Retired Marine and daily commentator W. Thomas Smith, Jr. returned this week from Fort Jackson with photographs. Under an open South Carolina sky, Army recruits marched to a site furnished with instruments and obstacles, and followed drill instructors through tactical exercises. In one picture a file of young men, ungainly in accoutrement, squinting at the sun; in another, a squad inside a beige transport truck. Particularly, Smith caught a simulation at Anzio Range, "where basic-trainees learn how to fight and survive a convoy ambush." He noted that a supervisory lieutenant colonel had participated in the deposition of Saddam Hussein — little question, then, where the surprise attack might be meant to take place, and against whom.
It has come to be a performing art to renounce the Iraqi campaign or those conducting it on grounds that it has lasted this many years and claimed this many soldiers' lives because a master stroke was not delivered. Against that is a justification for Western unpreparedness in reproof: in Iraq and Afghanistan are the wars Washington refused to fight as long as it could defer, and in the thirty years after the betrayal of Saigon, neither the GI nor his commanders would have any idea as to what form the enemy assumed. Years of fighting would need to pass before apposite men were granted the proper materiel.
Widely understood is that the terrorist — the transnational criminal — cannot stand up to the modern, freeman soldier. What he does instead is deprive that soldier's army of a neat victory, and compound homefront impatience with horror through licensed and inventive killing. Existentialist traces are touched off, goodness of purpose depreciates, and pretty soon majorities consider enjoining a war, if at least to end its disappointments.
That is how the enemy intends to succeed, anyway. Americans and allies have learned much of the Eastern thug since 2001, even more since 2003. They have an eminent advantage in resources and, miraculously, martial confidence. Decaying dictatorships produce radicalism, and Iraq's outcome is pivotal in judging whether an infusion of civility can — against a centrifugal, information-age threat — be defended.
What if hardships delivered a prevailing understanding of the enemy? And the enemy realized that winning lessons in Iraq were to be shared with the Lebanese, the Israelis, the Afghans, the Pakistanis, the many besieged Africans? That adversary might work to thwart any practice of diligence.
Four conclusions can be drawn from the most striking five minutes of last Tuesday's Republican presidential debate.
Congressman Ron Paul started the series of exchanges with a soliloquy on foreign affairs, using the candor that one of exceptional opinions might reserve for an invitation to dissent. It was an attempt to verbalize opinions for an audience without the same inchoate prepossessions, Paul's historical claims as peculiar in that night's setting as an excavation suddenly decompressing a tomb's relics into a downtown square. Out of the ramble came the assertion nobody standing behind a microphone liked, one which led Rudy Giuliani to disregard protocol and chide the congressman: that al Qaeda's murder is logically justified.
For his defense, Paul antedated the planned construction of military bases in Iraq, and compared the United States with China as if the relevant basis were the adoption of a national flag. But he also dismissed "the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics" while attributing to the Founders a rule to "be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them," indicating diametric troubles from the opening days of a Paul administration.
Reporter Wendell Goler asked the question a careful listener should have: if September 11th invalidated assumptions of the scale, intent and bearing of threats from overseas, why wouldn't the balance of the Republican Party abjure "non-interventionist foreign policy"?
In order: one, Ron Paul will now be identified by name, and as an eccentric; two, drawing a cordon sanitaire around the United States, on a map from sixty years ago or earlier, is less acceptable on the right, even now; three, Wendell Goler deserves top billing and a raise; four, although some maintain that each of Paul's competitors wanted to object, all but one had an undisclosed reason not to speak out, and thus the greatest plausibility as an articulate wartime commander-in-chief remains Rudy Giuliani's.
A month ago, none of the men campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination met the approval of commentator Peggy Noonan. There were two qualifications, one a regard for the executive position as an exalted one for uncommon men, the other a determination to somehow transcend normalcy and become so paramountly qualified; apparent in both, the fastidiousness that sometimes accumulates in the writing of the author in question.
