Outliving this Day and Coming Safe Home

July 4, 2017

It seems there is a never ending screech of politicians, pundits , academics proclaiming that America has never been so divided as it is today. Truth is, our nation has always been divided in matters of society, culture, economics and politics. The union of the Thirteen Colonies cam about because of a common purpose and common foe. Even so, many colonials were not in favor of leaving the British Empire. When independence was confirmed after a war that lasted seven years, quite a few loyalists were so distressed that they emigrated.

But for the most part, Americans have always shown a united front toward foreign enemies, particularly those who open the hostilities and who were a threat to United States interests. Post independence, the obvious exceptions were the War of 1812 and Vietnam, both of which were widely unpopular. The Iraq war is unpopular in retrospect, but was unopposed for the major action, except for a miniscule fringe. (World Wars I & II had their fringe opponents, too.) Nothing kept Americans more united in purpose than the 40 year Cold War with the Soviet Union. Of course, the prospect of nuclear annihilation in 30 minutes focuses the mind wonderfully.

At home, the division has always been palpable. The Constitutional purpose to ensure domestic tranquility has been imperfect at best. But public policy disagreements, which occasionally erupt into physical altercations, have served as a dialectic thesis. antithesis, synthesis. Perhaps the most fundamental tension is individual freedom versus security. Nearly everything else is a corollary. Direct conflict has nearly always produced a compromise that is heavier on the liberty interest. The result has been innovation and its unparalleled material success.

Professor Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College gave an interview to James Taranto in the July 1-2, 2017 Wall Street Journal (“Divided American Stands — Then, and Now” – p. A11). Many will not agree with everything he has to say, but he raises points worth considering.

Independence Day greetings to all.

The code in this post’s title spells out the name of its creator.

This week in 1845, one hundred seventy-two years ago this past week. He sent a message between Washington D.C. and Baltimore Maryland.

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Before that message was sent, human earthlings could communicate instantaneously only if they were in each other’s physical presence. Sending information meant writing it in symbols of one kind or another and physically sending the writing to recipients. Depending on the location of the recipients, it could take hours, days, or even months to reach them.

All that ended when Samuel F. B. Morse invented and built the first electric telegraph this device transmitted information at virtually the speed of light — instantaneously for practical purposes.

The method of coding, — dot and dash (or in sound, dit and dah) seems cumbersome to us today. And to transmit a complete message was not exactly instantaneous, but the code was refined over the intervening decades, ultimately becoming ones and zeros in digital devices. As was the media used, first copper wires, now electromagnetic waves.

Today it is not only possible for one on a fishing boat in the middle of lake in Texas to instantly communicate with someone else in Asia, the middle of the Pacific Ocean,  and even the moon. Obtaining the facility to do so is within the reach of almost any one, no matter their economic status.

What God hath wrought was in nature for eons. Morse discovered it less than two centuries ago. Remember this when you make the next call with your cellular smart phone.

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Given the kind of war we have today, where any one of us could be on the front lines at any time, one of the most apropos observations for Memorial Day was the last line of the 2015 film Eye in the Sky.

In this terribly true to life fiction, a drone strike took out terrorists plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Kenya, but caused significant collateral damage. Afterward, the British Under-secretary of State criticized the general who made the decision to make the strike, calling his decision “disgraceful.” The general replied, calmly relating what he observed at the aftermath of five terrorist mass murders. He finished with a rebuke, also calmly delivered: “Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war.”

Is Marine

Marianne?

Vive la France

The American Constitution Society and the Federalist Society often co-sponsor debates in various public forums on controversial constitutional issues. For those unfamiliar, the Federalist Society is an organization of lawyers that was formed during the 1980s to counter the left-wing bias in law schools in the courts. Its members are mostly conservative or libertarian. The American Constitution Society, on the other hand, and is often described as its progressive counterpart with a more or less leftward political orientation. Both groups are committed to civil debate of United States Constitutional issues, often those that cut across ideological lines.

