Wow!
Finally a frank, tell-it-like-it-is opinion piece in the venerable, conservative Wall Street Journal on the “stunningly incompetent prosecution of the war,” by the administrations of George W. Bush, that
… have virtually assured such a displacement by catastrophically throwing the country off balance, both politically and financially, while breaking the nation’s sword in an inconclusive seven-year struggle against a ragtag enemy in two small bankrupt states.
This and other eye-opening attacks on Bush’s seven years of failure “to devise effective policy or make intelligent arguments for policies that were worth pursuing,” by none other than Mark Helprin—hardly a Liberal—in the WSJ’s Dec. 18 “Bush Has Made Us Vulnerable.”
But wait, Helprin’s column is not without “criticism” of “the counterpart to Republican incompetence,”—the”Left”—which, according to Helprin has been warped by sentiment and “is embarrassed by patriotism and American self-interest, but above all it is blind to the gravity of the matter.”
Helprin then tries his hand at evenhandedness, albeit making one hand more “even” than the other:
The Right should have labored to exhaustion to forge a coalition, and the Left should have been willing to proceed without one. The Right should have been more respectful of constitutional protections, and the Left should have joined in making temporary and clearly defined exceptions. In short, the Right should have had the wit to fight, and the Left should have had the will to fight.
Both failed.
On the Constitution and the rule of law, Helprin becomes ambivalent, bordering on double-talk:
The pity is that the war could have been successful…had we taken strong and effective measures for our domestic protection while striving to stay within constitutional limits and eloquently explaining the necessity — as has always been the case in war — for sometimes exceeding them.
Finally, Helprin also touches upon our dire financial straits, the terrorism threat, China’s military expansion, Russian resurgence, and how ill-prepared we are to deal with these challenges.
Anyway, a very interesting piece by a great author, a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a former Guggenheim Fellow, one who has been awarded the National Jewish Book Award and the Prix de Rome from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Helprin also served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force.
