I’ve been reading Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away (reviews | pricing), an engaging memoir tracing the life of a Marine Force Recon officer from the recruiting station through tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Buried deep in the combat narrative is a short passage worth highlighting in a time when the only headlines from the frontlines seem to reflect a search for collateral damage:

On a hazy Sunday afternoon in early March, the commanding general of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General James Conway, visited Matilda to speak with his officers… Conway looked like a general should: tall, tanned, and white haired, with a deep voice that was both soothing and authoritative. Whenever he spoke, I thought of the radio announcer Paul Harvey. General Conway commanded instinctive respect.

The general stood on top of an amtrac, backed by the U.S. and Marine Corps flags. His voice boomed through a microphone to the hundred or so men standing beneath him. The theme was rules of engagement, and he wanted to make four points very clear. First, commanders had an inherent obligation–not merely a right, but a legal and ethical obligation–to defend their Marines. Second, when the enemy used human shields or put legitimate targets next to mosques and hospitals, he, not we, endangered those innocents. Third, a commander would be held responsible not for the facts as they emerged from an investigation, but for the facts as they appeared to him in good faith at the time–at night, in a sandstorm, with bullets in the air. His fourth and final point distilled the rules of engagement to their essence. He called it Wilhelm’s Law, a tribute to General Charles Wilhelm: if the enemy started the shooting, our concern should be proportionality–responding with adequate, but not excessive, force. If we started the shooting, the concern should be collateral damage.
I took notes as he spoke, thinking this guidance was pure gold to be passed on to my troops.
(Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away, pp. 181-182)

Once again, I seek the advice of my best critics: you.

One of my audiobook selections for the drive from Colorado was Stephen Mansfield’s recently released The Faith of the American Soldier (reviews | prices). Mansfield does an outstanding job connecting spirituality with the profession of arms. His book is a quick and fascinating read worthwhile to anyone interested in understanding how this generation has confronted their country’s call to war.

Rather than my usual habit of repeating an author’s words, the long weekend gave me enough time to write some of my own. The following is a piece I put together this evening and plan to submit to the campus paper in hopes of connecting with this year’s 9/11 anniversary. Constructive criticism welcomed with open, platonic arms. (There’s my last laugh, Andrew

OUR GENERATION’S CRUCIBLE
John Deniston, Class of 2007

This Sunday’s four-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks brings pause to observe another crucial yet silent milestone in America’s response to terror. As of June 7 of this year, the time elapsed since 9/11 has surpassed the span of America’s involvement in World War II—from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the final surrender at Tokyo Bay.

The realization that we have been fighting a Global War on Terror for a period longer than it took our grandparents—the Greatest Generation—to engage and defeat imperial Japan, fascist Germany, and their Axis partners might cause some to question our progress and reconsider our mission.

Discerning our prospects for victory against terrorism requires both an understanding of the complexities of fighting a war in this new, uncharted territory and an appreciation of those we have sent to fight it.

Our grandparents stunned the world with an Allied victory in only 1,365 days: time that included the Doolittle Raid and Midway, the invasion of Normandy, and the atomic results of the Manhattan Project.

Our own progress in four years, though, should not be underestimated: the terror sanctuary of the Taliban is gone and Saddam Hussein is not torturing his own people any more. Three-quarters of Al Qaeda’s original senior leadership have been killed or captured. A.Q. Kahn’s marketplace of destruction that provided nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea and other nations has been shut down. The Iraqi people have gone to the polls in impressive numbers and will soon be voting on the first democratic constitution in the region. On our own doorstep, the FBI announced the August 31 indictment of four men accused of planning terrorist attacks in Southern California.

Despite these victories, attacks in London, Baghdad, Sharm el-Sheikh and elsewhere remind us that our enemy is not yet vanquished.

If the script to ultimate victory were known—as it is the historical hindsight of World War II—it would be easy to measure our progress. But, in a war against enemies who do not mass on borders or even have a conventional chain of command, traditional metrics are not very useful.

Instead, we are inspired by another measure: the courage and skill of those we have sent to do our fighting. While we fight a far different war from that of our grandparents, the sacrifice, principle, commitment, and bravery of our uniformed peers surely matches that of the Greatest Generation.

The brave Americans on the streets of Kirkuk and Kabul bear a strong resemblance to their predecessors that fought from Bastogne to the Bismarck Sea. The average age of those storming the beaches on D-Day was only 19. Today, the average soldier at war is just 21.1 years old.

While these men and women are not much different than those giants on whose shoulders they stand, the more meaningful truth is that they are not much different from you and me.

We should be proud of our warriors not only because of their success, but because they are truly us. We should be confident of our victory because these brave Americans represent the best our nation has to offer—if they cannot win, we have lost.

Author Stephen Mansfield writes of our generation at war, “They were not expected to do well. The conventional wisdom pegged them as spoiled offspring of guilt-ridden baby-boomer parents who plied them with toys but never told them who they really were. They lived, we were told, in a materialistic, amoral, “online” world that hardened their souls and sickened their minds… They gave us Columbine, after all, and a dozen other symbols of decadence and decline.”

Our brothers and sisters-in-arms have exploded such pessimistic expectations faster than a “target of opportunity” on the first night of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

They have postponed college educations, said goodbye to fiancées and best friends, left behind the certainty of hometowns, and shunned the familiarity of life as you and I live it. They have traded all they have for a chance to be part of something larger than themselves. And they have fought valiantly.

They know what they are fighting for. One embedded journalist noted, “Soldiers I encountered were trained, ethical, thoughtful, and intelligent. It was not unusual to talk to a private or private first class and be absolutely astounded at how well he could talk about why they were there.”

Their confrontation with the brutal realities of war has caused them to embody sacrifice, the sincerest tenet of any religion. The most popular emblem carried by members of the military in Afghanistan and Iraq, outside of official insignia, is a small shield paraphrasing the words of Joshua 1:9: “I will be strong and courageous. I will not be terrified, or discouraged; for the Lord my God is with me wherever I go.”

They are not perfect. Just as you and I, they have lapsed in judgment and erred in justice. But intervening against injustice has not taken someone wiser or more senior, for they have done it themselves: the whistleblower at Abu Ghraib was twenty-four year old Specialist Joe Darby of Waynesville, North Carolina.

One journalist, writing of his experience at the front, commented, “The press back home doesn’t have it right. We are doing these people a disservice. I haven’t found Animal House and Debbie Does Dallas over here. What I found was Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan.”

These are our nation’s soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. These are our generation’s peers. These are our response to the terrorists of 9/11. These, I hope you will agree, are our heroes.

Continuing the background reading necessary for my upcoming counter-terror educational sojourn to Israel has led me to Natan Sharansky’s latest work, The Case for Democracy (reviews | prices). Sharansky, a fascinating Soviet dissident who spent nine years locked in a Siberian labor camp, investigates the moral premises separating free societies from fear societies while answering the foundational question, “Is freedom for everyone?” Though verbose in sections, overall this work is a penetrating look at important recent history–the collapse of the USSR, the Israeli/Palestinian peace process, the Global War on Terror–that isn’t being taught in school.

