Bruce Bartlett, in the Washington Times (May 5, 2004):

When people vote for candidates, they are not just voting for an individual; they are voting for a party. I don't just mean in terms of control of the White House or Congress, but in a philosophical sense. The two parties have very different philosophies on various issues and when one votes for a candidate of a particular party, one essentially votes for that philosophy, regardless of the views of the individual candidate. No matter what that candidate may say or believe personally, over time they eventually are forced to conform to their party's philosophy if elected.

On tax policy, it is pretty clear what the two major parties think. Democrats believe the tax system should be used aggressively and systematically to equalize incomes. Those at the top must be brought down by high tax rates and those at the bottom should be lifted up by tax subsidies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. Republicans, on the other hand, generally believe the tax system exists mainly to raise revenue needed to fund necessary government services and should not be used to implement social policy. In principle, Republicans believe we should have a tax system that interferes as little as possible with economic and social decisionmaking.

Obviously, both parties fall far short of their own ideals. Nevertheless, one can assume tax policy will tend toward a party's philosophy that is given the power to make policy. So it is worth looking at specific tax policies to see how the two parties differ, and how they might act on a broad range of issues. A good example is the Alternative Minimum Tax.

The AMT grew out of testimony by Joseph W. Barr, Treasury secretary for about two months at the very end of Lyndon Johnson's administration. Just days before Richard Nixon took office in January 1969, Mr. Barr used his position to publicize that 155 wealthy taxpayers had avoided paying any federal income taxes in 1967 because of legal tax avoidance techniques. This was considered a scandal that demanded legislative action.

In the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which Nixon stupidly signed into law, the AMT was first imposed. The idea was that if people were too aggressive in using tax deductions, credits and exclusions, they should be punished, even if everything they did was perfectly within the law. For example, if someone put all their money into tax-exempt municipal bonds, the AMT forced them to pay federal income taxes, even though the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds was created intentionally to subsidize local governments.

It's also worth mentioning that everyone who buys municipal bonds pays a large de facto tax. This is because interest rates on municipal bonds are well below those on equivalent taxable bonds. Therefore, municipal bond buyers always pay a tax equal to the difference between such bonds and taxable bonds. This difference will about equal the average marginal tax rate.

In 1986, largely at the behest of Democrats, the AMT was broadened into its present form. Taxpayers calculate their taxes under the ordinary income tax and again under the AMT and pay whichever yields the higher tax.

Under the AMT, many deductions that are legal under the ordinary income tax are disallowed. One of the most important is the deduction for state and local taxes. As a result, the AMT tends to heavily hit residents of high-tax states like New York. Indeed, some analysts have taken to calling the AMT the "Blue-State Tax," since most of the states hit hardest by the AMT are those where the Democratic Party is strongest; i.e., those that voted for Al Gore in 2000.

The real problem is the AMT's income thresholds are not indexed to inflation or real income growth. As a consequence, many of those considered rich in 1986 are simply middle class today. This illustrates an important point about tax policy: Laws designed to soak the rich eventually hit the middle class.

Nicholas Thompson, in Legal Affairs (May/Hune 2004):

FOR THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY, an unspoken gentleman's agreement bound the moneymen of Wall Street and the New York attorney general's office. The AG got to use an astonishingly powerful state securities law called the Martin Act, but not against the big boys. Acceptable targets through the years included shady pharmacists, Ponzi schemes, and peddlers of fraudulent Salvador Dali lithographs.

Two years ago, Eliot Spitzer, New York's current attorney general, broke the deal. He took the Martin Act, the securities legislation that is the legal equivalent of King Arthur's Excalibur, and plunged it into the guts of Merrill Lynch. Then he turned his saber on Salomon Smith Barney and the rest of New York's investment banking industry. This past fall he speared several large players in both the hedge fund and mutual fund industries. Others worry that they will face similar fates in the remaining two years of Spitzer's present term. They should.

