March 29, 2003
HISTORY
Life during wartime.
There’s nothing I can say about the parade of still pictures, the faces on the television – except, perhaps, that they all seemed to share a fierce pride in their eyes, photographed for the first time in their Marine Dress Blues. Surely their families are proud of them. I certainly am, and I never got to know any of them. And now, I never will.
Names scroll in little yellow letters across the bottom of our glowing screens: Sergeants, and Captains, and Privates. These men have died for us. More will follow. We asked them to go, and they went.
All across this nation -- here and there, sparkling across the map like fireflies on a summer night – sedans are slowly rolling to a stop outside of small, modest homes. Men in uniform emerge, straighten their tunics, and walk slowly up driveways. Doorbells are rung. Maybe here and there smiles will evaporate in shock and surprise as doors are opened, but more likely the face will be one full of stunned realization that the very worst thing in the whole world has happened. And children will be sent to their rooms. And the men will speak in somber, respectful tones. And sons and mothers and fathers and wives will be told that the one thing they love more than anything in this world has been taken away from them, that their sons and daughters will not be coming home, that their fathers or mothers have gone away and will never come back, not ever.
Why do we do this? What could possibly be worth this?
The war is an abject and utter failure. What everyone thought would be a quick, decisive victory has turned into an embarrassing series of reversals. The enemy, -- a ragtag, badly-fed collection of hotheads and fanatics – has failed to be shocked and awed by the most magnificent military machine ever fielded. Their dogged resistance has shown us the futility of the idea that a nation of millions could ever be subjugated and administered, no matter what obscene price we are willing to pay in blood and money.
The President of the United States is a buffoon, an idiot, a man barely able to speak the English language. His vice president is a little-seen, widely despised enigma and his chief military advisor a wild-eyed warmonger. Only his Secretary of State offers any hope of redemption, for he at least is a reasonable, well-educated man, a man most thought would have made a far, far better choice for Chief Executive.
We must face the fact that we had no business forcing this unjust war on a people who simply want to be left alone. It has damaged our international relationships beyond any measure, and has proven to be illegal, immoral and nothing less than a monumental mistake that will take generations to rectify. We can never hope to subdue and remake an entire nation of millions. All we will do is alienate them further. So we must bring this war to an immediate end, and make a solemn promise to history that we will never launch another war of aggression and preemption again, so help us God.
This was the condensed opinion of the Copperhead press. The time was the summer of 1864.
Everyone thought the Rebels would be whipped at Bull Run, and that the Confederacy would collapse within a few days or hours of such a defeat. No one expected the common Southern man to fight so tenaciously, a man who owned no slaves and who in fact despised the rich fire-eaters who had taken them to war.
Lincoln was widely considered a bumpkin, a gorilla, an uncouth backwoods hick who by some miracle of political compromise had made it to the White House. Secretary of War Stanton had assumed near-dictatorial powers and was also roundly despised. Only Secretary of State William Seward, a well-spoken, intelligent Easterner and a former Presidential candidate, seemed fit to hold office.
After three interminable and unbelievably bloody years of conflict, many in the Northern press had long ago become convinced that there was no hope of winning the war, and far less of winning the peace that followed. After nearly forty months of battle and maneuver, after seeing endless hopes dashed in spectacular failure, after watching the magnificent Army of the Potomac again and again whipped and humiliated by a far smaller, under-fed, under-equipped force, the New York newspapers and many, many others were calling for an immediate end to this parade of failures.
It took them forty months and hundreds of thousands killed to reach that point. Today, many news outlets have reached a similar conclusion after ten days and less than fifty combat fatalities.
Ahhh. Progress.
A few years ago, I made up my mind to visit for the first time many of the places I had come to know so well. So before my 1996 Christmas trip to visit my father at his house adjacent to Valley Forge – another place rich with ghosts and history -- I made a tour of as many Civil War battlefields as I could, driving northward through Virginia, seeking out the unremarkable hills and fields that I had followed with Shelby Foote through more than 2,300 pages of his magnificent Civil War trilogy.
It was bitterly cold the day I walked up the steep embankment where Hood’s Texans broke the Union line at Gaines Mill, and then I thrust my hands into my pockets and walked a few hundred yards and three blood-soaked years away to the lines at Cold Harbor, where the remains of the opposing trenches lay almost comically close.
As I walked from the Confederate to the Union positions, the green pine forest was as peaceful and serene a place as is possible to imagine. And there I stopped, halfway between the lines, listening to the winter breeze swaying the trees, and looked around – at nothing. Just a glade like any other in the beautiful back woods of Virginia. And yet here lay seven thousand men – here, in this little clearing. Seven thousand men. The Union blue lay so thick on this ground that you could walk from the Confederate lines to the Union ones on the backs of the dead, your feet never touching the grass.
You can see them, you know. Not that I believe in ghosts, or the occult. But when you stand on a field like that, in a place like that, with a name like that – Cold Harbor – you feel it. You feel the reality of it. This happened, and it happened right here. The history of that ground rises like a vapor and grabs your imagination by the neck, and forces you to see what happened there.
The next day, I stood in a tiny rut, a small bend in a shallow, grassy berm, where for sixteen hours men cursed and killed each other at point-blank range, where musket balls flew so furiously that they cut down a foot-thick oak tree. Here, at the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania, the fighting was hand-to-hand from the break of dawn to almost midnight; uninterrupted horror that to this day remains for me the most appalling single acre in human history. There, on that unassuming, peaceful, empty field – it might as well have been the back of a high school -- men had become so agitated that they climbed the muddy, blood-slick trenches, clawed their way to the parapets to shoot at a man a foot or two away, then hurled their bayoneted muskets like a javelin into the crowd before being shot down and replaced by other half-mad, raving automatons.
What trick of time and memory, what charm or spell does history possess, that can turn such fields of unremitting violence and terror into places of religious awe and wonder? Why are some people called to these places, in America and around the world, to stand in wonder – not only at the brutality of war, but at the transcendental, ennobling power of them? How does slaughter and death turn into nobility and sacrifice? Why can we recite the names of places like Roanoke, Harrisburg, Phoenixville, Marseille, Kiev, Vanuatu and Johannesburg with no more passion than we muster while reading the ingredients on the back of a cereal box, while names like Antietam, Gettysburg, Valley Forge, Verdun, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal and Rorke’s Drift thunder through time as if the earth itself were being rung like a bell?
Today we are at War. The future is dark and filled with uncertainties. We are at a time of great peril and momentous decisions are being made by the hour. We know history is being written before our very eyes. No one knows how things will turn out – only history will know.
We can, however, step back from 24/7 embedded coverage. We can in fact gain what is most missing in these anxious days -- perspective. Like all worthwhile journeys, this will take some time.
First, we need to go to the one place that could perhaps best make sense of all this blood and terror and waste and pain.
I found it, finally. As with all the other places I had visited, I had great difficulty realizing where I was because the reality was so much smaller than what I had imagined. Off in the distance stood Seminary Ridge, where Pickett and Armistead and the rest would march into history – but that was not what I wanted to see.
I had made my way over the boulders of The Devils’ Den, caught my breath when I found myself in a small alcove where a dead Confederate had lain in one of the most famous photos from the war. And finally, I found the marker I was looking for, and walked – such a small distance – down and then up again that little stretch of hill.
This was it, all right. This was the place. I was standing on the exact spot where the very existence of the United States of America, where all of our lives and our history, all our subsequent glory and tragedy, turned on what lay in the heart of an unassuming professor of Rhetoric from a small college in Brunswick, Maine.
One of the most subtle distortions caused by history’s telephoto lens is the sense of predetermination. We know the Allies won World War II, as decisively as any conflict in history. But in London, 1940, such an outcome would have seemed unthinkably optimistic. The fact is, it was a very, very near thing.
We look back on the Union victory in the Civil War with the same sense of it being a foregone conclusion. But it was not. By the second day of July in 1863, the mighty armies of the Union had been beaten in every major battle except Antietam – and that had been not much better than a tie. And they had not just been defeated. They had been thrashed. Whipped. Sent reeling again and again and again by a half-starved collection of scarecrows in homemade uniforms.
None of this was lost on the Union men that morning, not the least on that Professor of Rhetoric from Bowdoin College. He had seen, first hand, the disasters at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. For those men, as for us today, the future was dark and unknowable. Yet history can often show where we are going by showing where we have been, in the same way that a ship’s wake extending to the Southern horizon is a sure sign of a Northward course. And that course, for the Union, for the United States as we know it today, was bleak.
Were the South to win that July day, the first northern state capitol – Harrisburg – would fall to the Confederates. Nothing would stop them from reaching Baltimore, and Washington. If the Army of the Potomac lost yet again on this field, the South would very likely take Washington, the British would enter the war on the side of the Confederacy and the mighty Royal Navy would break the Union blockade. In the words of Shelby Foote, the war would be over -- lost.
The Federal position was strong, but it had a fatal weakness. At the southern end of the Union line were two small hills. The smaller and nearer, called Little Round Top by the locals, overlooked the entire Union position. Artillery placed on that hill could fire down the entire Union line, wreaking carnage on the men below. The entire position would become untenable.
No one was on Little Round Top.
Across the ground that Pickett would cross the next day, this did not escape the eye of Confederate Lieutenant General Longstreet. He knew that if he could get some guns on that little hill the battle would be over. Indeed, the war would be over – won. He asked Lee if he could send his toughest men, John Bell Hood’s Texans and Alabamans, to take that hill. Lee agreed.
