Is Russia Helping Snowden?

Is Russia helping Snowden? Video with Ralph Peters. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, July 1, 2013.

No Horizon in a Perpetually Unstable Palestine. By Nathan J. Brown.

No Horizon in a Perpetually Unstable Palestine. By Nathan J. Brown. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 27, 2013.

There is no end in sight to the current impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An unanticipated shift in the regional environment may be the only force that can spur change.

The Palestinians’ Receding Dream of Statehood. By Nathan J. Brown. Current History, December 2011.

Israel: Athens or Sparta? By Benny Morris.

Athens or Sparta? By Benny Morris. Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2013.

Review of Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country—and Why They Can't Make Peace. By Patrick Tyler. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 576 pp.

Same-Sex Marriage Isn’t About Freedom. By Donald Devine.

Same-Sex Marriage Isn’t About Freedom. By Donald Devine. The American Conservative, June 27, 2013.

Not individualism, but the reaction against it, paved the way for marriage equality.

Devine:

Rod Dreher recently set the marriage debate in its broadest possible moral context: “Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology.” “Very near the center” of that Christian culture, he says, citing sociologist Philip Rieff, was its “rejection of sexual individualism,” a rejection that allowed Christianity to displace the “sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture” and substitute its own morality as the operational value system of the West. 

The problem today is that “the myth of individual freedom” has by now torn “away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.” Gay marriage is individual freedom’s “decisive blow” because it destroys the last communal restraint: traditional marriage. Since every culture “imposes a series of moral demands on its members for the sake of serving communal purposes,” the lack of these limits in contemporary America portends the end of Western culture and represents its final “deconversion” from Christianity.

 

Dreher’s case that the battle over traditional marriage and family morality has been won by the left, especially among America’s young, is persuasive. But his description of how this happened is almost backwards: freedom and individualism are not to blame. And before retreating to the catacombs, it is well to look more closely at Rieff’s assumptions, which Dreher did warn were those of an unbeliever.

 

To Rieff, “the essence of any and every culture” is “what it forbids.” Modern freedom has “inverted the role of culture” by “releasing [us] from the old prohibitions” and grasping at “sexual expression and assertion,” which is “how the modern American claims his freedom.” Supporting gay marriage is the final logical result. But is Christianity’s role to support a culture, to serve communal rather than individual purposes, to set a culture’s prohibitions, even to support family?

 

Indeed, where did the subversive “myth of individual freedom” come from? It was Jesus himself who separated the individual from Caesar, reinforcing this with a remarkably un-communal statement: “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No I tell you but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against one another, three against two and two against three” (Luke 12:49-53). When his disciples were confronted by potential converts who would not adopt the broadly Jewish cultural practices of the early Christian community, Peter, Paul, James, and the others freed the pagans from these cultural practices (Acts 15: 1-21). Paul went to the extent of freeing Christians from the restrictions of the Law itself (Gal: 3:23-29) and added “when Christ freed us, he meant us to remain free” (Gal: 5:1).

 

As the conservative thinker Frank Meyer emphasized, by freeing the individual, Christianity created a tension between its high standards—to be perfect as the Father is perfect, to turn the other cheek—and the impossibility of achieving them. This tension is the source of the energy that would make the West the world’s dominant civilization, but it also unleashed the impulse to impose a “human design of perfection upon a world by its nature imperfect.” No culture was safe from the potential excesses of utopianism once Christianity opened Pandora’s Box, unless it was restrained by the faith’s new commandment of love.

 

Ancient civilizations were communal, with sexual institutions that often included polygamy or concubinage. Homosexuality always existed too. These were defended by their supporters as traditional rather than as libertine practices. As Dreher notes, Christianity’s liberation of women and slaves from the “sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture” was one secret of its success. Ancient sexuality was firmly controlled by a rigid patriarchal social order, which was not undermined until Pope Gregory I forbade marriage to close kin in the 6th century AD. Before this, marriage was between families, not individuals. It was Christianity that made marriage more of a free individual choice.

 

Dreher and Rieff are correct in a strange way when they find it “pathetic” to consider Christianity “a therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism.” But Christianity is in fact the source of individualism, which simply did not exist before. Almost everything BC was clan, cult, tribe, and state.

 

If freedom is the problem, Christianity is the culprit for “inverting” the role of culture and freeing the individual to question tradition. Citing Europe’s history of war and unrest, no less a critic than Rousseau concluded that Christianity’s dual forms of loyalty to church and state were “clearly bad” because they “destroy social unity” and civic peace. Rousseau’s solution was that the “sovereign fix the articles” of a new civic religion that would provide for order, welfare, morality, and even freedom properly understood—that is, freedom as defined solely by the state.

 

The whole modern project has been an attempt to control the freedom unleashed by Christianity’s dual loyalty, to re-create the conformity to “traditional” culture that predated the Christian moral liberation. What we see today in the success of gay marriage is not really freedom run amok, but the result of turning the power to define morality over to the state, or to the dominant group representing it.

 

People pretty much absorb the prevailing cultural stereotypes generated by the media, as Walter Lippmann taught us. And what finally persuaded a mass public—by way of constant reinforcement from TV news, sitcoms, and in every classroom—was changing the argument from freedom to “marriage equality.” In fact, the American people were told that allowing equality in marriage was the moral thing to do. This assertion of cultural and political power, not the individual freedom arising from Christianity, is what has truly led to what Dreher calls the “final triumph of the Sexual Revolution.”

