The civil rights coalition in this country has had its way with the Democratic party since 1957. That was the last time the coalition, as a liberal constituency, was defeated. The coalition includes the ACLU and the leaders of such civil rights organizations as People for the American Way and the National Association for the Advancement of (Liberal) Colored People.

How have the leaders of these civil rights organizations become so empowered? They do not have normal jobs. Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, for example, raises money and keeps a percentage of it for himself as head of the organization. The same is true for the head of People for the American Way. They do not have real jobs, yet they have power. They derive that power by utilizing the tools of class envy and hatred.

These people enjoy power for only one reason. Their sole source of strength is their monolithic constituency -- which determines the number of liberal votes they can deliver to Democrats on election day. This monolithic constituency delivers up to 90 percent of the minority vote to the Democratic candidate for president every presidential election year. The ability of all these civil rights groups to deliver the vote for Democrats has invested them with power. This vote, in turn, has invested the Democrats with power. It's a win-win situation. [On p. 41, Limbaugh also claimed, "The Democrats love giving money to the poor because it makes them dependent upon the Democrats and helps to ensure their reelection."] . . .

It is neither far-fetched nor unfair to draw an analogy between the civil rights leadership and the Soviet Communist leadership, insofar as exploitation of their people is concerned. The leaders of both enjoy the privileges of class at the expense of the masses, who do all the work and whom the leaders purport to serve. . . . Their efforts produce no goods or services to be contributed to the economy, but in fact have just the opposite effect.

These passages are classic demagogy, inciting the prejudices of the ignorant against "these people," with a barrage of unsubstantiated, sweepingly vague slanders. (Nowhere here or elsewhere did Limbaugh explain what specific abuses he was criticizing that warranted comparison with the massacres and imprisonment of millions in the Soviet Union.) Beginning with the first sentence, I defy anyone to explain what on earth Limbaugh could have been referring to in 1957. Prominent civil rights leaders at that time included Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, head of the Mississippi NAACP, both of whom were to be murdered by white racists. Hundreds of other leaders were imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and attacked by police dogs and fire hoses for demonstrating peacefully for these rights in the decade following 1957. Given his timeline, we must infer that Limbaugh meant to include King, Evers, and the rest in his unqualified indictment of civil rights leaders who are only out for power (an unprovable, ad hominem charge in any case).

As for their "having their way" (a sexually suggestive phrase) with the Democratic party, 1957 was the year Republican President Eisenhower desegregated Little Rock High School, against armed resistance ordered by Democratic Arkansas governor Orval Faubus. The civil rights movement was waged in opposition to the Democratic segregationists who dominated the party and Southern governments then. The Democrats nationally and in the South only came around to supporting civil rights legislation between 1963 and 1965 -- immediately after which millions of white segregationists switched to become Republicans, forming the base of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968. Can we again infer that passage of those laws ending segregation is what Limbaugh meant by civil rights leaders "having their way" with the Democrats since 1957? His defenders will rationalize that he only was talking about more recent leaders, not the earlier ones. But if that's what he meant, why didn't he just say so, instead of coy wink-wink-nudge-nudge innuendos keyed to that damning date of 1957?

The rest of Limbaugh's passage contains so many logical fallacies in so few words that it would take volumes to unpack them. For a sampling, his insulting account of the nature of the jobs of civil rights leaders (raising money and keeping a portion of it as salary) could be applied with equal accuracy to officials of any nonprofit organization including churches, charities, and such favorite Republican lobbies as the National Rifle Association, anti-abortion groups, and the Christian Coalition.

Or consider the logic of the claim that "the Democrats love giving money to the poor because it makes them dependent upon the Democrats and helps to ensure their reelection" -- with the implication, in context, that most of the poor are minorities. Why would any political party choose to "pander" to poor people, since they have the lowest rate of voter turnout and campaign contributions, and since -- by Limbaugh's own account -- they amount to a small percentage of the American population, even if 90 percent of the number who actually vote do vote for the same party? Wouldn't it be more advantageous to pander to the rich and middle class (and whites) -- in precisely the manner of Limbaugh and the Republicans? When Limbaugh wrote this, before Clinton's election in 1992, Republicans had won seven out of the last ten presidential elections. Which was the "win-win situation"? (Even in 2008, Obama could not have won without a substantial number of white, middle-class voters.) Limbaugh's tirade, of course, fails to recognize the possibility that Democrats might support, and be supported by, minorities and the poor out of genuine moral values, including the teachings of Christ about caring for the poor, rather than the selfishness that this avowed Christian assumes to be his opponents' motive no less than his own.

