THANKSGIVING

by William H. Benson

November 25, 2010

     Robert Kosi Tette is an African immigrant now living in Detroit. His relatives, in his home country of Ghana, in 1998 pooled their capital and paid his fare to America, and he arrived with the equivalent of a high school diploma and a load of determination. He now holds a graduate degree and has “a  relatively successful professional career.” After ten years, in March of 2008, he wrote for Newsweek:

     “Every inch of progress has been achieved through exhausting battles.” He worked at  “multiple minimum-wage jobs,” to finance his education, and finally accepted a professional job, but then, in order to avoid being walked all over at work, he learned to, at least, pretend assertiveness. He signed up for graduate school to give himself an edge over his fellow employees, and all the while, he was struggling with enormous legal blockades to obtain the coveted permanent residency. in the U.S.

     “It was as though,” he wrote, “I had run ten consecutive marathons, one for each year in America, and my body screamed for rest. . . . Most of us leaving home never considered how much we would change, or the scarring challenges ahead of us.”

     Robert’s joys and survival skills are not unlike any other immigrant’s over the past four centuries, for to achieve in America one must grab for an education, for a job, for more education, and so jump ahead of the lazy, the unfocused, and the unambitious. How difficult it can be for a solitary immigrant to arrive in America and achieve even a shred of professional success.

     “The American Dream” is all relative. Christopher Caldwell, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote that “a 75-minute bus commute to a job at a [big-box discount store], which looks like wage-slavery to the son of a unionized industrial worker, might be a dream come true for an immigrant from a poor country,” but “to the average native-born American with no other frame of reference but his life’s span in this country, however, it is not a dream. It is simply the social contract.”

     Other immigrants, such as the Pilgrims or the Puritans, arrived in North America, not as individuals but as families, and in an atmosphere of mutual trust, each family worked their fields together.

     Asians, especially the Chinese steeped in Confucian thought, stare in astonishment at America’s highly individualistic society, for, according to the Japanese-American scholar and thinker, Francis Fukuyama, “Americans assume that ‘rugged individualism’ is one of the most distinctive and appealing aspects of their civilization.” That is not the case in Confucian China, where the family is preeminent.

     And yet Americans, Fukuyama argued, have also demonstrated a powerful tendency to form associations: social ones—in churches, clubs, and organizations; political ones—in fire, school, and irrigation districts; and economic ones—in partnerships and corporations. Fukuyama writes that the social capital, the currency that underlies these associations, is “trust,” for without trust, they falter and fail. And whom do you trust? In your government, your church, your company, or perhaps only in yourself, or possibly, to extend it a little further, in your family?

     Our country’s holidays are observed for various reasons: for religious—Christmas and Good Friday; for historical events or people—Presidents Day, Fourth of July, Columbus’s discovery, and Martin Luther King’s birthday; for those who have passed on; for laborers; for veterans; for mother’s; and for father’s. But what is being observed on Thanksgiving Day? Is it a historical or religious holiday? Yes, we grant an obligatory nod to the Pilgrims, and we pause to thank God for His blessings.

     However, I think that Thanksgiving is more: it is also an observance that honors the immigrant. To “immigrate,” according to Webster’s means “to come into a country of which one is not a native for permanent residence.” America is a nation founded upon immigration.

     The columnist, Jose Expedito M. Garcia, wrote, “Whether we like it or not, when we celebrate Thanksgiving, we are paying homage to the story of a group of immigrants who celebrated their bountiful harvests and good graces on their New-found-land. Thanksgiving is, indeed a living testament to America’s unique character as a land of immigrants.”

     When we, as fellow Americans, seat ourselves at the table on Thursday, surrounded by family and friends, whom we mostly trust, we should think of that family member who prepared the meal, and we should also think about the immigrant laborers, most often from Mexico, who worked tirelessly for low pay often under inhumane conditions in the fields to grow those potatoes, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and raise those turkeys. And we should think about the corporations that owns the means of production and the distribution channels to deliver it all so conveniently to our local stores. And we should think about our forefathers who risked everything, packed up, left their homeland, and came to America. Africans, English Pilgrims and Puritans, other Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican—all of us are Americans, and so we learn to be thankful on a single day in November.

     Have a great Thanksgiving!