Thanks for Nothing, College! By Tim Donovan.

Thanks for nothing, college! By Tim Donovan. Salon, June 30, 2013.

Is Arming Syrian Rebels the Right Answer?

Is arming Syrian rebels the right answer? Video, with General Jack Keane and K.T. McFarland. America Live with Megyn Kelly. Fox News, July 1, 2013.

Learning to Truly Love a Gay Son. By Linda Robertson.

Just Because He Breathes: Learning to Truly Love Our Gay Son. By Linda Robertson. The Huffington Post, July 1, 2013.

Kerry Keeps Leaving the Mideast Empty-Handed. By Raphael Ahren.

Almost there, Mr. Secretary? Really? By Raphael Ahren. The Times of Israel, June 30, 2013.

The top US diplomat leaves the region empty-handed again but vows a breakthrough is imminent. Either he’s not afraid of more humiliating failures, or he knows something we don’t.

Final status negotiations “within reach,” says Kerry. The Times of Israel, June 30, 2013.

Kerry: “Real progress,” but no Israel-Palestinian agreement. By Karen DeYoung and William Booth. Washington Post, June 30, 2013.

Why “a little more work” won’t do it, Mr.Kerry. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, July 1, 2013.

Even if talks resumed, they’d lead nowhere, because the Palestinians don’t see genuine peace with Israel as serving their own vital interests. Changing that reality is the diplomats’ true challenge.

Israeli official: Kerry disappointed in Abbas. By Mati Tuchfeld, Daniel Siryoti, and Yoni Hirsch. Israel Hayom, July 1, 2013.

Kerry vs. Palestinian obstinacy. By Eli Hazan. Israel Hayom, July 1, 2013.

Kerry avoiding the blame game. By Dan Margalit. Israel Hayom, July 1, 2013.

Chaos in the Middle East Grows as the U.S. Focuses on Israel. By Mark Landler and Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, July 1, 2013.


Ahren:

Solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a laudable goal, and Kerry might initially have been forgiven a belief that he was somehow uniquely qualified to break the deadlock. But visit after visit should surely have long since underlined a few simple truths: The two sides mistrust each other. Each is more concerned with avoiding blame for failed talks than prepared to take risks in the faint hope of success. Netanyahu and Abbas are also both looking over their shoulders at rivals and bitter opponents poised to capitalize on any missteps. And the unchanging bottom line: The most that Netanyahu might conceivably offer Abbas, were they ever to actually get to the table, is less than Abbas might conceivably accept — less than Ehud Olmert offered in his unrequited bid for an accord in 2008.

 

Those inescapable truths are hard to reconcile with Kerry’s insistent assertions at the airport that a breakthrough is “within reach,” and that all it needs is “a little more work.”

 

Kerry’s boss, president and Nobel peace laureate Barack Obama, also tried to tackle the conflict at the beginning of his first term, but backed away fairly rapidly, and subsequently focused his efforts on other areas.


Horovitz:

Insanity — according to a definition variously attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Confucius, and most credibly to a 30-year-old book called “Narcotics Anonymous” — is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

 

Five times John Kerry has been to our part of the Middle East since taking office in February. Five times, like some hapless gofer, he has shuttled back and forth between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, ferrying demands and proposals, and rejections. The estimate is that he spent 14 hours in the company of Netanyahu on this latest mission alone, and another seven with Abbas.

 

You’d think he’d have gotten the message by now. But no. In defiance of all his first-hand accumulated evidence of Israeli and Palestinian stubborn immobility, Kerry flew out of Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday afternoon proclaiming that a breakthrough was potentially “within reach.” Just “a little more work” and all that diplomatic failure could yet be translated into success.

 

Yet this willful “cautious optimism,” insistently invoked by the secretary, is not the reason why the definition of insanity comes to mind. Who knows? If only to spare him further humiliation, Abbas and Netanyahu really might eventually capitulate and agree to shake hands, look meaningfully into each other’s eyes, call each other a partner, and sit down across a negotiating table. It’s not as though they haven’t done so in the past.

 

Maybe if Kerry honors his Terminator-style “I’ll be back” pledge a few more times, Abbas will consent to a phased process for the release of pre-Oslo Accords Palestinian murderers, Netanyahu will declare a wider settlement freeze, or some other complex formula of declarations and promises, drafted with lawyerly vagueness and finesse, will enable both leaders to claim sufficient face-saving achievement as to resume direct negotiations.

 

The point is: So what? The point is that Kerry is investing immense personal energy and time, and the United States’ diplomatic prestige, in desperately chivying Netanyahu and Abbas merely to the starting point of a path that has already been walked many times before — a path that, the bitter experience running right through the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies shows, leads only to a dead end.

 

That’s why the definition of insanity unfortunately resonates when considering the secretary’s indefatigable efforts. He is straining to persuade Netanyahu and Abbas to begin talking when we know that such negotiations can only lead to the same failure they have yielded in the past.

