‘I Didn’t Have an Answer’

The New York Sun’s May 11-13 editorial, “I Didn’t Have an Answer,” says President Bush is now “in Lincoln’s boots,” with respect to the propriety of his calling upon the rest of the country to pursue the current war in Iraq without criticism.

This extraordinary conclusion is derived by the editors from a description of a meeting in 1865 between President Lincoln and Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune. Medill claimed that he tried unsuccessfully to get Lincoln to reduce the Union draft quota for Chicago’s Cook County and that rejecting the appeal Lincoln argued that the Northwest and its journalists were “largely responsible for making blood flow as it has” and, therefore, should make the sacrifices necessary to run the war.

Even if we believe that Lincoln angrily told Medill that since the paper had agitated for war it must now bear the burden of winning it, where would the parallel be to 2007? Modern American newspapers perhaps with the exception of the Sun did not demand that the President invade Iraq. To the contrary, President Bush sold a bill of goods about weapons of mass destruction to the nation’s editors as well as to Congress, most of whom, along with most of the rest of the country since then, have concluded they were bamboozled into accepting the president’s illusory rationale for the war.

It’s also obvious that there is an enormous difference between fighting to preserve democracy and majority rule at home while eradicating slavery, as Lincoln did, and sacrificing life and treasure in a foreign incursion on the basis, to put it gently, of a mistaken rationale.

No one understood this difference better than Lincoln himself. As a Congressman in the late 1840s, he objected passionately to America’s war with Mexico. Speaking out on the floor of the House of Representatives on January 12, 1848, Lincoln warned in a speech President Bush and recalcitrant modern editors would profit from reading anew to beware of the “exceeding brightness of military glory that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.”

To Lincoln, President Polk had demanded an unjustifiable American war on foreign soil which dragged on until, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, President Polk found himself lost. Lincoln described Polk’s dangerous obstinacy: “How like the half insane mumblings of a fever-dream” were his stubborn justifications for the misadventure. What Lincoln considered Polk’s unnecessary war is a historical analogy worth studying today.

It is also worth pointing out that one of the Republican Congressmen who went to the White House last week to read President Bush the riot act on the Iraq disaster was Rep. Ray LaHood of Peoria, Ill., the city where in 1854 Lincoln warned his own party that “our Republican robe is soiled” by indifference to real injustice in that case, slavery. Congressman LaHood currently serves as co-chairman of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Perhaps he understands when to channel Lincoln, and when not to, better than the Sun’s editors.

Finally, a coda: editor Joseph Medill does deserve credit for one good act. In championing the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates he presciently assigned a “stenographic reporter” to transcribe every word the candidates spoke. The results, which would have been lost to history without Medill’s innovation, were published in newspapers across the country. Later, they formed the core of a book published in 1860 that undoubtedly helped Lincoln win the nomination and election as president in an age when issues really counted. Iraq is an issue that cries out for the kind of serious, protracted, detailed debate, which the country once routinely expected of its aspirants for high office. Instead we get “interview” sessions requiring one-minute answers to “gotcha” personality questions, and weak efforts to pretend George Bush somehow is “in Lincoln’s boots.” Those shoes would be much too big for our harried president.

Where is Joseph Medill when we really need him — to get our presidential candidates to debate the Iraq mess in detail, accurately and publicly?

MARIO CUOMO
New York, N.Y.
The writer, formerly governor of New York, is the author of, among other books, “Why Lincoln Matters, Today More Than Ever.”

The finest editorial to see the light of the day in as long as I can remember .

ROBERT HELD
New York, N.Y.

I am sure President Lincoln had better plans for America than to shed the blood of a whole generation, but shed blood he did. Oceans of it. Because he saw the preservation of the Union as sacrosanct, and would not stand for America’s Balkanization over the issue of slavery. The South left him no choice.

Al Qaeda in Iraq leaves us no choice as well. As a veteran I feel deeply for the suffering and deaths of our nation’s finest. But this is the situation we find ourselves in today in Iraq. Harping on whether or not it was justified in the first place is a moot point. Al Qaeda has chosen this battlefield to make their great stand. And stand and fight we must, like it or not. There are greater issues at stake here. Our survival, for one.

Keep this also in mind: when we retreated from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident, Al Qaeda was feeling their oats and came at us everywhere, from the first World Trade Center attack to the last. If we retreat from Iraq in similar fashion, who in their right mind really thinks things will get better for us?

