RUTHFULLY YOURS

The long U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt is likely drawing to a close. What once worked to assure stability in the region and keep the oil flowing will not work in the face of Iranian nuclear capability, and the administration is disinclined to rethink a workable strategy. The United States will likely reengage, but only when the resulting chaos spreads to our shores, as it surely will.

How different it was twenty-five years ago this month, when President Bush (41) said Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait “would not stand.” American and allied forces rushed to the battlefield despite concerns about Iraq’s unconventional weapons — primarily poison gas, which had already been used against the Kurds in the north. But Israel provided a counter-threat to Saddam, letting him know that if Israel were threatened with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons it would join the war. It was a threat Saddam took seriously, as his nuclear program at Osirak had been destroyed by Israel a decade earlier.

We prisoners know the blasts were necessary to end the war. No Japanese soldier or civilian was preparing to surrender in August 1945.

What does it mean to fight to the end? In April 1942, it meant fighting until my tank battalion and I were forced to surrender at the Battle of Bataan. For everything else that followed I only fought to survive: the Bataan Death March, brutal transport aboard a “hell ship” to Japan, and slave labor in a Mitsui coal mine.
For my imperial Japanese enemy, in contrast, to fight to the end meant to give his life in a presumably noble and glorious fashion. He would die for the emperor—who ruled by divine right—confident that he would be enshrined with his ancestors for his efforts in defense of a mythic civilization. There could be no surrender and no negotiated peace. Death itself was beautiful, and death alone was honorable.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, upended this belief. The bombs showed the Japanese the devastating and ultimately inglorious outcome of their fight. The bombs offered no true opportunity for confrontation and no chance of death with honor; they promised only obliteration.

A Very Model Moral Panic. Preposterous charges against an L.A. preschool set off a wave of copycat cases—with dire consequences.
In the mid-1980s, a friend of mine testified on behalf of an elementary-school teacher who had been accused of being a pedophile. A child had told his mother that the teacher had taught them about “boobies and dicks” and had drawn a picture on the blackboard that sounded suspiciously to the mother like an image of an ejaculating penis. The police had raced to the classroom and confiscated the damning evidence: several copies of “Moby-Dick.” What the teacher had drawn was a whale and its spout.

Looking back, we can see that the only boobies involved in this case were the adults. But whenever we are in the midst of a moral panic, as we were in the 1980s, we feel that our alarm is reasonable and that punitive solutions are appropriate. Dicks? That child knew the word “dicks”? Cancel sex ed! Run that teacher out of town!

Waves of sexual hysteria sweep across our nation with depressing regularity. Each one seems to come out of thin air, wreaks enormous havoc, subsides and is forgotten. Each is regarded as an anomaly. I have no doubt that 30 years after the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, parents tried to teach their children about the Un-Puritan Activities Committee’s interrogations that led to the executions of 20 people, the imprisonment of 150 others, and accusations against an additional 200. “George, sit down here so I can tell you how Giles Corey was pressed to death by these crazy people,” I can hear a parent say. “Aw, Ma,” young George probably replied, “that was so 17th century.”

Indoctrinating students isn’t the same as teaching them. Homer and Shakespeare have much to tell us about how to think and how to live.

I was a few minutes early for class. Father Alexander, my high-school sophomore-homeroom teacher, was standing outside the room, cigarette in his mouth, leaning on the doorjamb. “Morning, Father.”His response was to put his arm across the door. “Agresto,” he said, “I have a question I’ve been thinking about and maybe you can help me.”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Do you think a person in this day and age can be called well educated who’s never read the ‘Iliad’?” I hadn’t read the “Iliad,” and am not even sure I had heard of it. “Hmmm. Maybe, I don’t see why not. Maybe if he knows other really good stuff . . .” His response was swift. “OK, Agresto, that proves it. You’re even a bigger damn fool than I thought you were.”
***

I grew up in a fairly poor Brooklyn family that didn’t think that much about education. My father was a day laborer in construction—pouring cement, mostly. He thought I should work on the docks. Start by running sandwiches for the guys, he told me. Join the union. Work your way up. There’s good money on the docks. And you’ll always have a job. He had nothing against school, except that if bad times came, working the docks was safer.

Chuck Schumer’s decision to oppose President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal may not defeat the accord, but it certainly does showcase its flagging political support. Mr. Schumer is a party stalwart who wants to succeed Harry Reid as Senate leader, and his defection suggests that the deal will be opposed by at least a bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress.

Think about how extraordinary that would be. Major foreign policy initiatives are often controversial, but they typically garner at least majority support. The resolutions for the Gulf War and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq all earned majority support, as did the Nixon and Reagan arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union.

