Perspective

With a hat tip to State of the Union, I give you the words of Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal:

"Someone had decided to put down on the ground (at the Marines memorial) an article published just three weeks ago in the News-Herald, a nearby newspaper. "All I can ask," wrote Marine Cpl. Jacob Arnett, who is still on duty in Iraq, "is that the American people be given more than the bombings and daily death toll, because we are giving much more than that for Iraq."...

Opinion polls, whatever their value, suggest that in Iraq the "much more" is indeed getting washed away beneath daily, graphic, meticulously reported accounts of combat death.

The ebb of martial emotion is of course not new. In his biography of George Washington, Joseph Ellis writes: "During the Valley Forge encampment the officers of the Continental Army . . . based on their revolutionary credentials as the ultimate repository of commitment to the cause of American independence . . . were the 'band of brothers' that sustained the virtuous ideal amidst an increasingly corrupt and disinterested civilian society."

In "Lincoln," David Herbert Donald describes the passage of public sentiment during the Civil War from enthusiasm to condemnation: "Many Northerners were euphoric at the outbreak of war, confident that the Union with its vast natural resources, its enormous superiority in manufactures, its 300% advantage in railroad mileage was bound to prevail. . . . Seward thought the war would be over in 90 days. . . . The New York Times predicted victory in 30 days." We know what happened. And the mood changed. Ohio Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham took to the House floor and "denounced Lincoln's effort to restore the Union by war as an 'utter, disastrous, and most bloody failure.' The President, Vallandigham said, had made the United States into 'one of the worst despotisms on earth.' "

Sounds familiar, at least if one lives among the intellectual combatants whose battleground in our day extends from Washington to Manhattan. The view from Brook Park, over the past weekend, was not so complicated."

Curious that this notion of instant war resolution has been with us since the very founding of our nation...