JOHN SIMPSON
Via www.nysun.com

Beautifully to the point. Thank you.

K.L. duPRE
Via www.nysun.com

The proverbial nail must be smarting as it was hit right square on the head.

MICHAEL DIXON
Via www.nysun.com

Such a nonsensical comparison. This war is lost because the American people have no desire to sacrifice anything. We don’t have a draft, and we place the entire burden on a few hundred thousand. We don’t even want to pay for it. We’re borrowing money and passing the bills onto our kids.

RICK SCHWAG
Via www.nysun.com

Bush? Lincoln?? Please.

KEN BRONFENBRENNER
Via www.nysun.com

The comparison of the Iraq invasion to the American Civil War would be a joke if we didn’t have 3,400-plus dead soldiers and tens of thousands wounded in a war that serves no American interest, no American asked for, had nothing to do with national security or — unlike our own civil war — served no purpose other than fanning hatred against America. And let’s not forget, Bush isn’t a Lincoln.

JEFFREY ABELSON
Via www.nysun.com

Thank you New York Sun for the magnificent editorial. I, for one, have the greatest respect for our president and pray that he remains strong and resolute in the face of the horrific enemy we all face. He also has demonstrated awesome grace under unjustified fire from idiots and history will be kind to him.

LYNN CAMPBELL
Via www.nysun.com

A Gettysburg Address of Editorials. I am getting an online subscription to the Sun today simply because of this editorial. It is the best I have ever read.

DAVID KLEYKAMP
Via www.nysun.com

Simply brilliant.

RALPH LOGAN
Via www.nysun.com

The difference between then and now is that Lloyd Wendt and Joseph Medill were honorable men. The same cannot be said of those who were all for the war when it seemed politically advantageous and who are now against the war because it seems politically advantageous.

What will happen if the surge succeeds, if Iraq quiets down, if we actually do put a functional democracy in the midst of the Middle East? Wouldn’t that be the political death knell of the anti-war party? And, isn’t that why having chosen the path they’re on they must do anything to prevent success?

JOHN CLIFFORD
Via www.nysun.com

The Sun may think it doesn’t matter who the “pleaders” are, but the fact is that while President Lincoln may have given Boston and Chicago the war they asked for, President Bush gave Congress and Americans a war they did not need.

Moreover, Mr. Bush’s mistakes in not asking for real sacrifices from Americans when he started the war are the primary reason it is so difficult to ask for them now. This is a nice little parable, but the comparison of Presidents Bush to Lincoln is devastatingly inept. The only connections are that they were both presidents leading an unpopular war.

MICHAEL WILKERSON
Via www.nysun.com

This is a shining example of the position that circumstance and political pressure put on our presidents. No one outside their inner circles can truly know what burdens they must live with day in and day out, like the lives of all the young people put in harm’s way by their decree, or countless others. We can only stand in support of them and applaud how they hold their ground when they know they must live by their decisions, political risk, or not. I can only hope Mr. Bush reads your editorial.

EDMUNDO BALDERRAMA
Via www.nysun.com

Heart-wrenching because it is exactly the spot President Bush has been put into.

HELEN BENEDICT
Via www.nysun.com

Thank you for this reminder. History can help us make good decisions about our future and will help us have courage to fight the battle for freedom for ourselves and others who desire to be free.

ROY CROSBY
Via www.nysun.com

Will people never look back at history? President Bush is very courageous in the face of the nation’s newspapers.

LEO KHANDJIAN
Via www.nysun.com

God bless President Lincoln and President Bush. May our current efforts be crowned with success. May the Iraq people achieve an open and representative government consistent with their history and culture. May the Iraqi success be an example to other oppressed peoples in the region. Modern day copperheads will assume their rightful role in the cool hindsight of history.

DOUG SANTO
Pasadena, Calif.
Via www.nysun.com

I find this article to be a good analogy of what is going on today. The press wields great power and could do so much for the war effort; but they are mired in their prejudices. The congress sees only their own reelection, not the greater good or the future of the country; nor how their actions will be viewed through the microscope of time.

KIM BALDINGER
Via www.nysun.com

What a great story out of history. I have read a great deal about the Civil War and never came across this. It is truly one for the ages and for this particular age we are living in.

JOSEPH KANE
Via www.nysun.com