Free Republic

<p>What a great man Bob Bartley was. He had guts and he was honest and independent and he worked hard. He was living proof that journalism doesn't have to be a vanity production. It can be big. It can change history. He did.</p>

<p>A week ago today Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, Bishop Wilton Gregory, the head of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Council, and a handful of bishops met in Washington with a few dozen Catholic laymen to discuss the future of the church. The official name of the conference was "A Meeting in Support of the Church," but everyone knew the context.</p>

<p>Looking back, and around, 21 months after the day that changed (nearly) everything.</p> <p>Seems like a long time ago; seems like yesterday. Actually we're in that awkward period of historical memory in which it's too soon to see 9/11 as History Channel fodder and too late to feel it freshly. It was 21 months ago; life moves on; we don't talk about "Where were you?" anymore.</p>

<p>This is a book about love. That's an odd thing to say about a collection that spans 9/11/01 to 9/11/02, and that centers on the attacks on America. But the primary emotion I felt in those days was a love, or a tender sense of appreciation, for everyone who played a part in the drama--the dead, the survivors, the firemen and the heroes on the planes, the families left behind and their shaken neighbors down the block. For us. September 11 changed everyone, and for me, among the changes was one that had a professional impact. It liberated me to include in my work what I felt but had not always expressed: the idea that people are precious, that they're beautiful and deserving of honor and respect. And the knowledge that we are all brothers and sisters together, whatever our circumstances. Before 9/11, I held these convictions but they did not always seem pertinent, or appropriate, to what I was writing. But after 9/11, I felt free to say what I thought and let it frame my work, and even become an engine for that work.</p>

<p>The death of Michael Kelly is a sin against the order of the world. He was a young man on his way to becoming a great man. He was going to be one of the great editors of his time, and at the age of 46 he was already one of its great journalists. And one's first thought about him, after saying the obvious--that he wrote like a dream, that he was a great reporter with great eyes, that he was a keen judge of what is news and what should be news--is this. He was an independent man. He had an indignant independence that was beauty to behold. He knew what he thought and why, and he announced it in his columns and essays with wit and anger.</p>

<p>Unanticipated good can come from misfortune. When the war began 11 days ago, on that Thursday morning that began with the big bunker blaster hit on the famous target of opportunity, it seemed possible, if only for 48 hours, that this just might be an easy war. What surprise and relief. There were reports that Saddam Hussein might be dead or injured, and the Iraqi command seemed in chaos.</p>

The question on everyone's mind that nobody in the US can bear to discuss It is a great unanswered question of the war and one we Americans don’t want answered. How much will America be willing to suffer? What kind of losses will America accept and absorb, if it comes to that? It is on our minds, more so since the war has turned hard, but it’s not what Americans are discussing. The war has just begun; you don’t go on to the field at Gettysburg chattering about likely losses and the impact back home. You go in committed to...

<p>So far so good. The war has begun, and the world hasn't ended (alarmists, pessimists and prophets on left and right please note). Saddam Hussein may be hurt or dead. And so, on to Baghdad.</p> <p>An old song from the American civil rights is on my mind and seems on point. It's about how far the movement had come and would go as long as all involved remained focused, in spite of setbacks, on the new day that was coming. "Keep your eyes on the prize, oh Lord, oh Lord," went the refrain.</p>

<p>It's the right time to weigh in on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.</p> <p>The Bush administration, famously inclined toward clarity and bluntness in foreign affairs, did something Friday that seemed almost . . . subtle. Or even obscuring. On the brink of war, with everyone in the world rushing to the radio and TV to see if the invasion had happened or the White House blinked or the Security Council vetoed or Blair cracked, Colin Powell and President Bush marched to a podium in the Rose Garden to announce they were going away. They were going to a sunny island in the middle of the Atlantic. There they would meet with our closest allies and confer at long meetings. And Mr. Bush would be attending those meetings having on his mind his strong convictions regarding a new Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative.</p>

