The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  But I believed it, supported the war and cheered the troops. My break came in 2005, with two columns that questioned Mr. Bush’s thinking, his core premises and assumptions, as presented in his second Inaugural Address. That questioning in time became sharp criticism, accompanied by a feeling of estrangement. In the future I would feel a deeper skepticism toward both parties.

  So that was my Iraq, wronger than some at the start, righter than some at the end, and not shocked by the darkening picture I saw when I went there in 2011.

  Henry Kissinger said recently that he had in his lifetime seen America enthusiastically enter four wars and struggle in the end to end each of them.

  Maybe great nations do not learn lessons, they relearn them.

  I called for a serious Republican debate on its foreign policy, but the Democrats need one, too. What’s their overarching vision? Do they have a strategy, or only sentiments?

  There’s a lot of Republican self-criticism and self-examination going on. What about the Democrats’?

  What America Thinks about Iraq

  The Wall Street Journal: June 20, 2014

  “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

  We are back to 2003 (the invasion), 2007 (the surge) and 2011 (the withdrawal).

  How does the American public view what is going on in Iraq now—the burgeoning war, the fall to ISIS of cities we fought for and held, the possible fall of Baghdad and collapse of the country? What attitude and approach will the public support in response?

  Here is my sense of it:

  They believe going in was a disaster.

  They believe getting out is producing a disaster.

  They believe the leadership in Washington failed in both cases, in the going in and the getting out.

  They think George W. Bush made the wrong call and followed with the wrong execution. As for those around him, they had no realistic plan for what would happen after they toppled Saddam Hussein and seem to have thought George Washington would spring from the rubble and take it from there. There was no sophisticated and realistic game plan. American officials did not seem to know there was a difference between a Sunni and a Shia. They were frequently taken aback by events that were predictable. They assumed good luck, a terrible, ignorant thing to assume in a war.

  The American people believe Barack Obama viewed Iraq as a personal political problem. He won the presidency being antiwar, so he had to anti-the-war before his reelection. He did it without appropriate care and commitment, which probably guaranteed we’d wind up where we are. He is out of his depth. Amazingly, he radiates a sense that he isn’t all that invested, that he doesn’t drag himself to the golf course to get a break and maintain balance, but plays golf because at the end of the day Iraq, like other problems, challenges and scandals, isn’t making him bleed inside.

  And the people don’t like any of this. Americans hate incompetence, but most of all and in a separate class they hate bloody incompetence. They’ve seen it now from two administrations.

  The bright spot: the earnest professionalism of our troops, still unsurpassed.

  But the loss of life, the financial cost, the loss of prestige, the sense that somehow after 9/11 we squandered the sympathy and support of the world, the danger to the world when America gets beat or looks beat, the inspiration that is to evil-minded men—these things the American people would hate.

  They do not believe the architects of Iraq told them the full truth in the past or are candid and forthcoming even now, more than 11 years after the invasion. The architects do not speak of what they got wrong and exactly how, when and why. Their blame-laying sounds less like strength than spin. They are like what Talleyrand is said to have observed of the Bourbons, that they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Because of this they are not fully credible when they critique the current president and not fully believable when they offer new strategies.

  When you have been catastrophically wrong, you have to bring a certain humility to the table.

  The American people do not want to go back into Iraq. They will be skeptical of all plans, strategies and decisions because they lack faith in their leaders. If they hear “We are sending 300 military advisers,” they will think: It won’t end there.

  They don’t think the U.S. can solve Iraq. They think only Iraq can do that.

  They think Iraq’s leader, Nouri al-Maliki, is a loser who lives in Loserville. Get rid of him? Tell him to resign? Sure, but who will replace him, the loser next door? Should he reform his government, making it more respectful, tolerant and accountable? Sure. But do the ISIS forces look like men who’ll respond, “Wow, he’s being a better leader, let’s lay down our arms!”? No, actually, they don’t.

  Americans are worried about the country’s standing in the world. They want to be the most powerful and respected nation in the world, because we are Americans and that’s how we roll.

  They have the feeling that what America has to do now, the missing part of the terrible puzzle, is to rebuild here, refind our strength, be rich again, pump out jobs, unleash our energy—let it bound out of the ground and help turn our economy around. We have to reset our relationship with ourselves. We have to become strong again—that is the key not only to our confidence but to the world’s respect.

  Here’s a terrible thing, though: They don’t really have any faith that this remedial work will get done, that the economy will be reignited, that corrupt governance and crony capitalism will be stopped. They don’t have any particular faith that it will happen with the generation of losers we have now in Washington.

  They do not think the bad guys will wait and pause while America says, “Excuse me, I need time to get my act together. Could you present your existential challenge later?”

  They think the fighting in Iraq will likely continue and spread. They think a lot of violent extremists will kill a lot of violent extremists, and many good and innocent people, too. It always happens. It’s one of the reasons war is terrible.