Below, I’ve included some of Sharansky’s more insightful points:

Pg. 104-105
A regime based on fear must maintain increasingly tight control over its population to remain in power, and such control inevitably triggers a process of decay. Outward signs of this decay may take some time to emerge. In fact, if a fear society is blessed with abundant natural resources, the society may prosper even when the process of internal dissolution is well under way. This is what occurred during the middle decades of the twentieth century in the Soviet Union. Rich reserves of coal, oil, iron, aluminum, diamonds, and many other commodities provided the means to sustain the regime’s total control over its own people. Moreover, in an age of industrialization and mass production, methods perfected elsewhere could be put to use in the Soviet’s command-and-control economy. But in an information age, when technological innovation was becoming increasingly dependent on the free flow of ideas, the Soviet’s sclerotic fear society was destined to fall further and further behind the West.In Saudi Arabia, where a degenerating fear society has been hidden for decades beneath a sea of oil, a similar breakdown is setting in. The hundreds of billions of petrodollars that have poured into the country have built cities, paved roads, and created enormous wealth and power for the regime. But as populations explode and oil revenues dwindle, the inability of the Saudi’s fear society to generate growth from within will become more and more apparent. The Saudis control their fear society through a number of institutions, including those that support a global Islamist network. As these institutions come under increasing strain, Saudi Arabia and the regime that rules it will face the same bitter fate that awaits all fear societies: stagnation, regression, and eventually collapse. This process is inexorable. The only way to slow it down is to seek help from the outside. If it is unable to generate enough energy from within to provide the means to indefinitely control its people, a fear society must parasitically feed off the resources of others to recharge its depleting batteries.

Pg. 205-207
Human rights violations can and do take place in democratic societies. But one of the things that sets democracies apart from fear societies is the way they respond to those violations. A fear society does not openly debate human rights issues. Its people do not protest. Its regime does not investigate. Its press does not expose. Its courts do not protect. In contrast, democratic societies are always engaged in self-examination.

For example, look at how the United States dealt with the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison. Even before the abuse became publicly known, the army had suspended those involved and was conducting a full investigation. And as soon as the disturbing pictures of the abuse were published, America’s democracy was shocked into action. The Congress, determined to find the culprits, immediately convened public hearings, and demanded a full account of what led to the abuse. Politicians and opinion makers insisted that the people responsible for the abuse be held accountable, including those at the very top of the chain of command. The media mulled over the details, pursuing every allegation, tracking down every lead. The American people openly discussed what the abuse said about their own country’s values, its image in the world, and how that image would affect the broader War on Terror. The U.S. president, for his part, apologized to the families of the victims and said that those responsible would be punished.

But let’s not forget that the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib under Saddam was far worse than anything America was accused of. Yet were pictures distributed of Saddam’s soldiers murdering, raping, and torturing Iraqis? If they had been distributed, would Iraq’s parliament have conducted public hearings? Would the Iraqi media have reported it? Would anyone have publicly called for the resignation of Saddam’s defense minister, let alone Saddam himself? Would Saddam have denounced the brutality and apologized to the victims and their families?

Far from showing that all societies are the same, the human rights abuses that sometimes occur in democracies often help illustrate the tremendous moral divide that separates free and fear societies.

Pg. 264-265
For ten years, and with five different prime ministers, Israel has tried various approaches to peace with the Palestinians. Rabin and Peres sought to create a “New Middle East” with a Palestinian dictatorship. Netanyahu tried to establish reciprocity. Barak jumped to final status negotiations. Sharon embraced unilateral disengagement. During this time, most of the world and many in Israel measured progress in the peace process by the percentage of territory that was handed over, by how close Palestinians were to establishing a state, or by how close Israel was to removing settlements. Thus, according to the world’s criteria, the peace process was either speeding ahead or stuck in neutral. In contrast, I measured progress by the extent of freedom within Palestinian society. But according to my criteria, despite the efforts of Israeli governments to make peace, the peace process was going steadily in reverse because there was less freedom and more fear within Palestinian society than before Oslo began.

There is another way. History has shows us that a few years of freedom can make a world of difference. In 1944, Germany had descended into depths that are scarcely imaginable today. A few years later, West Germany, a free society once more, was building its democratic institutions and becoming a peaceful member of the free world.

The culture of death and violence that has engulfed Palestinian society can also change quickly. But the change is unlikely to happen on its own, nor will it be the product of an Israeli withdrawal or phony peace. It will happen when the free world abandons the false assumptions hat have guided diplomacy in the region for decades. It will happen when the world’s democratic leaders, especially those in the United States and Israel, embrace the principles that President Bush outlined on June 24, 2002, and ensure that those principles shape their policies. Above all, it will happen only when those democratic leaders have faith that freedom has the power to change our world–even when its seeds are planted in the rocky soil of the West Band and the Gaza strip.

Words well said from a wise revolutionary.

Hours of bus rides around Northern Virginia have afforded me the opportunity to catch-up on a months-neglected reading list, the latest selection from which was Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future (reviews | prices). Mr. Barone was a memorable actor in my childhood via his regular appearance on The McLaughlin Group, a PBS public-policy-rant-fest that was a regular contender in the Deniston Family Friday night television thrill-fest. His latest writing continues this proud tradition.

Essentially, Barone provides a simple but potent paradigm upon which to judge public policy: does it make life “Harder” or “Softer”? He writes, “Soft America coddles: our schools, seeking to instill self-esteem, ban tag and dodgeball, and promote just about anyone who shows up. Hard America plays for keeps: the private sector fires peoples when profits fall, and the military trains under live fire.”

More applicably for my demographic, Barone continues, “… Americans up to age eighteen live mostly in Soft America, just as most Americans after the age of eighteen live in Hard America. This is the opposite of the situation in most of Europe, where high schools are Hard, to the point that students’ performance usually determines how well they will do in the rest of their lifes, and where life after high school is Soft, with generous welfare benefits, short work hours, long vacations, early retirement, and generous state pensions (Pg. 146).”

Barone spends the balance of the book recounting the Twentieth Century shifts towards Hard and Soft throughout America: in business, education, criminal justice, welfare, the military, et cetera. On the whole, Mr. Barone presents a fascinating lens through which to both understand current events and explore recent, relevant history. In a look towards the future, he includes in his conclusion a striking passage that seems to be a fitting celebration of this day:

Pg. 161-162
United Flight 93 was the last of the four hijacked planes to take off, because of delays at Newark airport. That meant that the passengers had time–109 minutes–after the hijackers launched their attack to respond. Prior to September 11, the standard injunction to passengers and crew on a hijacked airliner was to cooperate and not resist, the assumption being that the hijackers want to land the plane somewhere and that the only way to survive is to acquiesce. But passengers on United Flight 93 called their loved ones on cell phones and heard the terrible news of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It quickly became obvious that these hijackers had no intention of landing the plane safely. So the passengers got together and resisted. “Let’s roll!” were the last words Lisa Beamer heard husband Todd Beamer say. We do not know exactly what happened: the tapes that have been released to relatives of the dead passengers and crew members are reportedly terrifying. But we do know that United 93 came down in an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, far short of the hijackers’ intended destination–probably the U.S. Capitol. As columnist Brad Todd wrote five days later, “Just 109 minutes after a new form of terrorism–the most deadly yet invented–came into use, it was rendered, if not obsolete, at least decidedly less effective. Deconstructed, unengineered, thwarted, and put into the dust bin of history. By Americans. In 109 minutes.”