 

The Palestinians would argue — and will try to persuade the world of the validity of this account when the talks, if they do start, inevitably collapse — that a hard-hearted, settlement-loving Israeli government refuses to grant their weak, helpless, occupied people the independent statehood that they deserve. But the root of the unavoidable failure of any resumed talks lies primarily, though not solely, with the Palestinians.

 

Exemplified by Ariel Sharon’s political turnaround, a consensus has gradually emerged in Israel over the past generation that an accommodation with the Palestinians — a separation that frees Israel of responsibility for the millions in the West Bank and Gaza — is a vital Israeli interest. Most of us want a Jewish and a democratic Israel, and we don’t want to be ruling over another people.

 

The Palestinians have reached no parallel, self-interested conclusion. The despicable Yasser Arafat bequeathed his people the toxic narrative that there was no Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and by extension that there is no Jewish sovereign legitimacy in this part of the world, and that Palestinian steadfastness, attachment to the land, and birthrate would ultimately see the unrooted Jewish colonialists sent back to their European homelands. The weak-willed Abbas has allowed that false narrative to fester, including in his schools and his media, rather than energetically disseminating a more accurate picture of competing, legitimate claims to a small, coveted area of land, requiring conciliation and compromise.

 

Last month, the Israeli prime minister who almost five years ago offered Abbas everything the Palestinians ostensibly seek, Ehud Olmert, concluded publicly for the first time, presumably with some reluctance, that Abbas is simply “nota big hero” — he didn’t have the guts to take the deal, because he hadn’t had the guts to lay the groundwork for a deal by telling his people some unpalatable truths about historic Jewish sovereign legitimacy.

 

The path to Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation does not run along the route much traveled by the well-intentioned Secretary Kerry between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Pulling Abbas and Netanyahu back to the table will only presage another failure — and the Second Intifada demonstrated how catastrophic the consequences can be.

 

Where the United States should be placing its energies, and its leverage, and its money, is in encouraging those frameworks that will create a climate in which the Palestinians actually recognize an interest in making true peace on terms that Israel can reasonably live with (terms that do not leave Israel vulnerable to military threat, and do not seek to alter the country’s demographic balance), because the Jews aren’t going anywhere, and Palestinian independence can only be attained in partnership with the Jewish state. The US should be supporting educational programs, and grass-roots interactions, and media channels that offer an honest perspective on the history of our conflict, and that promote a mutually beneficial future of co-existence. It should neither fund, nor encourage others to fund, institutions and organizations that perpetuate false narratives and consequent false grievances.

 

Change the climate. Gradually create an atmosphere of mutual respect, and a shared, fervent desire for an accommodation. Then you won’t have to be cajoling reluctant leaders back to the peace table.

 

Israel, too, has its share of extremists — willfully blind to Palestinian legitimacy, and to the counterproductive nature of the status quo — some of whom sit in government today, encouraging the growth of settlements in areas where Israel will never attain sovereignty, exacerbating hostility, discrediting Israel. Like most Israelis, the US observes this self-defeating process with legitimate bafflement and concern. The hawks in Israeli politics are becoming increasingly intransigent, wishing away the Palestinians by citing less troubling demographic prognoses, or reconciling themselves to the subversion of Israeli democracy. On the ground, “price tag” extremists exemplify a lawlessness and amorality that shames us all.

 

But as the elections in 1992 and 1999 underline, the Israeli middle ground has elected would-be peacemakers when it sensed that hard-line prime ministers were missing genuine opportunities. There is no such sense today, no consensual feeling that Netanyahu — kicked out of office in 1999, remember — is blowing it; that a deal is there to be done if only we had a different prime minister. That’s how successful Arafat, Hamas, Fatah’s military wing, Abbas’s disingenuity, and the chilling Arab Spring have been in shattering Israeli confidence.

 

In a region where instability is now the norm pretty much everywhere bar Israel, and where Iran has thus far outmaneuvered the West as it speeds toward a nuclear weapons capability, this is a pretty discouraging time for a tiny country to be contemplating high-risk territorial compromise — especially when Hamas’s quickfire violent takeover from Fatah of Gaza in 2007 constituted a profoundly worrying precedent for what might occur were Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.

 

Kerry’s unfathomable enthusiasm notwithstanding, there are no short cuts. The only source of potentially justifiable optimism lies in a process of changed atmosphere and changed attitudes — a gradual process — in a Middle East, moreover, where Iran has been successfully faced down and relative moderates consequently emboldened.

 

There is immense merit in working to create a climate in which reconciliation and co-existence are regarded by both sides as serving their national interest. There are no diplomatic quick fixes. Believing otherwise? That’s insanity.


Secretary of State John Kerry, allowing hope to triumph over experience, has plunged into the morass of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” Since assuming office in January, Kerry, following in the footsteps of American diplomats before him, has made five trips to the Middle East in a bid to get peace talks restarted. This may prove a bit tricky if, as Khaled Abu Toameh reports, the Palestinian Authority insists on Jews being banned from any and all meetings, a condition that would violate U.S. law. Nonetheless Kerry is determined to keep hope alive. Preparing to depart from Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport, the secretary told a somewhat skeptical media “that with a little more work, the start of final-status negotiations could be within reach.” I fear Secretary Kerry will have to do a flip-flop on this statement as he has done on others in the past.

---------

Kerry’s Top Ten Flip-Flops. By Joel Roberts and David Paul Kuhn. CBS News, February 11, 2009.

