as both wrong and necessary? I would think that Father Abraham thought so. He knew full well he was violating the Constitution: “”To state the question more directly, are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated? Lincoln went on to ponder whether obeying the Supreme Court would not violate his oath of office to “preserve and protect” the country since he felt the suspension of habeas corpus to be absolutely essential to the survival of the country.

This, I believe, places President Bush’s actions in a similar light. While it is evident that Professor Ellis does not view 9/11 as the earth shattering event that many of the rest of us do (reason enough for any of us not to try and place it in historical perspective) it is also clear that he feels it is wrong to have it dominate our national security and domestic policy to the exclusion of most other issues:

What Patrick Henry once called “the lamp of experience” needs to be brought into the shadowy space in which we have all been living since Sept. 11. My tentative conclusion is that the light it sheds exposes the ghosts and goblins of our traumatized imaginations. It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.

Do I detect a whiff of partisanship in the professor’s notation that there has been an “overreaction” to 9/11? And how is it possible in this context that “complacency” toward an enemy that as I write this is desperately trying to get its hands on weapons that would kill 10 times and 10 times again the 3,000 that perished that horrible day?

The reason September 11 is the “defining influence” that it has become is the recognition of the kind of enemy we face and their fanatical desire to kill as many Americans as they can regardless of the consequences to themselves. It may be that someday soon we will start calling this war something besides the War on Terror. Goodness knows that appellation is a misnomer if there ever was one. It should be known as the War Against the Darkness or the War Against Modernity. It may even become War Against Islam which is what our enemies are calling it anyway. But to say that our actions have been an “overreaction” presupposes that there is a limit to what our enemies wish to visit upon us. A look at what they say and their actions in support of those words should disabuse all but the most inward looking among us that they mean what they say and worse, are capable of making good on their bloodcurdling boasts.

Sorry professor. I admire your attempt to get a debate going on this issue. But it may be a non-starter. In order to debate the issues you outline in your article, there has to be an agreement on basic facts like whether or not we are at war and whether or not you think George Bush has horns, a tail, and is the incarnation of the devil himself. What would be the point in debating 9/11 in an historical context if the person on the other side sometimes appears to believe that those dastardly attacks never happened?

UPDATE

A couple of other views on this worth looking at.

Ranting Profs:

In other words, because when we have responded to trauma in the past, the threat has turned out to be exaggerated, and September 11 was a trauma, this threat too will turn out to be exaggerated, QED.

And, by the by, however big a pig Joe McCarthy was, I think most people have come to the conclusion by now that there really were some Communists running around. And he himself argues that they were a threat when he lists the Cuban Missile Crisis in the first tier of historical threats — those weren’t Swedes pointing missiles at us, you know.

Well said. And I was going to include her point about Jumpin’ Joe being vindicated by the Venona intercepts - cables that showed that there were literally dozens of communists at State and DoD including Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs - but I also felt the professor had a point about McCarthy’s overreaching.

Robert Schlesinger at the Huffpo has a thoughtful piece:

There is of course a strong counter-argument. The September 11 attacks brought into sharp relief the fact that we have entered a world where individuals can wield destructive power that was once reserved for nation-states.

While I obviously have my inclinations, I am not entirely comfortable with either side. But it’s still a debate worth having.

I would argue that a couple of nukes would destroy the America we live in now and replace it with something unrecognizable.

See also Ed’s rebuttal to my post in the comments.

UPDATE II

Pat Curley has a great point that I sort of surrounded but didn’t make as clearly as this:

First, let’s stop calling it “Sept. 11″. That’s one incident. Where does Pearl Harbor rate on his scale? Answer: It doesn’t; it’s a part of a larger conflict called World War II. Obviously 9-11 wasn’t as big a threat to the United States as World War II. But is Islamic terrorism as big a threat as Hitler and the Japanese? Maybe not, but the scale is not as dramatically off kilter. How many American civilians were killed by our enemies in World War II? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it was not as many as died on 9-11.

Outside of Pearl Harbor and the odd sinking of a freighter that was carrying passengers, the number of dead American civilians doesn’t come close to the number we lost on 9/11.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

He was a not a very tall man, standing barely 5′ 7″ , but he was powerfully built. His barrel chest and broad shoulders gave the impression of a man possessed of great strength while his short gait and cat-like movements denoted a man of purpose. Surprisingly graceful, he had large, delicate hands that moved hypnotically when he spoke.

And when he spoke, the thunder rolled.

It is a constant source of amazement to me that even today, more than 3 decades after his assassination, Martin Luther King can be a source of controversy. I attribute it partly to the fact that so many alive today did not see him in the flesh but rather have only glimpsed his image in the grainy, black and white kinescopes and primitive video tapes that survive him. That, and the complicated legacy he left behind allows those so inclined to associate Dr. King with all manner of moral and political sins that like it or not, was part of the totality of his persona.

Regardless of what you think of King as a man or a political icon, as a figure in American history he was and remains a giant, easily as important as most of the founding fathers. In fact, from my own perspective, only George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had a greater impact on our history. If Washington can be called the “Father of our Country” and Jefferson the “Father of American Ideals”, then certainly Martin Luther King should be known as “The Father of the American Conscience.”

He was that and more. In a very real way, Martin Luther King saved the soul of America - saved it from the ruinous, scandalous, shameless practice of segregating human beings simply based on the color of their skin. His fight was not with white America but rather with history itself, a history that trapped Americans of all colors behind bars erected 300 years before he was born when the first black slaves landed on the pristine shores of the New World. America, which held out the prospect to remake the world, from that day forward failed to live up to its promise as a place where mankind could start anew. By allowing the sin of slavery to take root and flourish, our ancestors condemned the rest of us to living under the weight of three centuries and counting of unconscionable injustice, discrimination, and hate.

Quite a burden, that. And in his own way, Dr. King sought to lift that burden by holding a mirror up to the rest of us while asking simple, straightforward questions.

Does “All men are created equal” mean anything or are they just pretty words? Does “Equal justice under the law” have any significance or is it a lie? And most importantly, how can you love your neighbor while denying him the basic human dignity of recognizing his worth as an individual American citizen?

At bottom, King’s message was firmly rooted in Christianity and the bible. But it was the political ramifications of King’s ideas that were seen as a threat. A century after the Civil War, the south was still reeling from the effects of the aftermath of that conflict as the former slaves moved from bondage to the serfdom of second class citizenship. Codified into law, melded into the landscape by tradition and habit, Jim Crow was a millstone around the neck of southerners as “Whites Only” signs served to enforce the degradation and add to the indignities suffered by people of color.

Describing injustice was easy. As a minister, King’s thundering sermons on segregation from his pulpit at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church were filled with dark biblical images which provided a solid, moral justification for his campaign. But it was in the realm of politics that the problem itself would have to be solved. And in that arena, King proved himself one of the canniest and shrewdest political operators of the 20th century.

