A marine officer on patrol in Baghdad sees five Iraqi soldiers clustered beneath a streetlight, an easy target for snipers; certain something is wrong he rushes across the street. He finds the Iraqi ‘s staring at pornography on a cell phone. (News and Observer; 2-10-07).

An Army Lieutenant on patrol with Iraqi soldiers captures three prisoners, takes them to an Iraqi army intelligence center, then turns to leave. Behind him, he hears the Iraqi soldiers talking to the prisoners. He asks his interpreter what they were saying. The interpreter grins, “They’re asking how much they would pay to be released.”

The United Nation’s Atomic Energy Commission announces it is suspending half the technical aid it provides Iran – only half and only if all thirty-five nations on the IAEA Board agree.

And here at home the major news is ninety-year-old Zsa Zsa Gabor’s fifty-nine-year old husband, Prince Frederic von Anholt, may be Anna Nichole Smith’s baby’s father.

Sometimes it seems the war on terrorism has run hopelessly amuck and our fascination with starlets is a neverending obsession. But, recently, I read a reason for hope – at least in the war on terrorism.

In 1941, General Dwight Eisenhower wrote a speech to give to airmen at Kelly Field in Texas on December 12. He never gave it. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was ordered to report to the War Department in Washington, instead. But his description of America in 1941 sounds a bit like America today. He said dictatorships easily achieve the unity needed to fight a war, then added bluntly, “You follow the dictator’s orders, the alternative is the firing squad.” Then he went on to explain:

“In democracy the result is achieved more slowly. The overwhelming majority of its citizens must come to realize that a common danger threatens, that collective and individual self-preservation demands the submission of self-interest to the nation’s welfare. Because this realization and this unification comes about so slowly, often only after disaster and loss of battles have rudely awakened a population, democracy is frequently condemned by unthinking critics as the least efficient form of government. Such criticism deals with the obvious factors only, it fails to throw into the balance the moral fibre, the staying qualities of a population. A democracy resorts to war only when the vast majority of its people become convinced that there is no other way out. The crisis they have entered is of their own choosing, and in the long, cruel ordeal of war the difference is likely to be decisive. The unification and coordination achieved in this way is lasting.”

So our current dilemma (Congress and the President at loggerheads, the war running amuck) may not be permanent – or even unusual. It may just be the shocks of defeat and disaster leading us to unity.

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