Days of Infamy

From Scott Horton:

In his first inaugural, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told us that “the only thing we have to fear… is fear itself.” The Roosevelt presidency, and especially the conduct of the Second World War is the first proof of this statement. And in the last five years, Americans have lived through a second proof of it—if they only will open their eyes and see it. Those words sound simple to us today, and we need to remember the context in which they were uttered. As Roosevelt spoke, a shadow of totalitarianism had fallen across much of the world—fascism dominated the European continent and the rising Empire of Japan and communism covered the great Eurasian landmass that stretched in between them. These totalitarian regimes shared many common traits, and chief among them was the use of fear as a political tool. Fear was used to render the domestic populace silent and stupid. Fear was used to threaten and win concessions from the surviving democratic states on the periphery of the totalitarian swamp. Roosevelt understood the threat perfectly, and he understood that fear and the use of fear was the essential dividing line between the Western democracies and the totalitarian states. But somewhere along the line, this fundamental truth was forgotten in America.

In one of his earliest works, Edmund Burke tells us that fear is the hallmark of a despotic society. Fear is used to make a population stupid and subservient; it is used to chill the natural demand for the most basic of freedoms and liberties. A ruler who uses fear in this way deserves contempt, Burke wrote. One of the essential tools of fear is torture. Historical studies of the use of torture inevitably find that torture exists not as a device to gather intelligence, but as a tool to instill fear — to petrify, to silence. The Catechism of the Catholic Church understands this. It contains a single section addressing torture, and it is the same section which addresses terror used as a political tool. The Catechism teaches, and correctly understands, that torture is in its essence a tool for terrorizing a population.

This is why Roosevelt was explicit about fear as a tool, why Allied propaganda made clear that torture marked our adversaries, but not us. The Greatest Generation upheld our nation’s ideals when it went to war. It understood the value of those ideals as weapons. It won the war. And then it did some real magic. By treating our adversaries as human beings, by showing them dignity and respect, our grandfathers’ generation created a new world in the rubble of the Second World War. The nations which were our bitterest adversaries — Germany, Italy and Japan — emerged in the briefest time as our committed friends and allies. A world was born in which America was the dynamic center. And the foundation was laid to win the Cold War as well, after which America would emerge as the world’s sole superpower, its direction-giving force.

Days of Infamy, indeed.  We are living through them.  Something to remember this Christmas, and especially next fall: living and voting out of fear is no way to live our lives or elect our leaders.  I'd encourage everyone to vote for someone who is NOT trying to scare you this primary season and next November.  It is what the Greatest Generation would have done.

It maybe be that FDR's overall legacy is positive, but it ranks as one of the most shameful presidential decisions in the history of our union. That goes beyond "nobody is perfect".

Agreed.  I really am not going to even inch near defending that decision EXCEPT to say that, as you know, these were not death camps and therefore cannot (imo) be compared to the Nazis.  So ... unredeemable?  THAT is a great question, and worthy of a true debate.  My position would be that it was not systematic murder and, as far as I know (please correct me if I am wrong), some of the internees were released before the war was over and all were released after the war was over and restored to full citizenship.  That does not negate the decision to place them in the camps, but it brings a context to the overall judgment of FDR's decision.

Is his presidency unredeemable?  For you that might be the case and I would not blame you for that decision.  But for me I have to look at the overall way the war and the depression were handled and I come away with better impression.  Overall.  The firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and other cities are more damning to me than the imprisonment of the Japanese-Americans.  These are strategic decisions that (imo) brought a level of shame and callousness to America that we had before.  But then you have the FEPC, which many have argued was the first breath of the Civil Rights Movement.  You have the New Deal which ushered in decades of un-before-seen prosperity. 

FDR is a tough call, no doubt, and we haven't even discussed the A-Bombs.  But my overall point was that his brand of leadership during WWII - especially the way he rallied Americans to win instead of being afraid is what we are missing in this country.  The Republicans have their detainees, but they sure don't have much moral leadership.

While you, being the non-partisan, jump on a thread commemorating a historical tragedy, with no political advocacy beyond a call to support our veterans and men and women in uniform, quoting a Democratic Party senator in pursuit of that idea... try to turn it into a "this party bad / this party good" argument to convince people to support one over the other.  And of course, denounce the person who posted it as a partisan...