Kerry discusses $87 billion comment. CNN, September 30, 2004. Video of comment on YouTube.

Egyptians Increasingly Receptive to Military Rule. By Walter Russell Mead.

Egyptians Increasingly Receptive to Military Rule. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 1, 2013.

A replay of Mubarak’s twilight, this time with Morsi? By Avi Isaacharoff. The Times of Israel, June 30, 2013.

For the Brotherhood, Morsi’s fall would have a domino effect. By Avi Isaacharoff. The Times of Israel, July 1, 2013.

The Myth of the Inevitable Jewish Minority in Israel. By Jeff Jacoby.

The myth of the inevitable Jewish minority in Israel. By Jeff Jacoby. Boston Globe, June 26, 2013.

Israel’s Jewish Demography Defies Conventions. By Yoram Ettinger. The Ettinger Report, April 5, 2013. Also at Israel Hayom.

Israel’s Demographic Miracle. By David P. Goldman. inFocus Quarterly, Spring 2013.

The One-State Solution Would Be a Nightmare. By Carlo Strenger.

No, Moshe Arens, the one-state solution would be a nightmare. By Carlo Strenger. Haaretz, June 26, 2013.

Responding to Moshe Arens’ call for West Bank Palestinians to become citizens of Israel, Carlo Strenger says history shows such a state is a recipe for disaster.

There must be 50 ways to hate an Arab. By Moshe Arens. Haaretz, June 24, 2013.

Israel Faces a Culture of Hatred and Violence. By Mortimer B. Zuckerman. U.S. News and World Report, March 21, 2011.

Itamar massacre illustrates the existential threats facing Israel.

Israel: The Binational Alternative. By Tony Judt. The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003.

Two Responses to Professor Tony Judt. By Daniel Gordis and R. Ben. Midstream, January 2004. Also here.

Tony Judt’s Final Word on Israel. Interview by Merav Michaeli. The Atlantic, September 14, 2011.

Tony Judt’s Specious Clichés About Israel. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 10, 2010.

Enter the Neo-Canaanites. By Bret Stephens. NJBR, June 20, 2013. With related articles.


Strenger:

Moshe Arens is a rare specimen in Israel’s political landscape, and in a remarkable recent op-ed in these pages he launched an unrelenting attack on all forms of hatred against Arabs. A consistent hawk in his assessment of the Middle East’s future, he is one of the staunchest defenders of the basic liberal order and the sanctity of human rights, and he has for many years decried the many forms of anti-Arab sentiment stoked primarily by Israel’s right wingers.

 

For years he has argued that Israel cannot afford the establishment of a Palestinian State west of the Jordan River for reasons of security. But as opposed to many of today’s right wingers, for him there cannot be first and second class citizens in the Greater Land of Israel: all Palestinians will be citizens of the greater land of Israel, with full civic and political rights. Nothing else is even conceivable for Arens.

 

Arens’ record shows that he puts his money where his mouth is: during his long, distinguished political career, he has done more to move towards equal rights for Israel’s Arab citizens than any other major politician in Israel’s history. He is appalled by the current attempt to cancel Arabic as one of Israel’s official language, because he respects the identity of Arabs who have lived here for generations.

 

And now he has once again not only decried “price tag” attacks, but made clear that he considers Lieberman’s anti-Arab statements to be unworthy, inhuman and destructive. He is profoundly opposed to Lieberman’s plan to add Israeli territories with exclusively Arab population to the future Palestinian state to diminish Israel’s Arab Constituency.

 

Arens ends his recent op-ed on an interesting note: he claims that the insistence of Israel’s left that only a two-state solution will bring peace is itself partially an expression of anti-Arab sentiment. Why else, he asks should the center-left be so opposed to the inclusion of the West Bank’s Palestinians in the State of Israel?

 

Arens’ argument requires a serious response, because I have nothing but the highest respect for his moral and political principles. He is a liberal democrat to the depth of his heart. My disagreement with Arens is therefore empirical and pragmatic rather than ideological.

 

I will argue that Arens is too optimistic about human nature. He believes that rational interests primarily guide human action, and disregards the profound human need to feel part of a culture they share with others, and the desire to be governed by people they identify with.

 

Let me start with Arens’ insistence that the Greater Land of Israel will continue to be the homeland of the Jewish people. Its dominant narrative and national cohesion will be based on a Jewish-Zionist perspective, to which Arens is profoundly attached, and which, for him, is Israel’s raison d’être.

 

How can two and a half million Palestinians who have suffered under Israeli occupation for more than 46 years and have been in bitter conflict with the Zionist movement for more than a century identify with such a predominantly Jewish state? To this day I cannot fathom how the first session of the parliament of the Greater Land of Israel would function: would you expect Palestinians from the West Bank to sing Hatikva and identify with the Star of David?

 

But there are more general reasons to be skeptical of the viability of states that try to unify two or more ethnic groups, even if there is no violent history between them. Not only leading European politicians like Angela Merkel and David Cameron have come to believe that the multicultural ideal does not work.

 

A growing number of researchers in political science have become very skeptical about the possibility for state to function without a dominant culture truly accepted by the majority of the population. Recent history shows that most binational states run into troubles even if there is no history of bloodshed and violence. Czechoslovakia fell apart soon after the dismantling of the Soviet bloc; Belgium is constantly under pressure of the Flemish population that wants to secede; Scotland reserves the right to secede from Britain, so do the Québécois, the Catalan and the Basques.