The purpose of the Martin Act is to arm the New York attorney general to combat financial fraud. It empowers him to subpoena any document he wants from anyone doing business in the state; to keep an investigation totally secret or to make it totally public; and to choose between filing civil or criminal charges whenever he wants. People called in for questioning during Martin Act investigations do not have a right to counsel or a right against self-incrimination. Combined, the act's powers exceed those given any regulator in any other state.

Now for the scary part: To win a case, the AG doesn't have to prove that the defendant intended to defraud anyone, that a transaction took place, or that anyone actually was defrauded. Plus, when the prosecution is over, trial lawyers can gain access to the hoards of documents that the act has churned up and use them as the basis for civil suits."It's the legal equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction," said a lawyer at a major New York firm who represents defendants in Martin Act cases (and who didn't want his name used because he feared retribution by Spitzer)."The damage that can be done under the statute is unlimited."

Spitzer and his allies, of course, see the law the opposite way, lauding its unlimited capacity for good. Given the deep slumber of the SEC and other important financial regulators since 2000, the glaring improprieties of mutual funds and stock analysts—improprieties that disproportionately harm small, trusting investors—might not have been documented and addressed if Spitzer hadn't forcefully applied the Martin Act.

Either way, there's no question that a little-known New York law, intentionally rendered anemic when first passed in 1921, has morphed into something remarkable, helped along the way by ambitious supporters, neglectful opponents, and generous court rulings. The Martin Act has also given Spitzer the stature he needs to run for governor of New York in 2006—and perhaps, one day, something higher.

THE FIRST STATE STATUTE CRACKING DOWN ON FRAUD IN SECURITIES, or speculative investments, was passed in Kansas in 1911. It was nicknamed a"blue-sky" law after hustlers who, the story went, would sell shares of the blue sky if they could. Other states quickly followed, pushed by public concern about fraud as well as by self-interested lobbying from small banks, which worried that money which would otherwise be deposited was being put into securities.

By the end of World War I, the state that served as home to the world's financial capital decided it had to join in. Swindlers stalked Gotham's streets, fleecing the people who were investing with solo speculators and putting money into the stock market for the first time in a burst of postwar patriotic fervor. Much as when shares of Amazon.com hit the NASDAQ, newcomers were everywhere—and they quite frequently lost their bowlers.

New York's legislature was one of the last to pass a blue-sky law, letting through a deliberately enfeebled version. It gave the AG power to counter fraud once it was committed, but left that office with minimal control over who could sell securities in the first place. To the big financial companies that dominated New York politics, a registration law was a bureaucratic burden to be avoided. A simple fraud statute seemed like a good way to swat down small-time sharks and keep the field open for themselves. The weak law went into force in May 1921, bearing the name of Louis M. Martin, its sponsor in the state assembly.

New York barely made use of Martin's act for the first four years of its life, spending almost nothing on enforcement. The attorney general did try to apply it on several occasions in 1923, going after firms like the Multi-Insert Mailing Machine Corporation, which sold stock after spuriously claiming to have developed machines that addressed, folded, and handled envelopes. But he was tripped up by a clause in the Martin Act that granted automatic immunity to anyone who testified under it or even answered questions."It is said that the Martin law has teeth. It has, but they are an ill-fitting set of false teeth," snapped New York City's district attorney Joab Banton to The New York Times.

In 1925, the law found its first aggressive user, Attorney General Albert Ottinger, who was also successful in pushing for legislation that dramatically limited the act's immunity provisions. Spitzer's forebear in many ways, Ottinger sought out high-profile fraud cases and used the Martin Act to shut down the Consolidated Stock Exchange, a lowbrow offshoot of the New York Stock Exchange. His actions riled major financiers and led to several prominent court challenges."In this proceeding, if such it may be called, the Attorney General is . . . the complainant, the prosecuting officer and the magistrate before whom the proceeding is instituted," wrote Louis Marshall, a prominent constitutional lawyer, who led the charge against the act.

But Ottinger beat Marshall in the courts and continued his crackdown. At the end of his term, the AG summed up his political record as follows:"Hammer, hammer, hammer, at every manner and means of fraud and dishonesty, the prevention and assertion of which the Legislature has assigned to the Attorney General." Despite the popularity of Ottinger's hammering, however, he lost a close race for the governor's office in 1928 to a former assistant secretary of the Navy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Ottinger left a two-part legacy for Spitzer. He'd set an example for how an AG could use the Martin Act with vigor. And the court challenges he'd faced ended up bolstering the law. ...

