The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  But the creators of the 9/11 museum should be deeply proud. Finally someone has created something worthy of the day.

  Bravo.

  CHAPTER 10

  War

  What the Intrepid Said

  CBS News: August 6, 1982

  (In the summer of 1982 the USS Intrepid came to the piers of the West Side of Manhattan as a museum. We wanted to do a “Dan Rather Reporting” on it. We aimed it at the children who would visit.)

  * * *

  The aircraft carrier the USS Intrepid—home from the sea, home from history. Docked now on the West Side of Manhattan and serving as a museum.

  A reporter walked its decks, put his hand upon the turrets and saw the big guns. He listened to the lap-lap-lap of still water and in that sound he heard—oh, a trick of the imagination, a fancy—but in the lap-lap-lap of still water he thought he heard the ship. He thought, “I think it talks to me.”

  It says:

  I am the Intrepid who stands in the moonlight grave and still. I am the Intrepid, fast carrier, Essex class.

  Thirty years I sailed the sea. I knew the greatest battle in naval history. History lived within me. It lives within me still.

  The Philippines, Formosa, Okinawa. Do you know those names? My planes covered the boys who held the beachheads. Some of them hold them still. I was hit by so many torpedoes, so many kamikazes, that they called me “The Unlucky I.”

  Now I am a monument.

  Children run across my decks and squeal; I am like a strong old man. Children look at me and stare and ask “Oh what was it like?” What was it like…

  Listen a moment. They commissioned me in ’43 and sent me off with 3,000 boys. Farmboys and drugstore clerks now fliers and sailors. Boys don’t have majesty but my boys did. It was the times. Across the world bad men did bad things and my boys went to sea to stop them.

  They stopped them at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the biggest battle in naval history. The Japanese sent three naval attack forces after us but we pounded away and pounded back and that was the beginning of the end of the Japanese.

  Then that terrible day: 25 November ’44. The day after Thanksgiving.

  A rumble in the sky and the sound for general quarters and the men looked up and said O sweet Jesus and a kamikaze crashes into my flight deck and a kamikaze plows into the hangar and—My boys are down there, they’re down there and the hangar explodes and it’s an inferno and my boys die of smoke and fire.

  All my lost boys!

  I think sometimes I feel their presence.

  Late at night when the moon is dull and the clouds are high—I hear their laughter, I feel their presence! There is movement within me. The shadows move.

  And you there, child of ’82, standing on my deck in your brand-new sneakers. A boy fell there. He was manning a five-inch gun and he was shooting and he fell, he fell where your shadow is! Walk softly there, boy: walk softly…

  I am the Intrepid. I survived.

  I cover a beachhead called memory, and tell you of my times.

  I am the Intrepid.

  History lived within me.

  It lives within me still.

  A Time for Grace

  The Wall Street Journal: August 31, 2007

  What will be needed this autumn is a new bipartisan forbearance, a kind of patriotic grace. This is a great deal to hope for. The president should ask for it, and show it.

  Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, will report to Congress on Sept. 11. From the latest metrics, it’s clear the surge has gained some ground. It is generally supposed that Gen. Petraeus will paint a picture of recent decreases in violent incidents and increases in safety. In another world, that might be decisive: It’s working, hang on.

  At the same time, it’s clear that what we call Iraq does not wholly share U.S. objectives. We speak of it as a unitary country, but the Kurds are understandably thinking about Kurdistan, the Sunnis see an Iraq they once controlled but that no longer exists, and the Shia—who knows? An Iraq they theocratically and governmentally control, an Iraq given over to Iran? This division is reflected in what we call Iraq’s government in Baghdad. Seen in this way, the non-latest-metrics way, the situation is bleak.

  Capitol Hill doesn’t want to talk about it, let alone vote on it. Lawmakers not only can’t figure a good way out, they can’t figure a good way through.

  But we’re going to have to achieve some rough consensus, because we’re a great nation in an urgent endeavor. The process will begin with Gen. Petraeus’s statement.

  Particular atmospherics and personal dynamics are the backdrop to the debate. People are imperfect, and people in politics tend to be worse: “Politics is not an ennobling profession,” as Bill Buckley once said. You’d better be pretty good going in, because it’s not going to make you better. Politicians are individuals with a thirst for power, honors, and fame. When you think about that you want to say, “Oh dear.” But of course “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

  * * *

  All sides in the Iraq debate need to step up, in a new way, to the characterological plate. From the pro-war forces, the surge supporters and those who supported the Iraq invasion from the beginning, what is needed is a new modesty of approach, a willingness to admit it hasn’t quite gone according to plan. A moral humility. Not meekness—great powers aren’t helped by meekness—but maturity, a shown respect for the convictions of others.

  What we often see instead, lately, is the last refuge of the adolescent: defiance. An attitude of Oh yeah? We’re Lincoln, you’re McClellan. We care about the troops and you don’t. We care about the good Iraqis who cast their lot with us. You’d just as soon they hang from the skids of the last helicopter off the embassy roof. They have been called thuggish. Is this wholly unfair?