These organizations recently sponsored a debate here in Dallas on the issue of whether there ought to be term limits imposed on United States Supreme Court justices.

The debate was not the kind of presentation we are used to seeing for presidential or other political campaigns where the candidates pontificate and tout their virtues and allege their opponents’ flaws and vices. It was presented in the traditional manner where a proponent of the proposition stated his case, an opponent stated his, and each side was permitted a shorter rebuttal. There was absolutely no talking over or interruptions. In short, unlike campaign debates, more light than heat was actually produced.

I have been a fan of term limits for public officials, including judges, for some time. My main reason is that unlimited incumbency tends to increase the power of legislators and executive officers in favor of special interests and at the expense of individuals. The longer one is in office, the more power, especially the informal kind that is what really matters, increases with knowledge the proclivities of fellow officials, not to mention the “skeletons in the closet” many politicians seem to have. Political office is almost unavoidably lucrative for the officeholder, and the position becomes an end in itself. Special interests, almost by definition, have continuous attention of lawmakers and enforcers. Regulatory capture, which means regulation that ends up favoring the industry or activity regulated, is a phenomenon known to anyone who has a cursory knowledge of economics. The necessity of standing for reelection periodically generally has no practical check on incumbency. Inertial forces resist change. Challengers are nearly always less well-known, and are at serious disadvantage unless the incumbent is guilty of some egregious offense or scandal.

The United States Constitution provides that judges of the Supreme Court and inferior courts serve “during good behavior” and their compensation may not be diminished during their term of office. In other words, their appointment is for life. The purpose of this tenure was to insulate the judiciary from politics as near as possible, and assure the integrity of judicial rulings.

A federal judge can be removed from office the same way as the President — vote of impeachment by the House of Representatives, and conviction and removal by two thirds vote of the Senate. Only one Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached, but conviction removal failed in the Senate. Slightly more than a dozen lower court judges have similarly been impeached — nearly all for criminal offenses and bribery — but less than 10 have been removed. (A number have resigned when facing probable impeachment.)

Supreme Court justices, once confirmed, are free to decide cases based on their view of the law and Constitution, and are supposedly immune from the political vagaries of the day. Presidents’ nomination of justices, and Senate approval, which has in a number of instances been spectacularly withheld, has been based primarily upon party politics and ideology. There is also recently been a consideration of the relative youth of the prospective justice, so the nominating President can extend his influence to well beyond his two-term limit in office. These reasons have led me to generally favor some sort of term limits for Supreme Court justices, and lower court federal judges.

After listening to a well-presented debate on the issue of whether Supreme Court term limits was a good idea by four Constitutional scholars, I have pretty much changed my mind.

The reason for the change is after the discussion I realized that, first, the proposed cure might be worse than this disease. This is primarily because if you had fixed terms of years, which would have to be staggered, every presidential election would be about the Supreme Court. Nearly every other issue would be subordinate.

Second, the debate illuminated that the real problem with the Supreme Court is not the unlimited terms. It is that the Court has, practically speaking, the absolute final say on issues upon which significant portions of the electorate strongly disagree. While the Court decides discrete cases and controversies that are based on facts certain, the rationales and the legal principles pronounced have far-reaching consequences. The abortion issue, has raged for 44 years, and poisoned politics ever since it was decided in 1973.

In my view, the problem with Roe v. Wade is that it decided an issue of public policy for the entire nation on which about which nearly one-half of the populace disagrees. It did the same on the issue of gay marriage, in an area that has always been the province of the states. Both cases summarily overturned state laws, which were legally enacted by the people of those states. These cases affronted the principles of federalism that underpin the Constitutional framework that has worked so well to mitigate differences in public policy across a diverse nation. The divisions in this country that the media continue to showcase and harp on, are a result of the pro-centralization and anti-federalist rulings of the court, as well as many statutes enacted by Congress and regulations promulgated by the executive branch. Statutes, however, can only be enacted by a majority, or in some cases, a supermajority of representative chosen by the voters. Supreme Court decisions only require the vote of five out of nine unelected judges.