  They know something is wrong with their thinking, that it’s not fully satisfying but instead marked by caveats and questions.

  If the oil we need is truly endangered, and this tips us into a new recession…

  If daily we see shootings and beheadings of people who bravely and kindly stood with us during the war…

  All that will have a grinding, embittering effect on the public mood. And if some mad group of jihadists, when their bloody work in Iraq is finished, decide to bring their efforts once again to an American city—well then, obviously, all bets will be off.

  But the old American emotionalism, the assumption that the people of Iraq want what we want, freedom and democracy, is over. Ten years ago if you announced you had reservations about what the people of Iraq really want, and maybe it isn’t freedom and democracy first, such reservations were called ethnocentric, belittling, bigoted. That’s over, too. We are hard-eyed now.

  In the long term, the U.S. experience in Iraq will probably contribute to the resentment, the sheer ungodly distance and lack of trust and faith between the people who are governed in America and those who govern them, between the continent and the city called Washington. Also between the people and the two great political parties, both of which blundered.

  Pundits and pollsters have been talking about a quickening of the populist spirit, and the possibility of a populist rise, for at least a quarter century. But they’re doing it more often now.

  There is a growing disconnect between the American people and their government, a freshened resentment. We are not only talking about Iraq when we talk about Iraq, we are also talking about ourselves. We are not only talking about the past, we are talking about the future.

  The architects of the Iraq invasion always said the decision to invade was crucial, consequential, a real world-changer. They had no idea.

  CHAPTER 11

  What I Saw at the Evacuation

  Is there more to be said about Ronald Reagan? Yes, always, and history won
’t stop talking about him any more than it has any other big president. Here are some looks at the meaning of his life and reactions to his death.

  * * *

  Russia, the Big Picture

  The Wall Street Journal: April 2, 2014

  People sometimes ask “What would Reagan think?” and “What would Reagan do?” I don’t understand this and tend not to play. How would I know, how would you? He was a man of his time and place who responded to the great questions of his day. He could be surprising—actually he was both constant and surprising. The famous cold warrior who spiked defense spending worried fairly constantly about nuclear weapons and was willing to gamble all to get rid of them at Reykjavik.

  Also he was human, and you can never calculate with complete certainty what a human would do.

  Mostly I steer clear because the question is both frivolous and, around the edges, sad. “What would FDR do?” “What would JFK do?” “Only Lincoln’s wisdom will suffice.” Boo hoo. This is nostalgia as an evasive tool. You’re alive, what would you do?

  But the past few weeks I’ve been witness to many discussions of Russia at gatherings of American diplomats, journalists and historians, and taken part in interviews with experts and foreign policy thinkers. I am coming to conclude that almost everyone is missing the headline and focusing instead on a factoid in the seventh or tenth graf. Journalists pound diplomats with questions about U.S. sanctions, as if they believe the right one will do the trick and solve the problem. Diplomats dilate on the last Kerry-Lavrov meeting, or the next, or the credibility and potential impact of the Kiev government’s most recent accusation.

  One sophisticated observer will muse aloud about the Russian government for the first time really starting to clamp down on the Internet, while another will mention offhandedly the high state of Russian nationalist feeling—and anti-U.S. feeling—among politicians and the press in Moscow. But they don’t seem to understand the implications of their observations.

  The American leadership class has taken on a certain ship-of-fools aspect when it comes to Russia. They are missing the essential story.

  So the other night I was walking from a gathering when a writer and academic, a smart, nice man, turned to me and said, softly, “How do you think Reagan would view what is going on? How do you think he’d see all this?” And I surprised myself by answering.

  * * *

  I said that what people don’t understand about Reagan is that his self-concept in the first 40 years of his life, meaning the years in which you really become yourself, was as an artist. Not a political leader or an economist, not a geostrategist, but an artist. I saw this when I went through his papers at the Reagan Library. As a boy and young man he was a short story writer, a drawer of pictures, then an actor. He acted in college, went into broadcasting and then went on to act professionally. He paid close attention to script, character, the shape of the story. He came to maturity and middle age in Hollywood, which was full of craftsmen and artists, and he respected them and was one of them.

  He cared about politics and came to see himself as a leader when he was immersed in Screen Actors Guild politics, and later led that union.

  But he, to himself, was an artist.

  And the thing about artists is they try to see the picture whole. They try to get the big shape of things. They’re creative, intuitive. Someone once said a great leader has more in common with an artist than an economist, and it’s true. An artist has imagination, tries to apprehend the full sweep of what’s happening. An actor understands what moment you’re in in the drama.

  And so with that as context, I said, this is how I think Reagan would view the moment we’re in:

  The Soviet Union fell almost a quarter century ago. It was great news, a victory for civilization. That fall was followed by something: a series of Russian governments trying to maintain stability and pick up the pieces, turning toward democracy, toward modernity, really going for a non-state-dominated economy. Russian leaders were to some significant degree accommodating to the West, which had vanquished them. They engaged in reconstruction on many fronts, reinvention, too. They moved in varying degrees toward Western values.

