Schramm On Helprin
A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published a Mark Helprin op-ed that is extremely critical of President Bush's conduct of the war on terror. Thoughtul readers will recall a similar piece by Helprin that ran in National Review months ago.
Helprin is a fine novelist and thinker, but I thought he was off base with these columns. I never found the time or motivation to post anything on the topic earlier in the week. But Peter Schramm of Ashbrook came out with this fine critique:
This is an over-the-top attack on Bush's conduct of the war by Mark Helprin, the best living novelist and a serious thinker. I like Helprin personally and he is a fine mind, but this characterization of Bush and his war policy is only partially true, at best. It seems true only because�perhaps surprisingly�Helprin doesn't seem to understand that although this is called a war it is not a war like World War II where all the power and wealth of the nation has to be in play and wherein all our enemies need to be destroyed all at once. This is a more difficult and more subtle form of warfare and it is likely to remain such for many years to come. This war calls for practical wisdom in the best sense, for high diplomacy with an almost continual threat of force to back it up, and an occasional (and even frequent) use of fierce firepower. It calls for shifting alliances and some very fine rhetoric. It calls for a lot of patience and even more secret undercover work. This really is a war that depends more than any other on intelligence. Although what Helprin says about places like Saudi Arabia are true, it does not therefore follow that we have to take such regimes out, or at least that it must be done now. That temptation toward retribution and anger has to be controlled for larger and more just purposes. There is a large element of trust involved. The fact is that the Bush administration�with the help of Israel and others�is in the process of re-organizing the Middle East both for our interest and the locals' interest, and is about to either ensure that the UN becomes a tool of American foreign policy or it will wither into a League of Nations-like non-presence, and is killing many bad guys. The war is still going along fine, despite Helprin's outburst. Wisdom shows itself in the world in surprising ways and, so far, Helprin has missed it. Too bad.Schramm, who was trained at Claremont by two of my favorite scholars (Harry Jaffa and Bill Rood), gets this one right.
His Ashbrook Updates are well worth reading.
[Posted at 20:51 CST on 09/20/02] [Link]