King was one of the first politicians to recognize the extraordinary power of television. Unlike Eisenhower or even Kennedy, King saw TV as a medium where emotions could be manipulated to serve a political purpose. Where Kennedy saw television as a vehicle to enhance his celebrity, King saw it as a way to shame the vast majority of citizens who were either truly unaware of didn’t care about the plight of their fellow Americans of color in the south. To that end, King’s protests were staged to provoke a response from their primary tormentors - the southern authorities - who King knew would fight tooth and nail to hang on to Jim Crow. He recognized early on that the tactics of non-violence in the face of extreme provocation would place the bulk of the American people on his side. In the end, the moral courage shown by blacks across the South who endured the unspeakable tactics of the authorities proved King right.

As an orator, King had no equal in the 20th century. Blessed with a mellifluous voice and a razor sharp pen, King’s speeches not only inspired, they provoked. They got people angry. They made people think. In the end, he moved millions with his words. His “I have a dream speech” delivered in front of the Lincoln memorial before a nationwide audience brilliantly set forth in easy to understand and emotionally appealing language a cultural and political realization of all that America stands for. The speech has been called the greatest political testament in American history in that it calls forth our better angels to give dignity to all - white and black - in a spirit of Christian charity and patriotic devotion. For above all, the speech was quintessentially American in flavor; optimistic, looking toward the future, and a call to action that evoked the spirit of patriots going back to our founding.

Toward the end of his life, King’s message began to get lost in the cacophony of competing voices in the civil rights movement that called for more direct action and confrontational tactics with white authorities. While Jim Crow was legally gone, there was much work left to be done and many believed that the path to justice for all African Americans, both north and south, was to be found in more aggressive voices who sought economic justice for the nation’s largely minority poor. King recognized this and sought without much success to moderate some of the more radical calls for economic revolution. It will always be a source of speculation as to whether or not King could have guided the civil rights movement through this enormously troubled time of riots and violence. Some historians point to his declining influence and even open opposition on the part of some in the civil rights movement as proof that eventually, King would have been marginalized as a political figure.

Given King’s enormous talents as an organizer and politician, one could make a strong argument against that notion. It is rather other aspects of his complex legacy that we would probably see today as problematic. His support for affirmative action has been questioned despite the fact that he clearly saw the necessity for compensatory treatment in order to “level the playing field” for African Americans:

“Whenever this issue [compensatory treatment] is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the second would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.”

“A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.”

The real question is would Dr. King approve of what “affirmative action” has become. It now has little to do with “compensatory treatment” and much more to do with disguised quotas, exclusionary practices, and reverse discrimination. Somehow, I don’t think the man who said “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” would agree with the way that affirmative action programs are administered today.

As for the rest of his legacy, there will always be those who point to failings in King’s personal and political life as proof that he is somehow unworthy of our devotion and respect. King was not a saint. Nor was he perfect. He was after all, human. Even his association with suspected communists could be understood in terms of the struggle he was carrying on. King used the raw materials at hand to fashion a coalition to change society. The fact that some people in that coalition had ties to the Communist Party-USA was irrelevant to King who despised the Communist party’s atheism. Even Hunter Pitt Odell, a close aide of King’s and suspected communist, was kept on despite the urging of both Bobby and John Kennedy to fire him. King was unwilling to jettison a loyal aide simply because it angered the government.

The real legacy of Martin Luther King is not in his speeches or what the civil rights movement eventually became - just another group of special pleaders grasping for favors from government. Instead, it is in his ideas for a just and free society where King still lives in our hearts and minds. King’s otherworldly courage in taking on 300 years of oppression while holding malice towards none and charity for all remains one of the most inspiring achievements in American history. For that, it seems the least we can do to honor his birthday once a year and reflect on what a different country indeed the United States of America would be if Dr. King had never been born.

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware River.

This post originally appeared December 25, 2004.

It is perhaps the most parodied image in American history.

In countless advertisements, cartoons, sitcoms, movies, and plays, the image of George Washington (or some comical replacement) standing heroically by the bow of a boat as it navigates the frozen ice floes of the Delaware River has etched itself permanently into the American psyche. More often than not, the image has been used to show a haughtiness on the part of the individual substituting for Washington or to poke fun in an iconic way at America itself.

What the painting and its imitators doesn’t show is how near a thing it was that American independence died that night and how the iron will and gambling nature of one man changed the course of history and virtually assured freedom for the colonies.

Just three days prior to the attack on the Hessian outpost at Trenton, Tom Paine published the first of his “Crisis” articles whose ringing words still tug at the heartstrings of patriots everywhere:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

At the time of the crossing, things couldn’t have been worse for the patriot cause. Washington had seen his army continuously thrown back since the previous summer’s ill-advised campaign to meet the British army in New York. Every battle became a humiliating defeat. Every retreat saw his army shrink. From a high of 20,000 at the battle of Brooklyn Heights to its now paltry 4500 ill fed, ill clothed, scarecrows, the Continental army had become something of a joke to their enemies.

New York was lost. New Jersey was mostly occupied with more and more patriots giving an oath of allegiance to King George so that they could buy food for their families. The Congress in Philadelphia had fled to Baltimore where they hoped somehow to carry on a war that seemed all but lost. In effect, George Washington was not only in charge of the military for the young country, he was head of the government as well, acting as something of a military dictator but always careful to inform the Congress of exactly what he was doing.

But George Washington desperately wanted to go on the offensive. Seeing an opportunity with the way the British had spread out their garrisons throughout the New York and New Jersey countryside, Washington decided to take the biggest gamble of his career. An inveterate card player, (Wist was his game of choice) as well as being offensive minded by nature, he knew that his little army was about ready to disintegrate what with enlistments up after the first of the year. In his own mind, he felt he had no other choice but to attack. And attack not just one but two of the more isolated British outposts. He had it in mind to threaten the huge British supply depot at Brunsiwck, New Jersey thus causing General Howe in New York to shorten his lines and relieve the pressure on New Jersey patriots.

The choice of Trenton was based on both geography and necessity. But the attack on Princeton was a strategically brilliant concept. By taking both Trenton and Princeton, Washington would cut off the British Army in New York from their main base of supply in New Brunswick. And such a move would free most of New Jersey from British occupation and rally patriots in that beleaguered state to the cause.

None of this would matter unless Washington could get across the Delaware and attack the overconfident Hessians at Trenton. Using an extraordinarily sophisticated intelligence operation, Washington was able gather enough information about the Hessian defenses at Trenton to make the enormous gamble worth taking. Throughout the war, Washington acted as his own spymaster, developing networks of patriots in and around New York city. The British couldn’t sneeze without Washington knowing about it.

Beginning the crossing at 2:00 pm on Christmas day, Washington’s plan called for three separate columns to descend on Trenton at the same time. But due to an ice storm that came up early that evening, the other two columns never made it to the battlefield. Only the tirelessness of General John Glover’s “Marblehead Regiment” who courageously battled the ice and cold by manning the oars that took Washington’s boats containing 2,500 men, horses, and two precious cannon across the river made the victory possible.

The march from the New Jersey side of the river to Trenton was a nightmare. It was said one could see the progress of the army’s march by following the bloody footprints in the snow; many of the 2,500 men did not have any shoes. Two men died of the cold on the march. And instead of reaching the Hessian encampment while it was still dark, Washington’s threadbare little army didn’t reach Trenton until well after dawn.