Oh, please.  You're about as non-partisan as Mitt Romney is Catholic.  You lost your ability to pretend otherwise LONG ago.  Read my original post, it had nothing to do with partisanship - it had to do with voting out of courage instead of fear.  YOU, my friend, are the one who jumped in to make sure everyone knew that DEMOCRATS are as "fear mongering" as REPUBLICANS.  Where did you imagine that conversation was going to go?  Equating the scare tactics of the GOP with the DNC is going to get a rebuttal every time because (guess what?) the GOP is COUNTING ON FEAR to usher it into another four years in the White House.

Or as FDR might have said, "the only thing GOP has to fear ... is that people won't be afraid".

I am not claiming to be non-partisan.  I definitely have my problems with the Democrats, especially on the issue of torture (kind of the point of my original post) but I definitely side with the Democrats and consider myself to be on the left of the politcal spectrum.  No surprise there.

What IS surprising is your sensitivity about be labelled a partisan.  I guess I am scratching my head trying to figure out what else to call a person who would take a fairly benign post about the un-American nature of torture and remind everyone that – Hey!  Don't forget Democrats use fear too!

Do you really not see the role FEAR plays in Republican politics?  I mean, you really don't see it?  And if you do see it, are you honestly claiming that the Democrats use FEAR as much as Republicans?  Really?  Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani all claiming a win by Democrats will mean more attacks like September 11.  This is the same as Barack Obama arguing that the Iraq War has made us less safe?

Really?

See, I don't understand this logic.  It makes no sense to me because it is SO obvious that Republicans play that fear-of-terrorists card so easily and freely and that card is just not the same as a foreign policy critique.  When I see you write this stuff, I have a hard time as viewing you as a "non-partisan independent".  Similar to when you spent two or three days trying to convince everyone 'round here that the War in Iraq really was legal because ... uh ... why was it legal again?

Not quite as painful as reading your "defense of the indefensible" comment.  Downplaying what you openly admit were atrocities... for reasonable ends and because 'nobody's perfect?'

Where did I downplay the internment camps again?  Where did I claim they were the means to a reasonable end?  You're losing me.

What I thought I was doing was balancing the faults and the achievements of one of our Presidents.  This is not an easy thing to do, but I find it a very interesting exercise.  Of course it is made much more difficult if I have to worry that speaking logically and objectively about that President's actions is going to have me labeled as an insensitive bastard.

Glock, if you really want to be considered a "bi-partisan independent" then more power to you.  I just don't see it, sorry.  But it is already clear that we don't see things the same way, so no news there.

Have a great weekend!

Lets not lose sight of how terrible all of the days were, and how so many acted with complete disregard for their own safety to help others.

Let those who acted with such courage, cleanse their medals with my tears.

To that end, I am, and shall always remain;
Rex Bradfield

I got to about the fourth paragraph of my response here and realized that I should have let your posts speak for themselves from the beginning.

That would have been fine with me.  I didn't realize posting an article about the inherent unAmerican-ness of torture would require a bi-partisan disclaimer.  Duly noted for future reference.

It does not justify using the power of the executive office to terrorize the citizenry in the name of national defense.

This was actually the point I made in my original post. I would suggest further exploration of this topic here and here.  Donations are also welcome, I would suggest this group needs your money most desperately at the moment.

To the issue of my apparent support of the internment of the Japanese-Americans, context and a quick reading of this thread would show that when I tried to draw a contrast between the way FDR handled WWII and the way the War of Terror has been handled, Xian wisely pointed out that the parallel between the way FDR detained the Japanese-Americans during WWII and the way we have used torture is quite strong.  This quickly turned into a debate about the merits of FDR, to which I responded:

Is his presidency unredeemable?  For you (Xian) that might be the case and I would not blame you for that decision.  But for me I have to look at the overall way the war and the depression were handled and I come away with better impression.  Overall.  The firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and other cities are more damning to me than the imprisonment of the Japanese-Americans.  These are strategic decisions that (imo) brought a level of shame and callousness to America that we had before.  But then you have the FEPC, which many have argued was the first breath of the Civil Rights Movement.  You have the New Deal which ushered in decades of un-before-seen prosperity. 

FDR is a tough call, no doubt, and we haven't even discussed the A-Bombs.  But my overall point was that his brand of leadership during WWII - especially the way he rallied Americans to win instead of being afraid is what we are missing in this country.  The Republicans have their detainees, but they sure don't have much moral leadership.