From the South China Morning Post (April 25, 2004):

If the United States and its allies had consulted history books before invading Iraq just over a year ago, they might have had second thoughts. Iraqis do not take foreign occupation lightly, as the blood-spattered accounts attest.

Most telling is the British war cemetery in Baghdad known as North Gate.

Row upon row of graves - more than 3,000, mostly unidentified - mark the last resting places of invading soldiers killed during more than four decades of occupation from 1914.

That, according to historians, is the tip of the human cost of Britain's attempts to militarily hold on to the region once known as Mesopotamia as part of its empire. Tens of thousands of civilians died fighting to oust the occupiers, sometimes in aerial bombings and mustard gas attacks.

Such methods of warfare are now outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, but invasion of another country is not, as the United States-led occupation proves. Neither have Iraqis altered their desire to determine their own future.

The point is not lost on historians and defence analysts, who are not surprised at the mounting toll of coalition soldiers. More than 800 have so far been killed - more than three-quarters of them since US President George W. Bush declared the war over on May 1.

As the toll rises and the objectives of instilling stability and democracy seem increasingly difficult to attain, the comparisons with the Vietnam war are inevitable. But it is the British occupation, not Vietnam - America's biggest military humiliation - that is a closer parallel, former US army colonel Kenneth Allard suggested last week.

"Americans do not know their history and what they do know, they do not know well," Professor Allard, a defence analyst with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said."Most have at least heard of Vietnam and we're inevitably drawing our lessons in Iraq from that conflict.

"But in this case, the relevant example is the British occupation of Iraq in the 1920s, not Vietnam. There were the same number of British there after the first world war as there are Americans in Iraq now."

There are 135,000 American troops in Iraq and calls are rising in the US for that figure to be increased to crush resistance before the handover of power to an Iraqi civilian authority on June 30.

Britain became militarily involved in the region in November 1914 when it declared war on the Ottoman Empire for siding with Germany in the dawning days of the first world war. With an eye primarily on protecting its oil interests in Persia, now Iran, it invaded and occupied Mesopotamia the following month.

With Germany's defeat in 1918, Britain and its victorious allies divided the territorial spoils of war. In January 1919, Britain formed Iraq from Mesopotamia and the governates of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. In April the following year, the forerunner to the United Nations, the League of Nations, gave the British a mandate over the new nation.

Middle East expert Phebe Marr, author of The Modern History of Iraq, said most Iraqis viewed the mandate as foreign occupation, and it resulted in a ferocious rebellion from July to October 1920. Involving all sectors of society, from urbanites to tribespeople, different ethnic and religious groups, the human and economic cost for Britain was high.

Historical accounts generally agree that 4,000 Arabs and 450 British were killed. The cost to the British treasury was about GBP40 million - an amount worth many times more today.

"Britain had to go back to the drawing board because taxpayers refused to foot the bill or accept the cost in lives," Dr Marr, a Washington resident who spoke during a visit to Qatar, said."What they came up with was indirect British rule under a monarch and a western-style democracy with a parliament and elections."

The rumblings from Iraqis continued, though, and eventually the main dissenters, Shi'ite religious leaders, were exiled to Persia. Fresh elections were held, an Anglo-Iraq treaty signed in October 1922 to supplant the mandate and, through behind-the-scenes manipulation and skill, relative stability was created.

Iraqi independence was recognised by a British treaty in 1927, although the nation still retained three air bases on Iraqi soil. The pact was formally recognised by the Iraqi parliament in November 1930, confirming independence, sovereignty and British base rights for the next 25 years. Statehood was finalised with admission to the League of Nations in October 1932.

Political instability persisted, though, with a military coup in 1936. The onset of the second world war in 1939 and Iraq's pro-German stance prompted a second British invasion and occupation in 1941, which ended six years later.

