Allan Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute of Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Reflections on Visiting a U.S. Military Cemetery Abroad: The Uniqueness of America and the Dangers of Going to War Precipitously

Recently, this writer visited the U.S. military cemetery at Nettuno, Italy, down the road from Anzio, together with my son Peter and grandson Dario. This caused me to reflect upon both the unique nature of American society and the dangers of going to war precipitously.

The Sicily/Rome American Cemetery was established as a temporary wartime cemetery on January 24, 1944, two days after the actual landing at Nettuno/Anzio, and covers 77 acres. The total number of dead interred is 7,861, which represents only 35 percent of those who died in combat from Sicily to the liberation of Rome. The Wall of the Missing located in the Chapel has 3,095 names inscribed. Twenty-three sets of brothers are buried side by side as well as two sets of twins.

The U.S. maintains on foreign soil 24 permanent military burial grounds. Presently, 124,914 U.S. war dead are interred in these cemeteries: 30,921 of World War I, 93,243 of World War II, and 750 of the Mexican War.

Each grave site in the permanent World War I and II cemeteries on foreign soil is marked by a headstone of pristine marble. Stylized marble crosses mark the graves. Headstones of those of the Jewish faith are tapered marble shafts surmounted by a Star of David.

Following the capture of Rome on June 4, 1944, the Allies pursued the enemy northward toward the Po River and the Alps. For the first time since the Allies landed at Salerno in September, 1943, the enemy was in full retreat.

Sixty-three years after Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy to turn the tide of World War II in Europe, a new visitor center at the Normandy American cemetery in France opened in May, 2007 to tell the story of the 9,387 Americans buried there and put the D-Day landings and follow-on battle in Europe in perspective as one of the greatest military achievements of all time.

Looking at the names and birth dates on the headstones, I remarked to my son, now 31, that the vast majority of those buried were much younger than he is now.

Reading the names of the dead and their hometowns tells us much about the uniqueness of the American society. Virtually every nationality and ethnic group is represented. In the 1840s, Herman Melville wrote that, "We are the heirs of all time and with all nations we divide our inheritance." If you kill an American, he said, you shed the blood of the entire world.

America is more than simply another country. Visiting New Amsterdam in 1643, the French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues was surprised to discover that in this town of 8,000 people, 18 languages were spoken. In his Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in 1782: "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world."

During the radicalism of the 1960s, when many young critics of America denounced their own country, although they understood little of its history, author Mario Puzo wrote:

America . . . may deserve the hatred of its revolutionary young. But what a miracle it once was. What has happened here has never happened in any other country in any other time. The poor who had been poor for centuries -- hell, since the beginning of Christ -- whose children had inherited their poverty, their illiteracy, their hopelessness, achieved some economic dignity and freedom. You didn't get it for nothing, you had to pay a price in tears, in suffering, but why not? And some even became artists.

As a young man growing up in Manhattan's Lower East Side, Puzo was asked by his mother, an Italian immigrant, what he wanted to be when he grew up. When he said he wanted to be a writer, she responded that, "For a thousand years in Italy no one in our family was even able to read." But in America everything was possible -- in a single generation.

Puzo Writes:

It was hard for my mother to believe that her son could become an artist. After all, her own dream in coming to America had been to earn her daily bread, a wild dream in itself, and looking back she was dead right. Her son an artist? To this day she shakes her head. I shake mine with her.

In 1866, Lord Acton, the British Liberal leader, said that America was becoming the "distant magnet." Apart from the "millions who have crossed the ocean, who shall reckon the millions whose hearts and hopes are in the United States, to whom the rising sun is in the West?"

At a celebration in New York of the 150th anniversary of Norwegian immigration, news commentator Eric Sevareid, whose grandfather emigrated from Norway, addressed the group -- in the form of a letter to his grandfather. He said:

You knew that freedom and equality are not found but created. . . . This grandson believes this is what you did. I have seen much of the world. Were I now asked to name some region on earth where men and women lived in a surer climate of freedom and equality than that Northwest region where you settled -- were I so asked I could not answer. I know of none.

America has been a nation much loved. Germans have loved Germany. Frenchmen have loved France. Swedes have loved Sweden. This, of course, is only natural. America has been loved not only by native Americans, but by men and women throughout the world who have yearned for freedom. America dreamed a bigger dream than any nation in the history of man. It was a dream of a free society in which a man's race, or religion, or ethnic origin would be completely beside the point. It was a dream of a common nationality in which the only price to be paid was a commitment to fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship.

Yet, if visiting the American military cemetery caused this writer to reflect upon the unique nature of our society, it also produced concern about those who would take our nation to war precipitously -- unless absolutely necessary for our own defense and survival.