WORLD WAR II

by William H. Benson

November 11, 2010

     For an American soldier or sailor who served during World War II, the words “called to serve for the duration” meant until “death, serious wounds, or captured” rendered that fighting man or woman ineffective, useless, or incapable. Of course, none of those three options were desirable, but the American people, between the years 1941 and 1945, were fiercely committed and utterly determined to fight the Axis powers—the German Nazis in Europe and the Japanese Imperialists in the Pacific—until they surrendered without condition to the Allied powers.

     The American soldier and sailor was then an expendable fighting unit, but the American people understood that they were fighting a just and a moral war, that the Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists were vicious thugs who were holding tight to an abhorrent set of bankrupt ideas that needed crushed.

     The times were desperate. Save for southern Africa, and Central and South America, the entire world was at war. The Allies were desperately trying to conquer the Axis powers at the same time that the Axis powers were desperately trying to defend themselves from absolute destruction. It was a world-wide fight-to-the-death series of ferocious battles in the middle of Europe as well as in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The reality of such an all-out war is unimaginable in 2010, just as it was unimaginable in the dark days of 1942.

     The historian, Kenneth W. Rendell, wrote that, “In recent wars there has always been a step the United States didn’t take. In Korea we could have used atomic bombs against the Chinese; in Vietnam we could have obliterated Hanoi. Political and humanitarian considerations stopped us. But in World War II there were no such considerations. It was all-out war. Hitler would have dropped atomic bombs if he’d had them first. . . . It was total war.”

     The numbers of casualties in World War II are truly staggering. “Sixty million people were killed. Twenty million soldiers and forty million civilians.” And those numbers may be low because the records in China and the Soviet Union were not always accurate. It was the Soviet Union that took the brunt of those deaths: over twenty million people, mostly civilians, were killed inside the Soviet Union when Hitler’s military machine swept across Eastern Europe and attacked Russia.

     As all good things eventually come to an end, so do all bad things, and this world war found its ending in 1945. In Europe, in the spring of 1945, when surrounded by the Allied forces and virtually all alone, Adolf Hitler, with his mistress Evan Braun, took his own life, and so without their leader to instruct them to keep fighting, the Germans surrendered.

     The Japanese people required a different kind, a far heavier and punishing form, of persuasion. Think of this: “When you consider all of the industrial might of the United States—in a total war, involving every person and every industry—after three and a half years not being able to defeat  Japan—it brings a startling sense of reality to the war.” The Japanese military leaders refused to consider surrendering.

     Indeed, the Japanese government on June 6, 1945 wrote and agreed to the Ketsu-Go Plan, the “Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War,” an all-out plan to defend the Japanese Islands from the anticipated American attack. Of this Japanese defensive strategy, according to the historian Paul Johnson, “2,350,000 trained troops would fight on the beaches, backed by 4 million army and navy civil employees, and a civilian militia of 28 million.”

     It was anticipated that this Japanese civilian militia would then be armed with “muzzle-loaders, bamboo spears, and bows and arrows,” not a pleasant thought for those U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines expected to be dropped onto Japan’s beaches, perhaps as soon as later that summer.

     Rendell wrote that, “One of the top-ranking military leaders stated that the loss of 20 million Japanese civilians (from a population of about 70 million) in an American invasion was acceptable.” Also, American military strategists believed that “a minimum of 250,000 Americans would be killed in an invasion, and another 750,000 hospitalized from wounds.”

     The President, Harry Truman, did not hesitate. He ordered that the newest American invention, the atomic bomb, be dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; it killed 75,000 people. Three days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki; it killed 39,000. Still, the Japanese dawdled. Without hearing any hints of a surrender, Truman, at noon on August 14 ordered that the third and final atomic bomb then available be dropped on Tokyo. That same day, at 4:05 P.M., Truman received word that the Japanese would surrender, and World War II ended.

     The news of the dropping of the two atomic bombs thrilled those American soldiers who were in line to invade the Japanese islands, for “They knew then that they had a chance to survive the war.” It is a myth to argue that the atomic bomb was unnecessary: Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.

     In August of 1945, Douglas MacArthur wrote: “I thank a merciful God that this mighty struggle is about to end. The magnificent men and women who have fought so nobly to victory can now return to their homes in due course and resume their civil pursuits. They have been good soldiers in war. May they be equally good citizens in peace.” November 11^th this year is Veterans Day, a day to pause and reflect what those men and women did sixty-five years ago.