Duty calls, Hardness happens. Welcome to the Millenial Generation.

An afternoon of relaxation spent at the Rockbridge Regional Library here in Lexington, VA led me to stumble across an outstanding 120-page read: John Lewis Gaddis’ Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (reviews | pricing). This highly-accessible book, based on a series of lectures the author delivered at the New York Public Library in 2002, is a fascinating look at the evolution of America’s national security grand strategy throughout our short history. More specifically, Dr. Gaddis traces the role of preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony through the inflection points of the War of 1812, World War II, and 9/11.

The lectures, easily consumed by an interested reader in two hours, provide a historical context sorely missing from today’s debate on the Bush Doctrine. The writer has a unique ability to objectively guide the reader into a topic commonly inflamed as a tinderbox of partisanship and emerge the listener from the argument with the feeling that the issue isn’t political in the least.

As is my habit, I’ve funneled a few particularly insightful thoughts from the book into the space below. I apologize if some of the excerpts below are less informative outside of the author’s original context–sitting down with the book would certainly provide the greater picture and pleasant learning experience. Comments, as always, are welcomed.

Pg. 37-38
Thus, over the decade that followed the first surprise attack on United States soil–the occupation of Washington by the British in August 1814, and the subsequent burning of the Capitol and the White House–American leaders evolved a strategy of forestalling future challenges by enlarging American interests. The principal elements of that strategy were: preemption where marauders might exploit the weakness of neighboring states, or where that weakness might tempt stronger states to establish a presence; unilateralism, so that the United States need not rely upon any other state to guarantee its security; and, finally, hegemony over the North American continent, in order that the dominant international system there would reflect a preponderance of American power rather than a balance among several powers, with all possibilities for wars, commercial rivalries, and revolutions that the latter arrangement had led to in Europe.Pg. 69-71
Both the British attack on Washington in 18114 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 revealed failures in what we would today call homeland security. The British invasion showed that the United States could no longer rely upon competition among the European great powers to keep it safe: wars in Europe had in the past, and might again, spill over onto the North American continent. The Japanese assault demonstrated that the United States could no longer depend upon continental or even hemispheric hegemony to insulate it from danger: new methods of projecting military strength across great distances meant that the rise of hostile states anywhere in the world could endanger our security.

It’s important to emphasize the word “states,” because it distinguishes the surprises of 1814 and 1941 from the one that occurred in 2001. The first two attacks did indeed come from states using a familiar form of power–military force–in unexpected ways. The remedies fell, therefore, within the traditional limits of diplomacy and warfare. The United States might seek to dissuade, deter, or defeat such adversaries, but whatever option it chose it would be dealing with an identifiable regime led by identifiable leaders operating by identifiable means from an identifiable piece of territory. We could assume, therefore, a more or less common calculation of costs versus benefits across the differences that separated us from our opponents. A sufficient level of diplomatic activity would remove whatever reasons there might be for hostility; if it didn’t, a sufficient accumulation of retaliatory capability would deter whoever remained hostile from attacking us; and if that didn’t work, a sufficient application of military strength would compel an eventual settlement or surrender.

None of these things was true of the terrorists who carried out the attacks of September 11, 2001. They acted on behalf of no state, for although Al Qaeda was operating from a base in Afghanistan, it’s not at all clear that Osama bin Laden consulted his Taliban hosts prior to launching the operation, or that–given the certainty of reprisal–they would have approved it had he done so. Nor can anyone claim that the destruction of the Taliban or the subsequent invasion of Iraq has removed the danger of future terrorist strikes, in the same way that defeating Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in World War II eliminated the threats those regimes posed. Nor is it likely that diplomacy or deterrence could have prevented the September 11th attacks, because those techniques require identifiable adversaries who have interests of their own–whether it be the survival of their regime or simply of themselves–which they wish to secure. The terrorists struck, as states can never do, from the sanctuary provided by anonymity: how does one negotiate with a shadow? Nor were they interested in their own survival: how does one deter someone who’s prepared to commit suicide?

Pg. 71-72
There have always been anarchists, assassins, and saboteurs operating without obvious sponsors, and many of them have been willing to risk their lives in doing so. Single acts of terror, however, have rarely in the past shaken the stability of states or societies because the number of victims they have targeted and the amount of damage they have caused have been relatively small…

September 11th was something new in this respect also. For although the attacks did not destabilize a regime–the effect was just the opposite–they certainly did shake a society. No previous act of terrorism had come anywhere close to the lives list and damage inflicted: indeed it would be difficult to think of any conventional military operation in which the results produced were so disproportionate to the resources expended. As President George W. Bush himself pointed out: “All of the chaos and suffering [the terrorists] caused came at much less than the cost of a single tank.” Or, to put it another way, by expending 19 lives and a few hundred thousand dollars, the attackers managed to kill some 3,000 people, to inflict as much as a hundred billion dollars’ worth or property damage, and to redefine the nature of our times.

Pg. 80-82
It was not just the Twin Towers that collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001: so too did some of our most fundamental assumptions about international, national, and personal security.

That was the situation President Bush confronted before that morning had ended. Any administration in such a crisis would have to rethink what it thought it knew about security and hence strategy; but this administration has done so in a particularly startling way, with striking results. To sense how much so, try a time travel exercise: place yourself back on that terrible day and ask how you would have responded had someone predicted the following:

That the United States would quickly respond by invading, and easily conquering, the nation any historian could have told you would be the most resistant to invasion and conquest, Afghanistan–and that it would have the support of the Afghan people and of most of the rest of the world in doing so. That the bush administration would then, over the next few months, undertake the most fundamental reassessment of American grand strategy in over half a century, and that it would publish the results of this rethinking, for all to read, discuss, and dissent from. That it would then, in a manner fully consistent with that strategy, seek the approval of its allies and the United Nations Security Council for what it regarded as the next logical step–going after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq–and that it would fail miserably in getting that approval.

That the United States would then nonetheless, with the help of Great Britain, go ahead and attack Iraq anyway, in the race of the direst warnings about the risks of military resistance, the use of weapons of mass destruction, the eruption of outrage in the Arab world, a new outbreak of terrorism, a huge increase in the price of oil, and astronomical estimates of the human and material costs of the operation–only to have none of these things happen. That among the things that did happen would be: a modest improvement in American and global economic conditions; an intensified dialogue with the Arab world about political reform; a withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia along with their redeployment to such formerly inhospitable locations as Afghanistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Kyrgzstan, Romania, and Bulgaria; and an increasing nervousness on the part of the Syrian and Iranian governments as they contemplated the consequences of being surrounded by American clients or surrogates.

Finally, that much of the rest of the world would find itself amazed, and if the truth be told somewhat alarmed, over the emergence of the United States as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international system than it had been on September 11, 2001–as well as over one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V. If anyone had predicted all of this on that day, you might have wondered what pills they had been popping or what weed they’d been smoking. You almost certainly would not have taken them seriously. And yet, this is indeed what’s happened.