Back on Cemetery Ridge, the Blue commanders realized, at long last and to their abject horror, the danger they were in. They immediately sent some regiments down the line to hold that hill, extending the left of their line up Little Round Top. And there, on the afternoon of July 2nd, 1863, history and the Professor of Rhetoric collided.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was an amateur. And everything he knew about tactics he had read, on his own, in a little book he carried with him in case it would come in handy. He knew that his 20th Maine Regiment was the extreme left of the entire Union army. In fact, he could look over to that man standing there, the one with the neatly trimmed beard: that fellow, right there, was the end of the line.
Chamberlain knew the significance of his position on the field. He knew if he failed the Union left would roll up and crumble the way the right had a few weeks before in the disaster at Chancellorsville. He knew the Union could not bear another defeat of that magnitude.
Up from the valley below came Hood’s men: fierce, shrieking, caterwauling demons, the same pack of wolves that had shattered the Union line at Gaines Mill and whipped and humiliated their opponents every time they had taken the field. They came up through the thin forest yelling like furies.
Chamberlain casually walked the line, keeping his men cool, plugging holes and moving reserves while showing the utter disregard for his own life that commanders of both sides were expected to show during those horrible brawls.
Repeated and steady volleys drove the Southerners back, but not for long. They came again. Again they were driven back. Again they came with their weird and terrifying Rebel Yell, and again they were knocked back by withering volleys from the 20th Maine. The Northerners were holding on, but by sheer guts alone, for each charge and counter-volley knocked more men out of the line, heads and arms and torsos exploding under the impact of the heavy lead musket balls. Worse, they were by now almost out of ammunition.
The Confederates were skilled tacticians. When the men from Maine showed more determination than expected, they looked for a way around them, to hit the line from behind. Quickly they sent their men sideways, to the left, trying to get around the corner and attack from the rear.
Chamberlain saw this. Armies could readjust themselves, but there was nothing in the little book about what to do with a single regiment. So he planted the flag, and on that spot, he sent men off at a right angle, like an open gate, to confront the flanking Confederates head on.
Again they came on, getting right to the lines this time. Again they were shot and clubbed back down the hill. Again they massed for another charge, their determination to take that hill as strong as the 20th’s was to defend it. Only now, Chamberlain’s men were completely out of ammunition. During this latest repulse the Rebel veterans had staggered back down the side of Little Round Top under a hail of rocks being thrown by the exhausted men in Blue.
And so we come to this exact time and place. It is the 2nd of July, 1863, just south of a small Pennsylvania town. You are on a small hill covered with thin pine trees. Your face is black with gunpowder: it burns your throat and eyes, it has cracked your lips, and you are more thirsty than you believed possible.
All around you are dead and dying men, some moaning, some screaming in agony as they clutch shattered arms or hold in their bowels. The field in front of you is covered with dead Rebels, and yet the ground looks alive, undulating, as the wounded Confederates try to crawl back to safety. In the woods below you can hear fresh enemy troops arrive, hear orders being issued in the soft accents of the deep South. You have no more musket rounds. There aren’t even very many rocks left to throw. And you know that this time, they will succeed.
These men have never been beaten, least of all by you. You are a professor of Rhetoric at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. As you walk what is left of your line, you know you have fought bravely and well, done more than could ever be asked of you. You have no choice but to fall back in orderly retreat. Your men are out of ammunition. To stand here and take another charge is to die. It’s that simple. These men are your responsibility. Their families depend on you to bring them home. Many have already died. To not retreat will likely condemn many more wives to being widows, not the least your own.
You look down past the dead and dying men to the bottom of the hill. Masses of determined Confederate men are emerging, coming for you. They are not beaten. They are determined to have this hill. Off to your left stands Old Glory, the hinge in your pathetic, small gate.
You know that this is a war to preserve a Union, a system of government four score and seven years old. Many said such a system of self rule could not possibly survive. If you retreat now, today will be the day they are proven right.
You cannot go back. You cannot stay here. Your men look at you. You utter two words:
“Fix Bayonets.”
You can see the reaction on the faces of the men. No, that can’t be right. He couldn’t possibly mean it.
But you do mean it. You know history. In the middle of this shock and death and agony, amid the blood and stench and acrid smoke, you have the perspective even now to see what is really at stake here.
As Chamberlain walked his line one last time, he smiled, and shouted, “Stand firm, ye boys of Maine, for not once in a century are men permitted to bear such responsibilities!"
Today, the United States is at war with Iraq.
Before the Civil War, we would have said, “the United States are at War with Iraq.” Before the Civil War, the United States was plural, a collection of relatively weak, sovereign nations. After the Civil War, we were welded by fire and death into a single, indivisible nation. There is a marker, in a forest, on a hill, to mark that transition.
We are a nation because the Rhetoric professor did not retreat. He did not tire, he did not falter, and he did not fail. As the Confederates charged Little Round Top to take the hill, the battle, and the war, the schoolteacher from Maine drew his sword, and swung his gate around like a baseball bat, hitting the Rebels on the side as they leapt down upon the shocked and awed Confederates who promptly broke and ran.
There would, of course, be two more years of blood and carnage: Pickett’s Charge was 24 hours in the future; the Bloody Angle and Cold Harbor further down that dark, unseen road. If you told the men of the 20th Maine that day they had saved the Union on Little Round Top, they would have looked at you as if you were mad. It was, after all, a relatively small engagement in the biggest, bloodiest battle in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
But you have to ask yourself if perhaps Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain might have had a glimpse of the future. “Not once in a century are men permitted to bear such responsibilities!” he had shouted. He knew, on some level, that this history being written large, that the actions of a small, battered regiment, indeed, the actions of a single man, would determine whether we would live in one country, or two.
War. Secession was settled, too – settled most emphatically.In 1865 the issue of American Slavery, an issue dodged in 1783, an issue compromised in 1850, and an issue that tore us apart as a people was settled once and for all, by force of arms. By
War settled whether the Mediterranean Sea would be a Carthaginian Lake or a Roman one. War settled whether Jerusalem would be Christian or Muslim. War determined whether a surrender document would be signed aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay or on the Yamato just off Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. War determined whether France would be living through four years, or a millennia of darkness under Nazi supermen, and a weird, ghostly war determined whether or not there would be Englishmen and Scots and Americans living and dying in gulags in Siberia.
And four years of unimaginably brutal war determined whether or not the United States of America would in fact be a land where all men are created equal. War determined whether the fatal, poisonous stain of slavery would split the nation into two irreconcilable camps, or whether the blood and sacrifice of men at Little Round Top and The Angle and Cold Harbor would, in part, wash away that stain and put right that which was unable to be put right at the birth of this awesome experiment in self-rule.
We have markers on the fields at Gettysburg because there men died so that men and women like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice and Vincent Brooks and Shoshana Johnson and millions of other African-Americans would have a chance to experience the American promise as full and equal members. Having walked these fields of slaughter and murder, I now know that the marble and monuments are not glorifications of death, but reminders of the sacrifice of men determined to fight and die to do the right thing for people other than themselves.
Lincoln’s purpose at the beginning of the war was to preserve the Union. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
But if our Civil War was started for the most pragmatic of reasons, by the time it was over the motivation had changed. When Grant took overall command and swung the Union armies into the south like a sledgehammer, the war took on a brutality and carnage unbelievable even to those jaded by the previous horrors. And yet as the Union armies marched through the south singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the voices of the men would swell in choked emotion as they sang:
As he died to make men holy
Let us die to make men free
While God is marching on.
Sacrifice and death transformed that War, and remade the nation. Abolition, at the outset a position taken by a vocal minority in New England and the Midwest, became the great cause of liberation and freedom for all men.
Back in 1996, when I walked those fields, I did not know how such a thing could have happened. But now I do. For I see exactly the same thing happening today in Iraq.
No sane person wants to fight a war. But many sane people believe that there are times when they are necessary. I believe this is one of those times.
For it seems to me that if you are against any war – if you believe that peace is always the right choice -- then you must believe at least one, if not both of the following:
1. People will always be able to come to a reasonable agreement, no matter how deep or contentious the issue, and that all people are rational, reasonable, honorable, decent and sane,
or,
2. It is more noble to live under slavery and oppression, to endure torture, institutionalized rape, theft and genocide than it is to fight it.
History, not to mention personal experience, shows me that the first proposition is clearly false. I believe, to put it plainly, that some people have been raised to become pathological murderers, liars, and first-rate bastards, and that these people will kill and brutalize the good meek people, and steal from and murder them whenever it is in their personal interest to do so. You are, of course, free to disagree about this element of humanity. I, however, can put a great many names on the table. History is littered with people and regimes just like this: entire nations ruled by murderers and thugs, savage and brutal men who could herd grandmothers and babies into gas chambers and march to battle with guns in the backs of old men and teenage girls for use as human shields. I believe these people are real, and that they cannot be reasoned with. I believe that there are entire societies where dominance and force are the norm, and where cooperation and compromise are despised and scorned. Again, history gives me quite a sizable list, and that list is evidence of the first order.
There are people – pacifists – who do not deny this, and these are the people who I really do find repulsive and deeply disturbing, for these are people who acknowledge the presence of evil men and evil regimes, and yet are unwilling to do anything about them. These are the people who cling to fantasies about containment and inspections and resolutions, people who acknowledge that barbarism and torture are rampant but who desperately cling to these niceties as long as nothing bad happens to them. When you point out to them that 9/11 showed that bad things can happen when you ignore such people, they simply point out that Hitler or Stalin or Mao is not as bad as all that, that they haven’t done anything to us yet, that action against them is unconscionable and illegitimate.
There are also people who say “better Red than dead,” people who would rather face the possibility of slavery – for ourselves or others -- than the certainty of a fight, with all it’s attendant blood and misery.
