Peace at Antietam, Carnage in Copley Square

On this just-past beautiful spring Sunday, my wife and I took our first visit to Duke Farms, the 2600 acre Jersey estate of the tobacco heiress, philanthropist and passionate horticulturalist Doris Duke. The foundation has just launched a free bike share program, and we spent three happy hours tooling around the meadows, wooded ridges, and huge network of man-made, landscaped lakes, all in perfect 60-degree sunshine.

At the heart of the estate is a house that was never built - preserved foundations at the top of a low bluff, with grand marble stairs leading down to a large circular meadow.  At about 5:30 I took a short solo walk down the giant stairs, which felt like something out of Narnia, into the meadow, where you're flanked with grasses maybe two or three feet high.  There, in the late afternoon sun, I flashed back to the battlefield at Antietam, which includes a cornfield you can traverse, and which we also visited on a still, sunny afternoon.

At Antietam you are at pains to imagine unspeakable carnage, and what struck me late in the afternoon sun there, and came back to me this past Sunday, was the sense of deep domestic peace in the ensuing 150 years, and what  a rare blessing that is.  I know that peace is marred by a further hundred years of peonage for African Americans in the south, and almost equally brutal discrimination in the north, and to this day by urban war zones, and a brutal criminal justice system, and a thousand other social ills and injustices. But human social well-being is relative, and the peace for most of us is real, and an accomplishment and a blessing.

I gather that a similar sense of felicity and festivity was in the air in Boston yesterday, until 2:50 p.m.:

A fitting coda for 9/11/11

Leon Wieseltier implicitly acknowledges the many things that have gone wrong in the U.S. since 9/11 but affirms that we maintain our core virtue and ability to self-correct.  Looking back at my brief lament, I appreciate his superior balance:

It has been a wounding decade. Our country is frayed, uncertain, inflamed. There is hardship and dread in the land. In significant ways we are a people in need of renovation. But what rouses the mourner from his sorrow is his sense of possibility, his confidence in the intactness of the spirit, his recognition that there is work to be done. What we loved and what we valued has survived the disaster, but it needs to be secured and bettered, and in that secure and better condition transmitted to our children. Our dream of greatness must be accompanied by an understanding of what is required for the maintenance of greatness. The obscenities of September 11, 2001 exposed the difference between builders and destroyers. We are builders. Let us agree, on this anniversary, that it is an honor to be an American and it is an honor to be free.

A brief post-9/11 lament

I have been shying away from most of the 9/11 retrospectives, because when I think of what that day wrought in this country, all I feel is grief. Grief, that is, over what we in the United States have done to ourselves in response to the real and perceived threat.

The usually acute FT columnist Philip Stephens argued last week that in the grand scheme of things, 9/11 mattered not much of all. The main story of the last decade is "the rising states of Asia and Latin America"; 9/11 just accelerated the relative "rise of the rest."  That may well be true.  But to add as a corollary that "Bin Laden did not really change very much at all" is reverse myopia of the worst kind.

"Known known": Rumsfeld fixated on Iraq from 9/12/01?

In a well-documented take-down of Donald Rumsfeld's memoir Known Unknowns, Bob Woodward uses records from his own interviews and George W. Bush's Decision Points to dispute Rumsfeld's claim that Bush asked him to look at  then-current military plans for invading Iraq shortly after 9/11 -- on 9/26/01, to be exact. Woodward, offended that Rumsfeld "tries to push so much off on Bush", is at pains to demonstrate that Rumsfeld himself was floating the idea of invading Iraq on 9/11 and 9/12 -- and that "the record shows that it was Rumsfeld stoking the Iraq fires" before Bush did indeed ask for plans in late November. 

Woodward's evidence is from his own Plan of Attack and from the 9/11 Commission Report.  Former counterterrorism director Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies provides corroboration that Rumsfeld was fixated on Iraq from the beginning. Clarke implies that driving Rumsfeld's focus was Wolfowitz:

On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not yet persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor--Iraq must have been helping them...

