Week of Dec. 18, 2006

Look, everybody’s trying to write the history of this administration even before it’s over. I’m reading about George Washington still. My attitude is, if they’re still analyzing No. 1, 43 ought not to worry about it, and just do what he thinks is right, make the tough choices necessary.

In 1942 Franklin Roosevelt acquiesced in the British decision to delay invading northwestern Europe for a year at least, until an Anglo-American force could be assembled that would have a reasonable chance of success against the Wehrmacht. But American soldiers had to be committed, somewhere, against the enemy. Operation Torch, the November invasion of North Africa, was the consequence. The people, Army Chief George C. Marshall learned from Franklin Roosevelt, must be entertained. That is, the sustaining populace, on whose behalf wars are prosecuted, must be sufficiently convinced that its cause is just, that its wars are winnable and that the costs are not disproportionate.

Similarly, a North Vietnamese colonel, years after the war that had cost the United States almost 60,000 lives, acknowledged that his country’s army had never prevailed in open combat against the Americans and their vaunted technology. “But that is irrelevant,” he said. He understood that American willingness (what politicians call resolve) to keep the Army fighting is a diminishing asset — unless it can be plainly, repeatedly demonstrated that progress is being made and that the enemy directly threatens the nation.

At least temporarily. America’s actions against terrorism — necessary, unending, unsatisfying in producing the kinds of results that seem required to sustain public support — cannot be measured by immediate successes. When President Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, he was saluting an overwhelming demonstration of technological superiority: war seemingly made new. Three years later, the limits of technology are exposed again. Wars prosecuted by open societies against enemies who fly below the radar screen — to use an expression from [Max] Boot’s third revolution — are the most difficult to sustain and explain. Often the most difficult when the most necessary.

Donald Trump leap-frogged the likes of Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Martin Luther King with his surreal Miss USA press conference. Only an American with Trump’s remarkable boldness, stunning arrogance and complete lack of self-awareness could have turned a story about a beauty pageant winner having a couple drinks into an international media event.

Like Mother Teresa with the lepers, Trump placed his hand upon this fragile, broken woman and offered her a second chance at life. Without a reprieve from “The Donald”, Tara Conner would be sleeping under an overpass outside Lexington, Kentucky tonight. Miss USA, like the rest of the USA, owes Donald Trump a debt of gratitude. Luckily, the rest of us won’t have to repay it in his Trump Tower suite tonight as she will.

If politicians were historians by trade instead of lawyers and businessmen, no doubt the world would be a smarter and safer place.

Would there have been an Iraq war, for example, if the American president had been an historian rather than the scion of a wealthy Texas oil family?

Certainly there would not have been. No history professor worth his salt would have dared to destroy a sovereign nation without any sort of demonstrable threat or direct provocation.

There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers. There are too many eyewitnesses.

However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another.

We have to look within to improve and try to better ourselvesand remove those characteristics or actions that may have been the cause of the success of the Holocaust.