<p>It's a beat-up little suburban single-story house in a Third World place far away. Faded blue paint on the outside, broken bicycle on a cracked cement walkway, rusty fence. You wouldn't think twice if you drove by. It wasn't interestingly decrepit or antique, just modern, cheap and fallen down.</p>

<p>Recently Andrew Cuomo asked me to contribute to a book of essays on the future of the Democratic Party. I thought I would send it to Andrew through OpinionJournal.com. That way he will be able to see your responses pro and con and perhaps include a few of them in the book, too.</p>

<p>Two ex-presidents could learn from Eisenhower and the Bay of Pigs.</p> <p>Two of our former presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, have been talking a lot about their views and feelings on Iraq. It would be nice if they took to speaking less and thinking more. They could start with an event in the latter years of Dwight David Eisenhower, a former president who knew how to do the job.</p>

<p>A week in New York in the age of anxiety.</p> <p>What is emerging right now is the real "new world order." Twelve years ago when the Soviet Union fell, the first President Bush declared it had arrived, but it is this President Bush on whom it has come to call.</p>

<p>At this point Iraq is, for each of us, a gut call. We probably have as much information and hard data as we're going to get. There are different ways to interpret the evidence, to understand the peril. No one can prove containment will work in the future, for instance, and no one can prove that it won't. There will be a price to pay if we invade. There will be a price to pay if we don't. And ultimately you have to go with your instinct, your gut sense of the world and of men.</p>

<p>Wasn't it surprising that at a time like this Mr. Bush didn't limit his State of the Union address to the two great issues, Iraq and the economy?</p> <p>It surprised me when I learned of it, which was the morning of the speech. I was one of the columnists invited to meet with a high government official with intimate knowledge of the president's thinking, as they say, on background. We met in his office, which has no corners. He told us he would be presenting his domestic agenda, a blueprint for the coming year, in his speech.</p>

<p>The Columbia's loss is a searing reminder of American heroism.</p> <p>"The Columbia is lost. There are no survivors." Blunt words spoken softly by President Bush this afternoon. He spoke of how easy it is for all of us to "overlook the dangers of travel by rocket. . . . These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly." He spoke of why "mankind is led into the darkness," and he promised that "our journey into space will go on."</p>

<p>You always hope a State of the Union address will be a sleek and handsome ocean liner cutting through the sea. Often they start that way and then turn, inevitably, into a greasy old barge riding low in the water, weighed down by policy cargo. It blows its horn proudly but the sound is more impressive than the ship; in fact it highlights the ship's inadequacy.</p>

<p>Nothing personal, Mr. President: How to make the case against Saddam.</p> <p>Nothing is more beautiful, more elevating, more important in a speech than fact and logic. People thinks passionate and moving oratory is the big thing, but it isn't. The hard true presentation of facts followed by a declaration of how we must deal with those facts is the key. Without a recitation of hard data, high rhetoric seems insubstantial, vaguely disingenuous, merely dramatic. Without a logical case to support rhetoric has nothing to do. It's like icing without cake.</p>

<p>It is now 30 years since the Supreme Court, in its Roe v. Wade vision, blew down the barriers to abortion on demand, using as the essential rationale a constitutional right of privacy that the court had discovered less than eight years earlier. Since 1973 roughly 40 million abortions--that seems to be the generally accepted number--have been performed in America, and 40 million children banished from life.</p>

<p>With this past autumn's discussion in Washington over what to do about Iraq there arrived also the season of protests. They were everywhere. In the national newspapers, Common Cause published a full-page letter, backed by "7,000 signatories," demanding (as if it had been outlawed) a "full and open debate" before any American action against Iraq. More radical cries emanated from Not in Our Name, a nationwide "project" spearheaded by Noam Chomsky and affiliates, which likewise ran full-page advertisements in the major papers decrying America's "war without limit," organized "Days of Resistance" in New York and elsewhere, and in general made known its feeling that the United States rather than Iraq poses the real threat to world peace. At one late-October march in Washington, there were signs proclaiming "I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas," and depicting President Bush wearing a Hitler mustache and giving the Nazi salute.</p>