Consider the neo-conservatives who led us into war in Iraq, a nation, however objectionable its government, which never attacked us and which bore no responsibility for the September 11 terrorist attacks. Kenneth Adelman, head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Reagan administration, predicted that the mission would be a "cakewalk." Other advocates of the war were equally optimistic -- and equally, it seems, unaware of the history of the region. It would be like Paris in 1944, with the Iraqis greeting American troops as liberators, not occupiers. Columnist Mark Steyn predicted in 2003 that "in a year's time Baghdad and Basra will have a lower crime rate than most British cities." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz rejected the idea that the occupation would be a financial drain. He predicted Iraq's oil revenues would pay for the entire cost of reconstruction.

These same neo-conservatives are now beating the drum for war with Iran. Fortunately, the American people, with two wars now in process, are unlikely to heed their call. The neo-conservatives themselves do not take responsibility for their role in taking the nation to war, and even go so far as to deny their own existence. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank reported in February about Richard Perle's appearance at the Nixon Center. Perle, a leading neo-conservative promoter of war, seeks to rewrite history. According to Milbank:

He created a fantastic world in which: 1. Perle is not a neo-conservative. 2. Neo-conservatives do not exist. 3. Even if neo-conservatives did exist, they certainly couldn't be blamed for the disasters of the past eight years. "There is no such thing as a neo-conservative foreign policy," Perle informed the gathering . . . . "I've never advocated attacking Iran," he said, to a few chuckles. . . .

Discussing the foreign policy of the Bush administration, dominated by the thinking of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and their fellow neo-conservatives, Gene Healy, vice president of the Cato Institute, notes:

What, after all, was conservative about George W. Bush's post-September 11 pledges to "rid the world of evil" and "end tyranny in our world"? Conservatives used to believe that there were limits to the federal government's capabilities. . . . Conservatives seem to have forgotten the wisdom of one of their intellectual founders, Russell Kirk, who resisted empire and militarism, and maintained that war had to be a last resort, because it might "make the American president a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, and distort the economy."

At the end of William F. Buckley's life according to longtime National Review hand Jeffrey Hart, Buckley believed that:

. . . the movement he had made destroyed itself by supporting the war in Iraq. . . . American voters don't approve of attacking countries that never threatened us, nor do they care for ambitious, expensive schemes to remake the world through military force. In that, they're more conservative than the conservative movement's leaders have been for quite some time.

Because of the policies advocated by neo-conservatives, new U.S. military cemeteries will be filled. Traditional conservatives always believed that the reason to be the most powerful nation on earth was precisely so that we would not have to fight wars. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, in his July 4, 1821 address, provides a helpful reminder about the traditional goals of our foreign policy:

The United States has, in the lapse of nearly half of century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. . . . She is the well-wisher to the freedom of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

We defeated the Soviet Union, a real enemy dedicated to and capable of our destruction, without going to war. We maintained diplomatic relations with Moscow, and engaged in summit meetings and negotiations. Why should we do less with the much weaker potential adversaries of today?

The U.S. military cemetery in Italy was, to me, a reminder of the high cost of war. Visiting it with my son and grandson made me hopeful that their generations will be spared the sacrifice made by the young men interred there.

Are There Any Limits on Rewarding Bad Behavior?

We have entered a strange new era in which businesses -- whether financial or industrial -- that fail are bailed out by taxpayers and in which individuals who took loans they could not afford are subsidized by those who live within their means. This is being done with the assent of both political parties. It was the Bush administration that started the bailout process. Now, the Obama administration is carrying it to further extremes. Republicans, being out of power, now find the whole notion of bailouts a form of "socialism." When they held power, it seemed to be quite all right.

Permitting failed businesses -- and banks -- to fail is part of the free enterprise system. "There's something fundamental about the need for failure," says Syd Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and author of Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It from Happening to You. He declares: "We're tinkering with the genetic DNA of a capitalist society."

James Grant, founder of "Grant's Interest Rate Observer," points out that in the 1870s, there was a five-year depression, followed by the historic era of mechanization that destroyed old industries and generated new ones. "It was a time of terrific insecurity," he says. "It was also a golden era of dynamism. Such companies as IBM (started in the 1880s), Johnson & Johnson (1885) and General Electric (1892) date from that period.

Commentator Rick Newman points out that companies such as Nike and Reebok

. . . gained a foothold in the 1970s because their established competitions -- Converse and Keds -- failed to foresee the boom in running and aerobics. Toyota has relentlessly exploited the failure of Ford and General Motors to satisfy their customers. IBM went through a near-death experience in the 1990s after betting wrongly that the old mainframe would dominate the PC -- a painful experience that the company's leaders now tout as a crash course in adaptation.

Don Keough, former CEO of Coca-Cola and author of The Ten Commandments for Business Failure states:

Ask 100 people "What have you learned from success?" and most of them will just look at you. But ask what you learned from failure, and you'll get lots of answers.

