Friday, October 28, 2005

PRIORITIES: WAR AND JUSTICE

Historian Victor Davis Hanson has some advice for President Bush at NRO today:

It is also time to step up lecturing both the American people and the Iraqis on exactly what we are doing in the Sunni Triangle. We have been sleepwalking through the greatest revolutionary movement in the history of the Middle East, as the U.S. military is quietly empowering the once-despised Kurds and Shiites — and along with them women and the other formerly dispossessed of Iraq. In short, the U.S. Marine Corps has done more for global freedom and social justice in two years than has every U.N. peacekeeping mission since the inception of that now-corrupt organization.

(emphasis added)
Hanson, once a full-time farmer, is a Classics scholar and prolific author of books and articles, with a unique dual emphasis on matters military and agricultural. Now a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, he established the Classics Department at California State University, Fresno, and has taught at Stanford University and the U.S. Naval Academy. My impression is that he is an expert in keeping his head when all about are losing theirs. Attention should be paid.

That means you, Mr. President. Fight the war, strengthen the court-- what you do in these two arenas will be a matter of national life and death long after you yourself are unemployed and then dead. Everything else is footnotes.