RUTHFULLY YOURS

A History of Waterloo More Gripping Than a Novel

Where Napoleon Met His Fate Wellington singled out James Macdonell as the bravest man at Waterloo.

The battle of Waterloo, fought on June 18, 1815, was unquestionably one of the decisive battles of history. It put an end to the Anglo-French wars that had been rumbling along for almost five centuries. It also, by smashing the counterweight of French power, opened the gate for the German domination of Continental Europe, which has lasted, with intermissions, to the present day.

That is the only unquestioned fact about it. National pride is still too deeply involved for objectivity. Belgium produced a Waterloo design for a two-euro coin, which the French, not surprisingly, declared unacceptable. Some French historians still argue that Waterloo should be declared a victory for Napoleon, presumably on grounds of superior style. Their German colleagues, by contrast, see the turning point as the late arrival on the battlefield of the Prussian troops led by Marshal von Blücher, while Dutch and Belgian writers complain that the British give no credit to anyone but their own troops and the King’s German Legion.

Bruce Hoffman’s Anonymous Soldiers is a deftly written account of the Jewish revolt against the British in 1940s Palestine. Despite its scholarship—it draws heavily on recently declassified British documents—and its significant bulk, it is a page-turner that leaves the reader feeling sorry once the book is finished.

Unlike most accounts of the Jewish underground, this one tells the story from the British point of view, though without taking Britain’s side. It leaves the reader with no doubt that it was the Irgun, and to a lesser extent the much smaller Lehi, that drove the British from Palestine, and not, as the longtime mythology of Israel’s Laborites would have it, David Ben-Gurion’s skillful politicking.

It was Lehi that began the terror war against the British in 1940. Its members were completely isolated at first, perceived by the Yishuv—a term for Palestine’s Jewish community—as a criminal gang. Lehi was led by Avraham (Yair) Stern, whom Hoffman describes as a man “of grandiose dreams and half-baked plans,” an outstanding classics student at Hebrew University, and a poet. The title of Hoffman’s book comes from a poem written by Stern, which would become Lehi’s anthem. Stern was killed by the British in 1941, and the group’s remaining members killed or captured. The group was revived in 1943 under the leadership of Yitzhak Shamir, decades later to become Israel’s prime minister.

In an article by Connor Wolf called This Is The Difference Between TPP And TPA (Hint: They Are Not The Same Thing), he explains that these two bills are linked together because Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) is a means to fast track passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I am confused by this line of reasoning because as a stand-alone bill, TPA is intended to provide transparency to all trade negotiations by soliciting public and congressional input throughout the process, however, TPP as a stand -alone bill, is behemoth and most of the information to which the public has access has been leaked. Furthermore, it was negotiated behind closed doors. According to the verbiage of TPA, if TPP is not negotiated using TPA guidelines, the fast track option is negated. So why do news outlets and a wide range of legislators portray these two bills disingenuously? Bundling the TPA and TPP as one idea called Obamatrade is no different than bundling immigration reform and border security, which are two separate issues. One is about drug cartels and terrorism and the other is about how we manage people who want to immigrate to the United States.

In Washington recently I met Donald Rumsfeld, America’s former defense secretary. Rumsfeld became almost as famous for his musings about “known unknowns” as he was controversial over his role in the Iraq war.He is also widely respected for his intellect and his incisive, take-no-prisoners approach to foreign and defense issues. So I wanted to know what he made of a world which has now become infinitely more complex, chaotic and dangerous.

Although measured and diplomatic, he sounded a clear warning. A dangerous world was becoming even more threatening because of a profound failure by the West to grasp the nature of that danger.

Hillsdale College takes no federal or state money—but bureaucrats are still plotting ways to regulate its affairs.

If it weren’t for Plato, Larry Arnn would have been a lawyer—though it is difficult to imagine him in a courthouse filing terse procedural briefs. The president of Hillsdale College for 15 years, Mr. Arnn seems like a born professor. Ask about the 2016 election or the state of higher education, and it isn’t long before he’s quoting, in a soft voice with a hint of southern drawl, Winston Churchill, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, or the book that changed his life, Plato’s “Republic.”