"Candidates on the trail today," Noonan reproved in the Wall Street Journal, "would be better off keeping as their template for the office Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln — the unattainable greats." Noonan was part of a collaborative publication on presidential leadership from three years ago, one in which the founding triumvirate was included. Surely she must have considered the raw material from which these men's heroic legacies were made?
Before Abraham Lincoln was final arbiter of a great American dispute, there was Abraham Lincoln the kindly knockabout and then Abraham Lincoln the obstreperous partisan. A newly elected Whig representative in Washington, January 1848, Lincoln decried American entry and supremacy in the Mexican War. He literally anathematized President James Knox Polk by suggesting that "he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him." The independence of Texas was, to Lincoln, obverse to the freedom of Mexican subjects. What he thought of the militarist Santa Anna we don't know, as Lincoln must have run out of invective.
That was as a Whig, and that was politics. Thirteen years later Lincoln would be in controversy himself, spoken of vividly but perhaps not always in the reverence Noonan might infer from his settled biography.
There is a war on now, and the president conducting it bears in defamation all the names Lincoln called President Polk. It isn't Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, the tacitly running Fred Thompson or even the contrarian Ron Paul who is insulting George Bush or devaluing the office or making a cad of himself. A common esteem is held among them but not by one for himself. Can you or I humbly institute greatness? The candidate who tries that would probably not be the fulfillment for somebody who reads like she is hoping to vote for a living saint.
This one doctor of mine, who I have written about before, sidesteps the manners of most people and nearly every doctor by talking politics as soon as he enters the examination room and shakes my hand. So it was this afternoon. A handshake, greeting, smile, and then: "Which one?"
He knows that I am on the right, once at the head of my little city's Republican party. The inquiry's subject — declared and intimated GOP presidential candidates — was obvious. Still, my response was long, about three-quarters qualification that I thought germane. I have no reason to vote against any of them, I said, not right now; too much can happen. But, I continued, looking off to the side, if the primary were today my choice would be — Giuliani.
"Mine too," my doctor said. "And that would be a crossover." The former mayor, in his words, "knows what is going on" and has demonstrated noble competence, most strikingly so in Manhattan. "He's a New Yawkah," my doctor laughed, from the City himself. Then came a frown with the contemplation of provident commentary on Giuliani's chances outside his hometown.
Such pessimism, I volunteered, must be drawn from caricatures of the Republican base and the broader country. How much, I couldn't know for certain, but sharp refusal is a suspicion of those who live, corporally or sympathetically, in Washington, D.C. It is contravened by polls, including one taken with a sample of two disparate, likely voters, whose respondents agreed that as it all looks right now, neither party would be too disappointed if its letter succeeded the name of Rudy Giuliani.
Michael Nifong, Durham County District Attorney is a liar, in the final analysis of evidence. Three varsity lacrosse players at Duke University, falsely accused of rape and wrongfully indicted by Nifong, have done no crime as submitted. Matters of race and privilege, which once concerned commentators as much as the charges did, may still be germane but from very different premises — and now probably not mediated with the same urgency, or zeal. The young men are free to try to salvage their reputations. Nifong, who himself won a full term to his office while doing unspeakable things to Lady Justice, is, too.
Assessing this in a strictly legal sense, it's appropriate for us to say "Poor, poor boys," and a plurality of thinkers and talkers, certainly most on the right, are in such a chorus. Michael Nifong and associates made the courtroom a theater, and told lies that will persist.
Not in dispute was what was supposed to happen, and what went as planned, on the night of March 13, 2006.
Did college lacrosse players ravish a woman at said place and time? No. Was the woman one of two strippers hired to commemorate the Duke team's prime sportsmanship? Yes. Did that turn out raucous fun as advertised? Not really, based on a timeline provided last year by the defense. One of the — gentlemen? — made a lewd request of one stripper. A relative standard of decency emerged and the player was slapped, then the mood was shattered, and the night-gone-wrong fell into the confusion of which spurious indictments are composed.