The people of states who believe they are adversely affected by a Supreme Court ruling, should have a Constitutional means to challenge that ruling. Term limits the life tenure of Supreme Court justices will not solve this problem.

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I was in the U. S. Army stationed in South Korea for 15 months in 1968-69. guarding what was PR folks called “Freedom’s Frontier.”

After spending some time studying Korean history, getting to know the locals, and making general observation, I became convinced that there was great potential for that nation. In many ways, it was like the late 19th Century United States — rugged, innovative, and economically capitalist. In no small degree, able to be so by American influence and military assistance.

I was right. South Korea became, and for the past several decades, has been an economic powerhouse. Hyundai automobiles, Samsung electronics, and many other products are omnipresent.

What about the North?

The fall of world-wide communism in 1989 – 1992 excepted Cuba and North Korea.

Cuba, a former client of the defunct Soviet Union, has been and is no threat to the United States or the world. North Korea, on the other hand, a totalitarian state run by a dynasty willing to starve its own people to maintain a war-making potential always was. Now, with nuclear weapons, it  really is.

Previous administrations should have taken the North Korean Kim family seriously and gotten rid of them when it was possible with little cost.

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Lenin arrives at Finland Station Saint Petersburg April 16, 1917

Three days after the United States declared war on Germany, on April 9, 1917, another event occurred that could have had a decisive effect on the war, but certainly had an effect on the geopolitics of the next 75 years.

Russia, whose military mobilization in support of Serbia against Austria-Hungary can be said to have started the general war, was in bad shape by the beginning of 1917. The Russian army was barely holding on and discontent in the ranks resulted in desertion and near mutiny in some instances. On the home front the same economic privations that affected the Germany affected Russia.

This was compounded by Russia’s inept and sclerotic government, headed by the grossly incompetent Tsar Nicholas II. A severe food shortage during the first two months of 1917 became a crisis. The Russian people finally had enough of Nicholas and forced him to abdicate in early March. The Tsar was replaced by a provisional parliamentary government led by moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky. The new government stepped into a chaotic situation and proved to be unstable. Its leadership nevertheless vowed to continue the war.

Throughout the time the war was raging, and even as the Tsar was overthrown, communist revolutionaries, who had been seeking to overthrow the regime for over a decade were living in exile in Zürich Switzerland. Their leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had long decried wars between nations as detrimental to the establishment of classless proletarian regimes worldwide, and had made it known that he believed it was in the revolution’s best interest that Russia not be involved in the war. Problem was that Switzerland was a considerable distance from Russia and Germany, no less hostile towards communism than the Russian Tsar had been, was geographically in the way.

The German high command saw an opportunity for a ploy. If Lenin and the Bolsheviks obtained power in Russia, they would be inclined to withdraw from the war and make a separate peace, freeing Germans forces to fight in the west. The Germans believed these forces from the eastern front could be brought to bear in France before the Americans were able to arrive in sufficient numbers to make a difference. Thus, on April 9 the German military provided a train and safe passage through Germany, across the Baltic Sea to Sweden, into Finland, which was then part of Russian territory, and then to Saint Petersburg. Lenin and his entourage arrived at the Finland Station there on April 16.

Once in Russia, Lenin and his henchmen were able to gin up the latent opposition to the war, and unify sufficient numbers of Bolshevik controlled councils, known as Soviets. They overthrew the provisional government in November 1917.  Lenin did not achieve complete power in Russia immediately, and a civil war ensued between the Bolshevik Reds, and provisional government supporters and monarchists known as the Whites. Nevertheless, the Communists had control of the apparatus of the Russian government and began negotiating a peace with Germany. The treaty of Brest-Litovst was signed in March 1918. Russia was out of the war.

Unfortunately for Germany, Russia’s exit from the war came too late. In the spring of 1918, with additional, but fewer than expected military resources from the Eastern front, the German high command gambled on a final, all-out attempt to break through the allied lines in France. Now buoyed by fresh American forces, the western allies managed to stall the German advance. The combined forces then seized the initiative and, by November 1918 forced an exhausted Germany to sue for an armistice, and end the war in their favor.