“The question is whether anyone can bridge the fighter and statesman camps. On Thursday night, at least, the candidate who came closest may have been Mr. Rubio, who talked about “an economy that has been radically transformed” and offered a bit of Dodd-Frank regulation wonkery, while also picking a fight—though with Hillary Clinton rather than fellow Republicans.”
Distinction raises question about the electorate: Do voters want a candidate who channels their anger, or one who acknowledges it yet moves beyond it?

The initial Republican debate Thursday night provided entertainment aplenty, but also this bit of enlightenment: It divided the GOP field into two distinct camps, the fighters and the statesmen.

It says something about the national mood of 2016 that it isn’t entirely clear which is the better place to land.

Donald Trump is, of course, the leader of the fighters’ camp, as he showed again on the debate stage. Any expectation that a more sedate Mr. Trump would appear was blown away within seconds, when he opened the official Republican campaign season by threatening to run as an independent if he doesn’t get the nomination.

But it wasn’t only Mr. Trump. Sen. Rand Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also signed up for the fight card, as did former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in his own, more folksy way.

While they were engaged in a kind of debate demolition derby, there was another group that seemed more interested in a calmer drive down the political parkway. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Ohio Gov. John Kasich leaned more toward a policy discussion in the traditional mode. More than that, they appeared to think that the correct image to project in a presidential debate was the statesmanlike one, even if that might leave them appearing understated and even plodding at times compared with the crashing sounds around them.

A short 15 years ago, the larger American public was completely ignorant of the vocabulary of jihad.

Now some terms that once were italicized and considered foreign—because they WERE foreign—have become woven into our daily consciousness and news vocabulary.

But to still far too many, the terms introduced by the terror tsunami of the past decade and a half are still fuzzy. In Sharia-Ism Is Here: The Battle to Control Women and Everyone Else, author Joy Brighton brings clarity, citations, history and important supportive documentation to bear to clear up any uncertainty as to the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, laws and customs, and the whole directory of confusing terms.

“If European countries accept a wave of migrants, there will be terrorists among them. … By accepting the migrants, we strongly facilitate the Islamic State’s expansion to Europe.” — Czech President Miloš Zeman.

“We are committed to being active participants in our society, but it has to be on Islam’s terms, without compromising our own principles and values. Democracy is antithetical to Islam… The way forward for Muslims in Denmark is to resist the anti-Islamic integration policy and the aggressive foreign policy pursued by successive governments in this country.” — Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

“If you talk about immigration, you are a xenophobe. If you talk about security, you are a fascist. If you talk about Islam, you are an Islamophobe.” — French MP Henri Guaino.

“We cannot lose this war because it is fundamentally a war of civilization. It is our society, our civilization that we are defending.” — French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Irrespective of Western attempts to portray Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan and Egypt as supporters of the Iran nuclear deal, leaders of these countries, and especially the House of Saud, consider the accord a colossal, lethal threat, resulting from a reckless, short-sighted and self-destructive policy, which will initially plague the Arab World, and subsequently the Western World, including the USA, “the Great Satan” according to the Ayatollahs.

While Saudi leaders are restrained in their official reaction to the Iran nuclear agreement, they voice their authentic concerns and assessments via the House of Saud-owned media, which have traditionally served as a convenient venue, providing the element of deniability, sparing diplomatic inconvenience.

During a recent visit to Capitol Hill, I was told by legislators in both chambers, on both sides of the aisle: “While Israel is concerned about Iran’s nuclearization, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are panicky.”

1) The moderators did not delve into the core beliefs of the candidates. The Constitution itself was only raised in one question. Where’s the beef?

Perhaps it is naive to think that this matters in a world in which identity politics, sound bites and snark frequently trump all else, but I found the debate sorely lacking when it came to giving candidates the opportunity to expound upon their political philosophies.

As a proxy for this point, guess how many times the Constitution was raised during the debate?

In the case of the moderators, only once, on a question from Chris Wallace to Gov. Mike Huckabee regarding his belief in Constitutional amendments banning gay marriage and abortion.

Only Senators Cruz and Rubio even invoked the Constitution.

I understand we are living in the Roberts/Pelosi era, in which the Constitution is selectively applied when not treated as a mere piece of parchment, but come on.

I also understand that the moderators were likely more concerned with drilling the candidates on perceived weaknesses and/or questions that would elicit compelling and/or viral responses.

And it’s not lost on me that voters care most about how they are going to put food on the table, education and national security.

But for GOP primary voters, philosophy matters too.