Pg. 93-94
How, though, to maintain the momentum, given that the Taliban was no more and that Al Qaeda wasn’t likely to present itself as a conspicuous target? This was where Saddam Hussein came in: Iraq was the most feasible place in which to strike the next blow. If we could topple that tyrant, if we could repeat the Afghan Agincourt along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates, then we could accomplish a great deal. We could complete the task the Gulf War left unfinished. We could destroy whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam might have accumulated since. We could end whatever support he was providing for terrorists beyond Iraq’s borders, notably those who acted against Israel. We could liberate the Iraqi people. We could ensure an ample supply of inexpensive oil. We could set in motion a process that could undermine and ultimately remove reactionary regimes elsewhere in the Middle East, thereby eliminating the principal breeding ground for terrorism. And, as President Bush did say publicly in a powerful speech to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, we could save that organization from the irrelevance into which it would otherwise descend if its resolutions continued to be contemptuously disregarded. The attraction of this particular stone was the number of birds it could simultaneously kill.

Pg. 111-113
A good place to start might be with Adam Smith, who saw as early as 1776 that the Americans “are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.” The Wealth of Nations, in which that passage appeared, made the case that a collective good–prosperity–required the pursuit of individual interests within an open market. For the state or anyone else to try to determine those interests, or to restrict the choices allowed in pursuing them, or to incorporate them within some central plan–to attempt and of those things, Smith argued, would constitute an abridgment of liberty, the single individual interest everyone shares. In an increasingly complex world, he insisted, no authority possessed the competence to determine and then fulfill each individual’s interest. People could, however, be trusted to do their own determining and fulfilling, as long as they proceeded within a set of rules designed to safeguard their right to do so and the fairness with which they went about it.

Although we don’t often think of it in this way, the United States Constitution transferred Smith’s thinking from the realm of economics into that of politics. For it too assumed that the pursuit of individual interests within a fixed set of rules would produce a collective good: that’s what federalism was all about. It was at the same time, however, no prescription for paralysis. It would be absurd, Alexander Hamilton noted in the 23rd Federalist, to confide “to a government the direction of the most essential national interests, without daring to trust it to the authorities which are indispensable to their proper and efficient management… [This] is the strongest argument in favor of an energetic government; for any other can certainly never preserve the Union of so large an empire.”

A century and a half later, the United States projected its federal model abroad as it assumed its international responsibilities, at first unsuccessfully in the form of Wilson’s League of Nations, then more successfully through the United Nations, and most successfully of all through the consensual coalition American leaders built and maintained throughout the Cold War for the purpose of containing international communism. At no point was there an effort to centralize all decision-making in a single location, or to entrust it to a single individual. At no point did power alone confer legitimacy: just as the Constitution gave Delaware an equal voice with Pennsylvania in the United States Senate, so Luxembourg was accorded the same status as France, West Germany, and Great Britain within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. At no point as well, though, was paralysis permitted: in a manner fully consistent with the spirit of federalism, the American system of Cold War alliances balanced the leadership needed in seeking a common good against the flexibility required to satisfy individual interests. It provided a way for the United States to wield power while minimizing arrogance, and that’s not a bad model for an even more powerful United States in a post-September 11th world.

If this record confirms, as I think it does, the “transferability” of Smith’s principles in geopolitics as well as politics, then it would seem to follow that a twenty-first-century empire of liberty should not content itself with making the world safe for democracy, or for diversity, or even primarily for the United States. Rather, it should seek to make the world safe for federalism, from which all the rest would flow. Adam Smith’s grand design–applied more widely that even his prophetic sensibility could have ever imagined–has served this country in particular, as well as the cause of freedom in general, remarkably well. All the more reason, then, not to discard it lightly now that Americans have the opportunity once again to do so much designing.

Pg. 115-117
The question “Why do they hate us so?” was a reasonable one to ask at the time, but as we’ve learned more about the attackers it’s become clear that the better question would have been: “Why do so few hate us so much that they would strike us in that way?” It wasn’t poverty, injustice, or any other morally justifiable grievance that caused them to do so. It was because they agreed with Lincoln. We are, therefore, like the Twin Towers, an irresistible target for those few whose aspiration is to kill hope.

How, then, do we keep hope alive when the costs and risks of doing so have suddenly become much greater? The first thing I’d say is that we have to be ready to fight for it. I shall always remember one of my Yale undergraduates getting up before a group of students and faculty one evening shortly after September 11th and announcing: “I love this country. I love this place. I love what we’re doing here tonight. I love it so much that I’m prepared to defend our right to do it, which is why I’m joining the Marines. It’s people like me who make it possible for people like you to be here doing what you’re doing.”

And so, indeed, it is. Our ability as a democracy to question all values depends on our faith in and determination to defend certain values. They are the bedrock beliefs that make it possible for us to be here and for so many others to wish to be. Of course these are social constructions, as my post-modernist colleagues would be quick to point out, but it’s our society that constructed them. That makes them worth fighting for, as so many others have done before us.

‘Twas delighted to find the latest issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis speech digest in my campus mailbox today. This edition includes some excellent words from historian David McCullough concerning life, history, and education.

McCullough’s words are an apt reminder of the value of a liberal education–particularly poignant given the advent of finals in two short weeks. The folks at Hillsdale have been kind enough to allow me to reproduce the transcript in its entirety. If you’d prefer to absorb McCullough’s wisdom away from the glow of the computer screen, a free subscription to Imprimis is yours for the taking.

Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are
David McCullough

Harry Truman once said the only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know. Lord Bolingbroke, who was an 18th century political philosopher, said that history is philosophy taught with examples. An old friend, the late Daniel Boorstin, who was a very good historian and Librarian of Congress, said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers. We’re raising a lot of cut flowers and trying to plant them, and that’s much of what I want to talk about tonight.

The task of teaching and writing history is infinitely complex and infinitely seductive and rewarding. And it seems to me that one of the truths about history that needs to be portrayed – needs to be made clear to a student or to a reader – is that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at any point along the way, just as your own life can. You never know. One thing leads to another. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Actions have consequences. These all sound self-evident. But they’re not self-evident – particularly to a young person trying to understand life.

Nor was there ever anything like the past. Nobody lived in the past, if you stop to think about it. Jefferson, Adams, Washington – they didn’t walk around saying, “Isn’t this fascinating, living in the past?” They lived in the present just as we do. The difference was it was their present, not ours. And just as we don’t know how things are going to turn out for us, they didn’t either. It’s very easy to stand on the mountaintop as an historian or biographer and find fault with people for why they did this or didn’t do that, because we’re not involved in it, we’re not inside it, we’re not confronting what we don’t know – as everyone who preceded us always was.