The Russian civil war lasted into the early 1920s. The United States, Great Britain and other powers intervened in that conflict on the side of the Whites in limited ways, but to no effect. Lenin’s Bolsheviks ultimately won and established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the old Russian Empire. That regime sponsored the Comintern whose stated purpose was to bring communism to the entire world. After the even bloodier second World War, Soviet Russia engaged the West, led by the United States, in a Cold War which lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union and fall of communism in 1991. Lenin and his successors’ regime ultimately fell of its own weight. But in the meantime, it wreaked 75 years of poverty, fear, death, and destruction in Russia and on the rest of the world.

For further reading on the details of Lenin’s journey, see British historian Catherine Merridale’s  Lenin on the Train (2017). As Merridale observes, “In part, it is a parable about great power intrigue, and one rule there is that great powers almost always get things wrong.”

Lenin’s Journey

President Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 campaign for reelection used the popular slogan “He kept us out of war” and “America First” to appeal to those voters who wished to avoid the United States’ intervention in the European Great War—now known as World War I.  A majority of Americans, including many of those who voted for his Republican opponent, wanted to stay out of what they regarded as a purely European conflict. Wilson carried 30 states with 277 electoral votes to his opponents’ 254. The President was sworn in for a second term on March 4, 1917.

Less than one month later, on April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Imperial Germany; on April 6, Congress obliged him with huge majorities in both Houses. What had changed?

Many wars begin because of a series of miscalculations, and proceed with other miscalculations. World War I was an extreme example. It began with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke — Bismarck’s “fool thing in the Balkans” — which should have been merely a squabble between Austria and Serbia.

Serbia was a client of Russia, Austria was allied with Germany, Russia was allied with France defensive against Germany. Austrian insistence on Serbia’s total accession to an ultimatum was supported by Germany. Saber-rattling by the powers led to Germany’s preemptive attack on France in order to avoid a two front war. Britain joined in, ostensibly provoked by Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality believed necessary to effect its plan.

It was the first major war in Europe since Napoleon surrendered after Waterloo. In the century that passed, military technology had made quantum leaps. Most notably of these advancements were repeating rifles, machine guns, and high explosives based on nitrates. Tactics, however, had not made similar advances. Using mass formations to attack a line defended by machine guns produced mass slaughter. Military leaders on both sides were slow to realize this despite the horrendous number of casualties. When they did, the fighting settled into static trench warfare, where neither side could advance very far. Thus, stalemate.

In an effort to break the stalemate, in 1916 the German army began a massive assault on French positions at Verdun. This battle lasted over six months, and produced more than a million casualties, sometimes tens of thousands of a single day. In the same year the British began an assault known as the battle of the Somme, which was only slightly less horrific than Verdun. Despite the massive casualties, neither side really gained anything.

Even though the military stalemate had not been broken, by the end of 1916 Germany was really in a bad state. An early strategic measure by Britain and France was the establishment of a naval blockade of Germany and its allies to interdict war materials and other materiel necessary to carry on a war. The superiority of the British Navy, at least in its surface fleet, was able to enforce the blockade. Germany was thus cut off from essential goods that could have been supplied by the United States and other neutrals. Both the German military and the home front suffered materially.

To retaliate and likewise interdict supplies to Britain and France, Germany deployed its submarine fleet around the British Isles and French coast. The U-Boats, as they were called, being no match for an armed surface ship, attacked surreptitiously without warning.  In an era when warfare was still considered glorious and romantic, at least to those who did not have to actually fight, the U-Boats were a sneaky and underhanded tactic, akin to shooting a man in the back without giving him a chance to defend himself in a fair fight. Or so the British anti-German propaganda would have the rest of the world believe.

The United States was the main target of such propaganda. Early on, President Wilson declared that the United States was to remain neutral, and so it did for the first two and one-half years. But America, even then, was an arsenal, if not necessarily for democracy, for the British Empire and France. Those belligerents could not sustain a war long without supplies from America. Manufacturing and shipping enjoyed an economic boom from the war almost from the start.

