Quote/Unquote 2005 Sept.

Gen. Richard Myers, outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, warned Wednesday that winning in Iraq was as important to the US as winning WW II had been, and that a withdrawal would lead to another 9/11- style attack.

With all due respect, Gen. Myers is wrong on both counts. For the US to stay massively in Iraq, occupying a major Arab Muslim country, for very much longer is what will provoke another attack on the US mainland. Gen. John Abizaid, who actually knows the Middle East, warned against a large, long-term occupation of Iraq in spring of 2003 and he was right. As for the WW II analogy, puh-lease. National Socialist Germany and its allies had large, well-equipped armies and occupied all of continental Europe, West and North Africa save Egypt, and (via Japan) Korea, much of China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Burma, and Indonesia among other territories. The German military was 20 million strong, the Japanese nearly 10 million. Italy's military was 3 million.

The guerrilla movement in Iraq is typically estimated at around 30,000 strong, though I suspect it is twice that. The total number of persons in the jihadi movement outside Iraq who could and would commit violence such as bombings against the mainland United States is probably in the hundreds, and is at most a couple thousand. They can't even seem to muster more than a couple thousand volunteers to fight the biggest Western incursion into the Muslim world since the Soviet invasion of Aghanistan, which is pretty pitiful if you think about it. I teach World War II in the Middle East, Gen. Myers. This is no World War II.

Re: Tom DeLay Terry M. Neal:

It is entirely possible both that your enemies are out to get you and that you did exactly what you are being accused of doing. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Ask Bill Clinton.

Re: Hubris & Scandals Julian Zelizer:

We've constantly had leaders going down in the last 20 years for related issues. Those who are successful, there's a high chance they've pushed the boundaries of money in politics as far as they can go.

Re: Hubris & Scandals David R. Gergen:

We know that second terms have historically been marred by hubris and by scandal. We've seen the hubris [referring to Bush's proposal to revamp Social Security]. And now we're seeing the scandals.

Re: Kennedys David Talbot, founder of Salon:

Last year, during an interview with President Kennedy's close advisor Theodore Sorensen, the man who helped give JFK's speeches their poetic vision, I delicately raised the subject of the president's assassination, which Sorensen immediately alerted me was, after all these years, still a"terribly painful" topic for him. Before he cut the discussion short, Sorensen told me in a voice heavy with melancholy that if he could"know that my friend of 11 years died as a martyr to a cause, that there was some reason, some purpose why he was killed -- and not just a totally senseless, lucky sharpshooter -- then I think the whole world would feel better. That brave John F. Kennedy, with all these courageous positions, went into Texas knowing that it was hostile territory, and he ended up dead."

This new wave of scholarly and journalistic investigation promises to finally do just that: show that President John F. Kennedy died for a cause. Perhaps this realization, once it fully sinks into the national consciousness, will bring a measure of solace to the Kennedy family and New Frontier survivors like Sorensen.

Re: Indifference to History Stephen Kinzer:

History is becoming America's enemy because too many American leaders do not believe in history. They believe that the United States is so unique, so much more powerful than any other nation or empire has ever been, that history does not apply to it. They believe, in effect, that history has stopped happening. Clio always takes revenge for such insults.

WEEK of September 19, 2005

Re: Gays & the Catholic Church News story in the NYT following the disclosure that the Vatican plans to stop gay people who try to join the priesthood:

"I feel like a Jew in Berlin in the 1930's," said a 48-year-old gay priest who has spent 18 years in a religious order. He said he was considering donning a pink triangle - the symbol used by the Nazis - and getting heterosexual priests and members of the laity to wear the triangles as a protest.

Re: Bush & Taxes & Leadership Fareed Zakaria:

Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report"The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that"throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts.

Re: Abortion Charles Krauthammer:

In our lifetime, has there been a more politically poisonous U.S. Supreme Court decision than Roe v. Wade? Set aside for a moment your thoughts on the substance of the ruling. (I happen to be a supporter of legalized abortion.) I'm talking about the continuing damage to the Republic: disenfranchising, instantly and without recourse, an enormous part of the American population; preventing, as even Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, proper political settlement of the issue by the people and their representatives; making the U.S. the only nation in the West to have legalized abortion by judicial fiat rather than by the popular will expressed democratically.

Re: Race & Poverty Paul Krugman:

[W]ho can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself,"There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself,"Why should I be taxed to support those people?"

WEEK of September 12, 2005

Re: Low History IQ's News Story (NYT):

Quick, who was the American general at the Battle of Yorktown? A) William Sherman B) Ulysses Grant C) Douglas MacArthur D) George Washington. If you answered D), you did better than two out of three graduates of America's top universities. Many of them picked Grant - and 6 percent picked MacArthur. Historians are citing those results along with a cascade of other data to argue that many Americans are, for all practical purposes, historically illiterate.

Re: Iraq & Democracy Political scientist Cory Robin:

[H]ow is it that few liberals and no leftists in 1968 believed that Lyndon Johnson, arguably the most progressive President in American history, would or could airlift democracy to Vietnam, while many liberals and not a few leftists in 2003 believed that the most reactionary President since William McKinley could and would export democracy to Iraq?

Re: Bush & Lincoln Phil Collins, in an email to HNN:

I work for Martin E. Janis & Company, a P.R. company in Chicago. A client of ours, George Fox, recently published a book,"Abraham Lincoln's Faith Based Leadership," which is about President Lincoln's Christian faith and how it helped him during the Civil War. Would you like to receive a copy of the book so that you could review it? I think that it links history to current events because many articles have been written about President Bush's faith. Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, and Bush wants to free the people of the Middle East from the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

WEEK of September 5, 2005

Re: Hurricaine Katrina Columnist Eugene Robinson:

[A]n administration that since Sept. 11, 2001, has told us a major terrorist strike is inevitable should have had in place a well-elaborated plan for evacuating a major American city. Even if there wasn't a specific plan for New Orleans -- although it was clear that a breach of the city's levees was one of the likeliest natural catastrophes -- there should have been a generic plan. George W. Bush told us time and again that our cities were threatened. Shouldn't he have ordered up a plan to get people out?

Re: Hurricaine Katrina Robert Dallek:

I think he's really undermined his credibility at this point, and it really saddles him with the kind of problems that Johnson and Nixon faced. These crises are such a heavy burden, and they are so self-inflicted, except for the court vacancies, that if he is not very careful and tries to put across someone who is seen as an ultraconservative, he is going to touch off a conflagration in the Senate.

Re: Hurricaine Katrina News story:

Perhaps not since Richard M. Nixon faced Vietnam-era tumult abroad and at home has an American president had to meet quite the combination of foreign war, domestic tribulations and political division that President Bush now confronts, from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf Coast to Capitol Hill.