With parliament and elections restored, a period of calm ensued until the coup of 1958, in which the king was assassinated, the monarchy abolished and a republic established. That decade could be described as Iraq's"golden age", Dr Marr suggested.

"Although there was martial law and newspapers had to be closed, this was a period of great stability," she said."They had a parliament, a constitution, elections and a reasonably free press. It didn't function as well as it would have in a western society and economic development was not widely spread, but it could be termed a 'golden era' nonetheless."

Gradually, Britain lessened its influence and relaxed control.

Dr Marr agreed there were striking similarities between the British occupation and that of present American operations. But she also believed there were sufficient differences to suggest that history was not being repeated.

Both occupying forces had believed Iraqis were ready to embrace efforts of"liberation"; there was a similarity in the June 30 handover to an Iraqi administration with a degree of sovereignty, but little control over security and the economy; and a parallel could be drawn with the future role of the UN and that of the League of Nations in 1919 to legitimise the process.

"But I wouldn't push these parallels too far," Dr Marr said."We have gone into a state which we all agree was ruled by an horrendous regime and destroyed the institutions that ruled it - the government, the ruling Ba'ath Party and the military. We had no grip on reality in Iraq or understanding of what we were doing."...

Gordon Dryden, in the New Zealand Herald (April 26, 2004):

Maybe it's the death of Michael King, so soon after completing The Penguin History of New Zealand. Or maybe the devastation and killing in Iraq. But somehow Anzac Day seemed much more important this year than any others I can remember.

A good time, too, to recall George Santayana's famous quotation:"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

But the lessons are much wider and different than those raised by Ron Smith in his article http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?thesection=news&thesubsection=&storyID=3561864 Appeasement policy puts us all in danger

Perhaps the biggest lesson of all is, beware of simplistic, single-word or simple-sentence dogma.

All who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s can remember the now-obvious bias of New Zealand's primary-school history book, Our Nation's Story. Michael King and other historians have since spent years trying to dispel its one-sided message of the glories of the British Empire.

So what are some of the lessons New Zealanders might ponder from our own involvement in war?

The Musket Wars of the 19th century led to at least 20,000 being slaughtered, thousands more being enslaved, and almost all tribal boundaries being redrawn. As Michael King put it in his introduction to Ron Crosby' s 1999 book, The Musket Wars:"If any chapter in New Zealand history has earned the label 'holocaust', it is this one."

In World War I, New Zealand suffered, with Belgium, the biggest proportionate losses of any country - in our case, 17,000 dead. Can anyone now justify the senseless and bloody slaughter of that four-year disaster? Yet at every school Anzac Day service I attended in the 1930s and 1940s, we were regaled with the myth that our soldiers had died fighting for"God, King, country and our freedom". The Germans and Turks, of course, were told the same.

World War II? Most who lived through it would probably agree with Dr Smith on the major lessons, including the peril of appeasement, but also the danger of any other global power wanting to dominate the world.

The Vietnam War? I happened to be in America in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson announced that North Vietnam had fired on an American naval vessel"in international waters" in the Gulf of Tonkin.

With this"grave threat to the United States", America declared itself at war. So did Australia and New Zealand - on the oft-repeated ground of the"domino effect", that if Vietnam goes, so will the dominoes fall in the rest of Southeast Asia.

More than 50,000 American deaths and 2 million Vietnamese deaths later, the US was finally defeated in 1975. But the dominoes didn't fall. And then came the proof: the Tonkin Gulf incident was a lie. An American naval boat had deliberately gone inside North Vietnam's 12-mile limit to provoke an attack.

And how about the Cold War? There is no doubting the disastrous consequences of the Soviet domination of eastern Europe after World War II. But from 1950 to 1990, America's enormous military budget was ramped up each year on the basis of the well-publicised alleged parity between US and Soviet military forces.

Yet such parity did not exist. In 1970, Moscow didn't even have a public phone-book. By any standard, the Soviet economy was in ruins. And when the Soviet empire finally collapsed in 1989-90, we discovered its economy was the same size as that of the Netherlands.

And what of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, democracy in the Middle East, and religious fundamentalism?