PRE-COLUMBIAN VS. POST-COLUMBIAN AMERICA

by William H. Benson

October 14, 2010

     Published in 1950, Nomads of the Longbow was an anthropological study of the Siriono, one of the tribes of eastern Bolivia, in the upper reaches of the Amazon River. A doctoral student named Allan R. Holmberg had lived with the Siriono between 1940 and 1942 and came away believing, and arguing in his book, that they were, “among the most culturally backward peoples of the world.”

     “No clothes, no domestic animals, no musical instruments, no art or design, and almost no religion,” he wrote. The Siriono were, Holmberg announced, representative of the most primitive of human beings, living unchanged for millennium, without technical or cultural skills.

     Even though Holmberg was correct that the Bolivian tribe was exceedingly primitive, he was mistaken that they had always lived that way. In the first ten pages of Charles C. Mann’s  recently-published book, 1491, he pointed out Holmberg’s error. “The Siriono were among the most culturally impoverished people on earth,” Mann wrote. “But this was not because they were unchanged holdovers from humankind’s ancient past but because smallpox and influenza laid waste to their villages in the 1920s.”

     The people that Holmberg lived with were the “survivors of a recently shattered culture,” due to an epidemic, and he was wrong to assume that they had always been “barefoot and starving.” They had not. Mann points to evidence that suggests that the tribes of eastern Bolivia had once built ingenious devices, weirs for raising and harvesting fish, as well as sophisticated mounds and causeways upon  their frequently flooded homeland.

     The story across the Americas for five centuries has been the same. Epidemics of disease have jabbed, like daggers, deep into the Native American communities of North and South America, often before the arrival of white Europeans into their homelands. When the whites finally did arrive, they were startled and then dismissive at what they observed—the pitiful and shocked remnants of the tribe.

     The Pilgrims arrived on the shores of New England in November of 1620 and established their village of Plymouth atop a former Wampanoag village called Patuxet. The sole member of Patuxet, Tisquantum, explained to the English that he had been captured and taken to Europe, and that when he returned five years later, Patuxet had evaporated. Mann wrote, “Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun.” The best diagnosis is that the Indians in Patuxet had suffered and died from viral hepatitis A, spread by contaminated food. 

     Christopher Columbus was the watershed. For all of that man’s achievements, his arrival on the shores of the New World in mid-October of 1492 spelled the beginning of a disaster, a calamity of immense proportions for the Native American tribes in the Western Hemisphere. “Holocaust” and

“genocide” are loaded words, and Mann cautions against using them, because Columbus and his followers did not intend to more than decimate the Indians with biological weapons. But it did happen.

     Scholars may disagree as to how and when the first Indians arrived in North America, but those same scholars are in full agreement that the newcomers from Siberia “must have been small” in terms of numbers. Hence, their gene pool was limited, creating remarkable homogeneity, little diversity throughout the Americas. For example, virtually all South American Indians have Type O blood and 90% of North American Indians, but among Europeans it is more variable: A, B, AB, and O.

     Charles Mann underscores the idea that homogeneity does not necessarily indicate inferiority. Columbus and his fellow “Spaniards simply represented a wider genetic array. Asserting their superiority is like saying that the motley mob at a football game is somehow intrinsically superior to the closely related attendees of a family reunion.”

     Homogeneity though can be a good thing though. Prior to Columbus, the Native Americans knew nothing of “cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea, newborn anemia, schizophrenia, asthma, and (possibly) juvenile diabetes,” diseases passed down from one generation to another.

     The trauma of such a high death-rate percentage must have traumatized those Native American tribes. Mann wrote, “Living in the era of antibiotics, we find it difficult to imagine the simultaneous deaths of siblings, parents, relatives, and friends.” Family bonds were severed, governing structures loosened, and survivors were suddenly quite alone.

     “Cultures are like books,” wrote the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. “Each a volume in the great library of humankind.” In the sixteenth century,” Charles Mann wrote, after Columbus’s arrival, “more books were burned than ever before or since.” Again and again and again, for five centuries now a disease would reduce, diminish, or virtually obliterate a tribe to a primitive, culturally-backwards stature. It was and is a monumental human loss.