  The antiwar forces, the surge opponents, the “I was against it from the beginning” people are, some of them, indulging in grim, and mindless, triumphalism. They show a smirk of pleasure at bad news that has been brought by the other team. Some have a terrible, quaking fear that something good might happen in Iraq, that the situation might be at least to some degree redeemed. Their great interest is that Bushism be laid low and the president humiliated. They make lists of those who supported Iraq and who must be read out of polite society. Might these attitudes be called thuggish also?

  Do you ever get the feeling that at this point Washington is run by two rival gangs that have a great deal in common with each other, including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fight?

  * * *

  Not only hearts and minds are invested in a particular stand. Careers are, too. Candidates are invested in a position they took; people are dug in, caught. Every member of Congress is constrained by campaign promises: “We’ll fight” or “We’ll leave.” The same for every opinion spouter—every pundit, columnist, talk show host, editorialist—all of whom have a base, all of whom pay a price for deviating from the party line, whatever the party, and whatever the line. All this freezes things. It makes immobile what should be fluid. It keeps people from thinking.

  What is needed is simple maturity, a vow to look to—to care about—America’s interests in the long term, a commitment to look at the facts as they are and try to come to conclusions. This may require in some cases a certain throwing off of preconceptions, previous statements and former stands. It would certainly require the mature ability to come to agreement with those you otherwise hate, and the guts to summon the help of, and admit you need the help of, the other side.

  Without this, we remain divided, and our division does nothing to help Iraq, or ourselves.

  It would be good to see the president calming the waters. Instead he ups the ante. Tuesday, speaking to the American Legion, he heightened his language. Withdrawing U.S. forces will leave the Middle East overrun by “forces of radicalism and extremism”; the region would be “dramatically transformed” in a way that could “imperil
” both “the civilized world” and American security.

  Forgive me, but Americans who oppose the war do not here understand the president to be saying: Precipitous withdrawal will create a vacuum that will be filled by killing that will tip the world to darkness. That’s not what they hear. I think they understand him to be saying, I got you into this, I reaped the early rewards, I rubbed your noses in it, and now you have to save the situation.

  His foes feel a tight-jawed bitterness. They believe it was his job not to put America in a position in which its security is imperiled; they resent his invitation to share responsibility for outcomes of decisions they opposed. And they resent it especially because he grants them nothing—no previous wisdom, no good intent—beyond a few stray words here and there.

  And here’s the problem. The president’s warnings are realistic. He’s right. At the end of the day we can’t just up and leave Iraq. That would only make it worse. And it is not in the interests of America or the world that it be allowed to get worse.

  * * *

  Would it help if the president were graceful, humble, and asked for help? Why, yes. Would it help if he credited those who opposed him with not only good motives but actual wisdom? Yes. And if he tried it, it would make news. It would really, as his press aides say, break through the clutter.

  I don’t see how the president’s supporters can summon grace from others when they so rarely show it themselves. And I don’t see how anyone can think grace and generosity of spirit wouldn’t help. They would. They always do in big debates. And they would provide the kind of backdrop Gen. Petraeus deserves, the kind in which his words can be heard.

  The World the Great War Swept Away

  The Wall Street Journal: August 8, 2014

  In this centennial year of the Great War some things have not been said, or at least I haven’t heard them. Among them:

  All the smart people knew the war would never come. The continent to which war came was on such an upward trajectory in terms of prosperity, inventiveness and political culture that it could have become—it arguably already was—a jewel of civilization. And the common man who should have wept at the war’s commencement instead cheered.

  John Keegan went into these points in his classic history “The First World War,” published in 1998.

  His first sentence is beautiful in its simplicity: “I grew up with men who had fought in the First World War and with women who had waited at home for news of them.” His father and uncles saw combat, his aunt was “one of the army of spinsters” the war produced.

  His overall assessment is blunt: “The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.” Leaders who lacked “prudence” and “good will” failed one after another to stop an eminently stoppable train of events that produced a conflagration. That was tragic not only in terms of loss of life, and psychological, physical, emotional and even spiritual injury to survivors, but because the war destroyed a rising, bettering world: “the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent.” It of course also left “a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so intense” that it guaranteed the world war that would follow 20 years later, which by Keegan’s calculation was five times as destructive of human life. Auschwitz and the other extermination camps “were as much relics of the First as the Second world war.” “They have their antecedents… in the fields where the trenches ran.”

  World War I didn’t do nearly as much material damage as World War II. No big European city was destroyed in World War I, and the Eastern and Western fronts ran mostly through forests and farmlands, which were quickly returned to use at the war’s end. “Yet it damaged civilization, the rational and liberal civilization of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage done, world civilization also.”

