Week of Dec. 11, 2006

It seems to me that our political history has been marked the past 10 years by lurches, reactions and swerves, and I wonder if historians will see the era that started in the mid-'90s as The Long Freakout. First the Clinton era left more than half the country appalled--deeply appalled, and ashamed--by its series of political, financial and personal scandals. I doubt the Democratic Party will ever fully understand the damage done in those days. In reaction the Republican Party lurched in its presidential decision toward a relatively untested (five years in the governor's office, before that very little) man whom party professionals chose, essentially, because"He can win" and the base endorsed because he seemed the opposite of Bill Clinton. The 2000 election was a national trauma, and I'm not sure Republicans fully understand what it did to half the Democrats in the country to think the election was stolen, or finagled, or arranged by unseen powers. Then 9/11. Now we have had six years of high drama and deep division, and again a new savior seems to beckon, one who is so clearly Not Bush.

Bush seems likely to try the"surge" tactic in Iraq of putting in substantially more troops, perhaps 20,000, in an attempt to take Baghdad and clear it of 'terrorists.'

Hope springs eternal in the human breast, which is the only explanation for adopting this stupid idea. The Iraqi masses are now politically mobilized, and they are well armed. There are 27 million Iraqis, and some 6 million of them in the Sunni Arab areas. 20,000 US troops is a drop in the bucket. Some are saying the US should try to destroy the (Shiite) Mahdi Army. The Mahdi Army is an urban social movement, and cannot be destroyed by conventional military forces. Bush is about to take us on another destructive wild goose chase.

In 1994 John Coolidge, the president's older son, told me:"My father could not possibly be elected to anything today." That is surely true. Looking at the people who do get elected to our republic's highest offices today, it is also regrettable.

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, I’m wondering what books you read while you were secretary that you found most useful and edifying.

RUMSFELD: Well, I’ve read a great many books. They’re all history books; a number about the Revolutionary War and about George Washington and John Adams and others, Jefferson.

I started reading a number of books about the Civil War. And one particularly good one was a book on Ulysses S. Grant. But I stopped. I found the struggle going on — gosh, those years, there were so many people killed and wounded, and they were all Americans, except for the foreign fighters who came over from Germany and Poland and elsewhere.

So I turned away from that and read a great deal about World War II. And that has been basically what I’ve been reading.

There is a very good chance that the Iraq Study Group will be remembered as the Walter Cronkite of this war. As the oldest one-third or so of Americans can remember directly, and as others have heard, Walter Cronkite himself had a huge impact on domestic support for the Vietnam war. Cronkite was then the anchor of the CBS Evening News. The CBS Evening News was then something “everybody” watched or knew about. Cronkite traveled to Vietnam after the Tet offensive in early 1968, and broadcast on his return his conclusion that, while the U.S. had not “lost” in Vietnam, it could not expect to “win.” In a mere 500 words, he crystalized or catalyzed a broader American sense that American strategy was not working. The transcript of his commentary, here, stands up better than most things said and thought in 1968 (yes, notwithstanding the later analysis that Tet was a battlefield defeat, though a strategic victory, for the Vietcong and North Vietnamese). And passages like this one could be pasted right into the Iraq Study Group report:

"To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest that we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion."

Cronkite did not change America’s view of Vietnam by himself. Political campaigns were raging at that same time, and within six weeks Lyndon Johnson would, in effect, abdicate by saying that he would not run for re-election. The Iraq Study Group will not change America’s view of the Iraq war by itself. The political shifts of the last six months, and the election results last month, play an enormous part. But Cronkite’s broadcast is remembered because it legitimized a change in view; and I suspect that the Study Group’s report will be remembered in the same way.

Slavery seems like a remote part of history, until you see scholarly estimates that the slave trade in the 21st century — forced work in prostitution and some kinds of manual labor — is probably larger than it was in the 18th or 19th centuries....

The Lancet, the British medical journal, once estimated that 10 million children 17 and under may work in prostitution worldwide. Not all are coerced, but in the nastier brothels of Cambodia, Nepal, India, Malaysia and Thailand, the main difference from 19th-century slavery is that the victims are mostly dead of AIDS by their 20’s.

“It seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries was,” notes an important article about trafficking in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. It adds, “Just as the British government (after much prodding by its subjects) once used the Royal Navy to stamp out the problem, today’s great powers must bring their economic and military might to bear on this most crucial of undertakings.”

Historicism, in various new and not-so-new guises, dominates most contemporary academic literature departments. It has become something close to heresy to suggest that any literary work could be studied without close reference to the specific place, time, and culture in which it was produced. Literature does not express timeless truths about human nature˜or, at least, you would sound like a simpleton if you said so at an academic conference. Rather, literature articulates the ideas and values of its own time, according to older, Hegelian forms of historicism. Or literature"negotiates" the"power dynamics" of its own time, according to the newer, post-Foucaultian versions. These positions each have something to be said for them: Both respond, in different ways, to the obvious fact that literature is not produced independently of its author and his or her society˜as radical forms of literary formalism might suggest. But the triumph of historicism is a pity, not least because the dominance of any orthodoxy tends to deaden the critical faculties.

Because the USA is now mired in a war it appears to have no chance of winning, Eastwood may have picked the worst possible moment to make this film. There is a good chance that Americans on the left are avoiding the film because they mistakenly believe it is a flag-waving venture, while people on the right are avoiding it because America is losing the war in Iraq, and Flags reminds them of a time when America didn't lose wars.

Just as today we look back on extended and episodic conflicts such as the Thirty Years’ War or the Hundred Years’ War, historians may regard today’s clash as only another battle in a much longer war. U.S. actions in this Gulf war have dramatically increased the likelihood of future conflicts. We have inflamed tensions in the Middle East, undercut our regional influence and eroded the nation’s political will to remain actively engaged in this critical part of the world.

The forces pulling us back are so strong that it doesn’t matter which party controls Congress or occupies the White House. In fact, given the political shifts that this increasingly unpopular conflict has triggered, it seems quite possible that a Democratic president may be the one compelled to wage the Third Gulf War.

There are many of us with a direct connection to the Chile of the 1970s who have waited a long time for Sunday, for the death of former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. We awaited only the day of his arrest with more anticipation.