John Nicholas, in the Nation (April 24, 2004):

History usually provides a roadmap for the present. Unfortunately, leaders fail to consult the map. That's certainly been the case as the 9/11 Commission has prepared to hear behind-closed-doors testimony from Vice President Dick Cheney and President George Bush at the same time.

Members of the commission and, for the most part, members of congress, have accepted the secret-testimony arrangement. But why?

Presidents have testified before investigatory committees before. And they have done so on comparable issues. Former US Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman reminds us that in 1974, amid the national firestorm that followed President Gerald Ford's pardon of former President Richard Nixon, Ford voluntarily appeared before a House subcommittee that was reviewing the pardon.

"The President came before the subcommittee, made an opening statement and was questioned by the House members. Although each of us had only five minutes, I was able to ask the President directly whether there had been a deal with Nixon about the pardon. The public could determine by Ford's demeanor and his words whether to believe his emphatic denial of any deal," recalls Holtzman, who as a young member of the House was a key player in the Judiciary Committee's investigation of the Watergate scandal.

"The fact that important questions could be posed directly to the President and the fact that the President was willing to face down his severest critics in public were healthy things for our country. And, not even the staunchest Republicans complained that the presidency was being demeaned."

By recalling the history, Holtzman reminds us that President Bush could, and should, simply appear before the 9/11 Commission. There is no Constitutional crisis here. There is no dangerous precedent that could be established. And there is no question of proportionality--certainly, the intensity of the demands for an explanation of the Nixon pardon can appropriately compared with those for an explanation of how the current administration responded to terrorist threats before and after the September 11, 2001 attacks. "As with the Nixon pardon, the events of 9/11 have caused huge national concern," explains Holtzman. "The victims' families--as well as millions of others--have asked why it happened and what if anything could have been done to avert the tragedy. These are simple, reasonable questions."

Frank Rich, in the NYT (April 18, 2004):

The most apt movie for this moment just may be David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia." Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton ambassador to the United Nations whose foreign service career began in Vietnam, said to me last week, "That's the image everyone I've talked to who saw the movie has in his head right now."

What Mr. Holbrooke is referring to is the story's mordant conclusion. The Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire, abetted by the heroic British liaison officer T. E. Lawrence and guerrilla tactics, has succeeded. The shotgun mandating of the modern state of Iraq, by the League of Nations in 1920, is just a few years away. But as the local leaders gather in an Arab council, a tentative exercise in self-government, there is nothing but squabbling, even as power outages and public-health outrages roil the populace. "I didn't come here to watch a tribal bloodbath," says Peter O'Toole, as Lawrence, earlier in the movie when first encountering the internecine warfare of the Arab leaders he admired. But the bloodbath continued — and now that we've ended Saddam's savage grip on Iraq, it has predictably picked up where it left off. Only Americans have usurped the British as the primary targets in the crossfire of an undying civil war.

It was last weekend, after I watched "Lawrence" again for the first time in years, that L. Paul Bremer was asked by Tim Russert to whom we would turn over the keys in Iraq on June 30, and gave his now immortal answer: "Well, that's a good question." We don't have a clue, and in part that's because we have no memory.

As the historian Niall Ferguson points out in his new book, "Colossus: The Price of America's Empire," President Bush's promise to Iraqis of "a peaceful and representative government" in place of Saddam's brutal regime was an uncanny, if unconscious, replay of what the British commander who occupied Baghdad in 1917 told the people of what was then still Mesopotamia. "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," Gen. F. S. Maude said back then, expressing the desire that his forces would help the populace build their own governmental institutions.

Iraq did not, however, give birth to an indigenous form of self-government. The country was run instead by a Bremer-like civil commissioner, Sir Arnold Wilson, for three often violent years. He and his deputy, Mr. Ferguson writes, "drew up a scheme for a unitary Iraqi state with almost no local consultation, simply ignoring those who advised against yoking together Assyria and Babylonia, Sunni and Shia." Eventually a British-style constitutional monarchy was installed, leading to decades of tumult and coups. By the time the revolution of 1958 overthrew the monarchy, the Baath party and Saddam were lurking in the wings.