  Prewar European governments, imperial ones included, paid formal and often practical respect “to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law and representative government.” Confidence in those principles all but collapsed after the war: “Within fifteen years of the war’s end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected the liberalism and constitutionalism which had inspired European politics since the eclipse of monarchy in 1789, was almost everywhere on the rise.” To Russia came communism, to Germany Nazism, to Italy fascism and Spain Francoism. All these infections spread from a common wound: the dislocation and death of the Great War.

  The world swept away had been a rising and increasingly constructive one, where total war was unimaginable: “Europe in the summer of 1914 enjoyed a peaceful productivity so dependent on international exchange and cooperation that a belief in the impossibility of general war seemed the most conventional of wisdoms.”

  Informed opinion had it that the disruption of international credit that would follow war “would either deter its outbreak or bring it speedily to an end.” And the business of Europe was business. Industrial output was expanding; there were new goods and manufacturing opportunities, such as the production and sale of internal combustion machines. There were new profit centers, new sources of raw materials, including precious metals. Populations were increasing. Steamships and railways were revolutionizing transport. Capital was circulating. “Belgium, one of the smallest countries in Europe, had in 1914 the sixth largest economy in the world,” thanks to early industrialization, new banking and trading methods, and industrial innovators.

  Europe was increasingly international—independent nations were dealing and trading with each other. “Common Christianity—and Europe was overwhelmingly Christian by profession in 1914 and strongly Christian in observance also”—found frequent expression in philosophical and political pursuits, including the well-being of labor. Movements to restrict working hours and forbid the employment of children were going forward. European governments were spurred by self-protectiveness: Liberalized labor laws were a way to respond to and attempt to contain the power and appeal of Marxism.

  “Europe’s educated classes held much of its culture in common.” They knew Mozart and Beethoven and grand opera. “Tolstoy was a European figure,” as were Victor Hugo, Balzac, Zola, Dickens, Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante. High-school students in England were taught French, and French students German. Study of the classics remained universal, scholars from all the countries of Europe knew Homer, Thucydides, Caesar and Livy. All shared the foundational classics of philosophy, Aristotle and Plato.

  Europe as a cultural entity was coherent and becoming more so. By the beginning of the 20th century tourism “had become a middle-class pleasure” because of railways and the hotel industry that followed.

  But Europe was also heavily armed. All countries had armed forces, some large and costly ones led by influential, respected figures. What do armies in peacetime do? Make plans to kill each other just in case. Keegan: “[A] new era in military planning had begun; that of the making of war plans in the abstract, plans conceived at leisure… and pulled out when eventuality becomes actuality.” What do soldiers who’ve made brilliant plans do? Itch to use them. Europe’s armies came to see their jobs as “how to assure military advantage in an international crisis, not how to resolve it.”

  Soon enough they had their chance.

  As you read of the war and its aftermath, you are always stopped by this fact: There is no recorded instance of masses of people gathering together to weep the day it was declared. They should have. The beautiful world they were day by day constructing was in jeopardy and ultimately would be consumed. Yet when people heard the news they threw their hats in the air, parading and waving flags in every capital. In Berlin “crowds thronged the streets shouting, cheering and singing patriotic songs.” In London the same. In St. Petersburg thousands waved banners and icons. In Paris, as the city’s regiments pushed off, “an immense clamour arose as the Marseillaise burst from a thousand throats.”

  Western Europe hadn’t had a big and costly ground war since 1871. Maybe they forgot what war was. Surely some would have liked
the drama and excitement—the interruption in normality, the break in the boring dailiness of life. Or the air of possibility war brings—of valor, for instance, and shown courage. Camaraderie, too, and a sense of romantic engagement with history. A sense of something to live for—victory.

  Once a few years ago a reporter who had covered wars talked about this with a brilliant, accomplished, famously leftist editor in New York. At the end of a conversation on a recent conflict the reporter said, quizzically: “Why is there so much war? Why do we do that?”

  “Because something’s wrong with us,” the editor replied.

  I told him it was the best definition of original sin I’d ever heard.

  A New Kind of “Credibility” Gap

  The Wall Street Journal: September 20, 2013

  Washington

  An accomplished American diplomat once said that there are two templates of American foreign policy thinking. The first is Munich and the second is Vietnam.

  When America does not move militarily as some people wish it to, they say, “This is another Munich”—appeasement that in the end will summon greater violence and broader war. When America moves militarily as some people do not wish it to, they say, “This is Vietnam”—jumping in where we do not belong and cannot win.

  This is serviceable as a rough expression of where our foreign policy debates tend to go. But I suspect the past 12 years’ experience in the Mideast has left us with a new template: “It’s Chinatown,” from the classic movie. This is where you try to make it better and somehow make it worse, in spite of your best efforts. This is a place where the biggest consequences are always unintended.

  Surely this is part of the reason for the clear and quick public opposition to a U.S. strike in Syria, and it echoed in the attention paid to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s statement this week that such a move “would be throwing gasoline on a very complex fire in the Middle East.”