Now I know that many of us are not in the practice of actually reading the thread before you post, but I am wondering how, when reading the entirity of what I have written, anyone can honestly come away with the impression that I think the internment of the Japanese-Americans was a "moment of weakness for an otherwise great man"?  Where does one get the impression that I am justifying or downplaying that decision?  The only way I could see that implication is the contrast I drew with the strategic decision to kills hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.  And yes, I stand by my claim that FDR should be criticized more for THOSE decisions than the internment policy.  But in grown-up world that doesn't mean I thereby think the internment was perfectly fine.

I thought I was having a rational, objective conversation about FDR's Presidency.  I also thought it would somehow be ok for me to disagree with someone on here about the positives and negatives of that Presidency.  That perhaps it would acceptable to draw a different conclusion through the analysis of the evidence on hand.  Guess I was wrong about that one.  Again, duly noted for future reference.

You are wrong, though it is not clear to me what Rummy has done that would be on the level of a New Deal or leadership through the most successful war in American history.  Not to mention the FEPC, which (as I stated earlier) is one of the forebearers of the Civil Rights Movement, though even that could be argued to be a result of pressure from Randolph.  But I digress.

FDR is a complicated President and he brings up all sorts of relevant and interesting debate topics.  Detainees is one area of concern, firebombing and atomic bombing are another.  Is his contribution to world history diminished because of these judgments?  You bet.  Does that mean he is to be relegated to the trash bin of history?  I'm not so sure.

I do know that I did not intend to disregard the internment camps and would never do so.  I thought I went out of my way to make clear that I found them to be atrocious and a disgraceful part of American history.  To then turn around and read that someone thinks I am somehow diminishing the impact of those camps is disappointing, but somewhat par for the course.  If a commenter tries to engage any controversial issue it seems that he or she will be instantly cast into one camp or the other, all explanations to the contrary being damned.  I honestly feel that I could type in bold words that I DO NOT THINK IT WAS OKAY TO INTERN JAPANESE-AMERICANS DURING WORLD WAR II and I would still have people saying,

you're minimizing the impact of a failure of conscience that should never be quietly put away into the closet of our uncomfortable past.

But honestly, it just sucks to have to continue explaining myself.

Has there ever been a campaign in all of history that didn't use that approach?  One man's "grave concern" is another man's "tactics of fear-mongering".

Hmm.  I guess I am not familiar with the historic campaigns in which voters were advised to vote for one party or risk being killed in a terrorist attack.  Maybe McClellan during 1864?  I'd have to look it up.  But either way, I think the implications of the 2004 campaign and Giuliani's early statements leave the GOP in the category as "over the top" when it comes to fearmongering.  Tancredo's recent ads also repeat the theme.  Vote for me or armed immigrants will kill your children at the mall?  This is supposed to be "grave concern", not fear mongering?  Maybe we need to revisit our definitions, eh?

It seems to me that the contention that FDR didn't play on people's fear in totally contradicted by...drumroll please...the arrest, relocation, and years-long detention of tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans.  How can someone not be playing on people's deepest fears when the implied statement, after a surprise attack that kills thousands of Americans, is that the Japanese family living next door to you might be in cahoots with the enemy?  Or that your loose lips may sink the ships that take men and supplies to the theater?  (The merchant marine suffered a higher casualty rate than all other services.)  And the whole portrayal of the Japanese during WWII was that if we lost, they would come to America and enslave or kill us - and in light of what they did in China, I would stress that this wasn't a totally unreasonable fear.

NIE on Iran?  So we're trusting the intelligence community now?  They just managed to pull off the two biggest intel failures - 9/11, WMDs - in American, possibly world history. (I would put them ahead of Pearl Harbor because we barely had an intel capability then as opposed to 50 years and billions of dollars later in 2001-2003.)  Wouldn't a more prudent strategy be to take whatever they say and believe the exact opposite?  Anyway, the NIE says that Iran had stopped it's covert program - the part where they figure out how to design the bomb - because last time I checked, they are still moving ahead with the overt part, where they enrich uranium, and which is the harder part.  Let's not let Iran off the hook just yet, especially since any NIE is only a series of educated guesses using incomplete information (see: Iraq).