To revisit "Lawrence" and the history it dramatizes in embryo is to feel not only déjà vu but also a roaring anger at the American arrogance and ignorance that has led to the current nightmare. Condoleezza Rice's use of the word "historical" to describe the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing on Osama bin Laden was not the only tipoff to her limited understanding of history. In the opening filibuster of her testimony, she invoked the Lusitania, Hitler's rise and Pearl Harbor as analogues of 9/11 — an asymmetrical comparison that blurs the distinctions between nations' acts of war and the stateless conspiracies of modern terrorists. Apparently the administration's understanding of British colonial history in the Middle East is no sharper. Though it might have been impossible to prevent the 9/11 attacks, it would have been possible to avoid what's happening in Iraq now had anyone heeded the past. However much the current crisis may be a function of a military bungle like Donald Rumsfeld's inadequate deployment of troops or the diplomatic failure to attract a proper coalition, it is above all else the product of cultural hubris.

David Carr, in the NYT (April 25, 2004):

...The current administration's squeamishness about photographs depicting the consequences of war has plenty of precedents in American history, but it stands in stark contrast to where war photography began.

In 1862, New Yorkers went to the gallery of Matthew Brady and saw, for the first time, the gory externalities of the Civil War. The dead were a persistent presence because of the limitations of the technology of the day. Daguerreotypes required subjects that remained still, and there is no subject more patient than the dead.

But by the beginning of World War I, as the mass reproduction and distribution of images became more commonplace, the political and military leadership began to understand that seeing lifeless American soldiers could have a corrosive effect on the country's will to fight, and photography was banned altogether. It was only two years into World War II when the federal government decided it was time to take the lens cover off the camera - albeit in controlled and thematically patriotic ways.

"Up until that time, Americans had been supporting the war on imagination alone," said Susan Moeller, a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. "The photographs helped to make the rhetoric and the goals tangible. The military, in this instance, wanted the American public to be in the same war they were in."

By the time of the Vietnam conflict, all hell was breaking loose, often in front of the eyes of the viewing public. War's inherent savagery, its indifference to human suffering, entered the hearts and minds of Americans like a rocket-propelled grenade through graphic video and still pictures. The dissonance between those images and the rhetoric of the American leadership helped the public decide that what was initially sold as a global quest for freedom had become a trap with incalculable costs.

Sometimes, it is the juxtaposition of images that creates its own narrative. During the first Gulf war, President George H. W. Bush was photographed playing golf at a time when coffins were piling up at Dover. And horror and outrage created by the iconic pictures from the so-called Highway of Death, where Iraqis fleeing in retreat from Kuwait were immolated by American bombs and missiles, may have been one reason Saddam Hussein was not pursued into Baghdad. It was under the first President Bush that formal ceremonies for the returning bodies of soldiers were discontinued at Dover - and with that, cameras were banned as well. The reason given at the time was that the type and timing of ceremonies ought more rightly to be left to each soldier's individual family, but then - as now - those motives were widely questioned. Still, the same policy has now become the general rule at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

David Halbfinger, in the NYT (April 24, 2004):

When questions were raised last month about whether a 27-year-old John Kerry had attended a Kansas City meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War where the assassination of senators was discussed, the Kerry presidential campaign went into action.

It accepted the resignation of a campaign volunteer in Florida, Scott Camil, the member of the antiwar group who raised the idea in November 1971 of killing politicians who backed the war. The campaign pressed other veterans who were in Kansas City, Mo., 33 years ago to re-examine their hazy memories while assuring them that Mr. Kerry was sure he had not been there.

John Musgrave, a disabled ex-marine from Baldwin City, Kan., who told The Kansas City Star that Mr. Kerry was at the meeting, said he got a call from John Hurley, the Kerry campaign's veterans coordinator.

"He said, `I'd like you to refresh your memory,' " Mr. Musgrave, 55, recounted in an interview, confirming an account he had given to The New York Sun. "He said it twice. `And call that reporter back and say you were mistaken about John Kerry being there.' "

Such little-noticed moments in Mr. Kerry's past — including his decision at age 26 to meet the Vietcong emissaries to the Paris peace talks — are coming under new scrutiny now, as Mr. Kerry finally makes the presidential run that his comrades in arms, and in the antiwar movement, half-mockingly predicted decades ago.