If the obscene remark never came, and the show ended at normal time, the lacrosse team and the strippers were still involved in an old transaction, an exchange of the basest tender and mutual scorn. By contract, there was not to be an abundance of charity or trust. A tease is itself deceit, and each party has as its cruel purpose to receive what it wanted, not to lose much for that, and especially not to get unlucky. Enter the staple entertainment at an athletic celebration.
When Hilaire Belloc spoke apropos, he knew of a place we all patronize, usually for, oh, very chic and humorous and incidental and venial services — a place thought to be not as dangerous as warned but is still, in all its carnal surfeit, the underworld. The question then becomes what the lacrosse players were guilty of. At which point it is difficult, and embarrassing, to answer.
Bursting through a consequentialist hedge, with the most lethal weapons he can find, does the madman come.
Three dozen murders at a premier university, Virginia Polytechnic Institute: that can't be ignored by the sensible mind. To appreciate the event, however, isn't necessarily to understand it. When pallbearers are called for unexpectedly, and because of something atrocious, philosophy is naturally taken to, as well — but possibly as a compulsion, even an indulgence. The question to be resisted, unless one means to give succinct, narrow answers, is that which begins with the word "why."
An affluent South Korean; decadal resident alien; bright enough to study, abroad, literature in another language — the murderer? Well, he wasn't thinking like most of us. Malice can be explained, or repressed, as readily as hunger. Mass shootings committed by youths, a modern phenomenon, are the work of the same temperament that has always been responsible for acts of cold blood.
That the pleasure in harm is widely incomprehensible should brace, not bewilder. The record of the crime is now under the weight of condemnation, the names of the dead announced, witnesses expounding with portraits of heroism in those spare moments. Eudaemonia is thataway; here, savagery is called wrong, and that is the best we can do.
One of nature's clerics preaches without incardination — that is what hurricane specialist William Gray said, four days ago, of the man both formerly vice president and sedately minded. "For someone of his stature, he's a gross alarmist." Al Gore, Gray protests, "doesn't know what he's talking about."
Richard Lindzen, meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is as uncharitable to Gore's liturgy. Immaculate truth as Lindzen understands it confers "no such thing as an optimal temperature," and even if there were one, the industrialized world's own average rising far above it, "meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing."
Meanwhile, outside the tropics: after the first weekend that I heard, on the radio, a baseball game called on account of snow my local team, the Cleveland Indians, rescheduled the beginning of their regular season for a stadium in Wisconsin. Groundskeepers at Jacobs Field were slow in shoveling the diamond.
Climate worry isn't science. It's impassioned, hallucinatory sentiment. Happily, it may soon meet reason, and then its end. Where anecdote once happened to corroborate the claim, glances out the window nowadays reveal skies darkening, brightening; and temperatures rising and falling commensurate to the seasons. Yes, it gets too hot and too cold, then snow or rain falls on entirely the wrong day of the year, but to call weather mutable is to call it normal. Lurid possibility no longer acceptable for censure, a demand for proof is going to be made, and the "global warming" shamanists have none to adduce.
Madame Speaker? One first shy of where Nancy Pelosi must have wanted to be. The majority party's doyenne traveled to Near Eastern capitals this last week, and for that had to at least try on the title of Madame Emissary.
While packing, Mme. needed to untangle herself from controversy over her short tour. The Bush administration didn't want Pelosi to go to Syria because, explained a representative, "to have high-level U.S. officials going there to have photo opportunities that [Syrian dictator Bashar] Assad then exploits" dragged American foreign policy in a direction the White House considered backwards. The speaker thought this was unfair. "It's interesting because three of our colleagues, who are all Republicans, were in Syria yesterday and I didn't hear the White House speaking out about that."