Unrestricted submarine warfare, where the U-Boats would sink commercial as well as military ships on sight, put American goods, ships, and even lives at risk. This was brought home in May 1915 when the British passenger liner Lusitania, later found to have had U. S. made arms for Britain in its cargo, was sunk off the coast of Ireland. Hundreds of civilian passengers, many of whom were American, were drowned. Subsequent to the Lusitania, to placate the United States, Germany agreed to restrict its submarine attacks to military targets and British and French commercial freighters identified as such.

While the great land battles of 1916 were being fought, the German military hatched a plan to break the British blockade with its surface fleet. Near the Jutland Peninsula, the German and British armored battleships and battle cruisers fought what may have been the only such battle in naval history. The battle itself was a tactical draw, but the German navy withdrew to its base. Another stalemate, and it became clear that Germany could not break the blockade.

The German leadership, after Verdun, Somme, and Jutland, was deeply concerned that the home front, if not the army, would collapse as result of the severe privation. In an effort to reply in kind and starve Britain and France to the negotiating table, decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917. Though this measure was sure to bring protests from America, the Germans gambled that, even if such a resumption provoked the United States into entering the war, such U-Boat campaign could succeed before American forces could be brought to effect.

One result of German resumption of unrestricted U-Boat warfare was curtailment of shipping of goods to England and France by U. S. carriers — exactly what the Germans wanted and expected. But the economic consequences to American manufacturers and shippers were immediate and dire. Those engaged directly or indirectly in the production and transportation of war goods were beginning to see American involvement on the British-French side as necessary and desirable.

Now the miscalculation, or what in hindsight appears to be a really hare-brained scheme. Some German officials believed that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. would join the western allies, In such an event they would need something to distract the American military for long enough for the new U-Boat campaign to work.

At this time, the relationship between the United States and Mexico was at its nadir. The Mexican Revolution of 1911 that overthrew Porfirio Diaz resulted in a period of instability in that country that threatened U. S. interests. Consequently, the U.S. Navy and Marines occupied Vera Cruz for a time, and in 1916, the U.S. Army under General John J. Pershing invaded northern Mexico to chase the revolutionary bandit Pancho Villa who had raided a town in New Mexico.

Someone in the Berlin high command concocted a plan whereby, in the event of war with the United States, Mexico would ally with Germany to recover its “lost provinces” in Texas and the American southwest. Accordingly, the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann, set a coded message to the German ambassador in Washington to be forwarded to Mexican President Carranza proposing such an alliance. The telegram was intercepted by the British, who managed to decode it. Predictably, the publication of the telegram, the accuracy of which was confirmed by Zimmermann during a press conference, created a firestorm of public opinion against Germany.

Most Americans had been uninterested in what they considered a European squabble up until the Zimmermann Telegram was publicized. Loss of shipping and American lives on the high seas was one thing. The prospect of a German alliance with a troublesome neighbor like Mexico to help that neighbor seize territory of American states was quite another. The Zimmermann Telegram precipitated a decisive shift in American public opinion.

War was declared. Within a year the American presence on the western front in France tipped the scales against Germany. Rather than a stalemate ending in a negotiated peace, Germany was forced to sue for peace in November 1918. The world geopolitics for the rest of the 20th Century was set.

Postscript:

Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Zimmermann Telegram, published in 1958, is a readable, in depth treatment of the event. It is well worth reading for anyone interested in learning how why the United States became involved in what became known as the Great War.

Arthur Zimmermann had proposed a similar plan early in the war to ally Germany with the Irish separatists. He proposed to send arms and troops to Ireland where another front would distract the British. This plan was never approved by the German government, but just prior to the 1916 Easter Rising, the Royal Navy intercepted a German ship, disguised as Norwegian, carrying an arms shipment en route to Ireland. This plot failed, and the perpetrator was hanged for high treason.

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