I’m sorry to say it, but to me that is nothing but sheer cowardice and refined selfishness.
We fight wars not to have peace, but to have a peace worth having. Slavery is peace. Tyranny is peace. For that matter, genocide is peace when you get right down to it. The historical consequences of a philosophy predicated on the notion of no war at any cost are families flying to the Super Bowl accompanied by three or four trusted slaves and a Europe devoid of a single living Jew.
It would be nice if there were a way around this. History, not merely my opinion, shows us that there is not. If all you are willing to do is think happy thoughts, then those are the consequences. If you want justice, and freedom, and safety, and prosperity, then sometimes you have to fight for them.
I still don’t know why so many people haven’t figured this out.
Growing up a sci-fi nerd has a few – very few – advantages. One of the greatest was getting to read the Time Guardians series of novels by the late, and deeply gifted Poul Anderson.
These stories were the cream of a hoary old sci-fi genre, that being the idea of parallel universes, histories where interference or accidents caused the chips to fall in very different ways. Poul Anderson showed me worlds in which the Chinese discovered America, where Carthage defeated Rome. Other writers have taken us to worlds where desperate Americans vie for jobs as household servants to the occupying Japanese administrators after the American loss in World War 2, and to a 1960’s Nazi Germany where all evidence of the Holocaust has been buried and destroyed. I’ve read accounts of Winston Churchill emerging from behind the barricades of 10 Downing Street, Tommy gun in hand, being cut down in a hail of bullets from the invading Nazis at the collapse of street-to-street fighting in London. There are many others.
All of these stories have a common thread: someone has gone back in time, tinkered ever so slightly, and produced a horrific world in which, for example, the Nazis and the Japanese divide their American possessions at the Mississippi. In them, something has gone horribly wrong.
But I have often wondered, what if this history, the one we know as reality, was the one gone horribly wrong? For example:
In the fall of 1999, the Clinton Administration took the hugely unpopular decision to invade Afghanistan to root out Islamic terrorists organized by a largely-unknown fanatic named Osama Bin Laden. Operation Homeland Security cost the lives of almost 300 servicemen, and did long-lasting damage to our relations with NATO, the UN, and especially Russia. President Clinton, at great political cost to himself and the Democratic Party, claimed to be acting on repeated intelligence that Bin Laden and his “phantom” organization – whose name escapes me – planned massive and sustained terrorist attacks against the United States. Peace protestors gathered between the towers of the World Trade Center in September, 2004 on the five-year anniversary of the illegal and immoral invasion, calling on President Gore to pay the UN–ordered reparations to the Taliban Government.
Or:
Today, April 20th, Germans again celebrate the birthday of Adolph Hitler with a parade down a stretch of the autobahn, one of his greatest achievements. Although forced from office in disgrace when a platoon of French soldiers contested his entry into the Rhineland in 1936, his rebuilding of Germany following the ruin of the Great War, and his subsequent lobbying for American economic support, culminating in the Lindbergh Plan and Germany’s spectacular economic growth through the forties and fifties, so rehabilitated his reputation that he remains one of the greatest and most revered figures in German history.
And we can go on like this for a very long time.
I see history as an unimaginably huge and complicated railroad switching yard, where by moving a pair of steel rails a few inches one way or another, the great train of history can be diverted from Chicago to Atlanta. These switches may seem ridiculously small at the time, but the consequences are often immeasurable.
So when I stood on Little Round Top and walked down that little hill for the last time that day, I saw more than dead and dying men littering the ground. I saw two nations where today there is one. I saw a Second Civil War, perhaps in 1909, or 1913, for these two countries would never peacefully co-exist – not with people as proud and energetic as we. I saw not seven thousand dead at Cold Harbor, but 70,000 cut down in an hour by machine guns in the Battle of Tallahassee, saw the gas attacks along the Cleveland Trenches that left half a million dead and dying. I saw, perhaps, the dimmest outlines of a Third American War, fought perhaps in ’34 or ’37 with millions of civilians killed in great air raids over Washington and Richmond. Of course, these millions never died. They lived long and full lives, most of them – and had children, namely us. They didn’t die, these millions, because the men at Cold Harbor and The Angle and Little Round Top did.
Now it seems fair to say that you can boil down the opinions of many of those opposed to the War in Iraq to a question uttered by leading anti-war activist Susan Sarandon, who asked, “I want to know what Iraq has done to us.”
There are two reasons to fight this war. One is so that History will never be able to answer that question. I don’t ever want to read about the VX attacks that left 16,000 dead at Atlanta Hartsfield airport. I don’t want to see the video of makeshift morgues inside the LA Coliseum as more anthrax victims are emptied from the hospitals. And I don’t want to look at helicopter shots of a blackened, radioactive crater where Times Square used to be, or of millions of dead bodies burning in funeral pyres, like columns of failure, dead from starvation and disease in the worldwide depression that such an attack on New York would produce.
I’m sure Miss Sarandon, and others, would criticize this response as fantasy. I’m also sure that had President Clinton taken military action against Bin Laden in the 1990’s, the idea that planes could be flown into skyscrapers, that thousands would die as the New York skyline collapsed upon them would be seen as equally fantastic and absurd. Preposterous. Paranoid. Impossible.
But the fact remains that History will be written one way or another. Saddam’s crimes are well documented, as are his ambitions and his WMD programs. Are they worth stopping with force, before they have been used? I say yes, emphatically, and that anything less from the President is a dereliction of duty.
Many do not see it this way. I have to ask those people if they would have supported a military invasion of Afghanistan, with all the consequent upheavals, UN condemnation, and protest, in order to get Osama Bin Laden before he made 9/11 a symbol of disaster and death. The howls of protest that such people would have put up at such pre-emptive action are exceeded only by the shrieks from these same people that something wasn’t done about 9/11 before it happened.
Here is what I personally believe:
I believe that after September 11th, 2001, the Bush Administration sat down and took a very cold and hard look at what was going on in the world. I believe that they came to the conclusion that the post-WWII policy of depending on a strongman, an Attaturk or even a Nasser, to lift the Middle East into the modern world was an abject failure. I believe that they saw a region so steeped in despair and failure and repression that it would continue to generate, through asymmetrical warfare and weapons of mass destruction, an intolerable threat to the United States.
I believe that they came to realize that even if we were to pay the price of living in a police state, we cannot stop terrorists with flyswatters. Despite our best efforts, sooner of later, some of them will succeed, either with jet-fueled airplanes, or smallpox aerosols, or Sarin-filled crop dusters, or a suitcase nuke in Times Square or the steps of the capitol. As long as the failure of Arab nations generates such rage and hatred, they will keep coming. There is no end to the numbers a swamp like that can generate.
I believe that the United States government has taken a very bold decision to take the first steps to drain that swamp, and that this War in Iraq is the throwing of a railway switch to divert us from a very terrible train wreck lying ahead in the dark tunnel of history yet unwritten. Surely they know full well that this action will, in the short term, cause even more hatred and anger to be directed to us. But I see this as a chance – perhaps our last chance – to eliminate one of the states capable of and committed to the development of such weapons, and in the bargain establish a foothold of freedom and democracy in a region notable for its resistance to this historic trend.
Furthermore, I see it as a means of averting such wars in the future, for it shows in the most stark terms available that we are serious about this issue, and more than anything, when we talk about the safety and security of the United States of America we mean what we say. Entire wars have been caused by miscalculations of an enemy's resolve. As Tony Blair made clear in his ringing speech before Parliament on the eve of the war, to back down now, to show ourselves incapable of action, would have made all subsequent diplomatic efforts essentially meaningless. Showing that we will fight -- and fight all the way -- will make it far less likely that our enemies will miscalculate the way we allowed Saddam and Bin Laden to miscalculate.
As national policy, it is risky, and it is extremely dangerous. It is also an act of astonishing courage and leadership, because the alternative is horrible beyond contemplation. We are in the very early stages of a great and difficult campaign, one fraught with many setbacks and much loss. Although chaotic and uncertain to us today, it is a campaign that makes sense only through the long lens of history, for despite the blood and destruction, and the faces of those brave men and women held up to us nightly, it is the course most likely to steer us through these reefs into the open waters of security and a peace worth living under – a peace based on real security, on a free and democratic and successful Middle East, not the petty and false peace of inaction and denial in the face of the threatening storm. The world faced this choice in the late 1930's, and chose an easy 'peace' -- "Peace for our Time."
History records our reward.
Those who oppose this war may not be willing to face the pages of history that will forever remain unwritten by us taking this action in Iraq. But two things we can be assured of, and both of them are worth noting in these anxious times.
First, while we cannot say that Weapons of Mass Destruction will never be used against the United States, we can -- because of this courageous action -- say that they will not be Iraqi weapons. A swamp littered with chemical weapons shells, with anthrax-dispersing jet aircraft, and with a robust, stubborn and dedicated nuclear weapons program is being drained nightly before our eyes. That is a great victory.
Second, while the long-term outcome is hard to see through the fog of war, we are in fact sending our own children to die to set a people free. When Saddam’s murdering henchmen are dead and gone, when he and his psychopathic regime lie burning and shattered like his posters and statues, we may – or may not – see people emerge from three decades of horror to greet us as liberators, once they truly realize that doing so will not cost them their lives.
But even if they don’t, it does not matter. The Japanese and Germans saw us as conquerors and occupiers too, not to mention the people of Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina. All of these people fought, and fought hard, for regimes that had kept them in bondage. Nazism and Japanese Imperialism fell away relatively quickly and painlessly. American racism was a deeper problem; it has taken more than a century to remake this society, and while that war is not yet over it most certainly has been won.