 

There seem to be two blatant exceptions to this rule: one is Switzerland, a country that has four official languages and has been running its affairs very calmly and efficiently for centuries. But Alexander Yakobson has argued that Switzerland is not really multicultural, but rather multilingual, and that it shares a very strong common national ethos. Born and raised in Switzerland until early adulthood, I can fully confirm Yakobson’s view.

 

The other exception seems to be the United States, often hailed as the one, great successful model of multiculturalism. But the late Samuel Huntington, one of the great political scientists of recent times, has made a strong argument that the U.S. has never been really multicultural, but basically a White Protestant Anglo-Saxon Country. Its success in integrating waves of immigration was based on a simple principle: immigrants were offered the option to accept the Protestant work ethos and the idea of self-reliance. Those who could function in this framework could become part of the American dream.

 

Israel’s dominant ethos, to this day, is to have revived Jewish sovereignty after 2000 years. How exactly can we expect Palestinians to live with this ethos? Theirs is the exact opposite: their story is that Zionism was their catastrophe, their Nakba. How can these two narratives coexist within the same state? And how can we avoid a protracted struggle for demographic and political dominance in the Greater Land of Israel and endless competition for land and other resources?

 

As opposed to many younger members of Israel’s political right, who seem to care for Jews only, Arens is a true humanist. But unfortunately I am afraid that his well-meaning blueprint for a single state west of the Jordan will not bring peace, but an unending continuation of ethnic struggle by other means.

Here Comes the Groom. By Andrew Sullivan.

Here Comes the Groom. By Andrew Sullivan. The New Republic, August 28, 1989. Also reprinted at Slate.

Andrew Sullivan’s article laid the intellectual foundation for same-sex marriage in 1989.

Gay Marriage Now Becomes a Fight Over Religious Liberty. By Tim Carney.

Gay marriage now becomes a religious liberty fight. By Timothy P. Carney. Washington Examiner, June 29, 2013.

The Middle-Class Revolution. By Francis Fukuyama.

The Middle-Class Revolution. By Francis Fukuyama. Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2013.

All over the world, argues Francis Fukuyama, today’s political turmoil has a common theme: the failure of governments to meet the rising expectations of the newly prosperous and educated.

General George Gordon Meade: The Hero of Gettysburg. By Ralph Peters.

Section of the Gettysburg Cyclorama by Paul Philippoteaux, depicting the final climactic day of the battle (July 3, 1863).

The hero of Gettysburg. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, June 30, 2013.

Twilight of the Confederacy: How Gettysburg Changed History. By Allen C. Guelzo. National Review, July 15, 2013. Also here.

Battle Cry of Freedom. By James M. McPherson. NJBR, March 30, 2013.

The Battle of Gettysburg: 150 Years Ago. By Alan Taylor. Photo Gallery. The Atlantic, July 3, 2013.

Confederate dead gathered for burial at the edge of the Rose woods, July 5, 1863. (Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress).

George G. Meade and His Role in the Gettysburg Campaign. By Warren W. Hassler, Jr. Pennsylvania History, Vol. 32, No. 4 (October 1965).

Gettysburg: The Meade-Sickles Controversy. By Richard A. Sauers. Civil War History, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Septmeber 1980).

“We Never Expected a Battle”: The Civilians at Gettysburg, 1863. By Robert L. Bloom. Pennsylvania History, Vol. 55, No. 4 (October 1988).

The Gettysburg Cyclorama. By Paul Phlippoteaux. Full rotating panorama graphic at the Washington Post.

Rare Motion Pictures Show Civil War Veterans at the 75th Gettysburg Battle Anniversary Reunion. By Bob Janiskee. National Parks Traveler, February 11, 2009.

Gettysburg 75th Anniversary. Video. soldiersmediacenter, July 2, 2007. YouTube. Also at Vimeo, Daily Motion.




Peters:

One hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow morning, two great armies slammed into each other outside a crossroads town in Pennsylvania. Neither army’s commander intended to fight at Gettysburg, but the battle took on a life of its own as reinforcements rushed to the sound of the guns. Soldiers in blue and gray would fight for three days, leaving almost 7,000 Americans dead and 30,000 wounded.

At the close of the battle on July 3, 1863, the Army of the Potomac, led by Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade — the most underrated soldier in our history — had won the Union’s first indisputable victory in the east. With Gettysburg’s strategic effect compounded by news of Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, Miss., on July 4, the Confederacy was left with no realistic chance of winning the war militarily (although the South’s valiant, stubborn troops would fight on for two more years). The secessionist government in Richmond could only hope to conjure a political settlement.

Revisionist historians question Gettysburg’s decisiveness, given that the war continued. They fail to note the consequences, had General Robert E. Lee and his boys in gray won: In less than a week, Lee’s ferocious ragamuffins would have marched down Broad Street in Philadelphia; the North would have been pressured to sue for peace; and England and France would have found the excuse their social elites longed for to intervene on the South’s behalf.
 

Gen. Meade and his soldiers in blue saved our Union on those blood-soaked fields.