Keough points to one of his most dramatic failures, the 1985 introduction of New Coke, which market researchers predicted would be a hit.

By subsidizing bad business decisions, we are turning the very idea of capitalism on its head. Chrysler, for example, got its first government bailout in 1980. Now it -- together with General Motors -- is back at the public trough once again. The carmakers now say that they need $50 billion of taxpayers support to see them through. The Economist argues that:

Bailing out Detroit would be a bad use of public money. It would be bad in principle, because it would be an open invitation to companies everywhere to apply for aid to survive the recession. . . . Nothing would sap a recovery and job-creating enterprise like locking up badly used resources in poorly performing companies. . . . The U.S. created Chapter 11 precisely to help companies that need protection from their creditors while they restructure their liabilities and winnow out the good business from the bad.

No one seems to take responsibility for the bad decisions that have led to the current economic meltdown. Indeed, the very men and women who led our financial sector, our auto industry and housing sector to disaster, will be the same people to whom bailout funds are given. The financial bailouts reward bankers who destroyed their institutions by taking irrational risks. The auto bailouts subsidize companies and unions that, together, destroyed the viability of their industry. The housing plan will force people who bought homes they could afford to subsidize those who did not.

Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, notes that:

Financial wizards like Robert Rubin at Citicorp, Richard Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae -- all of whom made millions as they left imploding corporations -- had degrees from America's top universities. They had sophisticated understanding of hedge funds, derivatives, and subprime mortgages -- everything, it seems but moral responsibility for the investments of millions of their ordinary clients. . . . Millions of Americans who played by the rules . . . lost much of their retirement savings. . . . yet most disgraced Wall Street elites will retain their mega-bonuses and will not go to jail.

Thoughtful observers across the political spectrum understand that free enterprise without failure is a far different economic system from the one we have had, and the one which most Americans seek to perpetuate. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman notes that:

This is not the American way. Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we'll get out of this crisis. General Motors has become a giant wealth-destruction machine -- possibly the biggest in history -- and it is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so that they can truly start over under new management with new labor agreements and new visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money should focus on start-ups, not bailouts.

A recent study at New York University's Stern School of Business argues that the government has been too generous to bailed-out banks, giving them up to $70 billion more than necessary. Instead, it declares, it would be wiser to aid healthier banks, while letting market forces work their way with the sick banks. What may be necessary, NYU states, is bankruptcy protection for failed banks and business organizations. After a company declares Chapter 11, government could offer loans to help the company restructure, and bankruptcy judges have broad power to remove existing management, cut executive pay and order major changes. Sometimes, of course, liquidation is the best option.

When CNBC's Rick Santelli argued that President Obama's mortgage bailout plan would force hardworking Americans to pay for their neighbors' mistakes, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed him as a know-nothing derivatives trader out of touch with Main Street. But, declares Politico, the Capital Hill weekly:

If the White House simply dismisses Santelli's point, it may do so at its peril: A Rasmussen poll . . . found that 55 percent of those surveyed thought federal mortgage subsidies to those most at risk of losing their homes would be "rewarding bad behavior." Santelli's "Network"-style diatribe has already spawned a facebook group, and plans for "tea parties" protesting the bailout in major cities.

Economist Thomas Sowell says that people living beyond their means is hardly a recent phenomenon:

What is new is the current notion of indulging people who refused to save for a rainy day or to live within their means. In politics, it is called "compassion" -- which comes in both the standard liberal version and "compassionate conservatism." The one person toward whom there is no compassion is the taxpayer. . . . The old and trite phrase "sadder but wiser" is old and trite for the same reason that "saving for a rainy day" is old and trite. It reflects an all too common human experience.

In Sowell's view:

Even in an era of much-ballyhooed "change," the government cannot eliminate sadness. What it can do is transfer that sadness from those who made risky and unwise decisions to the taxpayers who had nothing to do with their decisions. Worse, the subsidizing of bad decisions destroys one of the most effective sources of better decisions -- namely, the consequences of bad decisions. In the wake of the housing debacle in California, more people are buying less expensive homes, making bigger down payments, and staying away from "creative" and risky financing. It is amazing how fast people learn when they are not insulated from the consequences of their decisions.

In the midst of our collapsed economy, no one seems to take responsibility for the bad decisions that have led us to this place. No one in a position of authority has resigned. Instead, we, as taxpayers, are asked to pay for their mistakes. Capitalism involves both success and failure. If we eliminate failure, call it what you will, it is no longer free enterprise. *

The American's Creed

"I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, a democracy in a republic, a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.

"I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies." --William Tyler Page, Written 1917, accepted by the United States House of Representatives on April 3, 1918