True, members of both parties from a Congress restless in the president's second term have pilgrimaged, several of them stopping in Damascus to patronize the man whose totalitarian regime endures seven years after the death of its founder, resisting the Westerly democratist push. Pelosi, who is politicking all the time, should know why she was singled out. Straying legislators have received the administration's open disapproval, including Republican Arlen Specter when he, in December, accompanied three Democrats. But as the frequency of these trips increased so did the profile of those taking them. Ranking senatorial committee membership doesn't compare to tertiary executive standing. The Damascene audience of three congressmen preceding the speaker might be identified as Who?, Who? and Who?, whereas one familiar with just a dozen Washington names probably knows Nancy Pelosi.
Once overseas, the emissary practiced grandma diplomacy. She was photographed wearing a native bonnet; then shaking hands with a nice, smiling man who lives in the watchtower of a police state. And then she misspoke to a degree of international incidence, with an artlessness that almost charmed. Talks with the nice, smiling man "enabled us to communicate a message from Prime Minister Olmert that Israel was ready to engage in peace talks." Mr. Olmert issued a correction to the world, insofar as Israel was waiting for Bashar Assad to enjoin Syria's terrorism, thus far from ready.
Some press accounts did not report this contradiction. Others assuaged Syria's blameworthiness by placing it at the end of an accusation of Bush's. "The White House accuses," but, you know, maybe not rightly. That Damascus extrudes fascism, of course, wouldn't be an assertion but an acknowledgment of asseverated fact, as if the weatherman were to accuse stratus clouds of supporting rain.
Propitious were two news items coming from Iraqi Kurdistan in the same week: the first, by Patrick Lasswell, was about an old torture facility in Suliamaniya known as "The Red Building"; and the second, a dispatch from correspondent Michael Totten, among the Peshmerga, on Kurdish soldiery. The Assad state regularly tramples its populating Kurds, and as Pelosi's itinerary skipped Baghdad, the speaker's magniloquent determination that "the road to Damascus is a road to peace" was a peculiar and consequential choice for recognition.
A murmur about the illegality of the tour has gone up, and will probably quietly go back down. Since the average resident of San Francisco is agog over any insult to Washington, and something near a national majority shrug their shoulders at the why and when of deploying consuls, the speaker will be, after this trip, neither unelectable nor irrepatriable. Still, in her peremptory summons to an American ally, and her silence on the crucial provinces in northern Iraq, Nancy Pelosi made obvious the loyalties that would be most highly valued, two years from now, by a Democratic president.
Historical precedent is one reference when trying to assess the last fortnight. Her Majesty's sailors were snatched in allied waters by Iran and were at least legally maltreated, drawing a response from London that generosity defined as forbearance. Today, it was announced that all captured hands would be let out.
Only one event can be precisely compared: that being the last time Britons were seized out of turn by Iranians, which was just under three years ago, captivity lasting only three days. The 1979 Khomeinist mobbing of the American embassy in Tehran and the 1982 Falklands War are germane to the belligerent nation and injured nation: the first, a kind of inaugural ceremony for a brutal theocracy; the second, a stultifying lesson to Argentina in the extant duties of a protector. Noted in passing, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis may most plainly show what elected men are willing to go to war over and if so, when.
Dissimilarities are obvious. Tony Blair has at his command nuclear weapons but is not John F. Kennedy, either in terms of obligation or temperament. Iran's compass is a regional one, widened through insidious, rarely overt, actions. And from what the public has seen of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's letters, Tehran's title may have all the ebullience of Nikita Khrushchev but none of the penmanship.
A cursory summation of the crisis — Kennedy discovers atomic weapons in Cuba, confronts Moscow and occludes Soviet convoys, Moscow accedes and strips Cuba of its arms — deludes. The White House was reluctant to believe that the Soviets would solve their problems with intercontinental ballistic delivery by placing limited-range missiles about one hundred miles from the United States. Kennedy would remain dubious for six weeks, from late August to mid-October, until photographic proof was brought to his bedside study.