I thought that Kem got to the heart of the matter (although I may be mischaracterizing his views), that there's a fine line between irrational fear and prudent fear.  I know that people are more likely to die in an auto accident than in a terrorist attack, but that hardly makes the fear irrational.  The people that died on 9/11 were mostly office workers, regular people going about their daily routine - just like other Americans.  So many people knew others that died that day - people they went to high school or college with, or friends that escaped across the plaza as bodies fell 100 floors around them.  How can people not be fearful when it strikes so close to them?

I would agree that both parties use fear, and they do it a lot: the fear of terrorism, crime, global warming, illegal aliens, legal abortions, illegal abortions, activist liberal judges, activist conservative judges, the draft (John Kerry promised me a draft if GWB won - who's the liar now?), the ACLU in charge of America, Halliburton in charge of America, confiscatory taxation, enhanced affirmative action, gutted affirmative action, etc.  It seems that the moral of the story is: be afraid...be *very* afraid.

Heh heh...yeah, Rex, I pretty much did that to, from ages 13-21.  With that in mind, I recommend grounding the intelligence community, taking away all car privileges, and not letting them go on that ski trip that they have been bugging us about.

It was too much absurdity for me to bear.

What conversation would that be?  The one you are having with the strawman in your head?  I argued none of the things you just claimed I argued.  Neither did I claim the following:

Bush is the ultimate evil for the actions that pale in comparison to FDR's crimes against U.S. citizens and the brutal tactics he employed during World War II. ... But for someone to hate Bush for those actions yet consider FDR one of the finest presidents of our nation in spite his far more extreme actions in the same matters?

Who said anything about Bush?  Who hates Bush?  I guess the part where I said ...

Overall.  The firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and other cities are more damning to me than the imprisonment of the Japanese-Americans.  These are strategic decisions that (imo) brought a level of shame and callousness to America that we had before.

... is to be ignored.  Or better yet it should be comprehended as me hating Bush.  Sure, that makes sense.

I can't even start to comprehend the kind of blind partisan loyalty to forgive such a man and be so dismissive over those issues.  If the WWII era propaganda wasn't the politics of fear... or at least of hate, I don't know what is.

What I enjoy most about this conversation, Glock, is your simple, ironic and illogical points.  Someone (oh, that was me) pointed out a long time ago that your partisanship was getting the better of your rational thinking skills.  You have now completely blown your top.  Instead of brushing past the point, or proving that I was wrong, you have now gone to great lengths to attempt to insult me over and over again as being the partisan you could never be.  It's like I insulted your mother or something.  What I particularly like is the drama involved in your insults.  As though anyone who dares believed FDR is anything but a butcher is completely irrational and on the level of a blathering idiot.  How can one even comprehend such an intellectual stance?  Why it is ... completely incomprehensible!

It's actually pretty funny.  As though you are out there furiously typing away on your keyboard, gaining alliances with other commenters against the Big Bad Wolf who dares to believe FDR is man that could possibly be "forgiven" for his actions as President.  Then the nice transfer onto the modern context and the irrational "Blame Bush for Everything" idea.  Simple, ironic, completely illogical. 

What would be more interesting is if you were able to provide some evidence or some argument that shows how often Democrats use fear to scare the electorate into voting Democratic.  Here's an ad from the 2006 mid-terms, produced by the GOP.  Here's a story off Politico about Giuliani claiming a win by the Democrats will mean another 9/11.  And here's CNN's story on Dick Cheney make the same nefarious argument in the run-up to the 2004.  Now I am sure your bi-partisan, independent self would have never voted Republican in any of these elections (Libertarian Party, perhaps?).  But don't you think this is kind of a theme?

Some people cannot see beyond their own prejudice.  I'm glad others are able to see it for them.

You're welcome.

Its 6 years and 2 months since the 9/11 "Day of Infamy" and I still am not convince the WTC distruction wasn't an "inside job".  If I had just not have taken my U of I 'TECH ELECTOVES' as structural engineering classes or not worked deconstruction design, it would be easier living today.

You all aren't being fair. It was a foolish thing to say, "Nobody's perfect", but once he's admitted that it was a foolish choice of words, it's not fair to continue to use that to attack his greater point.