Nothing, however, deterred Washington from attacking. After overcoming the sleepy outposts, Washington’s troops entered the town and before the Hessians could get organized, surrounded the enemy, killed Colonel Rall the Hessian commander, and forced the garrisons’s surrender. By noon of the 26th, Washington was back across the Delaware with almost 1000 prisoners and a huge cache of supplies.

A few days later, Washington scored perhaps his most audacious victory at Princeton. Crossing the River again, he confronted General Cornwallis whose 1500 troops had occupied a position between Washington and Trenton. With darkness falling, Washington left 400 men to tend campfires, giving Conrwallis the impression he was staying put while taking the bulk of his army clear around Cornwallis to attack a garrison headquartered at Princeton.

At first, the battle went badly for the Continentals. As the British surged forward and threatened to rout Washington’s army, he spurred his horse forward, rallied his men, and with bullets flying all around him, led the troops to a decisive victory. Then, before Cornwallis could cut off his retreat, he led his force to Morristown where he went into winter quarters.

General Howe in New York was beside himself. He realized that Washington, from his secure position on the heights above Morristown, could swoop down and attack any of his isolated garrisons at will. Accordingly, he pulled back his forces to the immediate vicinity of New York. In the space of 10 days, Washington had defeated two separate British forces, captured tons of desperately needed supplies, rallied the patriots, and levered the British out of New Jersey. No matter what defeats lay in Washington’s future, his reputation and position in American history was secured by his victories at Trenton and Princeton.

Two recent treatments of Trenton are worth mentioning. David Hackett Fisher’s “Washington’s Crossing” a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for History is eminently readable and is a treasure trove of tidbits on Washington and the continental army. The book also has some excellent background on Washington’s unconventional but very effective intelligence network.

And then there’s the made-for-cable production called “The Crossing” which stars Jeff Daniels as George Washington. Daniels, who gave an excellent portrayal of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain in Ted Turner’s “Gettysburg” falls a little flat trying to play Washington. While the movie is very watchable, I don’t think there’s an actor living or dead who could do justice to the part of Washington. The iconic image of Washington as father, savior, and ultimately civic saint makes the portrayal of such a gigantic historical figure problematic.

UPDATE 12/27

Betsy Newmark has some additional links as well as mentioning the Fisher book. She also links to another favorite Fisher book of mine Paul Revere’s Ride that gave me the idea for this post I called “Founding Brother” which I posted during last April’s anniversery.

I briefly mentioned in the post above that Washington was his own spymaster. To say that Washington’s intelligence gathering efforts were unconventional is an understatement. Washington used people who volunteered to spy and, incredibly, used British loyalists as well - unbeknownst to them, of course. I would not be an exaggeration to say that Washington knew more of what was going on in the British army than he knew about what was going on in Congress.

It is as predictable as the annual September collapse of the Chicago Cubs. Every single holiday in which we seek to celebrate what is good and decent about this country and contemplate all that we should treasure and be thankful for, some lickspittle lefty feels an obligation to point out that we should take the ceremonial sword and open up our midsection to atone for all of the past sins committed by our ancestors.

The fact that our “liberal conscience” has the historical knowledge and cognitive abilities of a high school sophomore doesn’t seem to faze the mainstream media who always seem to find room on the editorial pages for their juvenile diatribes. It is just one more example of the disconnect demonstrated by the dissonant left and their childish need for attention.

The holiday of Thanksgiving seems to bring out the worst in these galoots. If we’re not reading about the inequities of capitalism which has ground millions of our fellow citizens under its jackboot, we’re doing the slow burn over some idiot’s interpretation of the historical baggage accrued to the cultural conflict between whites and Native Americans. Sometimes, like this year. we get a twofer.

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

That the world’s great powers achieved “greatness” through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.

But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin — the genocide of indigenous people — is of special importance today. It’s now routine — even among conservative commentators — to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.

(HT: Michelle Malkin)

This excreable screed, penned by one Robert Jensen who purports to be a professor of journalism, should probably be dismissed as the ravings of an escapee from some lunatic asylum or perhaps the latest statement issued from the Democratic National Committee (some would argue the differences there are insignificant). Nevertheless, a cursory Technorati search revealed the fact that no one has taken the time or effort to contradict this moonbat’s flawed historical interpretation not to mention the outright falsehoods contained in his not-ready-for-high-school essay.

If it’s not too much to ask, can we please not have any more judgments from the left about “moral progress” or the lack thereof made by the United States over the past 200 years or so? The fact is that agitation for both fair and humane engagement of Native Americans as well as the abolitionist movement were both propelled by the most profound religious conservatism in our nation’s history. As historian James Brewer Stewart points out, it was the Second Great Awakening (the first occurring during the early colonial period) that was the catalyst for reformist movements of all stripes:

By stressing the moral imperative to end sinful practices and each person’s responsibility to uphold God’s will in society, preachers like Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel Taylor, and Charles G. Finney in what came to be called the Second Great Awakening led massive religious revivals in the 1820s that gave a major impetus to the later emergence of abolitionism as well as to such other reforming crusades as temperance, pacifism, and women’s rights. By the early 1830s, Theodore D. Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Elizur Wright, Jr., all spiritually nourished by revivalism, had taken up the cause of “immediate emancipation.”

This basic Christian belief in the value and dignity of every human being that to this day animates religious conservatives has suffered through a revisionism that would make Clio, the Muse of History, weep with anger. While it is true that some Southern preachers took it upon themselves to try and justify slavery via the bible - even to the point that it permanently split many Protestant denominations - the facts are that conservative revivalism played a dominant role in both the abolitionist movement and the efforts to reform government policies toward Native Americans.

Make no mistake. The United States government has much to answer for in its dealings with Native Americans. But a point not answered by Mr. Jensen or any other advocate for the historical revisionism that passes for a critique of the government’s Indian policy is the realization that every single time in the history of human civilization a society that possessed nastier germs, superior organizational skills, and more devastating weaponry came into contact with hunter gatherers, very bad things happened to the berry eaters.

In his controversial Pulitzter Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, author Jared Diamond asks the question why were the Europeans able to sail across the ocean and conquer (or subdue) Native American tribes in the Americas and not the other way around? The answer, according to Diamond was no inherent inferiority on the part of Native Americans but rather factors relating to the environment such as the flora and fauna that flourished on the Eurasian continent versus the Americas. That, plus the ease of idea diffusion that allowed innovations such as large scale agriculture to sweep across Eurasia with breathtaking speed (historically speaking) as opposed to the problems presented by the geography of the Americas that prevented agriculture from moving much beyond the Incans in South America and the Aztecs in North America until less than 500 years before Columbus’ voyage.

Diamond points out that the more than 3,000 year headstart Europeans had in organizing a civilization based on agriculture was more than enough time to develop superior technologies as well as allow for the mutation of some really nasty bugs so that the contact between indigenous peoples and Europeans was guaranteed to be a catastrophe.

This is true not only of recent history with Europeans subjugating North and South America, but also of the most ancient histories of which we are aware. The Celtic people who colonized much of Europe did not enounter pristine wilderness untouched by the hand of man. They overran much of continental Europe 500 years before the birth of Christ, enjoying the distinction of sacking both Rome and Delphi. And the remnants of their culture was eliminated over the years by a host of conquerers including the Romans and the Saxons.