REVOLUTIONS AND CHINA

by William H. Benson

October 1, 2010

     When in high school, nearly forty years ago, I remember the day when, either late in September or in early October, a fellow student, as he was heading up his math paper, blurted out and asked our instructor for the date, so that he might write it down. The instructor, whose sense of timing when  delivering his one-liners was superb, without pausing responded with a single word, “Soptober.”

     There was only a scattering of laughter, but at the time I remember thinking that coining such a word instantaneously, seemingly without thinking, was quite ingenious of that instructor. It would have required minutes for me to arrive at “Soptober,” rather than the second or two it took our instructor.

     “Soptober”—the final two weeks of September and the first two weeks of October—is, I think, the best four weeks of the year, and not just because it contains my birthday. The weather is pleasant: warm and sunny days, cool evenings, and less wind than usual. Behind us are the broiling days of summer, and the snow and ice and freezing temperatures of winter are some weeks distant. It is what is typically called “Indian summer”—near the first frost but before the first snow.

     Despite the pleasantness of the day’s temperatures, for the reminiscing historian, the approaching days of October remind him or her of one thing: political revolution.

     England’s general, Cornwallis, surrendered to America’s general, George Washington, on October 17, 1781, ending England’s attempt to restrain their American colonies from forging their independence. The Bolshevik’s “Great October Socialist Revolution,” according to the old Russian calendar, began on October 25, 1917 and ushered in a Marxist philosophy directed by Leninist tactics, a truly diabolical mix. And the Chinese celebrate National Day on October 1, the day in 1949, when, after years of civil war and desperate struggle, the Chinese Communist Party, headed by Mao Zedong, founded the People’s Republic of China.

     There have been other important revolutions—France’s in the late eighteenth century, Mexico’s in the early twentieth century, and Iran’s in the late twentieth century—but it was the American, Russian, Chinese Revolutions that have had such astonishing consequences for the people of North America, Europe, and Asia in the modern world.

     And of those latter three, the most pernicious, and yet not readily recognized, was that of the Chinese revolution, a viewpoint shared by the historian and writer, John King Fairbank, who wrote, “The Chinese revolution since 1949 has been the greatest in history, measured either by the number of people involved or by the extent and rapidity of the changes made. To the outside world it has also been the least known event of modern times.”

     Mao Zedong whipped the Chinese people into absolute submission to him, and in the process he converted the nation into something that was utterly unimaginable previously. Armed with his own interpretations of Karl Marx’s political theories, a socialist economic agenda, and a fierce determination to  redirect China’s culture, he transformed the Chinese people, and slaughtered any who opposed him.

     The Chinese people struggled and grappled to accommodate Mao’s profound changes and his demands. Fairbank wrote, “Frenzies of joyful enthusiasm and vengeful hatred, of organized effort and self-sacrifice, depths of terror and exhaustion, prolonged frustration, ardent self-discipline, new hope and pride, have been experienced among a population [a]rising from [between] 600 to 800 millions.” Truly, the Chinese, individually and collectively, experienced the entire gamut of human emotions, all they could bear and way beyond.

     “Mao Zedong’s real claim to immortality lies in his effort to smash the ancient ruling class tradition,” wrote Fairbank. The formerly ruthless and miserly landlords were rounded up in village after village all over China and either were publicly executed, expelled, or forced to publicly confess their errors to those peasants they had once lorded over. Land reform, or collectivization, was accomplished by fanning the lower classes’ hatred into mob violence.

     Mao carefully redirected people’s thinking by what was called “thought reform,” which included: “control of the environment; the stimuli both of idealism and of terror, intermixed; and a grim psychological experience, undergone with guidance through successive phases and intensified by the manipulation of one’s sense of guilt and shame.” We know it better as “brainwashing.” The people, with no alternatives to choose from, submitted their minds and bodies to Mao’s authority and came into  silent and yielding acceptance of his new attitudes and concepts.