The president was only, if ever, resigned to the eventuality of striking Cuban launch pads if Moscow could not be castigated into a rescission. He contemned Curtis LeMay and the general's stolid preparation for aerial bombardment, in Richard Reeves' biography telling his staff of the military, "If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong." There was deliberation, vacillation, in the Oval Office. A naval blockade and stateside mobilization came to be the favored policy. John Kennedy disregarded protocol several times, withholding reply to the enemy's targeting of U2 flights and even the fatal downing of one of the surveillance craft airborne over Cuba.
At the end of two weeks, a couple of days before Moscow's salient would be sheared off by American warplanes, the Politburo's concession, under pen name Khrushchev, was sent over the radio. From Reeve's account, John F. Kennedy likely thought of his threat of force as more of a bluff — the Soviet yield was peripety, a miracle.
Reeve's own summation was that the president "could not risk nuclear war or even send troops to die" for the subjects of contention. American victory was not unqualified. Missiles in Italy and Turkey, depicted as little Cubas off a Russian coast under the tint of moral equivalence as well as Khrushchev's own fervid correspondence, were soon after removed. Their strategic function was maintained as they were superseded, but a certain political and moral penalty was paid. Up to and during the confrontation, the president was braced by the country's support. A year earlier, nearly nine in ten Americans wanted the army in free Berlin, war or not; and welcomed Washington to devise new atomic weaponry even if Moscow was still abeyant.
In October 1962, a majority in the United States wanted a blockade, but not an invasion of Cuba. John Kennedy had a minority party rebuking him for not acting sooner or more firmly, and still navigated limits other than those self-imposed. Today's Blair government is burdened with complacency in politics and culture, restrained by low martial strength, and meanwhile continues its attendance at most fronts of the war. As of this morning, all sailors will return alive.
Although the prime minister is suffering invective, it isn't clear whether charges of pusillanimity spring from something more than pique. If Tony Blair and his American ally will keep the atomic bomb from Tehran, and the decisive moment is still years ahead, then Iran's harassments will be ignored. Attacking the Khomeinists for those unfortunate fifteen would have duly satisfied patriotism; justice, too. What about strategy?
Will he act for the sake of utility? Or cooperation? Science News magazine reports, as noted by a resourceful John Derbyshire, that contemporary magazine Nature will publish experiments conducted by neurologists to better understand the vitality of empathy in ethical judgment — with especial focus on that operation in a damaged brain. "The researchers propose," wrote Science News, "that prefrontal damage dilutes emotional reactions to harm that one inflicts on others. People with such damage thus solve moral dilemmas by following social conventions for helping as many folks as possible and hurting as few as possible, rather than by considering personal feelings."
What seemed to diminish the study's comparison of sentimentality and reason, however, were both the familiarity of scenarios and the narrow margin outside of sensible choices. One example, holding the power to prevent or acquiesce to the stilling of a child, was a suppressed and disfigured memory of MASH's Hawkeye, unforgettable through a blubbering Alan Alda — so one might have the wrong kind of vicarious experience. Another example begged what logical or sympathetic action would justify, all things the same, committing manslaughter of five instead of one.
I was reminded of a situation once posited by Glenn Reynolds. If you were in 2005 New Orleans and urged to evacuate, but had transport space so limited that bringing along the family dog meant forgoing vital supplies or even your neighbor, would you leave Rover to a watery end? Reynolds, in his famous dispassion, stated that he would place the life of man well over man's best friend, and received a swell of letters from indignant readers.
But the hypothesis was a good one; it provokes in a way that others couldn't. So in John's case: if Long Island were about to become a shoal and Boris didn't fit in the Derbyshire car, would he — ? Step back. Are dogs people? They aren't. Can dogs swim? They can. May lost dogs be replaced? Nominally, by all means. That is, anyway, subjectio the mind deploys in an argument with the heart, an argument it will on average lose.