I daresay there aren’t too many lefties agitating for the return of Ireland and England to the descendants of the Druids.

And while we’re at it, I might point out that recent archeological evidence has pointed to several migrations of peoples from Asia to North America with the last occurring approximately 8,000 years ago.

Anyone wanna guess what happened to those indigenous people before the people we refer to as indigenous actually became “indigenous?”

Mr. Jensen then makes the usual mistake of assuming that since very few choose to feel the kind of personal guilt that he is able to absolve himself of thanks to his humble mea culpa, that the reason must be something sinister; that American history is hidden away in a closet guarded by CIA agents 24 hours a day:

One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.

Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it’s also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.

Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.

For every pronouncement made by a politician or government official calling for the elimination of Native Americans, I could point to sentiments expressing exactly the oppoiste viewpoint made by others or even that same individual. There is nothing in American life that brought out more schizophrenia - with the possible exception of slavery - than our relations to and feelings about Native Americans. Every American President from Washington to Theodore Roosevelt called for fair and humane treatment of Indians. The fact that they usually fell far short in putting that rhetoric into practice was due to a variety of factors not the least of which the nasty habit Native Americans had of massacring settlers (women and children included) and torturing captives in the most barbarous ways imaginable (even some ways beyond imagining).

If it were a simple matter of “pushing back” against white encroachment, such behavior could be understood if not excused. However, many Native American tribes eagerly insinuated themselves into the politics of empire being played out on the North American continent not by attacking armies but by killing innocents - a tactic guaranteed to bring down reprisals by governments and even individual settlers. Did they believe that their taking sides would grant them immunity from the anger and revenge of whites?

If Jensen wants to blame the entire white race for the tragedy that occurred during the clash of cultures with Native Americans, then I would simply quote that great line from the movie Gettysburg in which crusty Seargant Buster Killrean says “Any man who judges by the group is a peawit.” The kind of deterministic interpretation of history that allows for condemning an entire race of people for the actions of their ancestors - especially when that interpretation leaves out inconvenient facts and analysis - should be relegated with the rest of Marxian and Hegelian claptrap to the ash heap where it belongs.

And the idea that “between 95 and 99 percent” of Native Americans were the victims of genocide is laughable. Unless one wants to posit the notion that the smallpox virus should be hauled into the World Court and charged with crimes against humanity, Jensen’s idiotic statement should be revealed as either a bald faced lie or a comical lack of historical knowledge not to mention a breathtaking minimization of what genocide really is.

The overwhelming majority of Native American deaths following the landing of Columbus - perhaps as some have said in the 75-90% range - were the result of contracting some of the nastiest diseases on the planet for which the tribes had absolutely no immunity. Guenter Lewey:

About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby, “but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath.” It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.

And most of those deaths did not occur as a direct result of contact with whites but rather because of the remarkable trade network operating on the North American continent long before Columbus’ trip was even imagined.

Some tribes were trading empires whose geographic breadth put to shame just about anything Europe could offer. At the time that Marco Polo was writing about the marvels in far away China, Native American tribes in Michigan and Minnesota were trading copper for sea shells from both coasts. It was this far flung trading network that caused diseases like small pox, measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever to spread like wild fire among Indian populations, wiping out entire cultures that had existed for thousands of years in a matter of months.

By using the term “genocide” to describe what can only be termed a tragedy of history brands Jensen and his ilk as deliberate falsifiers. In order to make a political point, they are willing to eschew reason, logic, and history itself. And by applying the incendiary sin of “genocide” to Europeans who had no clue as to how disease was spread or even what a virus or a germ was - cheapens the actual genocide practiced against Jews, Armenians, and others whose deliberate murder was carried out for the expressed purpose of eliminating their seed from the planet.

After saying all of this, it is a legitimate question to ask just what the US government is guilty of when talking about the clash of cultures which resulted in so many needless deaths on both sides? Certainly the sins of ommission far outweigh those of commission. It was never officially United States policy to exterminate all Indians everywhere. There was throughout American history a belief that Indians would be better off if they acted like whites. In that sense, the worst one can say is that the US government wished to wipe traditional Native American culture off the map. Trying to turn hunter-gathering nomads into farmers was pure folly but it hardly qualifies as genocide.

Of course, the history of treaty violations by the government is rife with both perfidity on the part of government and a tragic misunderstanding of Native American tribal structure. There were numerous instances of the government signing a treaty with some tribal elements who would agree to cede land while other chiefs refused the terms of such treaties. The predictable outcome of such misunderstandings led to predations on both sides.

Yes, there is blood on the hands of the US government when it comes to their dealings with Native American tribes throughout our history. But is Moonbat Jensen correct? Is this reason enough to turn Thansgiving into some kind of New Age Tantric fast ritual where we drink guana juice and walk across hot coals to atone for our sins?

Mr. Jensen is free to do whatever he wants on Thanksgiving. But the idea of collective guilt is both morally and intellectually corrupt. It reveals a mind that substitutes platitudes for serious thinking and a jaw dropping ignorance of the facts. For this, the good professor should delve into a little atonement politics himself. To do so, however, one would need the ability for introspection, something that the professor and his ilk have proven that they have neither the temperment or the depth of intellect to practice.

To those of us of a certain age, the year 1980 will be marked forever as the beginning of a gilded age in politics as conservatives streamed into Washington full of energy and enthusiasm ready to do battle on behalf of Ronald Reagan and his revolution with the staid, established interests who were strangling the country with their attitudes of defeatism and ennui.

Trying to explain what it was like to someone in their twenties or thirties is usually an exercise in futility. The reason is that those born after the revolution or who were very young while it was fought have no conception of the kind of country Ronald Reagan inherited from Jimmy Carter and the Democrats in that fateful year of 1980.

How do you explain 12% inflation to someone who has grown up in a virtually inflation-free era? Telling them that the prices you paid for food at the grocery store went up noticeably every week draws blank stares of incomprehension. Or trying to give a young adult today an idea of what it was like to try and buy a car when the prime rate was 18.5%? Or the feeling that America’s best days were behind her and that we may as well get used to the idea of decline. Or that communism was the wave of the future?

This was America when Ronald Reagan took office. His prescription for the country - cut taxes, revitalize the military, cut the bureaucracy, and rein in spending - triggered an explosion of ideas the likes of which Washington hadn’t seen since FDR’s first term. These were heady times for young conservatives who were more than ready to explore ways to bring the thoughts of conservative thinkers into the political conversation and make theory a reality.

I first remember hearing Lyn Nofziger at a breakfast meeting of the National Chamber of Commerce back in 1981. He didn’t give a speech as much as he simply “harrumphed” his way through his presentation. He was gruff, funny, down to earth, and very wise. He didn’t talk about conservative ideology as much as he talked about “the movement.”He gave a brief rehash of the 1980 election and then showed with devastating clarity why the Republicans would win most national elections far into the future. Demographic electoral trends in the south and west were going to heavily favor Republicans for decades to come. He believed that the Democrats could only win national office if they ran a moderate southerner who was identified with the pro-military wing of the party, a fairly prescient analysis given that Mr. Nofziger had no clue that the Soviets were to collapse in less than a decade.