     A quotation from Chairman Mao: “Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery. . . . A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

     Soptober, halcyon days of peace and prosperity forty years ago in North America, in the United States of America, but at the same time in a land half a world away, the Chinese people wordlessly groaned under the deadweight of their oppression. What a person experiences, the information that he or she receives through the senses, and the range of emotions that color and stain those experiences can never be fully contained in print. Those outside that revolution will never know nor realize the full extent what the Chinese people endured underneath Mao Zedong’s Revolution.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER VS. AGATHA CHRISTIE

by William H. Benson

September 15, 2010

     Born on this day, September 15, in 1789 was the American author James Fenimore Cooper. Because he inherited his father’s vast landholdings—surrounding the city of Cooperstown, New York—at a young age, and then he married well, to Susan DeLancey, the daughter of a landowning family, he never had to work the rest of his life. With little else to do, he bet his wife that he could write as well as any of the books then coming out of England, and so he proceeded to write, over the course of his life, three dozen novels. They sold well: he is considered the first ever best-selling American novelist.

     The best known are the five Leatherstocking tales: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans,  The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer. The main character in all five is Natty Bumpo, also called Hawkeye, who is a very practical-minded frontiersmen, more comfortable in the woods than indoors. With his gun nicknamed “Kildeer,” he can shoot anything with deadly aim.

     The rhythm of Cooper’s tales is the repetitive “danger and escape,” scenes that appear before Natty Bumpo with frequent regularity.

     The critics have derided Cooper’s stories ever since, mainly for his stilted use of language that seems obsolete to the modern reader, and also for Cooper’s egregious literary errors. Chief among that host of critics was Mark Twain, who lambasted Cooper with a lengthy essay by writing, “Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in Deerslayer, and in . . . two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”

     Twain especially did not appreciate Cooper’s standard trick, in which he would heighten the danger and the suspense by repeatedly laying in front of Natty Bumpo or Chingachgook a dry twig which they would invariably then step on. “Every time a Cooper person is in peril, “ Twain wrote, “and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig.”

     One can conclude that Cooper’s reputation as a literary artist has plummeted since the days he first wrote his “Leatherstocking Tales,” more so after Mark Twain so hotly disabused him.

     Also born on this same day, in 1890, was the British author Agatha Christie, who wrote her first murder mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920, introducing to the world of crime fiction Hercule Poirot. In 1926 she came out with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in 1934 Murder on the Orient Express, and in 1939 probably her best known mystery And Then There Were None or as it is sometimes titled Ten Little Indians. All together she wrote eighty mysteries over fifty-six years.

     Virtually all her books are a formula: a murder, a stack of exotic and diverse characters each with a motive to kill, a scenic location, a winding and circuitous plot, and a final scene in which Hercule Poirot draws all the clues together and confronts he or she who had done the deed.

     Agatha Christie was writing her successful stream of mysteries up until her passing in 1976. Along the way she introduced her favorite investigator, Miss Jane Marple, who was most skillful at slipping quietly into a crime scene, and without fanfare, solving it. It was Miss Marple, an elderly spinster, who explained her success. “After all, no one pays attention to an old woman.”

     Like Cooper, Christie too had her detractors, her critics. On January 20, 1945, Edmund Wilson, the book critic at the New Yorker, published an essay that he entitled, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”, in which he dismissed the entire mystery genre and most vociferously Agatha Christie. Wilson wrote that, “her writing is of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters because they never can be allowed an existence.”

     David Lehman, another literary critic, countered with a different opinion. “Wilson regarded the genre as terminally sub-literary, either an addiction or a harmless vice on a par with crossword puzzles. But the truth is that for every Edmund Wilson who resists the genre, there are dozens of intellectuals who have embraced it wholeheartedly.”

     I agree. A well-written mystery has always held my attention, ever since my days of soaking up one Hardy Boys mystery after another followed by my discovery of Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason. The same I cannot say for Cooper and the western writers.  

     Two authors. An American man. An English woman. Their birthdays separated by exactly one hundred and one years. James Fenimore Cooper wrote romantic fiction, of the early frontier, of adventure stories, was a  forerunner to the western writers Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Agatha Christie wrote murder mysteries, and was a forerunner to Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Robert B. Parker, and Sue Grafton, who all owe a debt back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and also, to Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin.

     A writer dares to write, a brave thing to do, for the ever-present critic is there to read and then point out the author’s mistakes, and the writer feels bruised. However, in spite of the critic, it is the reading public who ultimately judges whether a work succeeds in the market place. Few critics would have dared to believe, after reading Cooper’s and Christie’s first book, that they would sell so well, and yet they did, for the reading public is fickle: they read what they like, not what the critics like.

