The pro-French, anti-British half of the nation's public opinion -- led by Jefferson -- was at serious odds with the pro-English, anti-French faction -- led by President John Adams and past president George Washington. "Serious" includes private armies and state militias opposed to a federal standing army, Alien and Sedition Acts, the arrest of newspaper editors who disagreed with the government, the anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism of many of our nation's founders.

Then, as today, the rhetoric went beyond disagreement to personal attack, to actual hatred. -- so much so that terms like "patriot" and "traitor" lost all meaning. One difference between then and now is that neither side was peace-loving; there were no peaceniks. They disagreed only about whether we should fight Great Britain or France.

The country was only 10 or 12 years old, and we made it. And, we'll make it this time. Whether we emerge stronger or weaker, safer or more threatened, will in large part depend on whether this generation's hawks or doves (to oversimplify) dominate the dialogue and control government.

You know where I stand.

Love.
DAD

You think it's tough in Iraq?
In India in 1857, 10,000 British-trained Indian soldiers mutinied. After a battle in Cawnpore, the Indians massacred the men, women, and children who had surrendered.

A little while later, the Indians besieged 1,700 British military and their families in nearby Lucknow for 12 weeks. Some reinforcements broke through and held out for another three weeks. During the siege, one wife sent a letter to the London Times in which she described the prayerful resignation of everyone to an expected  repeat of the Cawnpore massacre. Instead, they heard the sound of Highlander bagpipes playing "For Auld Lang Syne," the siege was broken, and the garrison was relieved.

Hating President Bush
Many Democrats openly express their hate for President Bush. I can empathize, because I detested President Clinton.

Issue-by-issue, though, I agreed or disagreed with Clinton about matters like free trade, health care, foreign policy, the economy, judicial/political appointments.

I despise Hillary, but that doesn't prevent my admiring her courage when she called Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Iraq "a good thing," without qualifying her praise with negative muttering about playing politics and about exit strategy, as almost all the other commenting Democrats did.

It is distressing that many Democrats, including most of the presidential candidates, have so personalized the political debate that they detect, or pretend to see, devious and ignoble motives in everything Bush does or doesn't do.

Our Nation's Leaders
Whatever their real or rumored personal faults, our country's wartime leaders -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice -- will be remembered for being as influential in world affairs as were, say,  British Empire leaders like Gladstone, Canning, Castlereagh and spokesmen for historic French dominance like Richelieu, Colbert, and Mazarin.

The fact that the leaders sometimes disagree is not a bad thing. Abraham Lincoln's advisors disagreed among themselves. Hitler's generals often voiced open disagreement about some of his goals, strategies, tactics. (Until near the end, Hitler was more often right than wrong.)

Reasonable men and women can disagree and even the final results don't often prove either side completely wise/brilliant or stupid/stubborn. The top leader's responsibility is to listen to equally dedicated and equally knowledgeable advisors, then decide.

"My God, it's been four months . . . "
In late 1947, about two years after the end of the War in Europe, American intellectuals  -- then, as now, mostly from the Left -- were proclaiming disaster: "We won the war. We have lost the peace!"

There were complaints about de-Nazification not going fast enough, going too fast; about the use of some former Nazis to help rebuild Germany; about supplying funds and surreptitious help to defeat Italy's Communists; about our being not sympathetic enough to the defeated French; about our being too sympathetic to the cowardly French.

There were those who insisted that the United States should do to Germany what Germany had intended to do to the Slav countries: Destroy or confiscate its industrial complex and infrastructure and convert the country by force into an agricultural economy. There were influential and patriotic citizens and politicians who felt we should have stayed out and let Germany and Russia fight each other until they were both exhausted.

Despite all that disagreement -- except for a small anti-war protest movement -- everyone supported the war effort. Then the United States -- as no winning power in history had ever done before -- reconstructed friend and foe alike and created the very success that today's militant Arabs/Muslims have pledged to destroy.

People are dying every day
We're at war.
There will be casualties every day for the foreseeable future (see "how long are we going to be there" elsewhere in this essay).

The end of major combat has been followed by guerilla warfare. As tragic as each death or wounding is personally, the "price" of the War in Iraq so far has been remarkably small given all that has been accomplished.