Nor is there any such creature as a self-made man or woman. We love that expression, we Americans. But every one who’s ever lived has been affected, changed, shaped, helped, hindered by other people. We all know, in our own lives, who those people are who’ve opened a window, given us an idea, given us encouragement, given us a sense of direction, self-approval, self-worth, or who have straightened us out when we were on the wrong path. Most often they have been parents. Almost as often they have been teachers. Stop and think about those teachers who changed your life, maybe with one sentence, maybe with one lecture, maybe by just taking an interest in your struggle. Family, teachers, friends, rivals, competitors – they’ve all shaped us. And so too have people we’ve never met, never known, because they lived long before us. They have shaped us too – the people who composed the symphonies that move us, the painters, the poets, those who have written the great literature in our language. We walk around everyday, everyone of us, quoting Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pope. We don’t know it, but we are, all the time. We think this is our way of speaking. It isn’t our way of speaking – it’s what we have been given. The laws we live by, the freedoms we enjoy, the institutions that we take for granted – as we should never take for granted – are all the work of other people who went before us. And to be indifferent to that isn’t just to be ignorant, it’s to be rude. And ingratitude is a shabby failing. How can we not want to know about the people who have made it possible for us to live as we live, to have the freedoms we have, to be citizens of this greatest of countries in all time? It’s not just a birthright, it is something that others struggled for, strived for, often suffered for, often were defeated for and died for, for us, for the next generation.

Character And Destiny

Now those who wrote the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia that fateful summer of 1776 were not superhuman by any means. Every single one had his flaws, his failings, his weaknesses. Some of them ardently disliked others of them. Every one of them did things in his life he regretted. But the fact that they could rise to the occasion as they did, these imperfect human beings, and do what they did is also, of course, a testimony to their humanity. We are not just known by our failings, by our weaknesses, by our sins. We are known by being capable of rising to the occasion and exhibiting not just a sense of direction, but strength.

The Greeks said that character is destiny, and the more I read and understand of history, the more convinced I am that they were right. You look at the great paintings by John Trumbull or Charles Willson Peale or Copley or Gilbert Stuart of those remarkable people who were present at the creation of our nation, the Founders as we call them. Those aren’t just likenesses. They are delineations of character and were intended to be. And we need to understand them, and we need to understand that they knew that what they had created was no more perfect than they were. And that has been to our advantage. It has been good for us that it wasn’t all just handed to us in perfect condition, all ready to run in perpetuity – that it needed to be worked at and improved and made to work better. There’s a wonderful incident that took place at the Cambria Iron Company in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the 19th century, when they were building the first Bessemer steel machinery, adapted from what had been seen of the Bessemer process in Britain. There was a German engineer named John Fritz, and after working for months to get this machinery finished, he came into the plant one morning, and he said, “Alright boys, let’s start her up and see why she doesn’t work.” That’s very American. We will find out what’s not working right and we will fix it, and then maybe it will work right. That’s been our star, that’s what we’ve guided on.

I have just returned from a cruise through the Panama Canal. I think often about why the French failed at Panama and why we succeeded. One of the reasons we succeeded is that we were gifted, we were attuned to adaptation, to doing what works, whereas they were trained to do everything in a certain way. We have a gift for improvisation. We improvise in jazz; we improvise in much of our architectural breakthroughs. Improvisation is one of our traits as a nation, as a people, because it was essential, it was necessary, because we were doing again and again and again what hadn’t been done before.

Keep in mind that when we were founded by those people in the late 18th century, none of them had had any prior experience in either revolutions or nation-making. They were, as we would say, winging it. And they were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the continental army at Cambridge in 1775, was 43 years old, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was 40. Benjamin Rush – one of the most interesting of them all and one of the founders of the antislavery movement in Philadelphia – was 30 years old when he signed the Declaration. They were young people. They were feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn’t a bank in the entire country. There wasn’t but one bridge between New York and Boston. It was a little country of 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery, a little fringe of settlement along the east coast. What a story. What a noble beginning. And think of this: almost no nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.

In the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington hangs John Trumbull’s great painting, “The Declaration of Independence, Fourth of July, 1776.” It’s been seen by more people than any other American painting. It’s our best known scene from our past. And almost nothing about it is accurate. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed on July 4th. They didn’t start to sign the Declaration until August 2nd, and only a part of the Congress was then present. They kept coming back in the months that followed from their distant states to take their turn signing the document. The chairs are wrong, the doors are in the wrong place, there were no heavy draperies at the windows, and the display of military flags and banners on the back wall is strictly a figment of Trumbull’s imagination. But what is accurate about it are the faces. Every single one of the 47 men in that painting is an identifiable, and thus accountable, individual. We know what they look like. We know who they were. And that’s what Trumbull wanted. He wanted us to know them and, by God, not to forget them. Because this momentous step wasn’t a paper being handed down by a potentate or a king or a czar, it was the decision of a Congress acting freely.

Our Failure, Our Duty

We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate. And it’s not their fault. There have been innumerable studies, and there’s no denying it. I’ve experienced it myself again and again. I had a young woman come up to me after a talk one morning at the University of Missouri to tell me that she was glad she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased she had shown up. She said, “Yes, I’m very pleased, because until now I never understood that all of the 13 colonies – the original 13 colonies – were on the east coast.” Now you hear that and you think: What in the world have we done? How could this young lady, this wonderful young American, become a student at a fine university and not know that? I taught a seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history, honor students, 25 of them. The first morning we sat down and I said, “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” Not one. There was a long silence and finally one young man asked, “Did he have, maybe, something to do with the Marshall Plan?” And I said yes, he certainly did, and that’s a good place to begin talking about George Marshall.

We have to do several things. First of all we have to get across the idea that we have to know who we were if we’re to know who we are and where we’re headed. This is essential. We have to value what our forebears – and not just in the 18th century, but our own parents and grandparents – did for us, or we’re not going to take it very seriously, and it can slip away. If you don’t care about it – if you’ve inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don’t know that it’s worth a fortune, you don’t even know that it’s a great work of art and you’re not interested in it – you’re going to lose it.

We have to do a far better job of teaching our teachers. We have too many teachers who are graduating with degrees in education. They go to schools of education or they major in education, and they graduate knowing something called education, but they don’t know a subject. They’re assigned to teach botany or English literature or history, and of course they can’t perform as they should. Knowing a subject is important because you want to know what you’re talking about when you’re teaching. But beyond that, you can’t love what you don’t know. And the great teachers – the teachers who influence you, who change your lives – almost always, I’m sure, are the teachers that love what they are teaching. It is that wonderful teacher who says “Come over here and look in this microscope, you’re really going to get a kick out of this.”

There was a wonderful professor of child psychology at the University of Pittsburgh named Margaret McFarland who was so wise that I wish her teachings and her ideas and her themes were much better known. She said that attitudes aren’t taught, they’re caught. If the teacher has an attitude of enthusiasm for the subject, the student catches that whether the student is in second grade or is in graduate school. She said that if you show them what you love, they’ll get it and they’ll want to get it. Also if the teachers know what they are teaching, they are much less dependent on textbooks. And I don’t know when the last time you picked up a textbook in American history might have been. And there are, to be sure, some very good ones still in print. But most of them, it appears to me, have been published in order to kill any interest that anyone might have in history. I think that students would be better served by cutting out all the pages, clipping up all the page numbers, mixing them all up and then asking students to put the pages back together in the right order. The textbooks are dreary, they’re done by committee, they’re often hilariously politically correct and they’re not doing any good. Students should not have to read anything that we, you and I, wouldn’t want to read ourselves. And there are wonderful books, past and present. There is literature in history. Let’s begin with Longfellow, for example. Let’s begin with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, for example. These are literature. They can read that too.