We may or may not have prevented more attacks on the United States. We may or may not have generated a greater short-term threat from terror. I personally think that recent history has shown that resolute action, that taking the offensive, has been a great deterrent to terror, and that the operation in Iraq will do much more in that regard. I could be wrong. History will tell us, soon enough.
But of one thing I am absolutely certain. Despite all the switches in the rail yard, there is a flow and a direction to history that cannot and will not be denied.
It is the slow, uneven, grasping climb toward freedom. There are markers on Little Round Top, on the beaches at Normandy, and in the sands of Nasiriyah that show us where men have fought and laid down their lives, and willingly left their wives without husbands and their children without fathers, all for this idea. It is an idea bigger than they are, bigger than self-centered movie stars, bigger than cynical and bitter journalists, bigger than Presidents and Dictators, bigger, in fact, than all human failure and miscalculation.
It is the idea that people – all people – deserve to live their lives in freedom. Free from fear. Free from want. Free from despair and hatred.
My country has, again, taken up that banner, and the behavior of our young men and women under unimaginable stress and provocation has filled me with fierce and unremitting pride. We fight, nearly alone, alongside old and true friends, British and Australian, themselves decent and honorable people, long champions of freedom who have their own Waterloos and Gallipolis and cemeteries marked with fields of red poppies, rolls of sacrifice and honor that should fill all American hearts with pride. For friends like this are worth having, and I will always prefer the company of one or two solid, dependable friends over legions of fashionable and trendy and unreliable ones.
And someday, centuries from now, in the world we all hope for but which only a few will fight for, all of this death and destruction will be gone. All that will be left will be small markers in green fields that were once deserts, places where Iraqi families may walk someday with the same taken-for-granted sense of happiness and security I had in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
And perhaps they will read the strange-sounding names, and try to imagine a time when it was all in doubt.
+375 comments was getting to be a little hard on the bandwidth, so I have turned them off. Thanks to all who wrote in.
I had many questions about the source of the Civil War 'quotes' regarding the failure of the war and the unfitness of the President. These italicized paragraphs were meant to be taken as a summary of attitudes in the press at the time. There were not direct quotes, and therefore were not presented in quotation marks -- but they do accurately reflect the general anti-war, anti-Lincoln attitude of the Copperheads and the Democratic Party platform that McClellan ran on in 1864. You can find many attributed examples in The Civil War by Shelby Foote, and The BattleCry of Freedom by James McPherson, among many others.
Posted by Proteus at March 29, 2003 3:37 PM
Welcome to the Eject! Eject! Eject! commenter community. Please read and understand the following:
1. This is not a public square. This is a dinner party on personal property. Good conversation is not only tolerated but celebrated here. But the host understands the difference between dissent and disrespect, even if you do not. Louts will be ignored until the bouncers can show them the door.
2. This is a voluntary online community. Your posting of any material, whether in comments or otherwise, grants to William A. Whittle, Aurora Aerospace, Inc. and their affiliates, a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, sublicense, reproduce or incorporate into other material all or any portion of the material posted, for commercial or other use.
3. If a comment does find its way into a main page essay, print, or other media, every effort will be made to credit the individual making the comment. So chose your screen name accordingly, SLNTFRT33@yahoo.com!
Now let's see some distributed intelligence and basic human decency! Don't make me come down there every five minutes!
Comments
You've done it again. I think I may give up writing.
Nice historical perspective, no matter how much changes, it's always the same. I would guess that 150 years from now, maybe, someone will look back at our time and this war, perhaps to point out the similarities with their own current war. I'd like to think that it won't happen, can't happen, that people will all behave themselves so war is no longer necessary. But I don't think people will behave, and war will come again. Let's hope this one will stand as an example of "doing it right."
Posted by: david | March 29, 2003 3:53 PM
As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make men free.
Posted by: Nicholas Packwood | March 29, 2003 4:57 PM
Magnificent. I only wish I could force every peace-at-any-cost nitwit in this country to read it. Thank-you, Bill for another wonderfull disertaion. Can't wait for the book.
Posted by: John | March 29, 2003 5:27 PM
They didn't die for me; I asked them not to go.
Posted by: brent | March 29, 2003 5:27 PM
Freedom calls her sons to war and will allow history to be the final judge. Very well said, sir. Very well said indeed.
Posted by: Methuselah's Daughter | March 29, 2003 5:37 PM
Eloquent and heartfelt. Thank you.
Posted by: Tim | March 29, 2003 5:38 PM
@#!%# brilliant! Again! It would be amazing to see what you'd come up with if you had nothing else to do with your time but write. SOMEBODY PAY THIS MAN! WELL! This should be mandatory reading for anyone over the age of sixteen. And someone should deliver a leather-bound copy directly to Ms. Sarandon's door. Keep up the great work, have a safe trip back to California, and I'll see you at the Sun n' Fun fly-in in Lakeland next week.
Posted by: Steve | March 29, 2003 5:53 PM
Damn! I just...damn!
Thank you Bill.
Oh, and "brent?" They died for you anyway. In spite of the fact you asked them not to. Respect them for that, if you can't bring yourself to do it for any other reason.
Posted by: Kevin Baker | March 29, 2003 5:54 PM
Amen! Well Done!!
Posted by: Jim | March 29, 2003 6:00 PM
I remember those "Time Guardians" novels very well.
As for the essay, I have no words that are adequate to the task of commenting.
I'll just settle for tryng to get everyone I know to read it.
Posted by: Ith | March 29, 2003 6:16 PM
I wanted to add:
I've read Harry Turtledove's alternate histories of what might have happened had the South won the Civil War. His vision of that alternity is dark, and vile, and eminently logical. Very difficult to read, but very educational. I've not read the "Time Guardians" books, but I may have to now.
Posted by: Kevin Baker | March 29, 2003 6:23 PM
Another great essay.
My kids need your book!
Posted by: Jim Brant | March 29, 2003 6:29 PM
I wish I could come up with the words to thank you that had the same eloquence you used to instruct, enlighten and entertain me. You are a gifted, GIFTED man, and I salute you!
Posted by: Drumwaster | March 29, 2003 6:36 PM
Very nice. Our News Networks need to hire someone who's at least read a book about a war, even if they won't hire veterans. Now our military is switching to fighting some of the asymmetrical attacks of the Fedayeen Saddam. Some of our doom-saying pundits are acting like this is a type of enemy tactics we've never encountered before. In truth, we could dust off an American small-wars manual from the 19th century and still clean their clocks.
Posted by: George Turner | March 29, 2003 6:47 PM
Beautiful essay Bill. One of the best overviews I've read.
Posted by: BAM | March 29, 2003 6:53 PM
Superb.
Posted by: scarshapedstar | March 29, 2003 6:54 PM
I too agree this war is right, but I'm worried about the post-war situation. I'm afraid we're not being adequately prepared for the extent of the effort and the difficulty ahead.... Would love to hear your thoughts. I have no confidence that there are enough Arabs who will fight for it, nor that our will is strong enough to stick with it for a generation or more while suffering a terrorist war waged by some of the same Arabs we are trying to set free. It won't be easy.
Posted by: oceanguy | March 29, 2003 7:04 PM
Wow! Fabulous job, as always. I've loved absolutely everything you've written.
Posted by: mist | March 29, 2003 7:13 PM
I've just discovered your website through a link at Michael Totten's website. This History essay is breathtaking! Thank you for writing what I've been thinking for the past week--I was conflicted right up until the first bomb was dropped, not because I failed to realize that Saddam needed to go for the sake of the Iraqis, the Americans, and the World, but because I wanted there to be a third way (assassination, coup) to avoid the uncertainty of regional consequences. But as I've read news accounts of the past week, I realized that there was no other choice and there would be no possibility of a third way because the problem isn't merely Saddam, but an entire, cancerous regime that needs to be rooted out. And I could see a reflection of myself and the evolution of my own thoughts in your description of the evolving rationale for the Civil War. How true! I've have moved from hesitant acceptance for President Bush's decision to a certain belief in the rightness of this course even if things get worse before they get better.
Thank you for making my day!
Posted by: Moira | March 29, 2003 7:21 PM
Well done, old chap!
well done!
Posted by: docRussia | March 29, 2003 7:27 PM
:~)
Posted by: Mrs. du Toit | March 29, 2003 7:34 PM
:=)
Posted by: Kim du Toit | March 29, 2003 7:40 PM
Thank you, thank you. It helped so much to read this. Its hard to push back the mood and state of mind of an era. I think thats why some of the young conservative writers sound so blustery and hostile sometimes. It helps to beat back the foolishness and craveness of our time for them and for some of us who read them.
But you, sir, educate us in why it is in fact right to fight this evil and that we ourselves are not evil to do so.
Posted by: pbird | March 29, 2003 7:43 PM
Brilliantly said.
Posted by: Jay Solo | March 29, 2003 7:51 PM
Whew! Thanks, Bill
Posted by: Rich | March 29, 2003 8:05 PM
I envy your "Situational Awareness" and wonder how one person can enjoy its insight in more than one subject.
Once in a great while, I *may* realize a taste of the same only in the activities that I'm most proficient at -and only if I'm very lucky.
How you can be so posessed of such insight for all of the subjects that you write about, is beyond me.
You must be one hell of a pilot.
Posted by: Andy | March 29, 2003 8:39 PM
Brilliant! Truly wonderful. Thanks Bill.
Brent, they did in fact die for you. Until you are willing to give up your US citizenship, their blood sewed the seed of your freedom.
Posted by: Eric Meyer | March 29, 2003 8:42 PM
Superlatives fail me.
I mean, I knew you were going to write on History and, being something of a student thereof, I was looking forward to your take on it, but damn that was good.
Bravo.