UNDERDOGS

 

The North had the greater population, wealth and industrial might at the war’s beginning in 1861, yet poor generalship and poisonous politics led to one humbling Union defeat after another — especially in Virginia, where Lee took command in 1862 and scored astonishing victories.

Not two months before Gettysburg, at Chancellorsville, Lee had again humiliated a far-stronger Union force, driving it back toward Washington. The North’s premier army had become accustomed to losing. The situation had grown so bad that senior generals declined command of the Army of the Potomac to protect their reputations.

As Lee’s army’s rampaged through southern Pennsylvania and threatened Harrisburg, a frustrated President Lincoln sacked Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker (who had failed miserably at Chancellorsville). Lincoln ordered the relatively junior Meade to take command.

 

Awakened in the middle of the night three days before the first shots at Gettysburg, Meade initially thought he was being arrested because of a spat with Hooker. Instead, he learned that he was to take the reins of a dispersed, defeated army and stop Robert E. Lee.

It was one of those instances of the right man in the right place at the right time. A West Point-trained engineer and personally courageous, Meade promptly set about concentrating his forces, inspecting the terrain for the best fighting ground and pushing out his cavalry to find Lee. Thanks to his slovenly predecessor, he didn’t even have a map of southern Pennsylvania.

Called upon as the president’s last resort, George Gordon Meade would become the first Union general to defeat Lee in a fair fight on open fields. Southerners and jealous Northerners alike would never forgive him.

AN OVERCONFIDENT ARMY

Robert E. Lee had begun his invasion of Pennsylvania by making one mistake after another. His string of resounding victories had led him to believe that his Army of Northern Virginia was invincible and, over-confident, he allowed his dashing cavalry commander, Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, to take most of his horsemen off on a useless raid, leaving Lee blind to his opponent’s whereabouts and actions. Lee also permitted the dispersal of his three mighty corps over hundreds of square miles, leaving his army divided by South Mountain and its narrow passes.
 
As a result, when one of his corps’ forward elements marched down a country road toward Gettysburg from the west on the morning of July 1 — under stern orders not to become “decisively engaged” — its officers thought they only faced ill-trained militia. Instead, they blundered into Brig. Gen. John Buford’s seasoned cavalrymen — who knew how to take advantage of the terrain when fighting dismounted. And Buford had reported diligently on the Confederates’ locations before the fighting commenced.

Meade force-marched his nearest corps to Buford’s support. Still unsure of whether Gettysburg was the right place to give battle, Meade further tightened his grip on his forces. At the same time, he resisted the temptation to hurry to the battlefield himself. He had the professionalism to grasp that, as an army-level commander, he had to maintain control of his entire force and not become enmeshed in actions best left to subordinates. Until he was sure that Gettysburg’s situation favored his army, he meant to remain flexible.

Lee did the opposite. Rushing to the sound of the guns, he found a failing chain of command launching piecemeal attacks. Throughout the battle, Lee would discover too late that subordinates had ignored or amended his orders — with fateful consequences. Much of the fault lay in Lee’s gentlemanly habit of couching orders almost as suggestions. At Gettysburg, Lee’s subordinates behaved like knights in the novels of Walter Scott, each with his personal retinue and vanity.

Meade, by contrast, insisted on disciplined staff work, prioritization and teamwork: By Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac was on the verge of becoming the first truly modern military organization. In so many ways, this war was a struggle between a romanticized past and a modernizing world. In retrospect, the outcome seems inevitable.

VICTORY, DEFEAT, STALEMATE

 

Despite the death of one of the North’s most-admired officers, Maj. Gen. John Reynolds, the men in blue had badly stung the Confederate all morning, devastating proud regiments. The battle expanded from the west to the north of town, as the Union I Corps filled in on the left and the XI Corps curved over the fields on the Union right. The “meeting engagement” appeared headed toward a Union victory.

Then tragedy struck.

Brig. Gen. Francis Channing Barlow, Harvard valedictorian of the Class of 1855 and kin to New England’s “best” families, was a rising star who would go on to become the Union’s most-savage division commander of the war. But at Gettysburg, Frank Barlow would have his worst day of the conflict.

When Barlow, newly appointed to division command, arrived on the Union’s right flank, he didn’t like his assigned position. Without notifying his superiors, he moved his men forward a half-mile to what he believed was better terrain. Promoted too swiftly, he failed to grasp how his division’s mission supported the overall plan.

Barlow’s blunder opened two wide holes in the Union line — just as Confederate reinforcements poured in on that flank. The result was a collapse of the Northern defense. But the badly wounded — and well-connected — Barlow was never blamed. Instead, the scapegoats were the German immigrants in the XI Corps, even though Southern memoirs describe them as fighting harder than Yankees had ever done.

As the Union right disintegrated, Rebel blows directed by Lee against the Yankee left punched through that flank, too. Soon, Union troops were retreating madly through Gettysburg’s streets, with hundreds captured by advancing Confederates. It appeared that Gettysburg would be another one-day victory for Lee.

 

Beyond the town, the key position was a hilltop cemetery and the ridge running southward from it — the last, best defensible terrain. As the afternoon smoldered into evening, Lee directed his left-flank corps commander to seize Cemetery Hill and finish things.

 

Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell ignored the order. And Union reinforcements raced to the high ground. The battle would last two more days.