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.

And we need not leave the whole job of teaching history to the teachers. If I could have you come away from what I have to say tonight remembering one thing, it would be this: The teaching of history, the emphasis on the importance of history, the enjoyment of history, should begin at home. We who are parents or grandparents should be taking our children to historic sights. We should be talking about those books in biography or history that we have particularly enjoyed, or that character or those characters in history that have meant something to us. We should be talking about what it was like when we were growing up in the olden days. Children, particularly little children, love this. And in my view, the real focus should be at the grade school level. We all know that those little guys can learn languages so fast it takes your breath away. They can learn anything so fast it takes your breath away. And the other very important truth is that they want to learn. They can be taught to dissect a cow’s eye. They can be taught anything. And there’s no secret to teaching history or to making history interesting. Barbara Tuchman said it in two words, “Tell stories.” That’s what history is: a story. And what’s a story? E.M. Forster gave a wonderful definition to it: If I say to you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I say the king died and the queen died of grief, that’s a story. That’s human. That calls for empathy on the part of the teller of the story and of the reader or listener to the story. And we ought to be growing, encouraging, developing historians who have heart and empathy to put students in that place of those people before us who were just as human, just as real – and maybe in some ways more real than we are. We’ve got to teach history and nurture history and encourage history because it’s an antidote to the hubris of the present – the idea that everything we have and everything we do and everything we think is the ultimate, the best.

Going through the Panama Canal, I couldn’t help but think about all that I had read in my research on that story of what they endured to build that great path, how much they had to know and to learn, how many different kinds of talent it took to achieve that success, and what the Americans did under John Stevens and George Goethals in the face of unexpected breakdowns, landslides and floods. They built a canal that cost less than it was expected to cost, was finished before it was expected to be finished and is still running today exactly the same as it was in 1914 when it opened. They didn’t, by present day standards for example, understand the chemistry of making concrete. But when we go and drill into those concrete locks now, we find the deterioration is practically nil and we don’t know how they did it. That ingenious contrivance by the American engineers is a perfect expression of what engineering ought to be at its best – man’s creations working with nature. The giant gates work because they’re floating, they’re hollow like airplane wings. The electric motors that open and close the gates use power which is generated by the spillway from the dam that creates the lake that bridges the isthmus. It’s an extraordinary work of civilization. And we couldn’t do it any better today, and in some ways we probably wouldn’t do it as well. If you were to take a look, for example, at what’s happened with the “Big Dig” in Boston, you realize that we maybe aren’t closer to the angels by any means nearly a hundred years later.

We should never look down on those people and say that they should have known better. What do you think they’re going to be saying about us in the future? They’re going to be saying we should have known better. Why did we do that? What were we thinking of? All this second-guessing and the arrogance of it are unfortunate.

Listening To The Past

Samuel Eliot Morison said we ought to read history because it will help us to behave better. It does. And we ought to read history because it helps to break down the dividers between the disciplines of science, medicine, philosophy, art, music, whatever. It’s all part of the human story and ought to be seen as such. You can’t understand it unless you see it that way. You can’t understand the 18th century, for example, unless you understand the vocabulary of the 18th century. What did they mean by those words? They didn’t necessarily mean the same thing as we do. There’s a line in one of the letters written by John Adams where he’s telling his wife Abigail at home, “We can’t guarantee success in this war, but we can do something better. We can deserve it.” Think how different that is from the attitude today when all that matters is success, being number one, getting ahead, getting to the top. However you betray or gouge or claw or do whatever awful thing is immaterial if you get to the top.

That line in the Adams letter is saying that how the war turns out is in the hands of God. We can’t control that, but we can control how we behave. We can deserve success. When I read that line when I was doing the research on the book, it practically lifted me out of my chair. And then about three weeks later I was reading some correspondence written by George Washington and there was the same line. I thought, wait a minute, what’s going on? And I thought, they’re quoting something. So, as we all often do, I got down good old Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and I started going through the entries from the 18th century and bingo, there it was. It’s a line from the play Cato. They were quoting something that was in the language of the time. They were quoting scripture of a kind, a kind of secular creed if you will. And you can’t understand why they behaved as they did if you don’t understand that. You can’t understand why honor was so important to them and why they were truly ready to put their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor on the line. Those weren’t just words.

I want to read to you, in conclusion, a letter that John Quincy Adams received from his mother. Little John Adams was taken to Europe by his father when his father sailed out of Massachusetts in the midst of winter, in the midst of war, to serve our country in France. Nobody went to sea in the wintertime, on the North Atlantic, if it could possibly be avoided. And nobody did it trying to cut through the British barricade outside of Boston Harbor because the British ships were sitting out there waiting to capture somebody like John Adams and take him to London and to the Tower, where he would have been hanged as a traitor. But they sent this little ten-year-old boy with his father, risking his life, his mother knowing that she wouldn’t see him for months, maybe years at best. Why? Because she and his father wanted John Quincy to be in association with Franklin and the great political philosophers of France, to learn to speak French, to travel in Europe, to be able to soak it all up. And they risked his life for that – for his education. We have no idea what people were willing to do for education in times past. It’s the one sustaining theme through our whole country – that the next generation will be better educated than we are. John Adams himself is a living example of the transforming miracle of education. His father was able to write his name, we know. His mother was almost certainly illiterate. And because he had a scholarship to Harvard, everything changed for him. He said, “I discovered books and read forever,” and he did. And they wanted this for their son.

Well, it was a horrendous voyage. Everything that could have happened to go wrong, went wrong. And when the little boy came back, he said he didn’t ever want to go across the Atlantic again as long as he lived. And then his father was called back, and his mother said you’re going back. And here is what she wrote to him. Now, keep in mind that this is being written to a little kid and listen to how different it is from how we talk to our children in our time. She’s talking as if to a grownup. She’s talking to someone whom they want to bring along quickly because there’s work to do and survival is essential:

These are the times in which genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

Now, there are several interesting things going on in that letter. For all the times that she mentions the mind, in the last sentence she says, “When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.” In other words, the mind itself isn’t enough. You have to have the heart.

Well, of course he went and the history of our country is different because of it. John Quincy Adams, in my view, was the most superbly educated and maybe the most brilliant human being who ever occupied the executive office. He was, in my view, the greatest Secretary of State we’ve ever had. He wrote the Monroe Doctrine, among other things. And he was a wonderful human being and a great writer. Told to keep a diary by his father when he was in Europe, he kept the diary for 65 years. And those diaries are unbelievable. They are essays on all kinds of important, heavy subjects. He never tells you who he had lunch with or what the weather’s like. But if you want to know that, there’s another sort of little Cliff diary that he kept about such things.