OK, you know the drill: 5 copies of the book, and your choice of Adult Beverage should you ever swing through Raleigh, NC.
Posted by: TacJammer | March 29, 2003 8:54 PM
Superb. Required reading for the idiots up here in Canada who figure they can appease until our lights go out. You rock.
Posted by: Larry | March 29, 2003 8:54 PM
Bravo!
A remarkably cogent, articulate essay about our struggle against terrorism!
Encore, maestro! Encore!
Posted by: Santhosh Valloppillil, M.D. | March 29, 2003 8:54 PM
Brilliant.
I can barely type through the tears the truth brings. May I PLEASE buy you a beer when you're back in the land of sun and wind?
Either way... five copies of the book on my account.
Posted by: j | March 29, 2003 9:02 PM
If I may use another science fiction author:
"Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay--and claims a halo for his
dishonesty."
-Robert A. Heinlein
Posted by: MonkeyPants | March 29, 2003 9:18 PM
Dude.
It rocks.
Posted by: Richard Riley | March 29, 2003 9:29 PM
Wow Bill you did it again. I'm still looking forward to sending your book to both of my sons. I truely feel that we are in the same situation that Europe was in the late 30s. We either do it now or do it later at a much greater cost. Your tying the current war to the Civil War brought up a whole new way of understanding todays reality. The ONLY way we will lose is if we, as a people, do not have the will to accept the cost of success.
Thanks sir, you put my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs into words better than I ever could.
Ed Campbell
Posted by: ed campbell | March 29, 2003 9:43 PM
Bill,
Thank you. I find myself more and more realizing your essays are my thoughts put onto paper, only much much more eloquent than I could ever hope to sound.
Thank you for your support of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, our Commander in Chief, and above all else, the ideals on which this great nation was founded.
Posted by: stract | March 29, 2003 10:08 PM
Bill, I'm absolutly speechless. I have never read a piece that has so crystalized a moment of history at the crossroads such as yours has. It should be required reading in every school in the country.
Posted by: Bert Meyer | March 29, 2003 10:53 PM
This essay must be sent, priority mail, to Jean Chretian, the Prime Minister of Canada. In light of the HISTORY between Canada and the USA, how can he refuse to support the liberation??? GRRRRR!
From a Canadian reader: thank you for your excellent work. You will always be welcome on my hockey team!
Posted by: Andrew | March 29, 2003 10:57 PM
Thank you, sir.
Speaking as a member of the air force deployed to wage this war, I want to say that your words have refreshed my sense of purpose.
Posted by: Dave Kuwanoe | March 29, 2003 11:05 PM
I just e-mailed the URL of this essay, and some brief but hopefully pertinent snips, to Rush Limbaugh's e-mail address.
I hope he reads it.
I hope he reads the URL where this essay can be found on the air.
I hope that his 20+ million listeners all come here to snag a copy of this masterwork for themselves.
And I *really* hope that the bandwidth bills won't bankrupt anyone. *eg*
Posted by: Chuckg | March 29, 2003 11:13 PM
You've really captured a great deal, here. Thank you.
You knocked me over by "Stand firm, ye boys of Maine", and spoke my mind with "the behavior of our young men and women under unimaginable stress and provocation have filled me with fierce and unremitting pride."
"We fight, nearly alone, alongside old and true friends, British and Australian... For friends like this are worth having, and I will always prefer the company of one or two solid, dependable friends over legions of fashionable and trendy and unreliable ones." Too true.
I arrived here almost by accident, and now wonder why I've not visited sooner.
Keep up the great work.
Posted by: Mac | March 29, 2003 11:59 PM
I'm reminded of a story: when the trumpeter Miles Davis first heard the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett play, he asked, "What's it like being a genius?"
The same interrogative appies here.
Posted by: BillRay | March 30, 2003 12:07 AM
"As he died to make men holy
Let us die to make men free
Our God is marching on. "
Wonderful, and true.
-Jeff
Posted by: Jeff | March 30, 2003 12:33 AM
When I grow up, I wanna write like you Bill. Alas, I'm already grown up. But I ran across this snippet of a speech recently given at a pro-troops rally I wanted to share.
If you want to see true human shields, walk through Arlington Cemetery. There lie human shields, heroes, and the BRAVE Americans who didn't get on television and talk about being a human shield -- they were human shields.
-- Beth Chapman
Posted by: Mauser | March 30, 2003 2:13 AM
Bill,
It might have been sheer luck, but in February when my Brit journalist friend offered me the 6 videotapes of the 9-hour, "The Civil War", I jumped at the chance. He and I live in Bangkok, Thailand, expats both and writers of some worth... perhaps. The timing was serendipitous, indeed.
My wife and I speak only Thai in our home, but our two sons, aged 7 and 9, speak Thai and English fluently and watched much of the tapes with me, asking meaningful questions and trying to understand how I, Daddy, could be so upset as to be crying while watching still pictures of men mauling each other, time and again, and again, and yet again... in those far-off American settings... are THEY the bad guys, Daddy?
So patiently I helped them understand what I was struggling to come to grips with, that they are here, branches of two wonderful freedom-loving roots, one Thai-Lao and one Swedish-American... and how the American part of their heritage is steeped in freedom, just as the Thai roots are sprung from freedom...
But Daddy cries, because he knows that men, like Daddy, with Daddy's name, Hooper, served in the Union infantry and cavalry, and were incarcerated at Andersonville... there, that prison, see it? And Hoopers also served in the Confederate Artillery, and Cavalry, and were there on both sides at the Battle of Gettysburg...
And this was sinking in, deeply for me, the beginning of a long process for my sons, but coming home to me in ways which I never imagined when first I committed to watch the tapes...
Those soldiers, believing in their rightness, seeing around them the reality of the pain they were inflicting, the horror of their unresolved conflict, yet chose to give all rather than give up.
My sons asked if my service in Korea was like this... no, I said, but when I served on that island just south of the North Korean border, I learned and accepted that freedom is NOT FREE, and that Semper Vigilis (Ever Watchful) is more than just the motto of the intelligence-gathering Agency I served with. It is a need, an onus and a duty which falls to men and women of good conscience, when there IS conflict and when there seems NO conflict. If all around us were trustworthy, good and honorable, there would be no need for Arlington and those who shield, with their efforts and their bodies, the rest of us. We would not need to give our last full measure of devotion to America...
And I learned further, Bill, that as painful as it was at times, I did it willingly, as a volunteer serviceman NOT under duress. And I learned, while there, that there IS a DISTINCTION between the Kim, Jong-ils, the Saddam's and the Maos and the Hitlers of the world... and the George Bush's, who -however reluctantly- stand to carry out their oath of office and protect 'the land of the free, and the home of the brave.'
It was not easy, in the VietNam era, returning to a society rabidly spitting on me and my uniform as I tried to duck and weave through Sea-Tac International... It is not easy now, accepting that every nation of the world is potentially enslaved by the fear of the real terror which can be wrought by a tiny handful of dedicated sociopaths and ideologues... It is not easy to read posts by naive, well-meaning youngsters and long-time leftists and others who use their American-government-protected 'right to free speech' to speak poorly of their country, but it IS part of the process, and I DO TRUST that our higher nature, our positive strengths and our essential nobility will shine through... both during and after the War with Iraq.
KDean Hooper
Dr O'Kay
Posted by: Dr O'Kay | March 30, 2003 2:57 AM
Another excellent and moving essay, Bill.
But we do have some other friends besides the British and Australians who are helping us out, like those Polish Special Forces guys, and a lot of others whose nations may be less inclined to put their contributions in the spotlight. As you wrote, the yearning for freedom is universal, not just something for us English-speakers.
Posted by: BarCodeKing | March 30, 2003 3:22 AM
Bravo, Bill. And thank you.
Posted by: Dave | March 30, 2003 4:19 AM
Very nice essay, as usual. I too have been very conflicted about this war, and have been forced to do a tremendous amount of soul-searching - right up until the day the bombing started, in fact. Eventually I decided that the war was necessary, however unfortunate; this essay says, eloquently, many of the things I have clumsily pieced together for myself the last few weeks in order to come to that conclusion. If it had been out a little earlier you would have saved me much torment.
The majority of my internal strife has sprung from the suspicion that this war was being fought primarily for personal gain on the part of a select few of our leaders. Your essay provides excellent perspective on that concern; regardless of the initial motivations of our leaders, this war has become a war for freedom for the Iraqi people, just as the Civil War turned into a war of freedom for our slaves. When the war ends, many people will get rich off of the Iraqi oil, but the Iraqi people will also have won their freedom. At the worst I suppose it is a win-win situation; but since nations don't act out of altruism, I suppose that is the best we could hope for.
The only problem I have with your "time line" argument is that it works both ways- this invasion could very well be the lighting of the fuse, the action that sets events into motion which culminate in the horrors you described. Unfortunately you can say the same thing about any action, or indeed, any inaction- only a fool would claim to know in advance the full consequences of their actions. None of us are prophets. All we can do is determine what we think is right, and then act with conviction to make it so- damning the torpedoes as we go.
Anyway keep up the good work. I can't wait to buy your first book.
Posted by: SleepDeficit | March 30, 2003 5:02 AM
As fine a peice of writing as I have ever seen on line. When I saw the du Toits' emoticons I thought they were insufficient; I have tears leaking from _both_ eyes.
Others have promised you a drink if you make it up their way. If you make it to Milwaukee (hell, I'll bring it to Oshkosh if you come to the fly-in) I'll offer you the Signatory 20.