  Again, it lasted almost a quarter century.

  Now it is over.

  That history has ended and something new has begun. Now we are in an era so new we don’t even have a name for it. Maybe we’ll call it “Putinism,” maybe “Cold War II,” who knows—but it’s brand new and it’s different from the past not only in tone but in nature, character and, presumably, intent.

  Vladimir Putin is in control. The state is increasingly entwined with him. We don’t know how much autonomy he has, as Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations noted the other day. But we have to assume it is significant. We know he is not only in charge but popular, and the tougher he is, the more popular he appears to be. (A real question: Will Russian democracy itself survive this new era? We will find out in the next few years.) A spirit of nationalism is rising, and that nationalism may contribute in time to a feeling of blood in the air. The Russian government is clamping down on the press, on free speech.

  The Russian government isn’t trying to please us or work with us anymore. Mr. Putin has formally set himself as our antagonist.

  Something big got broken here. It will have worldwide implications, and be a major foreign policy challenge for the United States in the coming years.

  But we are in a new time and will have to plan anew and think anew.

  That is how I think the artist formerly known as Reagan would judge what’s happening. He’d see it clear and figure it from there. He wouldn’t think it was about sanctions and tweeted insults.

  * * *

  I would add that to create a new strategy we will not only have to see Mr. Putin clearly. We will have to consider—honestly—what steps and missteps, what assumptions and attitudes, led to this moment not only there, but here. We will have to figure out how the new moment can be nonviolently countered. This in turn will require being honest about ourselves—who we are, what we need and what we want—and our allies, and their particular character and imperatives. It would be good to remember it is not 1950. That, truly, was another world.

  It is my opinion that Reagan wouldn’t be alarmist because there’s no use in alarm. At the same time he’d be serious as a heart attack about what has happened and what it implies. Being serious would not involve putting down Russia as a merely regional power, as President Obama recently did. No nuclear power is merely regional. If Putin were merely regional, he wouldn’t have been able to save Obama’s bacon in Syria.

  I do think Reagan would be startled—that isn’t quite the word, because it doesn’t encompass a sense of horror—that it clearly won’t be the American president leading the West through the start of the new era, but a German chancellor.

  That, actually, would have taken him aback.

  Why We Talk about Reagan

  The Wall Street Journal: February 8, 2002

  A small band of former aides and friends of Ronald Reagan were all over TV this week talking about the former president on his 91st birthday. Our memories and reflections were treated with thoughtfulness and respect by the media. It wasn’t always this way but I’m glad it is now, and I think there are reasons for it.

  Journalists feel an honest compassion for Mr. Reagan’s condition—everyone is saddened by the thought that this great man who was once so much a part of our lives no longer knows he was great, no longer remembers us. It’s big enough to be called tragic: this towering figure so reduced by illness. Part of it, too, is a growing appreciation of Nancy Reagan, who is doing now what she did for 50 years, protecting him, protecting his memory and his privacy. Only now she does it 24-7 at the age of 78, and without the help and comfort of the best friend of her life: him. She told me some months ago how to this day she’ll think of something and want to say “Honey, remember the time…” Or something will happen and she’ll want to ask him what he thinks. And of cour
se she can’t.

  * * *

  It is also true—I am sorry to be cynical, but I have worked in media, have enjoyed and even shared its cynicism—that the hungry maw of every network and cable news show is hoping, on the day the former president leaves us, to get the Get. To get Mrs. Reagan on the air, or the former president’s children, or his associates in history. The more sympathetic they are now, the better the chance they’ll get the Big Get. And this is understandable. It’s what news people want to do: Get the story.

  Whatever the reasons, it’s good to see Mr. Reagan’s memory held high by those who admire and understand him, and have the arguments for his greatness heard with respect in the media.

  But let me tell you why we make those arguments as often as we can. When I talk about Mr. Reagan, media people often preface my remarks, or close them, with words like this: “You adore him.” Or, “You of course have great affection for him and so it’s your view that…”

  These are not unfriendly words, but they’re a warning to the viewer: Take what you hear with a grain of salt. Needless to say the grain-of-salt warning doesn’t come when the subject is, say, JFK or FDR or Martin Luther King, all of whom had friends, supporters and biographers who have spent decades advancing their causes with affection and respect.

  And that’s why those of us who talk about Mr. Reagan talk about Mr. Reagan, why we stick to the subject. After he leaves us the media may well conclude that they have no particular reason to listen politely when we speak of him. So we do it now.

  And we do it because history is watching. Because young people are coming up. Because new generations rise and look at the past and think: Who was great, who was worthy of emulation, who can I learn from? Children whose parents have not for whatever reason led them or nurtured them sufficiently sometimes feel a particular need to look at the historical past and think: Who can I learn from there as I try to put together a good life?