THE CRUSADES

by William H. Benson

September 2, 2010

     Soldiers from western Europe invaded Palestine, that narrow strip of land along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea with the intention of establishing a Western colony there. These warriors called themselves Franks, for they were Frenchmen, and they were led by zealous leaders, such as Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Godfrey of Bouillon, men fiercely determined to undo certain of the Muslims’ territorial gains.

     Their invasion was religiously-motivated: these Christians wished to supposedly “free” the Holy Land, the place of Jesus’ birth and ministry and death, from the the Muslims’ domination. The year was 1096, and it marked the beginning of a two-century clash between West and East called the crusades.

     The local inhabitants, the Muslims, were at first perplexed and then devastated when they understood that these blonde-haired and blue-eyed foreigners, whom they called franj, intended on  assaulting their towns and cities, and that they had no intention on leaving. Quickly, the local inhabitants realized that there was no army in all of Syria capable of stopping the franj’s advances. 

     March they did. After toppling the city of Antioch, the franj committed unspeakable atrocities at Ma’arra, and then stomped south along the coast, disposing easily of a succession of cities—Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, Acre, Haifa, and Jaffa—until, on June 7, 1099, they faced the gates of Jerusalem. “Knights and soldiers fell on their knees, uttering cries of joy, and burst into floods of tears.” But they had not arrived to only cry, pray, and worship; they were there to fight, to seize the city.

     After a siege of forty days, the franj sacked the city of Jerusalem on the night of July 15, killing thousands of both the Muslims and Jews. Survivors carried the grim news to Damascus, and to Baghdad, but there was so little that the Arab world could do to overpower the franj.

     Quickly, the franj established a network of fortresses to secure their colony, instituted a political system not unlike their own in Europe, and began to govern “by principles that were not easily transgressed.” In Jerusalem, the franj’s rulers would succeed one another peacefully. The Muslims were startled by these Occidentals’ allegiance to a mutual political system, for nothing like this existed among the Muslims, where the death of one monarch meant civil war until another regained power.

     Eventually, two centuries later, the Westerners were driven permanently out of their colony along the Mediterranean and, led by Saladin, Jerusalem was recaptured, but the Muslims never forgot. The effect upon them was traumatic, deeply wounding, and rightfully so, for their land had been invaded.

     The Arabs and other Muslims refused to open their own society to ideas from the West, and “this, in all likelihood, was the most disastrous effect of the aggression of which they were the victims.” They would not learn the franj’s language, and so the Muslim world turned in on itself, becoming over-sensitive, defensive, intolerant, and deeply suspicious of Western ideas. One author, Amin Maalouf said it best, “Modernism became alien.” And it has remained so there for a millennium.

     Two weeks ago, the last of the U.S. combat troops departed Iraq, after 2,711 days of occupation, although some 50,000 troops will remain until the end of 2011, at which time the State Department, through paid contractors, will train the Iraqi police. However, America’s combat role in Iraq ends this week, on August 31, 2010. A day for rejoicing.

     Peter Baker, a writer from the New York Times, in his August 22^nd column, asked a most profound question, “But after seven years of a war started by President George W. Bush on the basis of false intelligence, . . . after hundreds of billions of dollars, more than 4,400 American military deaths and at least 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and perhaps many more, was it worth it?”

     He apparently did not think so, and I do not think it was. In March of 2003, in the days before the war began, in this biweekly column, I questioned the idea of the U.S. military seeking to topple a dictator of a third-world country. Once the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction proved itself a fabrication, the purpose for the war then transformed itself: it was to bring to life and then nurse a fledgling democracy there. But, did no one in the Bush White House point out to him the history of the crusades, and the effect that that invasion had upon the Muslim people?

     In the days after 9-11, George W. Bush described his anti-terrorism campaign as a “crusade,” but an adviser cautioned him against saying that word, pointing out to him that it is a strident word to the people of the Middle East because of the historical events to which it referred. Both Muslims and Jews regard it as highly offensive, mainly for the sacking of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099.

     The world division remains: Christian vs. Muslim. Western vs. Eastern. Crusade vs. jihad—the words and their meanings, the religions, the people, the unforgettable memories, and the sobering histories. After a millennium, the split is still a significant part of our political landscape today and may remain so for the foreseeable future.