1 Boring Old Man

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

So here we sit after a couple of centuries dealing with the same question. Do we honor those who died in the attack on New York by staying dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal? Or do we decide that our attackers are not worthy of being treated as fellow human beings because of what they did? Lincoln struggled with that himself. He hated Slavery, yet he suspended habeas corpus for the prisoners of war – a fact Dick Cheney has brought up more than once. On the other hand, he opposed retribution on the Southerners after the Civil War. And he certainly did not have a torture policy nor a John Yoo writing memos to cover his ass. And as the Civil War wore on, there were powerful anti-war forces paradoxically and ambivalently lead by Lincoln’s General:

George Brinton McClellan was a major general during the American Civil War. He organized the famous Army of the Potomac and served briefly as the general-in-chief of the Union Army. Early in the war, McClellan played an important role in raising a well-trained and organized army for the Union. However, although McClellan was meticulous in his planning and preparations, these attributes may have hampered his ability to challenge aggressive opponents in a fast-moving battlefield environment. He chronically overestimated the strength of enemy units and was reluctant to apply principles of mass, frequently leaving large portions of his army unengaged at decisive points.

McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign in 1862 ended in failure, with retreats from attacks by General Robert E. Lee’s smaller army and an unfulfilled plan to seize the Confederate capital of Richmond. His performance at the bloody Battle of Antietam blunted Lee’s invasion of Maryland, but allowed Lee to eke out a precarious tactical draw and avoid destruction, despite being outnumbered. As a result, McClellan’s leadership skills during battles were questioned by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, who eventually removed him from command, first as general-in-chief, then from the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln was famously quoted as saying, "If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time." Despite this, he was the most popular of that army’s commanders with its soldiers, who felt that he had their morale and well-being as paramount concerns.

General McClellan also failed to maintain the trust of Lincoln, and proved to be frustratingly insubordinate to the commander-in-chief. After he was relieved of command, McClellan became the unsuccessful Democratic nominee opposing Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election. His party had an anti-war platform, promising to end the war and negotiate with the Confederacy, which McClellan was forced to repudiate, damaging the effectiveness of his campaign…

For the years from 2000 through 2008, we heard the same kind of rhetoric – patriotism, defending America, the "Axis of Evil." We were told that every one of the huge decisions being made was done with our best interests at heart. We went to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat with nuclear and biological weapons pointed our way. We were told that Joseph Wilson’s questioning the prewar intelligence was motivated by a junket set up by his wife. We were told that Domestic Surveillance wasn’t being abused and was good for us. We were told that we didn’t torture people. We were also told that the things that looked like torture were for our national security. We were told that DoJ Attorneys were fired "just because." Everything that was done was Lincoln-esque, they said. We were honoring the fallen.

Well, the Taliban is now marching on the capital of Pakistan. If bin Laden has survived his diabetes, he’s holed up in the Pakistani bad-lands. Iraq is still smoldering. All of the things they told us were good for us haven’t turned out as they said. If there was an "Axis of Evil," they went after the wrong one. It’s turning out that the motive for our torturing prisoners was to get them to confirm something that wasn’t actually true – that Hussein was behind 911. Now we’re reading memos that say the unspeakable torture by the C.I.A. was consistent with "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Any school child would know that is absolute baloney. Frankly, I’d rather hear that we tortured people because we were mad at them than to hear we were trying to get them to confirm the Bush Administration’s reasons for going to war.

Abraham Lincoln said, "It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." I believe he meant just that. And I have something of the same feeling about the people who died in the 9/11 attack on New York. We ran the Taliban out of Afghanistan. Now they’re coming back, not just to Afghanistan but they’re marching on Islamabad. And they are as dangerous to Iraq and Iran as they are to us. They dehumanize the people in their wake just as they dehumanized those New Yorkers.

Our government failed us in many ways in these last eight years, not the least of which was a failure to deal with our real enemy. They made up the fight they wanted to fight, and avoided the one that needed fighting. They macerated our Constitution, and in the process validated the insane view this particular enemy has of us. We had a Lincoln-esque moment, and we missed it. We lost 3000+ in New York. We’ve lost 4000+ more in the Middle East. We’ve lost a big piece of our soul. Now, we have an enormous domestic problem – one largely caused by our own government’s fiscal short-sightedness and mismanagement. And we still face an enemy – the Taliban and al Qaeda – that reins unchecked in the uncivilized regions of the Middle East.