In an interview about his antiwar activities, Mr. Kerry said that he knew nothing of attempts by his campaign to tinker with the past and that he disapproved. "People's memories are people's memories," he said, adding that he had no memory of the Kansas City meeting.

Mr. Hurley says he was merely asking Mr. Musgrave to be accurate, "because his memory was contrary to everything I was hearing."

Yet while Mr. Kerry is heavily accentuating his five months in combat in Vietnam, he rarely emphasizes his two years working against the war — though he first catapulted to fame 33 years ago this week when he electrified millions of viewers in asking the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "How do you ask a man to be last man to die for a mistake?"

And when Mr. Kerry appeared on "Meet the Press" last weekend, he disavowed his own remarks on the same program in April 1971, when he said he and thousands of other soldiers had committed "atrocities."

From its inception, Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a curiosity and an influential force in the Vietnam protest movement because of the novelty, and political potency, of antiwar demonstrators in uniform.

In the year and a half that Mr. Kerry belonged to the group, it was loosely structured and had its share of revolutionaries and provocateurs — including many secretly working for law enforcement — who pushed the writings of Chairman Mao and talked of tossing grenades, though they seldom did worse than toss bags of chicken droppings at the Pentagon....

Isolationists, Islamist extremists, and"intellectuals" -- and other types beginning with the letter"i," who will be left unnamed in the interest of civility -- have sneered at the awkward eloquence of President George W. Bush, embodied in his press conference on the evening of April 13.

"Awkward eloquence" is not an oxymoron, for those who express themselves with some difficulty, or when struggling with emotion, may yet speak more powerfully than those whose orations are brilliantly-crafted, and well-practiced. Moses, the prophet of freedom, was afflicted with a stammer, and the prophet Muhammad was an illiterate. Neither of them would have had a chance on most of today's television talk shows, yet they moved the world.

I did not sneer at the President's words. And I believe there are others who, like me, were moved, even to tears, by his statements:

"Freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom… We have an obligation to work toward a more free world."

The Chief Executive of these United States sought, at times haltingly, to explain to the American people that"it's important for us to spread freedom throughout the Middle East."

Not for many decades, for even a century, has an American statesman so simply and necessarily defined our place in world history. As I explained to my son, other admirable American leaders fought to defend our freedoms -- only rarely, and at great risk, did they commit our nation to the defense, nay, the extension of freedom far from our borders, in places where most of us would never set foot.

Harry Truman did so, when he sent General Douglas MacArthur to the relief of South Korea. What were the Koreans to us? And yet, the people of Western Europe held their breaths in horror, waiting to see if America would save the Koreans -- for if we did not, then Stalin, the most feral of all the 20th century monsters, would be emboldened to invade Western Europe. Revisionist historians may jeer at such an interpretation, yet I have interviewed an American naval attaché who described to me a young German woman rushing to embrace him in the streets of Bonn, when news of the Inchon landing came, saying,"you have saved us!" And I know from the history of the former Yugoslavia that Marshal Tito told his cabinet the same thing -- that MacArthur's daring action had prevented Stalin from marching into Yugoslavia, into Italy, into West Germany, and beyond.

John F. Kennedy promised the same expansion of the dominions of light, when he tried to assist the Cubans in liberating their brothers and sisters from Castro, and refused to back down from the challenge of Vietnam. But his projects failed, for reasons we all know, above all because of his untimely martyrdom.

Reagan succeeded in bringing down the Muscovite empire of evil because he understood that the Soviets were bluffers, that their power rested on the hesitation of their strongest opponents. Somewhere in his soul Reagan understood that history could not stand still, and that the bourgeois revolution, the engines of entrepreneurship, contract, accountability, and individual freedom in general, must inevitably conquer the whole planet.