Posted by: triticale | March 30, 2003 6:11 AM
Bill,
Congratulations. Cheers. "Bloody well done" as my Brit friends would say. Once again, sir, you have struck the nail on the head. You drive the points home well and deeply. You enlighten those who see your words by merging thought and perspective, leading the others to see events unfolding today in the light shed by those who struggled so 140 years ago.
Little Round Top has been identified as the key point of the Battle of Gettysburg. Yet what many don't know is that this key terrain was unoccupied by any line troops on the morning of July 2, 1863. The Chief of Engineers for Gen. Meade, Brigadier General (BG) Gouverneur K. Warren, was walking the left end of the defense, checking positions when he saw that Gen. Sickles had moved his entire corps, leaving Little Round Top undefended. Without prompt action by BG Warren, the outcome of Gettysburg would have been completely different.
I first really came to understand how important BG Warren's actions were when I taught leadership to young NCOs in the Army's Primary Leadership Development Course. His actions were shown as an example of someone stepping into the breach and taking immediate action without necessarily waiting for specific orders to do so.
The course where we studied BG Warren was titled Duties, Responsibilities, and Authority of the Non-Commissioned Officer. I always identified strongly with this course, as I felt the subject was the bedrock wherefrom the strength of any leader flowed.
If you examine the actions of BG Warren from almost any position other than that of a leader, he grossly overextended his nominal authority. He was a staff officer, albeit a key one. He had no command authority over any single commander on the battlefield. Yet he sent out his staff in a desperate effort to get some troops to the hill. He saw identified a critical issue, and took immediate steps to come to grips with it. One of his staff members found Colonel Vincent Strong marching his troops to support to join Gen. Sickles. Despite his orders, he saw the weakness presented by Little Round Top and marched his brigade to the position. There, he placed the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment on the left flank, with Colonel Chamberlain in command. The rest, as you say, is history. But what set the conditions so necessary for us to prevail in that terrible battle?
Duty. Responsibility. Authority.
BG Warren's duty led him to examine the defenses for his boss. When he found a decisive point of terrain undefended, he took responsibility to immediately find forces to occupy that terrain and deny it to the enemy. While the set of the defense was within his authority, he had no authority to re-task a brigade to occupy it. He and Colonel Strong used the authority of leaders in general to remedy a key defect. Without the efforts of these two leaders, and the courage, valor, and committment of Colonel Chamberlain and his men, the outcome of the key battle of the Civil War would have been greatly different. As you say, it is unknowable what the difference would have been. We live in a society that is a result of the actions of those men, who acted in accordance with the dictates of duty, responsibility, and authority.
I have argued in another thread on your site that America has acted in accordance with our national self interest to intervene in Iraq. I firmly believe that we came to that position based upon our duty, responsibility, and authority to the world in general, and our people in particular.
As you said above, in the light of September 11, 2001, our leaders had to take a long, hard look at the world around them. They saw what you detailed. I believe this is the point where they started making decisions that would effect us all.
The National Command Authority (NCA) is made up of the President, the Secretary of Defense, the major Combatant Commanders (i.e. the Commanding Generals of CENTCOM, USCINCEUR, CINCPAC, etc.), the Service Secretaries and the Chief of each Service. The NCA has the duty as well as the responsibility to protect America and her citizens. These duties and responsibilites are delineated within the Constitution, and the Annotated Code of the United States. The oath of office, as well as the oath of enlistment, cites
It is the duty of the NCA to protect and defend America. The President and his staff have followed their duty and identified a threat to our vital national interests. Whether or not they have clearly elucidated their reasoning is immaterial. They have the responsibility to make such determinations, and have done so. The positions they hold both oblige them to act as they deem appropriate, and responsible to us a nation for their actions or lack thereof. Finally, the President has the authority granted by the constitution in his role as Commander-In-Chief, to take such military actions as he deems appropriate and necessary.
He has done so in the case of Iraq. Our troops are now engaged in deadly battle against the forces of a maniacal despot who murders, assassainates, and destroys any and all opponents. He takes these acts without any check or balance; there is no rule of law applicable to him, only his whim applies. If he is feeling merciful, he puts people into shredders head first. Otherwise, he puts them in feet first.
The constitution places a check and balance on the President's military authority by placing the power of the purse in the hands of Congress. Congress agreed with his reasoning back in November when they passed the bill authorizing the use of force in Iraq. They are now in the process of approving additional funding for this military action, further assenting to the use of force against Iraq.
America as a nation has been thrust into a leadership role amoung the other nations of the world. We did not strive directly for this position, but rather assumed it out of necessity. We are now acting as a leader does. Perhaps not with exact knowledge of all possible outcomes, nor with other than a reasonable guess as to the duration of hostilities. But we are acting as a leader does.
According to the tenets of those three imperatives: duty, responsibility, and authority.
Sapper Mike
Posted by: Sapper Mike | March 30, 2003 7:16 AM
Absolutley beautiful, Bill. I wish I could shake your hand.
Thank you.
Posted by: daveman | March 30, 2003 7:18 AM
I may have to read this post every week, just to remind myself that the brave, inventive, and above all else, GOOD people who made America what it is today have not completely disappeared. Its hard to remember that watching anti-war protesters and CNN. :(
Posted by: Eric Sivula | March 30, 2003 7:18 AM
Excellent job, Bill! As a Desert Storm veteran, I have a different perspective than the mob of antiwar protestors who follow agitators that tell them whom to hate. I sneer in disgust when they claim to "support the troops," since many of them are the same people who spit in the faces of Vietnam veterans over 30 years ago. Before I retired from the military, I learned to be an expert at assessing risks, and know that making decisions that may place another service member's life in danger is one of the hardest of all. But the cost of inaction is like a debt to a loan shark that compounds daily at an astronomical rate. Unlike the sheep who attend antiwar rallies without thinking, just about everyone in the military weighs the consequences and impact of our actions - their lives literally depend upon paying careful attention to these things. And when a war is thrust upon us, we become more than fellow employees, but brothers and sisters in a common cause.
Posted by: Bloodthirsty Warmonger | March 30, 2003 8:08 AM
After a morning of reading and watching the relentlessly defeatist war coverage in The New York Times and on CNN, I felt the black cloud of depression starting to close in on me. That's something that each of us can ill afford right now, so I turned to the blogsphere for bucking-up. By happy chance, I stumbled on your essay "History."
Thank you. You are incredibly eloquent. God, there are people out there who can write! I know that everything you say is true, but to see it put with such passion and eloquence is a great morale booster.
On the subject of morale, let me also say that you are doing very important work. So is everyone who who writes (in the press or on the web), e-mails friends, challenges stupidities uttered by friends, aquiantances and strangers, and generally speaks up in support of our country, freedom and the truth. This is a small contribution, but it is one we can all make.
Posted by: Howard Jaeckel | March 30, 2003 8:37 AM
May I direct your attention to Richard Moe's book entitled "THE LAST FULL MEASURE" starting with pg 268 for who really saved the Union that day, namely the First Minnesota.
Posted by: Patrick | March 30, 2003 8:40 AM
The Brent's of the world will always be taking and not giving.
Posted by: Jim | March 30, 2003 8:48 AM
The Brent's of the world will always take and not give.
Posted by: Jim | March 30, 2003 8:49 AM
Bill,
Yup. I was right. It was worth the wait. Excellent job, as usual.
May I add my name to the list of those waiting to buy you your favorite beverage? Anytime you're in Salem, OR, give me a shout and I'll stand the round.
You keep writing like this, you may not ever have to buy a drink again!
Orion
Posted by: Orion | March 30, 2003 8:58 AM
Spot on, excellent, and well-said. As always.
Posted by: Darmon Thornton | March 30, 2003 9:18 AM
I don't think there are enough superlatives in the thesaurus.
Posted by: Kathy K | March 30, 2003 9:23 AM
It always seems unlikely that your next opus will be even better than the last, but we've come to expect the unlikely from you. You may single handedly be the "renaissance" of the essay, long overdue and greatly undervalued. Your observations and perspectives on history may themselves become history of note.
Please continue, and Godspeed.
Posted by: bob in the hills | March 30, 2003 9:33 AM
Excellent, absolutely excellent. Bravo, Bill.
Posted by: Mr. Lion | March 30, 2003 9:34 AM
Thanks for a very moving essay. I just discovered your site.
If you're looking for an opening quotation, may I suggest:
"The noblest fate a man can endure is to place his mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation." (Robert A. Heinlein, "Starship Troopers")
Such, indeed, are the *real* human shields.
Posted by: Former Belgian | March 30, 2003 9:55 AM
That's swell. Who did this kid die for?
Posted by: John | March 30, 2003 10:11 AM
As marvelous as the essay is, many of the comments are also worth printing for distribution.
I know many combat veterans of WWII, Korea, Viet Nam and a some other "minor" spots who would applaud all of you if they were able, or alive.
Thank you. All of you.
Posted by: John Candler | March 30, 2003 10:25 AM
I recognize the likely futility of attempting to offer a dissenting view to a bloodthirsty choir disguised as a thoughtful forum for ideas (as long as they agree with the preacher?s). At the very least, perhaps I?ll give you someone to attack, so you don?t have to keep slapping each other on the back. I think that?d get boring after a while.
For the sake of the discussion, let?s say that a primary reason for our invasion of Iraq is to free those oppressed peoples. I think that Americans generally believe that FREEDOM is an absolute value who?s definition is something we all agree on. Ask any ten people anywhere in this country for their definition of what freedom is (and how close to that ideal they personally feel they exist) and I submit you?ll come up with ten fairly diverse opinions. Even those of you here who argue in favor of the war are likely not in agreement about it. Yet, not only is that not an open topic for discussion, you?d suggest that we all rally around some variant of ?freedom? as being such an inarguable benefit that it licenses us to attempt to enforce it elsewhere. And whether your definition of freedom agrees with your neighbor?s or not, to suggest that it can be ENFORCED on potentially unwilling subjects is antithetical. If freedom doesn?t allow for its rejection, then it can?t be called freedom by anyone?s definition.