THE SECOND DAY

Arriving on the field after midnight to inspect the ground himself, Meade decided that Gettysburg was a promising place to fight. Now it was a race to see which army could concentrate first. Meade believed he could win it.

As for Lee, his pride was up, deepened by anger over missed opportunities. But his intelligence was poor; he never gathered all of his subordinates together to issue clear orders (Meade did); and his staff officers let him down repeatedly. On top of all that, he was ill and cranky, dismissing the concerns of his senior corps commander, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet. Lee believed valor could overcome any obstacle.

It almost did. Despite more blundering and a late start to Lee’s key attack, the Rebels came close to shattering Meade’s defense, fighting deep into the evening. The combat was close and vicious at such now-famed sites as Little Round Top, Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield and Culp’s Hill. As each side piled on more men, the day’s outcome veered back and forth.

 

In the dying light, Meade faced a crisis. After his plan had been all but wrecked by the incompetence of Maj. Gen. Dan Sickles — a Tammany Hall politician who’d wangled a corps command — Meade had shifted troops brilliantly, plugging one gap after another, parrying each Rebel thrust. Now he was out of men and anxiously awaiting the arrival of his last reinforcements. He found himself on horseback in mid-battlefield with just four aides and couriers beside him.

A full Rebel brigade emerged from the smoke, heading straight for Meade and the stripped-bare Union center. Instead of running, Meade drew his sword, ready to charge that entire brigade and die fighting. Just as he was about to give the order to gallop forward, Union banners crested the darkening ridge behind him. And the last Confederate hope for the day was crushed. 

Two exhausted armies slept amid the rising stench of the dead and the groans of the wounded. Everyone knew they would fight again the next day. 

PICKETT’S CHARGE
 
July 2 should have taught Lee the limits of valor, but his pride swelled into arrogance: He was not going to be defeated by upstart George Meade. In one of his worst decisions of the war, he ordered over 12,000 of his soldiers to attack across a mile of open fields against the Union center. Accustomed to defeating the men in blue, he convinced himself that one more blow would bring him victory.

Meade sensed what was coming and reorganized his lines to face the blow. Then he waited. Shortly after noon on July 3, the Rebels began a deafening bombardment — answered in careful measure by the Yankees. When the guns fell silent and the smoke thinned, long lines of men in gray and brown emerged from the trees, flags flying.

Doomed from the beginning, what should rightly be called the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge became a much-romanticized disaster: A handful of brave Confederates survived the crossfire of massed Union guns and the rifle volleys to reach the Union lines. But they were too few.

Tears in his eyes, Lee rode out into the field to greet the retreating survivors. Along the Union line the troops began cheering: They had finally defeated Robert E. Lee.

 

AFTERMATH

After Meade failed to oblige him with an equally doomed counterattack, Lee retreated back toward Virginia. Terrified just days before, Washington responded to Meade’s stunning victory by criticizing him for not destroying Lee’s army — an army with plenty of fight left in it, as the next two years would show. The gratitude of politicians was as slight then as it is now.

Meade organized a pursuit of Lee as quickly as he could, slowed by his own severe losses, the tens of thousands of wounded left on the field, and troops who were out of food and ammunition. He had just done the impossible and was damned for not doing the impossible twice in a row.

Still, Meade would be the only commander of the Army of the Potomac never dismissed. He would serve until the last victory. Those who mattered knew his worth.

Perversely, after the war it was Lee who’d be lionized. Meade died only a half-dozen years after the peace, while his arch-detractors, North and South, lived into the 20 century — not least Dan Sickles, who had almost lost the battle for the North.

 

Sickles spent decades belittling Meade and claiming that he was Gettysburg’s real hero. Worst of all, Meade never pandered to the press — and suffered the consequences.

But the man ordered to take command of a defeated army three days before the war’s decisive battle had done his country an immeasurable service — outfighting the South’s greatest soldier when it counted most. As a soldier myself, I’m amazed at Meade’s performance. But the truly amazing thing is that, on this 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, this great American is slighted when not forgotten.

George Gordon Meade. By Matthew Brady.



Three “Johnnie Reb” Prisoners, captured at Gettysburg, in 1863. (Mathew Brady/Library of Congress).



The Anti-Amnesty Movement’s Underbelly. By Matt K. Lewis.

The anti-amnesty movement’s underbelly. By Matt K. Lewis. The Week, June 26, 2013.

Some anti-immigration activists are motivated by a simple, ugly thing: Racism.

Reports of America’s Decline Have Been Greatly Exaggerated. By Walter Russell Mead.

Reports of America’s Decline Have Been Greatly Exaggerated. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, June 30, 2013.

While Britain stagnates, America is roaring back. By Daniel W. Drezner. The Spectator, June 29, 2013.

American power in the 21st century will be defined by the “rise of the rest.” By Joseph W. Nye. Washington Post, June 28, 2013.

How to Get More Women (and Men) to Call Themselves Feminists. By Christina Hoff Sommers.

How to Get More Women (and Men) to Call Themselves Feminists. By Christina Hoff Sommers. The Atlantic, June 25, 2013.

Focus on injustice, poverty, and women in parts of the world beyond the United States.

“The sword is drawn, the Navy upholds it!” Painted by Kenyon Cox, N.A. 1917. Library of Congress.