Limbaugh's other book, See, I Told You So (1993) is equally loaded with factual errors and appeals to ignorance in racial, sexual, religious, and a wide range of other issues. (The editors at Pocket Books, which has made millions from Limbaugh's books, apparently couldn't afford to fact-check them.) My favorite howler is on page 81: "Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes. Read the story of Joseph and Pharoah in Genesis 41. Following Joseph's suggestion (Gen 41:34), Pharoah reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the ‘seven years of plenty' and the ‘Earth brought forth in heaps' (Gen 41:47)."

One at least has to admire Rush's gall in figuring that his legion of religious conservative followers were so gullible they'd swallow this lie about one of the best-known passages in the Bible. Joseph's advice, of course, had nothing to do with taxes, but with the government laying up 20 percent of crops during the years of plenty, to consume during lean years. Sounds like socialistic stifling of the free market to me! Ditto, Rush?

"Early this decade, American soldiers landed on the island of Basilan, here in the southern Philippines, to help root out the militant Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf. Now, Basilan's biggest towns, once overrun by Abu Sayyaf and criminal groups, have become safe enough that a local Avon lady trolls unworriedly for customers. Still, despite seven years of joint military missions and American development projects, much of the island outside main towns like Lamitan remains unsafe."

In attempting to explain the uneven progress of U.S. counterinsurgency operations against Muslim guerillas in the region after the better part of a decade, Onishi also noted, "Basilan, like many other Muslim and Christian areas in the southern Philippines, has a long history of political violence, clan warfare and corruption." While he remained silent about events prior to the 1990s, his newspaper had offered this reasonably rosy assessment of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts against Muslim guerrillas on the same island -- 100 years earlier:

"Detachments of the Twenty-third and Twenty-fifth Infantry, with constabulary and armed launches assisting, are engaged in disarming the Moros on Basilan Island. The troops are distributed around the coast and are co-operating in a series of closing-in movements."

Days after Onishi's report appeared, two American soldiers were killed on nearby Jolo Island. As a Reuters story noted, it "was the first deadly strike against U.S. forces deployed in the southern Philippines since a soldier in a restaurant was killed in 2002..." As in Basilan, however, the U.S. counterinsurgency story in Jolo actually goes back a long way. In early January 1905, to cite just one example, two members of the U.S. military -- the 14th Cavalry to be exact -- were killed during pacification operations on that same island.

That U.S. forces are attempting to defeat Muslim guerrillas on the same two tiny islands a century later should perhaps give President Obama pause as he weighs his options in Afghanistan and considers his recent award. It might also be worth his time to assess the military's record of success in conflicts since World War II, starting with the stalemate war in Korea that began in June 1950 and has yet to end in peace, let alone victory. That quiescent but unsettled conflict provides a ready-made opportunity for the president to achieve a triumph that has long escaped the U.S. military. He could help make a lasting peace on a de-nuclearized Korean peninsula and so begin earning his recent award.

Vietnam and Beyond

At the moment, Obama and his fellow Washington power-players are reportedly immersed in the literature of the Vietnam War in an attempt to use history as a divining rod for discovering a path forward in Afghanistan. At the Pentagon, many evidently still cling to the notion that the conflict was lost thanks to the weakness of public support in the U.S., pessimistic reporting by the media, and politicians without backbones.

Obama would do well to ignore their revisionist reading list for a simple reason: bluntly put, the U.S.-funded French military effort to defeat Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s failed dismally; then, a U.S.-funded effort to set up and arm a viable government in South Vietnam failed dismally; and finally, the U.S. military's full-scale, years' long effort to destroy the Vietnamese forces arrayed against it failed even more dismally -- and not in the cities and towns of the United States, nor even in the halls of power in Washington, but in the hamlets of South Vietnam. U.S. efforts in neighboring Cambodia and Laos similarly crashed and burned.

Victory aside, the U.S. military proved capable during the Vietnam War of accomplishing much. Its true achievement lay in the merciless pummeling it gave the people of Southeast Asia, leaving the region blood-soaked, heavily cratered, significantly poisoned, and littered with explosives, which kill and maim villagers to this day.

