WHAT MANY AMERICANS FORGOT DURING THE GEORGE W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION , , . AND MAY HAVE NOT YET REMEMBERED.

Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1991) ("A threat to national security is normally a factor producing national integration, since it can usually be met only by a degree of social mobilization that itself can be achieved only by a degree of social conciliation and consensus. But that situation has been transformed by the advent of nuclear weapons. The threat these pose to national security is not one that can be countered by popular mobilization, by the creation of nations in arms. Writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Clausewitz described how war, which for a century past had been an occupation for princes and professional armies, had now become an affair of peoples; how war had been, as we would put it today, 'nationalized'. Without popular mobilization and participation, wars could no longer effectively be fought at all. Today in Western Europe and the United States we are seeing the reversal of that process. War is now seen a being a matter for governments and not for peoples; an affair of mutual destruction inflicted at remote distances by technological specialists operating according to the arcane calculations of strategic analysts. Popular participation is considered neither necessary nor desirable. As in eighteenth-century Prussia, the function of the civilian is seen as being to provide the money to enable his government to purchase the weapons and hire the specialists needed to defend him. This is not a recipe for national solidarity, and in my view much of the malaise in Western Europe today, much of the general support for the more extreme manifestations of anti-nuclear movements with their implicit neutralism, arises from precisely this divorce between the people and the mechanism of their defence. Nor I do believe, incidentally, that it is a very effective recipe for national defence, If Europe were to be attacked by the Soviet Union, it would have to be defended , at least in the first instance, by its own peoples; not by nuclear weapons under the control of a transatlantic ally." "Even in the nuclear age, the obligation on the citizen to fight in defence of the community that embodies his values seems to me to be absolute, and the more fully he is a citizen, the more total that obligation becomes. This ugly skeleton of military obligation for the preservation of the state can become so thickly covered with the fat of economic prosperity and under-exercised through the skilful avoidance of international conflict that whole generations can grow to maturity, as they have in Western Europe today, without even knowing that it is there. . . . But with the obligation to fight if necessary to defend one's community there goes a duty no less absolute, to fight in such a way as will so far is possible avoid the slaughter of the innocent; as it is to ensure that the defence of one's own rights does not involve, if one can possibly avoid it, the denial of the rights of others. If one ignores these obligations, the security one purchases by force of arms may be tenable only on a very short lease. With patriotic commitment and military skill, if these are not to be wasted and perverted, there must go also political wisdom; and a fundamental humanity." Id. at 48. Political wisdom and fundamental humanity were missing on the part of the government. And economic prosperity checked reasoned patriotism on the part of the the citizenry.).