Well after the war was over, Abigail went to Europe to be with her husband, particularly when he became our first minister to the court of Saint James. And John Quincy came home from Europe to prepare for Harvard. And he had not been home in Massachusetts very long when Abigail received a letter from her sister saying that John Quincy was a very impressive young man – and of course everybody was quite astonished that he could speak French – but that, alas, he seemed a little overly enamored with himself and with his own opinions and that this was not going over very well in town. So Abigail sat down in a house that still stands on Grosvenor Square in London – it was our first embassy if you will, a little 18th century house – and wrote a letter to John Quincy. And here’s what she said:

If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world and obtaining knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book, but it has been supplied to you. That your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have turned out a blockhead.

How unpardonable it would be for us – with all that we have been given, all the advantages we have, all the continuing opportunities we have to enhance and increase our love of learning – to turn out blockheads or to raise blockheads. What we do in education, what these wonderful teachers and administrators and college presidents and college and university trustees do is the best, most important work there is.

So I salute you all for your interest in education and in the education of Hillsdale. I salute you for coming out tonight to be at an event like this. Not just sitting at home being a spectator. It’s important that we take part. Citizenship isn’t just voting. We all know that. Let’s all pitch in. And let’s not lose heart. They talk about what a difficult, dangerous time we live in. And it is very difficult, very dangerous and very uncertain. But so it has always been. And this nation of ours has been through darker times. And if you don’t know that – as so many who broadcast the news and subject us to their opinions in the press don’t seem to know – that’s because we’re failing in our understanding of history.

The Revolutionary War was as dark a time as we’ve ever been through. 1776, the year we so consistently and rightly celebrate every year, was one of the darkest times, if not the darkest time in the history of the country. Many of us here remember the first months of 1942 after Pearl Harbor when German submarines were sinking our oil tankers right off the coasts of Florida and New Jersey, in sight of the beaches, and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. Our recruits were drilling with wooden rifles, we had no air force, half of our navy had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor, and there was nothing to say or guarantee that the Nazi machine could be defeated – nothing. Who was to know? I like to think of what Churchill said when he crossed the Atlantic after Pearl Harbor and gave a magnificent speech. He said we haven’t journeyed this far because we’re made of sugar candy. It’s as true today as it ever was.

Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hilldale College, www.hillsdale.edu.

I succumbed to impulse buying in the Sam’s Club checkout line last night and picked up a copy of a Rick Warren biography entitled A Life With Purpose (reviews | pricing). Rick’s unique style has intrigued me: he’s an articulate writer, he’s an entrepreneur and innovator, he stays “above the fray,” and, for a Baby Boomer, he seems pretty cool.

While the book felt like it was written from a distance, was surprisingly repetitive, and was rather lean on content about Rick after the early years, it was a quick and easy read and included an interesting history of the “Church Growth Movement.”

I was pleasantly rewarded with sticking through the preceding 190 pages with the conclusion’s discussion of Rick’s idea for global ministry entitled the P.E.A.C.E. Plan. I thought it was interesting enough to reproduce in this space:

“P” FOR PLANT CHURCHES
The “P” stands for planting churches, because Rick says that God is in the church building business, and planting a church is the first step in combating evil. In particular, he says that we need churches where there are none now because the most important thing for the people in a church-less community to have is a place where they can be introduced to Jesus Christ. That’s creating something that will be there for a long time.[...]

“The only way we’re going to help millions of people to hear the name of Jesus is to plant hundreds of churches around the world–under trees, in cars–you don’t have to have a building to have a church. If anybody knows that, we do. We grew to over ten thousand before we built our first building. We met in all sorts of places and told people, ‘If you can figure out where we are this week, you get to come.’”

“E” FOR EQUIP LEADERS
The “E” stands for equipping leaders to run those churches. Rick says that we need to be good leaders, and we need to train others to be good leaders. In Saddleback Church’s twenty-three years, the church has realized that to keep growing, you have to pass on what you have learned. Rick cites II Timothy 2:2 (Msg), “Pass on what you heard from me–the whole congregation saying Amen! to reliable leaders who are competent to teach others.” As a mark of what needs to be done, he says that great numbers of Christians and many ministers overseas don’t even have a Bible.

[...]

Here, as he always does, Rick taps the best and most famous to help train church leaders to be like Jesus. He has hired Ken Blanchard, author of the best-selling The One Minute Manager, to come to Saddleback to help train people how to be effective leaders at home, in business, in school, and in church. It is a dramatic and impressive move, one that is typical of Rick Warren.

“A” FOR ASSIST THE POOR
Rick believes that God favors the poor, and that it is a test of our faith the way we treat them. He says that religion is not about saying prayers; it’s about how you treat those in need. He cites a World Vision study that found there are 600 million poor in the world that could get out of poverty if someone would just loan them a little bit of money. He preaches that God blesses those who help the poor.

“C” FOR CURE THE SICK
Horribly, every day 27,000 children die from curable diseases! The greatest cause is unclean water, and the second is malaria, both of which are correctable. In addition, 14 million children become orphans every year due to AIDS.

Rick says that we are God’s plan to cure these problems. The answer is not the government or “those people over there.” The answer is you and I.

One typical project has been sending church members out with information and medical kits they call “Clinic in a Box.” It’s a plastic box filled with about $5,000 worth of antibiotics and malaria medicine (which costs the church about $350).

“E” FOR EDUCATION
Finally, “E” is for education: learning to train the next generation to live better, so that we stop losing these children. Warren says that none of these problems are new. What is new is the way he wants to solve them. The way he chooses is revolutionary: not the great convocations, but small groups. He says that large, bureaucratic groups have traditionally done missionary work while boards and churches have been told to keep out. THe church’s role, Rick says, was, “you pay, you pray, and you stay out of the way.” He and Saddleback Church are changing that to, “all go, all pray, all pay.” Warren and Saddleback have already had some 4,500 people go out on some mission project somewhere, such as “Clinic in a Box.”

More about Rick’s proposal is posted on the Saddleback website. It sounds to me like an interesting strategy; I’ll be watching for it to unfold. Your thoughts?

I recently finished the latest from the pen of Hugh Hewitt: Blog: Understanding The Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World (reviews | pricing). While I didn’t find this volume quite as stimulating as some of Hugh’s other work (I presume that dissatisfaction is largely due to being part of a blogosphere that has watched this “reformation” unfold firsthand), I was fascinated by a brief appendix in the book that pointed me to Hugh’s WorldNetDaily column from December 11, 2001.

The intriguing part is that Hugh’s column references another column: Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal piece from November 2, 2000. Remember that date when reading the following excerpt:

Mr. Bush is at odds with the spirit of the past 8 years in another way. He appears to be wholly uninterested in lying, has no gift for it, thinks it’s wrong.This is important at any time, but is crucial now. The next president may well be forced to shepherd us through the first nuclear event since World War II, the first terrorist attack or missile attack. “Man has never had a weapon he didn’t use,” Ronald Reagan said in conversation, and we have been most fortunate man has not used these weapons to kill in the past 50 years. But half the foreign and defense policy establishment fears, legitimately, that the Big Terrible Thing is coming, whether in India-Pakistan, or in Asia or in lower Manhattan.

When it comes, if it comes, the credibility–the trustworthiness–of the American president will be the key to our national survival. We may not be able to sustain a president who is known for his tendency to tell untruths.

If we must go through a terrible time, a modest man of good faith is the one we’ll need in charge. That is George Herbert Walker Bush, governor of Texas.