In the wake of out-and-out defeat in Indochina, Americans diagnosed themselves as suffering from a "Vietnam Syndrome" (resulting in a less muscular foreign policy -- embarrassing for a global superpower) and in need of a victory cure. In the 1980s and 1990s, this led to "triumphs" over such powers as the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and Panama, a country whose "defense forces," in total, numbered just 12,000 (about half the size of the U.S. ground troops in the invading force) -- and cut-and-run flops in Lebanon and Somalia.

The "lessons" of Vietnam were declared officially buried forever in the scorching deserts of the Middle East in March 1991. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" President George H.W. Bush triumphantly exclaimed at the end of the First Gulf War -- and yet Saddam Hussein, the enemy autocrat, remained firmly ensconced in power in Baghdad and the conflict continued at a less than triumphant simmer for over a decade until his son, George W. Bush, again took the country to war against the same Iraqi leader his father had fought and again declared the mission accomplished.

Following a lightning-fast march on Baghdad in 2003, much like the speedy pseudo-victory in Kuwait in Gulf War I, U.S. forces again proved unable to seal the deal. Bush administration efforts to dominate the country politically by writing Iraq's constitution, while circumventing real elections, were quickly laid low by Iraq's most powerful religious leader, the Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Then, the U.S. military was sent reeling for years by a Sunni insurgency. Though violence is currently tamped down to what is often called "an acceptable level," Iraq remains a war zone and Barack Obama is the fourth president to preside over a seemingly never-ending, irresolvable set of conflicts in that country. (The U.S.-allied Iraqi government has already proclaimed the U.S. a loser, announcing a "great victory" over the U.S. occupation in June 2009 and comparing the withdrawal of most U.S. forces from the country's cities to a historic 1920 Iraqi revolt against British forces. American officials have not disagreed.)

During the 1980s, U.S. proxies in Afghanistan, Muslim mujahideen guerrillas, fought the Soviet occupation. Today, U.S. troops are the occupiers, fighting some of those same mujahidin and in the ninth year of this latest war in Afghanistan, victory still appears to be nowhere on the mountainous horizon, while failure, according to Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal, is once again a possibility.

Late last year, at the 26th Army Science Conference, I listened to one of the top-ranking enlisted men in the Army, a highly decorated veteran of the Global War on Terror, and a draftee during America's losing war in Vietnam, candidly admit that U.S. troops in Afghanistan simply could not keep up with enemy forces. The lightly-armed, body-armor-less guerrillas were too mobile and too agile, he said, for up-armored, heavily weighed-down American troops. When I asked him about the comment later, a colleague of the same rank and fellow Global War on Terror veteran quickly jumped to his defense, declaring, "Yeah, I can't run the mountain with them, but I'll still get them -- eventually." Almost a year later, the better part of a decade into the fight, the unanswered question remains, "When?"

Peace President

The U.S. military is unquestionably powerful and has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to mete out tremendous amounts of destruction and death. From Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Iraq and Afghanistan, enemy fighters and unfortunate civilians, military base camps and people's homes have been laid waste by U.S. forces in decade after decade of conflict. Yet sealing the deal has been another matter entirely. Victory has repeatedly slipped through the fingers of American presidents, no matter how much technology and ordnance has been unleashed on the poor, sometimes pre-industrial populations of America's war zones.

Now, the Nobel Committee has made a remarkable gamble. It has seen fit to offer Barack Obama, who entered the Oval Office as a war president and soon doubled down the U.S. bet on the expanding conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an opportunity for a lasting legacy and real achievement of a sort that has long escaped American presidents. Their prize gives him an opportunity to step back and consider the history of American war-making and what the U.S. military is really capable of doing thousands of miles from home. It's an unparalleled opportunity to face up honestly to the repeatedly demonstrated limits of American military power. It's also the president's chance to transform himself from war-maker by inheritance to his own kind of peace-maker, and so display a skill possessed by few previous presidents. He could achieve a more lasting victory, while limiting the blood, American and foreign, on his -- and all Americans' -- hands.

More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory. What could make the limits of American power any clearer?

The record should be as sobering as it is dismal, while the costs to the peoples in those countries are as appalling as they are unfathomable to Americans. The blood and futility of this American past ought to be apparent to Nobel Peace Prize-winner Obama, even if his predecessors have been incredibly resistant to clear-eyed assessments of American power or the real consequences of U.S. wars.

Two paths stretch out before this first-year president. Two destinations beckon: peace or failure.