Week of Dec. 25, 2006

Bush may have come to believe in the neoconservative mission for the nation's military. But he never accepted the corollary about increasing the military. So he ended up pursuing Dick Cheney's foreign policy with Bill Clinton's army.

The leftist defecting rightward is a tiresome figure even for students of the Cold War. This figure of history would remain such if not for today’s Left, which seeks to compare the War on Terror with the Cold War, the goal of which is the detriment of both.

Their “usable past” jumps from date to date based on propagandistic need. If the U.S is winning the War on Terror, it is 1971, the year of Mai Lai. If the U.S is losing, then it is 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive. And if one of their own breaks ranks to support the war, then it is 1951, when the courageous fought fascism and the cooperative emulated Whittaker Chambers.

September 11th made 2001 a defining year in our country's history. But 2002 may have been the strangest. It began with all eyes on Osama bin Laden and ended with Osama bin Forgotten - as the White House turned its attention to Iraq. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union speech mentioned Saddam Hussein 17 times, but bin Laden not once.

Everything about my nine-month stint at cable news channel MSNBC occurred in the context of the ever-intensifying war drums over Iraq. The drums grew louder as D-Day approached, until the din became so deafening that rational journalistic thinking could not occur. Three weeks before the invasion, MSNBC Suits terminated"Donahue," their most-watched program.

For 19 weeks, I had appeared in on-air debates almost every afternoon - the last weeks heavily focused on Iraq. I adamantly opposed an invasion. I warned that it would"undermine our coalition with Muslim and Arab countries that we need to [help us] fight Al Qaeda" and would lead to"quagmire."

In October 2002, my debate segments were terminated. There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq - a daily show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it.

The US faces in Iraq what could be the most consequential foreign-policy debacle in its history. The only other contender for that distinction is the war in Vietnam. But Vietnam was a unitary state that had been artificially—and therefore temporarily—divided, while Iraq was an artificially united state that perhaps has now been permanently divided. Moreover, Iraq, unlike Vietnam, is surrounded by dominoes.

"A leader is like a shepherd," Nelson Mandela proclaimed more than a decade ago in his autobiography."There are times when a leader must move out ahead of his flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people in the right way."

It's an arrogant statement -- could any other democratically elected politician get away with equating his constituents with sheep? -- and yet supremely apt. For Mandela is arguably the greatest political leader of our time, the one person worthy of mention alongside FDR, Churchill and Gandhi. Mandela led the political and moral crusade for majority rule in South Africa against a white supremacist police state, risking his life, surrendering his personal freedom and his family's well-being. He spent 27 years in prison only to emerge as a wise, dynamic and conciliatory figure binding black and white together as father of his nation and inspiration for the world.