 An image of feminist empowerment from World War I.

A New Samson Mosaic Revealed at the 5th-Century AD Synagogue in Huqoq.

The Face of an Israelite Judge: Another Samson mosaic revealed at Huqoq. By Megan Sauter. Bible History Daily, June 27, 2013.

New mosaics discovered in synagogue excavations in Galilee. UNC News, June 24, 2013.

Strong as an ox, Samson effortlessly carries the gate of Gaza on his shoulders in this newly discovered mosaic decorating the floor of the fifth-century A.D. synagogue at Huqoq. Photo by Jim Haberman.

Greece Eats Austerity Lentils. By Joanna Kakissis.

Austerity Lentils. By Joanna Kakissis. Foreign Policy, July/August 2012.

Why Cold War Presidents Were Better. By Robert Kaplan.

Why Cold War Presidents Were Better. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, June 27, 2013.

Eight Reasons Straight Men Don’t Want To Get Married. By Helen Smith.

8 Reasons Straight Men Don’t Want To Get Married. By Helen Smith. The Huffington Post, June 20, 2013.

America in 2013 AD is Rome in 200 AD. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Glue Holding America Together. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, June 27, 2013.

Hanson:

As it fragments into various camps, the country is being held together by a common popular culture.

 

By A.D. 200, the Roman Republic was a distant memory. Few citizens of the global Roman Empire even knew of their illustrious ancestors like Scipio or Cicero. Millions no longer spoke Latin. Italian emperors were a rarity. There were no national elections.

Yet Rome endured as a global power for three more centuries. What held it together?

 

A stubborn common popular culture and the prosperity of Mediterranean-wide standardization kept things going. The Egyptian, the Numidian, the Iberian, and the Greek assumed that everything from Roman clay lamps and glass to good roads and plentiful grain was available to millions throughout the Mediterranean world.

 

As long as the sea was free of pirates, thieves were cleared from the roads, and merchants were allowed to profit, few cared whether the lawless Caracalla or the unhinged Elagabalus was emperor in distant Rome.

 

Something likewise both depressing and encouraging is happening to the United States. Few Americans seem to worry that our present leaders have lied to or misled Congress and the American people without consequences.

 

Most young people cannot distinguish the First Amendment from the Fourth Amendment — and do not worry about the fact that they cannot. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln are mere names of grammar schools, otherwise unidentifiable to most.

 

Separatism is believed to bring dividends. Here in California, universities conduct separate graduation ceremonies predicated on race — sometimes difficult given the increasingly mixed ancestry of Americans.

 

As in Rome, there is a vast disconnect between the elites and the people. Almost half of Americans receive some sort of public assistance, and almost half pay no federal income tax. About one-seventh of Americans are on food stamps.

 

Yet housing prices in elite enclaves — Manhattan, Cambridge, Santa Monica, Palo Alto — are soaring. The wealthy like to cocoon themselves in Roman-like villas, safe from the real-life ramifications of their own utopian ideology.

 

The government and the media do their best to spread the ideals of radical egalitarianism while avoiding offense to anyone. There is no official War on Terror or against radical Islamism. Instead, in “overseas contingency operations,” we fight “man-caused disasters,” while at home, we deal with “workplace violence.”

 

In news stories that involve crimes with divisive racial themes, the media frequently paper over information about the perpetrators. But that noble restraint only seems to incite readers. In reckless fashion they often post the most inflammatory online comments about such liberal censorship. Officially, America celebrates diversity; privately, America is fragmenting into racial, political, and ideological camps.

 

So why is the United States not experiencing something like the rioting in Turkey or Brazil, or the murder of thousands in Mexico? How are we able to avoid the bloody chaos of Syria, the harsh dictatorships of Russia and China, the implosion of Egypt, or the economic hopelessness now endemic in southern Europe?

 

About half of America and many of its institutions operate as they always have. Caltech and MIT are still serious. Neither interjects race, class, and gender studies into its engineering or physics curricula. Most in the IRS, unlike some of their bosses, are not corrupt. For the well driller, the power-plant operator, and the wheat farmer, the lies in Washington are still mostly an abstraction.

 

Get up at 5:30 A.M. and you’ll see that your local freeways are jammed with hard-working commuters. They go to work every day, support their families, pay their taxes, and avoid arrest — so that millions of others do not have to do the same. The U.S. military still more closely resembles our heroes from World War II than it resembles the culture of the Kardashians.

 

Like diverse citizens of imperial Rome, we are united in some fashion by shared popular tastes and mass consumerism. The cell phones and cars of the poor offer more computing power and better transportation than the rich enjoyed just 20 years ago.

 

Youth of all races and backgrounds in lockstep fiddle with their cell phones as they walk about. Jeans are an unspoken American uniform — both for Wall Street grandees and for the homeless on the sidewalks. Left, right, liberal, conservative, professor, and ditch digger have similar-looking Facebook accounts.

 

If Rome quieted the people with public spectacles and cheap grain from the provinces, so too Americans of all classes keep glued to favorite video games and reality-TV shows. Fast food is both cheap and tasty. All that for now is preferable to rioting and revolt.

 

Like Rome, America apparently can coast for a long time on the fumes of its wonderful political heritage and economic dynamism — even if both are little understood or appreciated by most who still benefit from them.