That said, the fact that ?freeing the Iraqis? seems to be the most prominent argument in favor of war would appear to evidence a very successful exercise in mass hypnosis. I submit that anyone who doesn?t realize that this invasion is all about a desperate attempt to hang on to a standard of living that this planet doesn?t seem likely to sustain is kidding themselves.
So here?s how I see your argument, folks: If I don?t fall for the misty-eyed rhetoric that legitimizes killing for the sake of another two years of being able to fill up those three car garages, then I?m hatefully unpatriotic. And if I complain that my rights are being withdrawn on a daily basis, supported by the propaganda that you all buy to feel better about the fact that you?re condemning untold numbers to death, I truly am the villain, huh?
Sing a few notes of THAT tune.
Posted by: Bill St James | March 30, 2003 10:41 AM
John 10:11 a.m.,
That poor boy died because his "president" is a magalomaniac who cares more about billion dollar palaces and pursuing unbounded power than he does about being a real leader of his people.
Posted by: Craig | March 30, 2003 10:55 AM
Bill St. James,
If protecting my country and my way of life is being bloodthirsty, so be it.
If you think this is all about OILLLLL!!!! at this late date, I don't know why I'm bothering to reply at all.
If you cannot come up with a consistent definition of freedom, and believe that justifies fascism, you are just sick.
Get over your white liberal perfectionist guilt syndrome (WLPGS).
You seem to think we are going to overheat or blow up the earth in a few years anyway. Why wait-avoid the rush and kill yourself now!
Posted by: Craig | March 30, 2003 11:02 AM
Bill,
Wonderful work. Can't add much to the platitudes above. Sorry about the following.
dfarmer,
I'll call you neither unpatriotic or a villain. Just a dope. There is nothing in the planning or implementation of this action that outlines the ENFORCEMENT of freedom. Only it's possibility, something impossible under the strangulating grasp of the only bloodthirsty person in sight - Saddam.
Your arguments are unconvincing:
1. The Iraqi citizens are not rushing headlong into the streets supporting us, therefore we oughtn't be there (I doubt the average Iraqi citizen has a very well-rounded view of the issue, due to having had some relative put thru a plastic shredder by the very folks that will shoot them in the head if they show anything but blind support for the madman that runs their country, nor the freedom to do so for the same reason.)
2. "another two years of being able to fill up those three car garages" - standard "it's all about oil" and class warfare rhetoric, all rolled up into one neat phrase - extra points awarded for brevity.
3. "my rights being withdrawn on a daily basis" - you're awfully self-important, aren't you?
If you really read and absorbed the essence of the piece, that there's something more than self and almost nothing higher than selflessness, it'd be worth slapping you down. But your real desire is be recognized as the squeaky wheel that you are. Great to live in a country where that's possible without having your tongue cut out and watch yourself bleed to death.
Posted by: Patrick | March 30, 2003 11:20 AM
Bill St. James,
I defy you to find a single American- a single Iraqi, a single ANYONE- whose definition of "freedom" involves being brutally tortured, violated, and murdered by a government which calls itself above the law.
I defy you to find a single American willing to live in the chains of true tyranny, where all ability to change the fate of the nation- buying political advertisements, organizing recall campaigns, and criticizing government, have been legally nullified.
And I defy you to find a single sane Iraqi who will reject the freedom and prosperity America at least TRIES to provide, and instead take the barren malice of the Islamists, or the cynical exploitation the French use in ALL of their oil deals. Hell, I'd be extremely surprised if you can name ONE nation who America "robs" of oil in the manner that the European Union- same colonialists, new methods- uses.
If we buy Iraqi oil for anything less than world value I will be astounded. America is NOT in danger of growing poor, you deluded simpleton. America is in danger of being destroyed by a psychopath who has stated his goal of destroying the one check to his power in some of the most explicit and vile fantasies since Mein Kampf, and who possesses some of the worst weapons in human history.
Sing a few notes of that tune.
Posted by: trevalyan | March 30, 2003 11:25 AM
Could someone clarify the source of the historical quote above:
"This war is an abject and utter failure. What everyone thought would be a...."
Thanks
Posted by: CC | March 30, 2003 11:27 AM
"I submit that anyone who doesn?t realize that this invasion is all about a desperate attempt to hang on to a standard of living that this planet doesn?t seem likely to sustain is kidding themselves. "
I can understand why you buy into the "unsustainable standard of living" line, but you really ought to get hit by a clue stick.
Human welfare is getting better worldwide. We aren't running out of resources. In fact the price of resources in terms of human time has been declining since recorded history. That decline hasn't reversed, it has accelerated.
You shouldn't worry about filling your gas tank. Your grandchildren won't have to worry about filling their tanks, either.
Posted by: John Hall | March 30, 2003 11:27 AM
And to Bill Whittle: I am exceptionally privileged to call myself one of the first people to read your writing, at Rachellucas.com. There is zero doubt in my mind that you could write for whatever publication you desired to work for. You could charge $100 for your book, and it would still be the most undervalued text since the $10 Bible.
You have surely noticed that your kindness, brilliance, abilities, and goodness have been remarked on by what I'm sure are hundreds of thousands of individual Americans and citizens of the world by this point. To keep your writing in this relatively less-travelled website is a crime akin to wrapping the beauty of woman in a suffocating burqa, locking an innocent and young puppy in a bare, fetid cage, and hiding the light of the world underneath a bowl.
I can't think of a being whose texts I would rather read, save for God's. For humans, you are one of the greatest writers we have ever seen. If your ego was proportional to your ability (unlike the arrogance of people without your dignity and grace)... I shudder to think of what an evil Bill Whittle could do.
God bless you and yours, my friend.
Posted by: trevalyan | March 30, 2003 11:35 AM
Mr. St. James (10:41 a.m.),
You are most certainly correct in that no two people will give an exact reply to what ?Freedom? (sic) is. But therein lies the subtle idea of freedom: It means different things to different people. To some, it means being able to say what they want, without many limitations. To others, that they be able to protest what they think are idiot notions that should be stamped out. The possibilities are myriad, and right for each individual. Because in its basic form, freedom is an individual thing.
You posit that the war in Iraq
Certainly, this planet cannot sustain such "ravages" for more than the next century or two. The actions of the early industrialists come to mind for sheer rapine. However, had we not learned a little stewardship over the years, I think there would already greater problems than we have. I am also equally certain that our children and their children will improve the technology and standard of life for themselves and their children.
Yes, Mr. St. James, I think this war is justified, and the fact that we are engaged in it now rather than at some later time is a good thing. I have fought in our armed forces, and understand the cost of such effort. I also recognize the cost of failing to make that effort. The cost is incomparably higher when we fail to act.
Sapper Mike
Posted by: Sapper Mike | March 30, 2003 11:38 AM
Looks like Bill St. James missed the whole point. I visit many blogs, and I haven't seen anyone arguing that the only reason we're in Iraq is to liberate the Iraqi's -- that's merely a secondary benefit to the people of Iraq. The main goal is disarmament of Saddan through the only means he has left the world, and by the world I mean the world led by the U.S. because most other nations have abdicated said responsibility.
Posted by: Jon Davison | March 30, 2003 11:39 AM
As always, it was well worth the wait, and for the first time, you've got a following here at my school that agrees. Get the book out quickly, the natives are restless!
Posted by: Max | March 30, 2003 11:53 AM
Dear Patrick
Thanks for your reply. I reckon just about anyone who reads different stuff, assigns different credibility to it and comes to different conclusions than you is a dope.
There absolutely IS an enforcement of freedom. If Iraqi citizens try to defend themselves in the face of the force that's delivering freedom to their door, they will be killed. That is force and it doesn't allow for discussion.
It seems you folks want it both ways. Either the people of Iraq are too stupid or uninformed to know what they should want or they DO know but we have to show them we know better (because they aren't choosing us and that by definition, means they're wrong). And I'm not basing any bit of my argument on the fact that we're not being welcomed with open arms. That would be a very easy way to point out a way in which our foreign policy since the Cold War has been defective...in school we were always authoritatively instructed that the people of the USSR and China would welcome us in a similar way...which in turn has fed our sense of being beyond reproach in whatever way we choose to deal with the rest of the world.
I appreciate your response to my suggestion that oil is the issue. Instead of offering any sort of argument at all either that it ISN'T the issue or that resources are running out (documentation of which I'd be happy to provide, but I'm guessing you'd dismiss because it's not what you want to believe), you just say everyone says that and apparently you feel as though my argument is rendered untenable. Good work.
The Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act are eating up YOUR rights too you moron. The fact that you'd choose to see my statement as a demonstration of my isolated self-interest indicates that a) you don't really have much to say in rebuttal and b) you'd rather attack me than my beliefs.
The "piece" appeals to your emotional sensibilities. You're trying to overlay a logical argument on something your heart responds to. And in order to get there you have to cut corners of logic by proclaiming certain opinions as FACT. Why don't you just admit that instead of trying to appear to be the voice of reason and authority?
Posted by: Bill St James | March 30, 2003 11:57 AM
excellent as always. keep up the great work and hold a copy of your book for me as soon as you get it published.
Posted by: David Gulliver | March 30, 2003 12:01 PM
For Jon Davison:
1) I think the people in the pro-war camp would have different (from one another) views about why we're really fighting in Iraq. I haven't seen any one overriding consensus.o
2) I suppose that the fact that George Bush, Colin Powell and Tony Blair have all been caught citing forged documents in order to support their claim of Saddam's capabilities (and admitted it) means nothing at all.