At that breakfast, Nofziger demonstrated a clear understanding of the idea that politics is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. And in this interview published in today’s Washington Times, it appears that Mr. Nofziger has not forgotten that one salient fact:

“They’ve been in power too long,” Mr. Nofziger says of Republicans. “Any time you put any political party in power for too long, it becomes corrupt. It loses its focus. It forgets why it came there.”

When it comes to the so-called neoconservatives surrounding the president, he says, “?’Conservative’ is a word that doesn’t mean anything. It can mean what you want it to mean.”

This is what I see as the major problem of the Bush Administration. Their conservatism is defined electorally not ideologically. It is ridiculous to talk about this Administration as the left does as “ideological” in a conservative sense. I truly believe that if 9/11 had not occurred, there would have been little to ignite the passions of Bush and his people and they would have governed as centrists in both domestic and foreign affairs. Their cautious approach to the flap over the collision with the Chinese fighter was indicative of the way Bush would have managed foreign affairs; consensus over confrontation.

But as he waxes nostalgic in the interview, Nofziger reveals the reason why conservatives today seem lost:

“To me, conservative means believing in a minimum amount of government and a maximum amount of freedom — and keeping government out of people’s lives and business — and leaving people alone,” Mr. Nofziger says. “I recognize you have to have national defense and have to finance the government. But government does not have to be the be-all and end-all.”

The question isn’t if this definition of conservatism has been invalidated by the Bush Administration but rather what does it really mean?

How do you translate that classic definition of conservatism and have it mean anything relevant when trying to govern a 21st century industrialized liberal (dictionary definition) democracy?

Simply believing one wants “small government” is a meaningless exercise in wishful thinking. Do we get rid of the FDA? How about the FTC? Or the EEOC?

These agencies aren’t superfluous bureaucracies, they are vital to the functioning of a government that wishes to protect the food and drugs consumed by people, ride herd on gigantic corporations who do not have the interest of the majority of the people at heart, and protect the rights of formerly oppressed minorities. But in order to carry out their mandates, they must insinuate themselves into “the lives and businesses” of people.

Can they be run better? Can they be made more responsible to the people we actually elect to run these agencies? The answer is yes. But how that is accomplished without some kind of revolution (with a concomitant upheaval that would endanger those agencies abilities to carry out their mandates)?

I’ve only begun to explore these questions. I would be curious to hear other people’s thoughts on how to translate the Nofziger definition of conservatism into something that would reflect the realities of government today.

Everyone knows the ending to the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. After finding the Ark of the Covenant, Indy hands his prize over to the US government who then proceeds to catalog the Ark, crate it up after stamping a rather large number on it, with the very last scene showing the crate being moved by a dolly in a gigantic government warehouse to be placed with thousands of other crates that look exactly like the one that contains the Ark. The clear implication left with the viewer is that somewhere, in some forgotten government warehouse, the United States is storing a find of immense historical importance.

Could something similar be the case regarding proof that Iraq WMD’s were moved to other countries prior to the US liberation in 2003?

The rapid victory of American forces over Saddam’s military took most of the world by surprise. In fact, it caught Saddam’s bureaucrats unawares as well, evidenced by the fact that literally millions of pages of incriminating documents were not destroyed prior to the fall of Hussein’s government. And as Stephen Hayes points out in this Weekly Standard article, the treasure trove of knowledge contained in those papers - most of them unclassified - could hold the key to unraveling the mystery of Iraq’s missing WMD’s as well as further illuminate evidence of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups:

For two years, I have been working to obtain copies of unclassified documents discovered in postwar Iraq. My reasoning is simple: If we understand what the Iraqi regime was doing in the months and years before the war, we will be better able to assess the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, perhaps, to better understand the insurgency. It’s not a light subject, to be sure.

But the quest for the documents, while frustrating, has also been highly amusing. It is a story of bureaucratic incompetence and strategic incoherence. It is also a story–this one not funny at all–about the failure to explain the Iraq war. Two years after I started my pursuit, I’m not much closer to my goal.

Why? I have been told countless times by officials of the executive branch that there is no need to reargue the case for war, that what matters now is winning on the ground, that our intelligence professionals don’t have time to review history, so occupied are they with current intelligence about current threats. I’m sympathetic to at least part of that thinking; it’s hard to insist in the face of new and evolving threats that intelligence analysts should spend their precious time evaluating the past.

Apparently, despite these documents political importance to the Administration’s efforts to justify the Iraqi liberation in the eyes of the world and American citizens, a pitifully small number of analysts have been assigned to wade through this mish mash of documentation in order to obtain whatever nuggets of useful information that can be gleaned from their contents.

What’s even worse is that the intelligence agencies in charge of this effort have a vested interest in seeing that no information comes to light that contradicts their conclusion that Iraq destroyed its WMD program following the first Gulf War. John Tierney’s interview in Frontpage Magazine has some interesting thoughts along those lines:

On the post-war weapons hunt, the arrogance and hubris of the intelligence community is such that they can’t entertain the possibility that they just failed to find the weapons because the Iraqis did a good job cleaning up prior to their arrival. This reminds me of the police chief who announced on television plans to raid a secret drug factor on the outskirts of town. At the time appointed, the police, all twelve of them, lined up behind each other at the front door, knocked and waiting for the druggies to answer, as protocol required. After ten minute of toilet flushing and back-door slamming, somebody came to the front door in a bathrobe and explained he had been in the shower. The police took his story at face value, even though his was dry as a bone, then police proceeded to inspect the premises ensuring that the legal, moral , ethnic, human, and animal rights, and also the national dignity, of the druggies was preserved. After a search, the police chief announced THERE WERE NO STOCKPILES of drugs at the inspected site. Anyone care to move to this city?

The search for documentary evidence of Iraqi WMD’s must also be placed in the context of the war being waged by many in the intelligence community against the Administration. While it is highly unlikely that any “smoking gun” evidence of WMD is being deliberately withheld, one can speculate on the reason why people like Stephen Hayes are having such a hard time getting access to unclassified documents. Could it be that there is some fear that Hayes and others would find something exculpatory of the Administration? This points up the real damage done by the opposition of the CIA, DIA and other intelligence agencies to the Administration’s policies; we simply can’t trust them to be honest and forthright when it comes to any work they do on Iraq’s WMD’s.

This brings us to the continuing, almost comical efforts by Hayes to get straight answers to simple questions regarding the documentation:

Because I’d been told that these documents are all unclassified, I requested copies from the Pentagon press office. For reasons I still do not entirely understand, the Pentagon would not provide them. Captain Roxie Merritt, the director of Pentagon press operations, suggested I file a Freedom of Information Act request. I did so on June 19, 2005. Two weeks later I received a letter from the Pentagon’s Office of Freedom of Information and Security Review.

The information you requested is under the cognizance of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). We have referred your request to them at the address provided below requesting they respond directly to you.