By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq."  Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda...

Christopher Caldwell girds for civilizational war near Ground Zero

Christopher Caldwell is a careful, precise writer, capable of building a powerful argument block by block. All the more pernicious, then, his attack on Park51, the proposed Islamic Center near Ground Zero.  His argument boils down to guilt by association and an acceptance of civilizational war.

Caldwell concedes that Park51's Constitutional and legal right to build the mosque are beyond dispute.  He argues that Mayor Bloomberg's defense of that right is beside the point:

Few mosque opponents argue seriously that this one can be blocked. The argument of Ms Palin and others is instead that it is insensitive to build a mega-mosque next to the spot where 2,700 people were killed in Islam’s name. This distinction – between what is constitutional and what is appropriate – is an important one.

The argument from insensitivity validates the assumption that the 9/11 attackers and al Qaeda did, in some sense, represent Islam at large. Because the attackers acted in Islam's name, no other proponents of Islam should presume to ensconce themselves anywhere in the vicinity. Caldwell states that premise explicitly, albeit with a caveat:

The attacks of 2001 were not a political-science abstraction. They were an expression of Islam. Not all of Islam, certainly – and Islam is neither the only religion that has such crimes to answer for nor the only one that has provoked such controversies. The building of a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz in the 1980s so wounded Jewish sensibilities that Pope John Paul II ordered it removed in 1993, even though the Holocaust was not carried out in the name of any faith.

Michael Bloomberg reminds us what we should have learned in Kindergarten

Michael Bloomberg knows what New York is all about, and what America is all about, and what the Enlightenment is all about  -- and the Constitution -- and just what is at stake at ground zero. Hero!

Sometimes the simplest words are best. Bloomberg speaking today on Governors Island in defense of the planned Islamic Center in lower Manhattan, spoke with the clarity of a kindergarten teacher. His denouement:

"Muslims are as much a part of our city and our country as the people of any faith. And they are as welcome to worship in lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshipping at the site for better, the better part of a year, as is their right. The local community board in lower Manhattan voted overwhelmingly to support the proposal. And if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire city.

"Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure, and there is no neighborhood in this city that is off-limits to God's love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us can attest."

 Earlier, reminders of the law, and the Constitution, and the facts of 9/11, and the stakes:

Unfinished business: Obama's case for renewed effort in AfPak

A few structural notes on Obama's speech at West Point laying out his strategy for Afghanistan:

1) Obama made an interesting dual use of the U.S. experience in Iraq.  First, he used it to explain why "the situation has deteriorated in Afghanistan" --  because "Throughout this period [of Taliban resurgence] our troop levels in Afghanistan remained a fraction of what they were in Iraq."  At the same time, he used the template of what he characterized as a successful surge in Iraq to build out his vision of success in Afghanistan: 

Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011. Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground. We will continue to advise and assist Afghanistan’s Security Forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul. But it will be clear to the Afghan government – and, more importantly, to the Afghan people – that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country.

This analogy was Obama's chief device for arguing the claim that the swiftness of an envisioned drawdown of forces in Afghanistan will be almost directly proportional to the swiftness of the coming troop buildup.

Palin on border patrol

Okay, it's shooting fish in a barrel to point out absurdities in Sarah Palin's foreign policy gyrations (this moment with Katie Couric has to be seen to be believed -- think Diane Keaton in Annie Hall). Still, a Palin comment at Ground Zero in New York today, reported by the AP, deserves to be parsed:

Palin was asked if she thought the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was helping to mitigate terrorism

"I think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to further security for our nation. We can never again let them onto our soil," she said.

Barreled fish, hold still:
1) How does our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan keep "them" off our soil?
2) Who exactly are "they"? Iraqis? Afghanis? The 9/11 terrorists, who hailed mainly from Saudi Arabia?