For one who has been in battle, the daily media reports about each Iraq roadside bombing, each mortar attack, are as irresponsible as though during World War II the press had suggested that the success or failure of each patrol action reflected the progress of the entire campaign. (In March of this year, I expressed some earlier thoughts about press coverage.)

Is pre-emptive war ever right?
Yes. And it may sometimes be wrong -- as practiced by Hitler against Poland, for example.

Was Japan's Pearl Harbor strike really pre-emptive, given the communications foul-up which reduced the time diplomats had to keep the peace? Let's say it was a pre-emptive strike. Was it justified?

If I were Japanese I'd say it was. The United States had cut off oil exports and scrap metal exports. Japan had less than a 6-month supply unless it struck out into the Pacific to capture supplies. Not only was the U.S. trying to stifle Japan's civilian and military power but with Europe engaged in the war against Hitler, only the U.S. Navy posed a major threat to Japan's plans.

Okay, so Japan may have been justified in waging pre-emptive war. And, as stated elsewhere in this essay, Japan's Kamikaze pilots may have been brave souls. None of that, once the war began, should or did cause Americans to wage other than a relentless war against an avowed enemy, no matter how sincere and courageous the Japanese were, no matter how long it took.

The war in Iraq distracts from the war against terrorism
Not really.

That's like saying that when we go after the terrorists in Sudan we are losing sight of the terrorists in Yemen or Saudi Arabia or the Philippines. Or -- to revert to the repeated World War II parallels in this essay -- like saying that fighting Germans in North Africa or in Italy was not the same as fighting Germans in Germany.

 Although this is not a world war in the sense of massed armies, it is a world-wide war.

Helpful hint
What does "Middle East" mean?
Because not all Muslims are Arabs or Islamists, and some Arabs are Catholic or Protestant, it is sometimes difficult to understand reports out of or about the Middle East. It would seem that too many journalists are themselves unclear about these matters.

Authoritative and influential international sources describe the Middle East as "the Arab World plus Iran, Israel, and Turkey." For "Arab World," read that group of nations whose first language is Arabic. The most frequently encountered mistake when discussing the Middle East is believing that the Iranians are Arabs. Iran was formerly Persia. Iranians are Persians; they speak Farsi.

Now, go read  the New York Times with confidence! 

About War
Roman General Paulus, before leaving for battle spoke to politicians: "Many of you seem to know exactly how to fight this war. Come with me, and fight . . . or, shut up!"

How long will it last?
In March 2003, VersagiVoice commented: God help us if Americans don't have the courage and the patience to absorb the tragedy and pain of perhaps hundreds of dead and thousands of wounded as we fight the necessary battles before us.

And in November 2003: America -- and increasingly the West -- is in for a 50- or 100-year war. There will be daily deaths, if not in Iraq, then elsewhere. And, those who hate us for either religious or nationalistic reasons will continue to try to destroy us even if we cut and run from Iraq. 

How long are we going to be there?
Think about it. We have been in Europe almost 60 years and in Korea about 50 years.

America at least and the entire West -- even if some European countries are currently behaving like ostriches -- are at permanent risk. Operating from religious or nationalistic motivation, or both, militant Arabs/Muslims intend to hang in there forever in their battle against the West's lifestyle and against The Great Satan, the United States.

One doesn't have to go all the way back to the Crusades to pick up on the hatred -- which at the time was admittedly mutual. The Barbary Pirates cited religion and praised Allah as they slaughtered women and children who were on the ships the pirates captured. America was already a target, and America struck back. ("From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli . . . ")

Move up to our present time. We may finally have declared war on the terrorists after the World Trade and Pentagon murders, but the militant Arabs/Muslims had already attacked us repeatedly. Click here for a quick chronology of attacks beginning in 1979.

While some of us seek "root causes" for "why they hate us," others point out that people who hate as a matter of habit or conviction don't need a reason to hate.

In the 14th Century, England and France fought the One Hundred Year War. I suspect that the West's fight against militant Arabs/Muslims will be the 21st Century's Hundred Year War.