Mr. Hayes then gets a bureaucratic runaround reminiscent of a Keystone Cops routine in a Buster Keaton silent movie. As the spooks play hide and seek with Mr. Hayes, directing him to inquire at other agencies for permission to view the documents, one is left with the distinct impression that the bureaucrats would just as soon have Mr. Hayes run along and mind his own business. But Hayes makes a good point; if they don’t want to take the time and trouble to examine the documents, why not let others have a crack at them?

One of the documents, “Iraqi Efforts to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals,” had been provided to the New York Times last summer. Thom Shanker, one of the Times’s best reporters, wrote a story based on the document, which was an internal Iraqi Intelligence memo. The Iraqi document revealed that a Sudanese government official met with Uday Hussein and the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in 1994 and reported that bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan. Bin Laden, according to the Iraqi document, was then “approached by our side” after “presidential approval” for the liaison was given. The former head of Iraqi Intelligence Directorate 4 met with bin Laden on February 19, 1995. The document further states that bin Laden “had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative”–a comment that suggests the possibility had been discussed. (According to another Iraqi Intelligence document, authenticated by the DIA and first reported on 60 Minutes, the regime considered bin Laden an “Iraqi Intelligence asset” as early as 1992, though it’s unclear that bin Laden shared this view.)

According to a report in the Times, bin Laden requested that Iraq’s state-run television network broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda; the document indicates that the Iraqis agreed to do this. The al Qaeda leader also proposed “joint operations against foreign forces” in Saudi Arabia. There is no Iraqi response provided in the documents. When bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996, the Iraqis sought “other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location.” The IIS memo directs that “cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement.”

What kind of cooperation resulted from this discussion and agreement?

You’d think the U.S. government, journalists, and policy types–not to mention attentive citizens–would want to know more. You’d think they’d be eager.

Meanwhile, John Tierney in the aforementioned interview by Frontpage Magazine dropped a few bombshells of his own, not the least of which is his crystallizing much of information about the real possibility that Saddam may have moved his stockpiles of WMD to Syria prior to the war.

FP: Let’s talk a little bit more about how the WMDs disappeared.

Tierney: In Iraq’s case, the lakes and rivers were the toilet, and Syria was the back door. Even though there was imagery showing an inordinate amount of traffic into Syria prior to the inspections, and there were other indicators of government control of commercial trucking that could be used to ship the weapons to Syria, from the ICs point of view, if there is no positive evidence that the movement occurred, it never happened. This conclusion is the consequence of confusing litigation with intelligence. Litigation depends on evidence, intelligence depends on indicators. Picture yourself as a German intelligence officer in Northern France in April 1944. When asked where will the Allies land, you reply “I would be happy to tell you when I have solid, legal proof, sir. We will have to wait until they actually land.” You won’t last very long. That officer would have to take in all the indicators, factor in deception, and make an assessment (this is a fancy intelligence word for an educated guess).

In fact, in a little noticed story back in April, the CIA admitted there was “sufficiently credible evidence” that Iraq WMD had been moved to Syria:

But on the question of Syria, Mr. Duelfer did not close the books. “ISG [Iraq Survey Group] was unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war,” Mr. Duelfer said in a report posted on the CIA’s Web site Monday night.

He cited some evidence of a transfer. “Whether Syria received military items from Iraq for safekeeping or other reasons has yet to be determined,” he said. “There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation.”

Given all the uncertainty surrounding the question of what happened to cause every major intelligence service in the world to be fooled into believing that Saddam did in fact have WMD’s, might it be a case where, given ample time in the lead up to America’s invasion of his country, Saddam, with the help of Russia was able to both destroy and spirit out of the country his stockpiles of WMD?

The answer may be contained in those documents that Mr. Hayes and others want to get a look at. At the very least, those documents should be examined and publicized for what they can tell us about the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein.

The precedent for this was the remarkable example found at the end of World War II. The rapid collapse of the Nazi regime meant for the first time in history, huge caches of documents, diaries, and other historical artifacts fell into the hands of a conquering army. What we found in those documents was absolutely chilling; plans for the systematic murder of millions of innocents. The “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was a plan to make Europe “Jew free” by shipping the continent’s Jewish inhabitants to death camps were they were to be exterminated by the millions. We know this to be true because of the meticulous records kept by both German government and businesses whose plans and calculations for cold blooded murder would be unbelievable if they weren’t put down on paper for all to see.

My guess would be that contained in those millions of Iraqi documents is similar evidence of planned, systematic atrocities against the Shias and the Kurds. For this reason alone, those documents should be examined by dozens of teams of experts from around the world in order to wring whatever information contained therein which would bring the perpetrators of Saddam’s horrors to justice. History demands it. And there will be no justice in Iraq until the full story of Saddam’s tyranny is brought into the light of day where history’s judgment can be meted out to Saddam and his cutthroat band of murderous gangsters.

A fading, sepia-tinged photograph of a man in an army uniform taken on his wedding day. A square face, not movie star handsome but pleasant to look at, high forehead, hair slicked back in the fashion of the day - a face wreathed in smiles and speaking Gaelic so Irish he looked. The pretty woman in the wedding dress, a flash of impossibly white teeth and shockingly jet black hair holding a bouquet of flowers in large, graceful hands. On her head, a veil worn by her grandmother whose husband was a postmaster in a tiny frontier town in South Dakota. Prairie stock, she. A clear sense of strength from both.

They had to be strong. They had both just navigated safely through the danger shoals of history and tragedy. A depression, a war, world shattering cataclysms that changed the politics and culture of the United States forever. The year 1945 was a year of national triumph. It was also a year of personal fulfillment as millions of ordinary Americans who had put on a uniform and become “citizen soldiers” in order to smash the ideologies of fascism and militarism unshouldered their patriotic burdens and were trying to get on with their interrupted lives.

It’s hard to tell from the picture if the sun was shining. But a special light shone from both their eyes. Clearly, they were in love, the kind of love that so many young lovers aspire to but rarely achieve - a deep, abiding commitment based on mutual respect and caring. And over the next 36 years they would share in the joys, the worries, the sorrows, and the mysteries of raising 10 children to adulthood, a remarkable achievement given that the odds said that their grandparents would not have been so fortunate. Infant mortality and a world without anti-biotics or vaccines against childhood killers like diphtheria or pertussis would have almost certainly taken one or two offspring 100 years ago.

This weekend those ten and their spouses are gathering to dedicate a recently purchased headstone that will forever mark where the mortal remains of Joseph T. Moran and Margaret L. Moran now lie a’rest in peace, their journey ended, the race won. They are coming from all over America; from both coasts, from the east and west, from north and south.

They are coming home.

In 1945, the GI’s who had rolled up the Nazi war machine and defeated the mad ambitions of the Japanese militarists were coming home to a different America than the one they had left just a few short years earlier. This was an America that even more so than today, stood astride the world like a colossus, unchallenged in military might and economic power. And it was a nation that in less than 4 years would, for the first time in the history of civilized man, voluntarily give up those military advantages in order to build something far more permanent and vital; a peaceful world safe for the children that the returning veterans were having in record numbers.