Shall we shrink, now, from words like"revolution"? Perhaps it would be better not to frighten the amateur thinkers in the isolationist camp, the pretentious pygmies who, knowing little of our history, tell us America never stood for anything but protection of our own shores, our own borders, our own hearths. The Hebrewphobes among them will particularly take offense at the dread word that signifies nothing more than inevitable change in the affairs of humanity, a turning of the mighty wheel of destiny. But let us not give them too much to shriek about. Some of us, like my friend Christopher Hitchens, may smile devilishly when they pronounce the words"regime change," suggesting that it was always a euphemism, and that they were for it on the barricades of Barcelona in 1937 when Orwell stood up against Stalinism, as well as in the streets of Manila in 1986 when"people power" ended the dictatorship of Marcos, and in the Nicaraguan voting booths when the Sandinista usurpers were shoved aside in 1990.

Isolationist poseurs wish the American people to forget that we were once described by Louis Kossuth, the 19th century hero of Hungarian independence, who was liberated from Russian and Austrian aggression by a" coalition of the willing" -- made up of the U.S., Britain, France, and Turkey -- in these terms:

"I have to thank the people, Congress, and government of the United States for my liberation from captivity. Human tongue has no words to express the bliss which I felt, when I -- the downtrodden Hungary's wandering chief -- saw the glorious flag of the Stripes and Stars fluttering over my head -- when I first bowed before it with deep respect -- when I saw around me the gallant officers and the crew of the Mississippi frigate -- the most of them the worthiest representatives of true American principles, American greatness, American generosity -- and to think that it was not a mere chance which cast the Star-spangled Banner around me, but that it was your protecting will -- to know that the United States of America, conscious of their glorious calling, as well as of their power, declared, by this unparalleled act, to be resolved to become the protectors of human rights -- to see a powerful vessel of America coming to far Asia to break the chains by which the mightiest despots of Europe fettered the activity of an exiled Magyar, whose very name disturbed the proud security of their sleep -- to feel restored by such a protection, and, in such a way, to freedom, and by freedom to activity; you may be well aware of what I have felt, and still feel, at the remembrance of this proud moment of my life. Others spoke -- you acted; and I was free! You acted; and at this act of yours, tyrants trembled; humanity shouted out with joy; the downtrodden people of Magyars -- the downtrodden, but not broken -- raised their heads with resolution and with hope, and the brilliancy of your Stars was greeted by Europe's oppressed nations as the morning star of rising liberty."

But enough of concern with the whimpers of the unwilling. President George W. Bush has clearly seen in the Arab and Islamic world an equivalent, for him, of what the Soviet empire represented for Reagan -- a part of the world that must inevitably also share the benefits of capitalism, democracy, prosperity, and peace. As he said on April 13,"Free societies are hopeful societies. A hopeful society is one more likely to be able to deal with the frustrations of those who are willing to commit suicide in order to represent a false ideology. A free society is a society in which somebody is more likely to be able to make a living. A free society is a society in which someone is more likely to be able to raise their child in a comfortable environment and see to it that child gets an education."

These simple phrases were not scripted. They were spontaneous, in reply to questions from reporters. And they speak to the responsibility that was always our American mission, when heroes like Kossuth looked to us for hope, and when our leaders, exemplified above all by Abraham Lincoln, proclaimed"a new birth of freedom" to the globe.

The task President Bush has assumed is an immense one, and is not without risk. When Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, Sovietism was moribund. By contrast, the Wahhabi ideology of al-Qaeda, the brutalizing brainwashing that led to horrors like the mutilations of Americans in Fallujah, remains volatile.

But I have said before, and will write now, and will argue again, that President Bush has restored to the Republican party its rightful legacy as a party of liberation. Those who, in the President's words,"don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing or free," will be proven wrong.

The walls that separate the Muslim world from the planetary realm of light will crumble. Iraq will not be President Bush's Vietnam, but his Berlin Wall.

Let the isolationists and Islamists, the limping leftists and recusant racists, make of it what they will: democracy will be fully globalized.

And as our greatest poet, Walt Whitman, wrote after a war wrought by another Republican war president:

"--Then turn, and be not alarm'd, O Libertad--turn your undying face,
To where the future, greater than all the past,
Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.