It was 1974, and Mr. Arnn was a senior in politics at Arkansas State University, down the road from his small hometown. He was required to take a course on political thought taught by a professor with a reputation for toughness. The two got into a philosophical tangle. “He wiped the floor with me—and showed me that the most interesting things in the world were not of interest to me, and I felt terrible about it,” Mr. Arnn says. “I can remember he said to me, ‘By the way, this thing justice, don’t you care about it? Does it not interest you at all?’ ”

Mr. Arnn says he began thinking about the higher questions—and he wanted more. “Instead of going to law school, I called my dad and I said, ‘Dad I’m going to go to graduate school,’ ” Mr. Arnn recalls. “He said, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ And I said, ‘I’m going to know it.’ ”

That ethos, of seeking knowledge for its own sake, is what has guided Hillsdale College since its founding in 1844. The liberal-arts school has about 1,500 students and is located a couple of hours west of Detroit in Hillsdale, Mich., a town of 8,000. Two things, primarily, brought the college to prominence: its refusal to take any money from the state or federal government, and its classical curriculum based on great books, the Western tradition and the American founding.

Like most conservatives of a free-market bent, I am predisposed to favor the elimination of trade barriers. But I do not trust the Obama administration; I do not trust government that I cannot verify; and I object to corporate welfare, public-private partnerships, and similar cronyism that enables the established and the connected to crowd out innovators and challengers.

Consequently, unless the TPP deal is made public and widely circulated, I would oppose it on principle. And if it is so voluminous and convoluted that it would not be realistically possible to know what the law is, I would likewise oppose it on principle. That would not be a case of a conservative opposing whatever President Obama supports; as my Corner post on Thursday illustrates, I support trade-promotion authority, which President Obama wants and hopes to use.

Neither the great many supporters of Israel whom I know personally nor I want anything but the best possible future for the Palestinians. No one I know hates the Palestinians. What we do hate are the organizations that exploit and dominate the Palestinian people, that deny them the right to vote for new governments, the culture of hatred in Palestinian mosques, schools, and political speeches, and the acts of terror and war that have been directed at Jewish, Muslim and Christian Arab Israelis for many decades. It is the hatred and the violence we deplore, knowing as we do that this hurts not only Israelis, but that, since 1948, it has been blocking Palestinians from achieving their true potential.

We believe sincerely that boycotting, sanctioning and divesting from Israel will not bring peace so long as the Palestinian leaderships in Gaza and the West Bank insist that they intend to destroy Israel and take control of its entire territory.

At first, last week’s shooting in a Boston parking lot of a man wielding a knife sounded as though it would become another story of the police overreacting. On Friday federal authorities in Boston said the dead man was the ringleader of a plot to behead American citizens or kill Massachusetts cops, in solidarity with Islamic State. The risk of “lone-wolf” terror attacks in the U.S. continues.

Federal prosecutors in Boston also arrested two other men and charged them with helping the dead assailant, Usaamah Abdullah Rahim. The authorities said that Nicholas Rovinski, who calls himself Nuh Amriki, and David Wright, known as Dawud Sharif Abdul Khaliq, intended to behead Pamela Geller, who staged a Mohammed cartoon show in Texas. The plans changed when Rahim decided instead to go after the police.

House Democrats pulled off a mutiny against President Obama on Friday and absconded with his trade bill as a hostage. Republicans will launch a rescue mission next week, but this astonishing fiasco could inflict lasting economic and strategic harm on the U.S.

Mr. Obama began the day by paying a rare, unannounced visit to Capitol Hill for an emergency closed-door pep rally with House Democrats, which was in retrospect a bad omen. His talk was reportedly well received at first but then he advised the caucus that “a vote against trade is a vote against me,” while Democrat Peter DeFazio of Oregon noted that the President “tried to guilt people and impugn their integrity.” In other words, it was a vintage Obama performance.

With less than three weeks to go before the P5+1 countries are slated to finalize the framework for a nuclear deal with Iran, an examination of where things stand today is in order.

The good news is that the regime in Tehran, ruled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not likely to sign the agreement it ostensibly reached with the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, China and Germany on April 2 in Lausanne.

The bad news is that U.S. President Barack Obama would rather risk having a mushroom cloud explode over the Middle East than let his fantasy of a diplomatic solution to global jihad go up in smoke.

None of this comes as a surprise. Obama’s dream of achieving a nuclear deal with the Islamic republic has been almost as great as his obsession with forcing Israel to establish a Palestinian state. And in each case, the fact that the realities on the ground make it impossible is of no consequence to him.