Joe and Margie Lou participated in the post war baby-boom with enthusiasm, having six children in the decade following the surrender of the Japanese aboard the USS Missouri (four more before the Kennedy assassination). Most of the men in our suburban Chicago neighborhood were also veterans and took part with eagerness in the business of baby-making. On our block alone there were families with 4, 6, 7, 9, and 11 children not counting the several “regular” families with only 2 or 3 kids. Summer days were filled with the sounds of squealing, laughing children, a cacophony of growing up noises, of jumping rope and ballgames and the endless babble of little girls and boys engaging in the mysterious, exciting process of becoming people.

It was amazing how lightly these conquerers of Europe and Asia wore their military experience, almost as if their time spent flying airplanes, driving tanks, or slogging through the jungles of Asia or the hedgerows in bocage country in France was a twice told tale, a happenstance of history that barely scraped the surface of their lives. One almost got the impression that these killers of Nazis and Japanese fanatics had to have been someone else, not these mild mannered suburban dads who quietly and without much fuss went about the business of building an America that their children would be happy in.

Joe made his living in the army jumping out of airplanes, an incongruity when one looks at pictures of him later in life and compare it to that picture taken on his wedding day. He was known as “Jumpin’ Joe” at the large corporation where he spent 35 years working to support his large family. And while he never spoke about his military experiences (to this day, I have no idea if he ever fired a shot in anger) the air of authority he exuded was noticed by all. Neighborhood children, while not fearful, were automatically on their best behavior around him - almost as if his presence demanded their attention and respect. When he walked into a roomful of playmates, a hush would descend on the group, a silent tribute to his confident bearing and what the French call a roulement de commande - a commanding presence.

It was this presence that probably represents the greatest gift the military gave him. Millions of young men who grew up in the depression had learned self-reliance. But it was the army that gave the farmer’s son from Minnesota or the mechanics boy from New York city the opportunity to command hundreds, sometimes thousands of men in life and death circumstances. Compared to the Philippines where he had been sent to fight, Joe must have thought being a corporate manager was a piece of cake.

It is also more than likely that the military instilled in him a sense of duty and honor above and beyond what his Irish parents and the Roman Catholic faith had taught him. The duty he had to his family was proven when, despite being accepted at one of the most prestigious writing schools in the country - the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University - he gave up a career in writing to get a job in the corporate world to support his growing family. Sacrifice is the essence of service whether it be to the army, to the country, or to one’s own family and both Joe and Margie Lou would sacrifice much in order to give their children a life free from want or cares.

But this Veterans Day as all ten of Joe and Margie Lou’s creations gather to remember them and laughingly reminisce about growing up in such a large, loud, and wickedly sharp family, I find my thoughts turning to honor. What makes a person honorable?

Surely it is devotion to those you love. And fealty to a set of principals that one follows even at the cost to one’s own comfort and ease. But it must also be the act of taking part selflessly in something larger than oneself, something bigger than the tiny corner of the world most of us inhabit.

I never served in the military. In my youth, such notions were considered “uncool.” Joe and Margie Lou, old fashioned liberals that they were, opposed the Viet Nam war and spent a good number of years worrying about the possibility that one of their precious creations would be drafted to serve in a conflict that both saw as a civil war and an immoral commitment by the United States to prop up a ruthless dictator. But during all those years when they were sweating out changes in the draft laws and the potential yanking of deferments for college students, I never once heard my father speak with bitterness about the military. He railed quite a bit against the stupidity of officers and the waste of men and material he had witnessed, but he never said a word to me that would have led me to believe that he thought the military was an evil institution.

Was it because deep down he knew what military service had done for him? How it had molded him to be a better man after he got out then when he went in? I like to think so. Having so many military friends while living in Washington, D.C. many years ago, I was struck by their sense of honor and duty toward the country and each other. Not that they made a point of wearing these virtues on their sleeves, but rather it was manifested in the way they approached life, as if everything they did mattered and had a purpose. This was Joe Moran. Whether he was showing me how to throw a curveball or teaching me how one goes about making an important, life altering decision (”Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper and then list the pros on one side and the cons on the other….”), he always seemed to be in charge of his life. Did military service help him discover this kind of inner strength? Again, I like to think so.

This is the kind of strength drawn from honor that makes a difference in the lives of others. And for that, remembering our service men and women for only one day out of the year seems inadequate. For all that they have given us, for not only their sacrifices in battle but the sacrifices made for their families and communities, that special kind of honorable person who has participated in a life outside of their own limited universe should be remembered every day - as my father is remembered by all ten of his legacies.

As we all gather tomorrow, the memories will elicit more than a few tears I’m sure. But it is not for what we have lost that sadness will thicken our view and tighten our throats; it is what we have gained by having an honorable man as a father who taught us all that sharing and sacrifice is something noble to which one should always aspire. So we will share the day and miss both Joe and Margie Lou terribly, taking comfort as always in each others presence.

That is the greatest gift any parent can leave for their children. For at bottom, honor is the recognition that love for others supersedes love of self. And for the Morans, this essential truth will, as always, prove that time and distance are meaningless when memories of dinner tables and lakeshore bonfires, teasing, roughhousing, and quiet rooms, quiet times, and most of all, of a man and a woman in love with each other and their large, boisterous brood are called forth and laid out like a picnic lunch for all to feast upon.

There is a certain amount of hyperbole practiced by bloggers that, at times, can be both annoying and a whole hell of a lot of fun. Even a cursory look at many of the articles on this site will show that I am not immune to exaggeration in the cause of either humor or political invective. Of course, our political foes make it very easy to draw them with broad brush strokes that highlight their total cluelessness or hypocrisy thus revealing aspects of both their personalities and ideology that are open to ridicule. But still, even my most rabid broadsides are (usually) based on some kind of truth be it historical in nature or on some kind of recognized, universal truth that has been ignored or trampled upon by the left.

But when it comes to reading articles about the French riots, I must confess to being a little annoyed by the casual way in which writers have connected the radical politics of al Qaeda with the thrill-seeking arsonists and troublemakers who are running wild in the streets of French cities torching cars and buildings while enjoying the media exposure of their grievances against French society. The remarkable fact that to date so few have been killed or injured is I think indicative of both the reluctance of French police to enforce the law but also an attitude on the part of rioters which reveals that whatever their beef with French society, they are not going to engage in wholesale slaughter to try and change it.

As several writers have pointed out, this apparent forbearance on the part of the rioters to restrain themselves from chopping off the heads of their tormentors may be only a temporary phenomenon. France may yet experience a wave of terrorist attacks that country has not seen since the Algerian independence movement of the late ’50’s and early 1960’s. During that period, various factions would regularly turn the streets of French cities into free fire zones. Even a group of disaffected French army officers got in on the gruesome fun as they opposed the eventual independence of Algeria and loss of French empire, going so far as attempting to kill President De Gaulle.

But that conflict was about national liberation not the killing of westerners in the name of Allah. And if al Qaeda is smart, they’ll send as much assistance as they dare to the radical imams who have jumped into the power vacuum left by France’s surrender. As Ed Morrisey points out, the eventual outcome of these riots may be more autonomy for the so-called “sink estates.” This can only mean trouble for French citizens as radical Islam spreads its message of hate and murder among the more impressionable and uneducated masses of Muslims who make up the bulk of rioters.