"As long as Bin Laden and Sadaam can release tapes, they're winning"
I've forgotten who the Arab interviewee was, but he chuckled at this statement and responded, in effect, "Those are fund-raising pleas. These guys are hiding out, afraid for their lives, and asking for money. Their so-called threats are nothing that the militants haven't been preaching and trying to do from the beginning."

The guerillas keep changing tactics on us
Which means that we have defeated each tactic they were forced to abandon. They've lost a country. How can they be considered successful when they blow up a building or a pipeline or shoot up a supermarket?

By the way, one American commentator was abused for suggesting that the terrorists who brought down the World Trade Towers were courageous.  Sorry, guys, as much as we can properly consider them evil they were personally courageous. So are the suicide-bombers in Israel and Iraq and Bali. So were the Japanese Kamikaze pilots in World War II.

Courage, like sincerity, is a personal characteristic, not automatically a virtue in everyone's eyes. But bravery in a despised enemy remains bravery. As I often say to prove the point: Hitler believed in what he was doing. Hitler was sincere."

The world loved us after September 11th. We have squandered that good will.
I, too, teared-up and was thrilled as the world waved American flags and shared our grief.

But think about it. That wave of sympathy cost the world absolutely nothing in money or material or manpower. To make an unflattering comparison, we in the U.S. sympathized with the victims of  genocide in Rwanda, but we did nothing to help.

The test of friendship is when the going gets rough. It will be hard to forget that as more than half of the expanded European Union and Japan help in diverse ways, France and Germany are still holding out. As an Italian-American I can't forget how disappointed I was when Italian public opinion after World War II suggested that there was no need to be grateful for U.S. aid, since "You are benefiting from creating stability in Europe, so you are helping us to help yourself."

Expanding on going-it-alone: Does anyone know of a world power or dominant regional power (both of which the U.S. has willingly and unwillingly become) which was loved by the rest of the world? The British were hated in India. The Spanish were hated in Latin America. The Dutch were hated in Southeastern Asia. The French were hated in Africa. Japan was hated in Asia.

We can disagree about whether the War in Iraq is justified, but once having decided that Iraq was a threat to the United States, by what reasoning should we wait until they attack? Said another way, have the militant Arabs/Muslims not already declared war on us? [Click here for a list of attacks since 1979.]

Once having decided we are under threat whose approval should we seek to defend ourselves?

What is our "exit strategy?"
I like Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's reply: "The only exit strategy I know is success." Or Bush's "as long as it takes."

Certainly, we'll reduce our troop numbers as the Iraqis take over their own country, so success won't be measured by total withdrawal but by enough of a military presence to make credible to potential enemies that they would experience trip-wire reaction from the U.S.

And will some opponent of the War in Iraq please specify  his or her "exit strategy," not only from Iraq but from the long-term War on Terrorism? Something other than "cut and run."

My biggest worry . . .
. . . is that the generations of my kids and grandkids have gone soft and mushy -- which is a euphemistic way of suggesting they lack the courage of their convictions, if indeed they believe in courage and in convictions.

I take solace in knowing that every generation has had similar worries about its kids and grandkids.

Frank Versagi
Christmas season 2003

 You say 'jihad,' we say 'crusade.'
The militant Muslims who have declared a holy war against the infidel West do not hesitate to state that they are fighting a religious war, so I think those in the West who hesitate to use the term "crusade" are unnecessarily wimpish -- even as I recognize that the West has not declared war on all of Islam. A little context here:
    Islam's three major sects have forever declared war on each other. Consider the Sunni the equivalent of Catholics, the Shi'a the same as Protestants, and the Saudi-based  Wahabites as Puritans. Then remember how Catholic France formed alliances with Protestant countries to fight other Catholic countries and how Protestant England formed alliances with Catholic countries to oppose other Protestant countries, and you come to understand how perceived political and military necessities often trump religion when foreign policy is concerned.
    During the 18th century, when Turkey was an Islamic state, not the secular state it is now, the Iraq, Turkey, Persia (Iran) military alliances showed the same flexibility of Sunnis and Shi'a alternately opposing and allying with each other, depending on perceived political and military necessities.
    Especially now that the Taliban have been defeated and dispossessed, any "crusade" the West mounts will be against stateless enemies and their supporters, with consideration for but not excessive deference toward Christian-Islam theological differences. (May 2003)