Which point did I miss?
Posted by: Bill St James | March 30, 2003 12:04 PM
Mr. Whittle,
I have read all of your essays on this site and am awed. There is a power, a magnificence, an understanding of human nature that far outstrips the mere words strung together by others.
I realize that your schedule must be filling up awfully quickly with offers of free food and drink, but I will add my name to the bottom of that list.
Should your peregrinations ever bring you to the East Coast (NYC, Boston, or...Newport, RI), please advise as to the when and where. I would consider it a signal honor to shake your hand, and a distinct privilege to share a meal and a toast with you at the location of your choice.
Please add me to the list of folks waiting to purchase multiple copies of your book when it is published.
Thank you - for the higher vision and the ennobling thoughts.
Posted by: mike fleuette | March 30, 2003 12:04 PM
Bill St. James,
I assure you: the ONE reason Iraqis do not support us is because America sold them out the last time, on the behest of the "coalition" of the useless. Your proclamation that Iraqis want the prestige or the dignity of Saddam in power, or the sight of simpering French diplomats cutting a new deal with the next tyrant in line, is so counter to intuition that it boggles the mind.
http://www.iran-daneshjoo.org/
These people, for instance, may prove the fact, evidently delicate in your mind, that people may not only welcome Americans, but welcome them more than you would.
Again: if the world runs short on oil, rest assured the United States will offer better prices for it than anyone else. And that they will go further towards solving the problem- eg. fuel cells, hydrogen cars- than any other nation, with perhaps the exception of Japan for cars. Of course we don't want nations who have betrayed us and worked against us to compete for the oil contracts, but our allies (Britain, Australia) are fair game. One last time: it's not the OIL, it's the fact America is the one thing between Saddam and his dreams of power, and therefore he wishes our destruction. Not since Lindbergh have I seen such blindness towards the obvious.
Posted by: Rohan | March 30, 2003 12:06 PM
For Craig:
I'm very sorry, I didn't receive the propaganda packet that proved we're not in Iraq for the oil. Perhaps "at this late date" you pro-war folks have spent too much time circle-jerking to get that word out properly. In any case I sure appreciate that you'd even respond to a dunce like me.
I didn't say I can't come up with a consistent definition of freedom. I said that on this planet and among Americans, you're going to find many different opinions of that. And YOU didn't respond to the idea that freedom can't be enforced, by definition.
Boy do you have ME pegged. I'm anti-gun control, against tax and spend and for reducing national government control...to name a few.
Posted by: Bill St James | March 30, 2003 12:12 PM
For trevalyan:
I'm not going to attempt to name one person who believes that freedom includes the qualities you mention. But it's pretty typical of the responses here...be obtuse about the points being made (or pretend to be) so you don't have to really respond substantively.
I SAID that since we all don't even agree among ourselves exactly what freedom is, how can we use this abstract notion as LICENSE to shove it down someone else's throats?
I also said that if freedom doesn't include the ability to reject it, then it isn't freedom by any definition. At this moment what we're doing in Iraq doesn't offer them any choices but to allow themselves to be subjected to whatever we offer (and we're not sure what that is, so how could we expect them to endorse it?) or be killed.
Is our motto in this war,"Be Free American-style or Die?"
Posted by: Bill St James | March 30, 2003 12:22 PM
Sorry...one other thing. This deluded simpleton is awed to be in the presence of such superior thinkers and I appreciate that you put up with me. But I wonder on what such bile-inspired authority you (trevalyan and all others who are in the club I've been left out of) can claim that our resources will be around for generations? I have evidence right here that not only proves otherwise but that the Bush gang is also well aware of it. But since none of you have seen it or recognize its veracity, I must be the one who's full of crap.
Strength in numbers. If enough of you can just laugh with each other and agree that you're the True Righteous Defenders Of Freedom" then golly, you must be.
Posted by: Bill St James | March 30, 2003 12:29 PM
Once again, I regret the terribly biased and relatively unimportant things that are taught in American history classes around the United States these days. Were more children to learn this way, with the things that you have mentioned and being instilled with an understanding of the "why" of the issues, perhaps we'd be a people better off. Instead, they are taught to be proud of the accomplishments, knowing little of what was the aim for most of the things that were done. It's tragic, really.
One thing I can say about humans and war; many die, but always, no matter what, humans as a species survive and recover. What sets us apart from animals is that we hold in our hands the ability to destroy one another, but that we can choose what we are fighting for. Our higher ideals, our thinking... It is what defines us. Wars may come and go, but then... There's always people. It makes me feel good to know that we still can care for one another enough to fight and die freeing fellow people.
Thank you for a moving and incredibly informed read.
All the best! - Jacinta M.
Posted by: Jacinta Meyers | March 30, 2003 12:36 PM
For Rohan:
Excuse me. When did I proclaim anything like
"Iraqis want the prestige or the dignity of Saddam in power, or the sight of simpering French diplomats cutting a new deal with the next tyrant in line..."
Nice. Now we're resorting to extreme misattribution in order to win an argument. Is that the best you can do? Respond to what you wish I would have said?
By the way, can you provide me with the documentation that demonstrates Saddam's "dreams of power?" His diary, perhaps? As far as I can tell, he's a pretty unsavory character and likely capable of actions that would make most of us shudder, but I tend to regard reports of his quest for domination over us as convenient triggers designed to get people like you to knee-jerk a response. And it works great too.
Your unbeliveable misquotiing of me suggests your unreliability as an objective correspondent. I won't spend any more time thinking about your dumb post.
Posted by: Bill St James | March 30, 2003 12:43 PM
"But I have often wondered, what if this history, the one we know as reality, was the one gone horribly wrong? "
I'm certain that there exist alternate Americas by whose standards ours has gone horribly wrong.
What if there had never been a New Deal or a Great Depression?
What if "the Space Age" had been our second Manifest Destiny rather than a collection of expensive publicity stunts?
What if medical technology had advanced so rapidly that there still lived a handful of Civil War veterans?
Is there a single pivot point that might have made the difference? Maybe, maybe not. But this is not the best of all possible worlds, not by a long shot.
Here's one possible scenario, pulled out of thin air:
Teddy Roosevelt wins the election of 1912. Two to three years later, he announces that the United States is joining the "Great War", three years ahead of (our) schedule.
He is impeached and thrown out of office. His progressive platform is discredited along with him. 19th Century laissez faire economics becomes the order of the day.
The Federal Reserve, which figured heavily in the Great Depression, is dismantled. A few historians will remember that one of the periodic downturns in our economy occured from 1929-1931 or thereabouts.
Prohibition never happened. No one has ever heard of a "gangster".
The rapid-fire introduction of groundbreaking new inventions that characterized the 19th century continues uninterrupted, builds on itself, and accelerates throughout the 20s, 30s, and beyond.
No one has seen a ground car in decades, except in museums.
The Federal Communications Act, if anyone had dared to introduce it, would have been rejected as a socialist plot, and as an intolerable affront to the First Amendment. Instead, rights to the radio spectrum have been bought and sold as property for decades, opening up opportunities for innovators to introduce new uses for wireless communication without playing Mother May I with the (non-existent) FCC. No one has seen a wired telephone in several decades either. Computer (wireless) networks sparked general excitement, a short period of irrational exuberance, a burst bubble, then a recovery and the beginning of a long period of continued development - in the 1950's.
During the 1930's, the Supreme Court finally declares that the states are not permitted by the 14th Amendment to run segregated school systems. Several states respond by eliminating all of their public schools. This practice eventually spreads as those states experience improvements in the educational attainment of their children.
As technological development proceeds, free market private schools drastically shorten their breaks and adjust their curricula, thereby allowing most children to continue to become self-supporting adults by age 18. The rate of unwed teen pregnancy never becomes much of a problem.
The US military plants the flag in Earth orbit, and builds up an unbeatable presence while the Kaiser and the Soviets are busy duking it out, and while the Japs and the Chinese are similarly locked in combat. By the time the dust settles over there, the United States of America owns outer space.
We spend the rest of the century embracing our new "Manifest Destiny". We welcome immigrants in staggering numbers, go on breeding like rabbits (since the real and imagined limitations of Earth's resources and environment aren't an issue), and take over the Solar System.
Our flag end up with 150 stars, with more undoubtedly to be added throughout the 21st century.
The gold standard finally becomes unworkable when we come up with a working fusion reactor. Instead, we rely on "networked bartering", where automatic agents negotiate complex trade deals on our behalf. If we have gadgets and want widgets, our agent trades first for thingamobobs, then thingamobobs for doohickeys, and finally doohickeys for widgets - all in fractions of a second with other peoples' automated agents.
No one needs permission to buy and sell medicines. No one has ever heard of a "prescription". People are still annoyed even to this day by bogus cures that sometimes appear, and sometimes even call for Washington to "do something". It never occurs to those people that, had Washington taken that advice a few decades ago, their anti-aging treatments would not exist, and they would find themselves subjected to a horrible death in less than a century!
Global temperatures plunge throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, after we stop using obsolete and inefficient fossil fuels. There are calls for the government to spend scads of money pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but nothing is ever done. Agriculture moves to space and under domes, and life goes on.
Feel free to poke holes in this rosy scenario at will.
Posted by: Ken | March 30, 2003 12:52 PM
Mr. St. James,
You say your rights are being taken away from you. Can you please list for us here, anything that you cannot do today that you could do before January 20th, 2001? What right, in particular, has been taken from you?
Secondly, do you honestly believe that Saddam Hussein can be trusted to not provide access to the vast stores of chemical and biological