What can the French do about it? Not too damn much. One might be tempted to say “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” but the fact is, France has lost the will to defend itself and the western values represented by more than 1000 years of French civilization. Ever since the grandsons of Charlemagne divvied up his kingdom creating what became France and Germany, the French have been something of a self-appointed guardian of what we loosely term “western values.’ While these values have undergone enormous changes over the centuries, France has been at the forefront of redefining both human liberty and the individual’s relationship with the state.

That is, until World War I. Almost exactly a year ago on Veterans Day, I wrote about “The Day France Died:”

In Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August , the author shows how all of the “Great Powers” blundered, stumbled, and through a willful disregard of logic and reason, rushed into a war that needn’t have been. Through a combination of national pride, misunderstanding, and a false sense of inevitability, the war became a gigantic destructive machine, devouring men and material at a pace never before seen in the history of human civilization.

This insanity touched France more than any other country. And it’s impossible to understand the France of today without looking at the France of nearly 100 years ago and understanding how the very idea of the French nation was destroyed in the trenches that, to this day, cut across the French countryside like some gigantic, unhealed scar; a constant reminder of innocence lost and lives destroyed.

World War I killed the idea of French nationalism. The great British poet and essayist Robert Graves in his book Goodbye to all That talked about the “Love Battles” of the war, battles so horrific that only a sublime love could explain how human beings could participate in such extraordinary bloodletting and barbarity:

One such battle was Verdun. Mention Verdun to a Frenchman today and he will relate with pride the manner in which the French army stood its ground against relentless German attacks. “They shall not pass” is as famous a phrase in France as “Remember the Alamo” is in America. Verdun was by far and away the largest battle in human history. In “A Short History of World War One” James Stokesbury points out that, at one time or another during the nearly year long battle, more than three quarters of the French Army fought at Verdun.

And therein lies the story of the death of France. The Chief of the German General Staff, General Von Falkenhayn, swore that “he would bleed France white” at Verdun. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. France suffered nearly 2 million casualties in defense of…what? Ten square miles of absolutely useless real estate, battered, bombed, cratered like the surface of the moon with the bodies of over 700,000 French and German soldiers pulverized by repeated and futile bombardments

In the end, the French army mutinied against the butchery. Such behavior explains the conduct of the French soldiery as Hitler’s armies swept out of the Ardennes in May of 1940. Entire armies surrendered without even firing a shot. When the French gave up less than a month later, it was estimated that nearly 75% of the men in its army had never fired their guns in anger at the Germans.

This latest challenge to the French nationalistic idea is being met with similar defeatism and timidity. And there is apparently nothing in the French soul to combat the threat. France is, after all, the birthplace of Deconstructionism, a movement that began as a new way to critique literature but ended up destroying the faith of the European left in western superiority. It should come as no surprise then, that the French are desperately seeking a way to accommodate the rioters rather than engage them on an intellectual level that would integrate them into French society.

The nation that was the home to some of the most articulate defenders of individual liberty has become a tired shadow of its former self. And for those who are saying that the riots are evidence of the death of France, I would say that it simply isn’t possible.

France has been dead for more than 80 years.

The Presidency of the United States has been called both the strongest and the weakest elected office in democratic government. This is because the President has no real constitutional authority to enact laws, consent to treaties, (theoretically) declare war, or even choose his own cabinet. All of these Presidential actions are dependent on the suffrage of the elected representatives in the Congress. The President can only “propose” not “dispose” and thus in a very real sense is at the mercy of both the partisan opposition and the vagaries of electoral politics in his own party when it comes to enacting his policies.

But the President is not a helpless giant. His ability to get what he wants from the Congress is usually directly related to his standing with the American people. Before opinion polls, Congressmen relied on a keen political ear in their own districts and states to tell them whether or not supporting the President would lead them into trouble. Even today, legislators can get a good sense of where their own constituents stand on the subject of the President’s popularity simply by reading their mail. True, there are organized attempts to influence the Congressman’s position by flooding he email or deluging his office with telegrams. These interest-group driven campaigns are also helpful although are not given as much weight as the letter from the 80 year old grandma who is worried about having her social security check cut.

What this adds up to is one of the truly remarkable aspects of our republic; the power of the President to get things done being dependent on how well ordinary people think he’s doing his job. This is not some pie-in-the-sky, starry eyed first year poli-sci nonsense but rather the cold calculation of power used by both parties, honed to a fine point via the science of polling, and then sliced and diced by experts to determine what kind of influence the President can wield.

Lately, the process has become even more sophisticated as “talking points” for the party faithful are promulgated based on this polling data and surrogates pan out to hit the various cable news shows where no matter what question is asked by the host, the talking points are driven home at least twice in the segment. Then more polls are taken and the process repeats itself. Both parties do it as does the Administration. In this way, the public is cajoled, pulled, pushed, and even manipulated in a dizzying, head snapping, confusing and often contradictory manner.

Surprisingly, people tend to resist a change in their feelings toward a President. This is because most Americans feel that they have a personal relationship with the man in the White House. Even before television and mass media, this was so. If anything, the ubiquitousness of the media has intensified the relationship.

I don’t have a clue what the internal polls of both the White House and the Democrats are really telling them about the attitudes of the American people toward George Bush. I suspect that the numbers are slightly better than the published polls that have come out recently showing the President’s “approval” (Do you like him?) ratings in the low 40’s. As has been pointed out many times by people like D.J. Drummond, much depends on the way a question is asked and who is being asked in the first place. Most public polls are taken to prove a point. The private, internal polling done by the White House and the Democratic National Committee are done to find out what people really think.

And that brings me to George Bush’s choice of Harriet Miers for Supreme Court Justice.

This has been a summer of discontent for Americans as gas prices have skyrocketed, progress in Iraq has slowed, a hurricane has virtually destroyed a major American city, consumer confidence in the future of the economy is down, and there is an overall feeling of unease in the electorate. Anyone who doubts this need only look at the political smoke signals just this past week as two high profile Republicans have declined to run for high office.

Outgoing North Dakota Governor John Hoeven has declined to run for the Senate seat currently held by vulnerable Democrat Ken Conrad while former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar tearfully turned down the opportunity to run against another vulnerable Democrat, Rod R. Blagojevich, for the statehouse in Springfield. This may be an indication that those two experienced and able politicians see 2006 as the year of the Democrat. And in an uphill battle against an incumbent office holder - even against a vulnerable incumbent - it should be apparent that the calculations made by both men included how the President was viewed in their respective states.

Bush’s nomination of Miers for the Supreme Court must be seen in this political context; the President may not have the strength to engage in a bruising partisan fight for someone more experienced and perhaps even more conservative. Not so much with the Democrats but with members of his own party who are running for re-election next year. When members of your own party start to sidle away from you, chances are your Presidency is nearing the point where your influence is waning and the crew feels less compunction is supporting the Captain as the ship is tossed on ever stormier seas.

The Bush Presidency is far from dead. But the President may have to make more decisions like the Miers choice in the future as his Administration teeters on the cusp of irrelevancy. Perhaps an easy confirmation will help him regain some momentum. That, along with the probable passage of an Iraqi Constitution next week could help the Administration regain some of the luster it has lost off its election victory less than a year ago.