If I was seen as doing that, it certainly wasn't my intention.  Having read Boon's posts on this thread and others, he just doesn't seem like the type to advocate hauling people off to concentration camps.  If I'm wrong about that, Boon, and the revolution comes, please remember me sticking up for you here and don't haul me off to a concentration camp.  ;-)

However, I can see the larger point that's worth debating.  When I was younger, Andrew Jackson was seen as an unvarnished heroic great American - but history is continually reassessed, and he is now looked at as a terrible war criminal (at worst) or a problematic personality that took some very hard, and even brutal decisions (at best).  Essentially, the Trail of Tears became weighted differently in the assessment of the total actions that he took, some of which were quite possitive.  Why should FDR get a free pass from reassessment?

Yeah, RSW, I posted a long one at 12:47 referring to the original discussion, but no one commented on it.  [Looking forlornly at the ground with sad puppy dog eyes]

Heh heh

As the "some people" who "wanted to comment on how bad the US was is", I'd like to wonder what you would rather I have done, RSWB. As a PWDEBTY (Person who does everything better than you TM), I find it more useful to focus on my own mistakes than others. I use the same principle for evaluating countries.

One of the greatest mistakes people make is to justify their own transgressions by pointing to others'. Of course, Japan caused horrible suffering with their ultra-nationalist pursuit of power. That exacted upon Hawaii pales in comparison to their other actions.

What that has to do with choosing to put American citizens into concentration camps in order to take land and property rights away from them because they were the wrong color is beyond me.

Why did I digress from the main topic to address this issue? Because it was an abomination and it was FDR's responsibility and because it is one of my specialties of study.

ps - Glock has also said now more than once that FDR used the politics of fear for his advantage.  To be specific:

If the WWII era propaganda wasn't the politics of fear... or at least of hate, I don't know what is.  And to glorify the king of such politics because his words were far more idealistic than his actions?

But I would challenge anyone on this blog to point out an ad, speech, radio commercial, etc. in which FDR or the Democratic Party claimed that a vote for a Republican would mean more Japanese, German or Italian attacks.  Or perhaps an ad where the Democrats claimed that voting for a Republican would mean we will lose the war or families will be killed.

Let me save you some time.  You won't find those ads, because the level that the GOP has taken the politics of fear in the last ten years is a new low, even surpassing Johnson's "Daisy" ads from '64.  That is the politics of fear, not propaganda posters demonizing your military enemy to sell war bonds.

Have a good night.

As the "some people" who "wanted to comment on how bad the US was is", I'd like to wonder what you would rather I have done, RSWB. As a PWDEBTY (Person who does everything better than you TM), I find it more useful to focus on my own mistakes than others. I use the same principle for evaluating countries.

What I'd rather you had done was not bring it up in this thread.  You can focus on your own mistakes rather than others - fine.   But when the negatives of our country are brought up, I think it is often perceived as the whole 'moral equivalency' argument - 'yeah, Japan was bad to attack Pearl Harbor, but we were just as bad when we.....'   If you spend your entire time a student of history evaluating all the bad things America has done, what kind of image do you have of your country?

What that has to do with choosing to put American citizens into concentration camps in order to take land and property rights away from them because they were the wrong color is beyond me.

So we did this to take their land?  Aren't you mixing this up with the American Indians?

And he [FDR] also blew it when he allowed the A-Bomb project to get off the ground and continue to fruition.

...conveniently ignoring the fact that the Germans were researching this too.  Nothing like getting your cities vaporized and not being able to respond, or even to deter that.  That's when your choices are surrender unconditionally to your enemy or face extinction - like the decision that Japanese faced.  Plus, it's not like no one was going to eventually figure out how to make one of these later, after the war, in which case we would have been equally screwed.

Yet we forgave them.  We picked them up, brushed them off, and helped them rebuild their countries.

Oh please.  Nothing like delicious, sugar-coated war myths.  In 1945 Germany and Japan were full of sour-ass American GIs that had just seen their buddies blown away by the countries they were occupying - we kept the atrocities down, but there was no love.  We rebuilt these countries because they were worth more to us rebuilt and as bulwarks against the USSR than they were as destroyed societies.  The generosity spin came later, and was a nice byproduct, but not the main reason.  If generosity was our only motivation, the Marshall Plan would have begun in 1945, not 1947.

I have posted three links that show clear usage of fear of terrorist attacks by the GOP in recent elections.  I have asked for examples of the way the Democrats use fear in their campaigns...