Peggy, you were right then. Too bad you didn’t know it. You’re right now. Too bad much of this world doesn’t know it.

As a sidenote, the curious “Herbert Walker” discrepancy is in the original. Such a silly mistake for such an insightful piece.

As a result of the three day weekend, I’ve been able to dig into some personal reading; this weekend I finished off George Friedman’s America’s Secret War (info | pricing), a comprehensive analysis of the Global War on Terror thus far. Friedman is an independent intelligence analyst and does a remarkable job of putting the geo-political pieces together to explain events separated by distance and time and offers an insightful analysis devoid of partisan punditry. In short: an excellent read for anyone interested in understanding this war.

I’ve collected a few of Friedman’s most incisive insights in the space below. Some of his thoughts are very different than what we’re hearing elsewhere, to say the least. Constructive comments are invited.

Pg. 33

Al Qaeda was not motivated by hatred of the United States, American popular culture, or American democracy. Its focus, instead, was on the Islamic world and its governments. Al Qaeda viewed the United States as the main Christian global power. As such, it had assumed a position of guarantor of existing regimes in the Islamic world. Put differently, even if the United States wasn’t directly responsible, it was viewed as protector of these regimes by the Islamic masses.

Pg. 35

The September 11 attacks, therefore, were not meant to send a message to the United States. The primary audience was the Islamic world. Bin Laden viewed the United States as an actor that could be manipulated into behaving as Al Qaeda wanted. But this is not to say that he was not focusing on the United States because of its particular moral shortcomings or character. As a non-Islamic society, the United States was full on inequity, but bin Laden’s actions were a politico-military maneuver designed to generate pro-jihadist change in the Islamic world.

Pg. 233-234

Al Qaeda was, in fundamental ways, a Saudi phenomenon. Its leaders an members were Saudi, its ideology was Wahabi, and its financing drew on Saudi citizens. Al Qaeda was created out of Saudi foreign policy. The problem was that Al Qaeda–or at least Al Qaeda’s social and intellectual foundations–were so deeply embedded in Saudi life that it was impossible to cut off support for Al Qaeda without ripping the Kingdom apart…The central dilemma the U.S. now faced was how to get the Saudis into the war… This was the origin of the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. There were other strands, such as fear of weapons of mass desruction, concern that Al Qaeda was collaborating with the Iraqis, and a genuine feeling that Saddam Hussein was a monster. But to understand the American decision to invade Iraq, it is essential to understand the American concern, even obsession, with the course Saudi Arabia was taking amid growing evidence that the Saudis were financing Al Qaeda.

Pg. 246-247

From a purely military point of view, Iraq is the single most strategic country in the Middle East. It borders on six other countries: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. In other words, from Iraq–and with its forces in Afghanistan–the United States could influence events in countries that ranged from the Himalayas to the Mediterranean and from the Black Sea and the Caucasus to the Red and Arabian Seas. Like its predecessor Mesopotamia, Iraq is the pivot of the Middle East.

Your thoughts?

Despite the fact it’s the last week of classes and I’m not quite over the Asian river and through the paper/exam woods, thanks to a surprisingly productive weekend, I managed to pilfer a few minutes of pleasure reading time today. I’ve been working through an astoundingly lucky find from the HKBU Library, a new volume from Britain entitled, quite accurately, Why The Rest Hates The West (publisher page, pricing info). Initially, I was quite reluctant to give the book a second glance, as I thought it was just another footsoldier in the Bush-bashing-publishing-onslaught that preceded Nov 2. I am, however, quite glad I did pick it up, as it’s turned out to be a very compelling and philosophical read.

One passage struck me as particularly insightful this afternoon. I thought I’d post it hear and seek the thoughts it elicits from the minds wiser than I that peruse these pages:

Why The Rest Hates The West, Meic Pearse

Excerpt from Chapter 3: “How To Be Sinless” pp. 78-79A Test Case: Abortion

The case we have been making against human rights and for traditional “obligations” language may seem to many to be somewhat theoretical and rooted in historical analysis rather than the supposedly solid ground of pragmatism. Rights and duties, it might be argued, are simply corollaries of one another, so it does not much matter which system we propound. One may teach that “you may not rob Mary as she walks down the street” or that “Mary has the right to walk down the street without being robbed.” Whichever code is followed, the same result ensues: Mary may conduct her business in safety.

We would counter that this is by no means the end of the story, for the two systems of moral catechizing produce very different states of mind in those who imbibe them. But let us also meet this objection (that rights and duties are virtual equivalents) on its own terms by looking at more immediate results; as a test case, let’s consider the debate about the moral status of abortion.

Supporters of the permissibility of abortion deploy many arguments, but central to them all is that of “a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body.” Christians and other moral conservatives who standardly oppose abortion counter with their own slogan: “the child’s right to live.” Whose right will win?

In the worlds of politics and moral debate around us, the victor in this argument is preordained. The women who wish to choose–to say nothing of the self-serving boyfriends and anxious parents who wish to urge them on, and the much larger numbers of people with an interest in the availability of abortion to underwrite their sexual freedom–are with us, voting and articulating their opinions. The children are unable to speak and reliant only on those who care about them and are themselves unencumbered by anticipating a need to dispose of the consequences of their own sexual indiscretions. Hedonism wins: the child dies.

Now let us recast the debate in the language of obligations and duties. Who, in this circumstance of an undesired pregnancy, has an obligation to whom? Again, the winner is preordained. It is the child. For clearly the woman and her sexual partner–and perhaps others too–have a duty to nurture and protect him or her. To argue otherwise, it would be necessary to say that the child has a duty to die so that the mother and her partner (or relatives, or society) are not inconvenienced.

Now it is not completely ridiculous to insist that, in certain circumstances, a person does indeed have a duty to die. Such a duty is implied, for example, when a war criminal is sentenced after pleading that he was “only following orders” while under a threat to his own life. The person who finds himself in such an extreme situation has a duty to die rather than to participate in the foul actions that constitute a war crime.

But the situation of an (unknowingly) unwanted baby in the womb is not such a circumstance. In any case, the baby is unable to fulfill such an obligation in his or her own person–only to have it imposed from outside by a the surgeon’s knife. To speak of a duty to die in such a case is presumably nonsensical.

If we frame the question in terms of human rights, abortion wins. If we ask instead about moral obligations, the child lives. In both cases, the answer was already present in the question.

The issue also illustrates the repeated mistake made by Christians in lightly accepting the premises of their opponents and then finding themselves powerless to resist the unwelcome conclusions. We wish to buy the Western worldview while subtracting the elements that we do not like. But those elements are the fruit of the poisoned tree. And a bad tree, as someone once observed, will not yield good fruit. To resist the conclusions of our opponents, we would be well advised to reject their premises as well, or else we will lose every argument. Indeed, we are, observably, doing so.

Reaction? I realize that a post on abortion seems rather counterintuitive to the idea of growing an unpolitical (or at least intentioned to be) blog. But, I’m quite curious to hear responses on the deeper issues unpacked and implied in this example: worldview, rights, duties, individualism, the Enlightment, the West, et cetera. If you’d like the rest of the story, I do recommend (at least so far) the book. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts…