U.S. needs the strength to be patient BY ANDREW GREELEY

U.S. needs the strength to be patient BY ANDREW GREELEY
Copyright by The Chicago Sun-Times
February 9, 2007

We are told that it is a time for Americans to demonstrate courage, strength, power. We must not accept defeat in Iraq and the "dire" (favorite new word) consequences of failure -- such as region-wide chaos in the Middle East. It is not clear who these "we" are. Not the senators or columnists or editorial writers who are calling on us for sacrifice. They are not in combat themselves, they do not have children in combat. By what right do they lecture those who do and those who now perceive that it was the wrong war, carried out in the wrong way?

President Bush and his swagger, either in his walk or in the "Bush Doctrine," emphasizes America's power. We can do what we want because we have the power to do so and God is on our side. The United States should not negotiate with Iran or Syria as long as it remains powerful and its people steadfast and courageous. It dialogues with other countries only in the modality that Cardinal Egan of New York described to his priests as dialogue Roman style -- "I talk, you listen." In fact, it seems unlikely that the president or the vice president or the attorney general are morally capable of dialogue. Once the arrogance of power is abandoned, they would become mute.

I suggest that what the United States needs is not power or strength, but ingenuity and honesty.

On "Frontline" last week they did a program about the Berlin Airlift, one of the great diplomatic triumphs of the cold war. Since no one pays any attention to history, it means as much to leaders today as the battle of Lookout Mountain. In 1948 Stalin imposed a blockade on Berlin, hoping to force the Allies out of the city and integrate it into their socialist empire. It was suggested to President Truman that we send a convoy of tanks through the blockade and force open the road to Berlin. Truman, unlike the current White House crowd, had been in a war. He realized that the Russians might back down (as they often did in subsequent crises), but that they might not and that something could go wrong, which would launch another war. He decided that the United States would supply the 2 million people of Berlin and the 20,000 Allied troops by air. No one, not least Stalin, thought it would work. However, American ingenuity and organizing skill made it work. After two years Stalin backed down -- the first defeat he had suffered since Stalingrad.

The current crowd, spoiling for a war with Iran while they are bogged down in the Big Muddy of Iraq, would have sent that tank column right down the road and God only knows what would have happened. It would have bombed the Russian missile sites in Cuba in 1963. It would have refused to negotiate with the Russians. It would never have gone to China as President Nixon did. It would still be fighting in Korea or Vietnam. It would not have broken the chill with Khrushchev. It would not have negotiated with Gorbachev, as did Reagan.

The history of the United States in the last half century shows that the country loses nothing when it minimizes risks, is open to negotiations, and exits impossible situations with grace. In those times the leaders of the country urged patience but never strength. They feared the dangers of war. They never equated power with moral right. They never lied to their people. They made mistakes but because they were more or less sane and not unintelligent, they were never reckless.

The revelations of the I. Lewis Libby trial reveal a very different environment. The office of the vice president emerges as something like a cross between a story by Franz Kafka and one by Lewis Carroll. The vice president and Libby, respectively, play the Mad Hatter and the March Hare in their efforts to cover up a cover-up.

The president and the vice president and the secretary of state, having learned no lessons from one war, seem ready to risk another. They urge courage and strength and power but are innocent of such traditional American instincts as realism, pragmatism, restraint and ingenuity, to say nothing of honesty.