[Earlier I had posted the world's longest run-on sentence]: "I would agree that both parties use fear, and they do it a lot: the fear of terrorism, crime, global warming, illegal aliens, legal abortions, illegal abortions, activist liberal judges, activist conservative judges, the draft (John Kerry promised me a draft if GWB won - who's the liar now?), the ACLU in charge of America, Halliburton in charge of America, confiscatory taxation, enhanced affirmative action, gutted affirmative action, etc."  I can keep going if you like.

But I would challenge anyone on this blog to point out an ad, speech, radio commercial, etc. in which FDR or the Democratic Party claimed that a vote for a Republican would mean more Japanese, German or Italian attacks.  Or perhaps an ad where the Democrats claimed that voting for a Republican would mean we will lose the war or families will be killed.

Or, to flip things around a little bit, I challenge anyone in the Democratic Party to show me an ad, speech, radio commercial, in which one of their members not named Lieberman supports the president *to the same extent* that the Republicans supported FDR during WWII.  Did the GOP complain about the fact that every single WWII serviceman's mail was read and censored by his CO (which we don't do today), or that the news was censored, or that the media was virtually an arm of the Pentagon, or that American soldiers sometimes shot surrendering Germans, and frequently shot surrendering Japanese?  And if you think that no one got tortured by us in WWII, I can assure you that some of those surrendering Japanese may have felt some, uh, discomfort - the Ken Burns documentary had a story about a GI extracting a Japanese soldier's gold teeth while he was still alive.

Both sides want to invoke the WWII, but rarely do they want to do some of the harder, nastier things that we did then.  The Germans and Japanese didn't give us some sort of pass in the late 1940s because we were so darn nice to them after the war, they gave us a pass because we bombed the snot out of them, crushed their militaries, occupied every inch of their territory, and had an ally (the USSR) that we could point to that made them ecstatic that they were on the friendlier side of the line.  It was the perfect example of "if you got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow," and not the reverse.  I'm not suggesting that we do the same things again, but we shouldn't expect the same result.

If you spend your entire time a student of history evaluating all the bad things America has done, what kind of image do you have of your country?

One of an honest one improving.

The actions of a few soldiers are not the same as the policies of the US Government.  Our policy from VE and VJ day forward was reconciliation and reconstruction.  The war licked them enough, we didn't need to pound the point home.

Yeah, that's close to the point that I was making, although perhaps I could have made it better.  All of our butt kicking happened during the war, you are right, and we didn't feel a need to rub it in quite to the extent that the USSR did with Germany.  Our policy was reconciliation, but only to the extent that we got to write the Japanese constitution for them or keep the Germans on a very short leash.  And our policy was reconstruction to the extent that we felt that they should get on with reconstruction - they could sift through their own damn rubble.  The Marshall Plan started two years after the war ended, plain and simple, not "from VE and VJ day forward."

We need a new Marshall Plan to rebuild the Middle East...

Ugh.  We have spent the last 60 years proposing "new Marshall Plans" - for Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, Eastern Europe.  Most of them never got funded, and those that did would have been better not funded at all - they were uniformly spectacular failures when measured against the real deal.  The Marshall Plan worked for very specific localized reasons that just aren't in place in the Middle East.  For example, a typical person in Western Europe before the war may have rode the tram to their job, worked at that job, ate at a restaurant for lunch, went to a dept store after work, and then taken the tram home.  In 1945, much of that was destroyed - no tram, no office, no store, no nothing, *except* (and that's a big except) his experience and education.  All you needed to do was to replace what got destroyed, and you would have a functioning industrialized democracy.  It wasn't magic, but it looked like it at the time, and it made us think that if we just threw a bunch of money at a problem - a new Marshall Plan - all would go well.  The only time we have spent close to as much money (or perhaps more) since the late 1940s has been...Iraq.  And look at how successful our reconstruction has been there!

Anyway, it's not exactly politically possible - with oil near a $100 / barrel, it's not like much of the Middle East needs our money.  What they need to do is to use their own money, not for building madrasas, or funding terror groups, not for new palaces and that 20th Rolls Royce in the garage, not for the whiskey-fueled weekend with London prostitutes, and not for vanity projects like planned cities in the middle of the desert - they should use it for smart development.  If there is a lesson from Iraq, it's that we can't solve their problems for them, they are going to have to do it themselves, and want to do it.

Ok, that's good.

I don't have a problem with constructive criticism, I just worry that it can overshadow the good done, whether you are talking about nations or Presidents.