WHAT WILL ENDURE?

February 12, 2003 - In November 2003 it will be Seven Score – One Hundred Forty years – since the President of the United States stood on a rough platform erected in the corner of a Pennsylvania cemetery and spoke to the occasion. He spoke of a government of the People, for the People and by the People. He was in the middle of a conflict among brothers testing whether our nation could endure. . We are at the brink of a new war and we, like the generation of that President, face a test as vital to the future of this nation as any overcome by Abraham Lincoln..

That President asked for his nation’s re-dedication to its founding principles in language that has sung to the hearts of generations of Americans. This President calls on us to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape and to trust in government to the exclusion of outdated principles of individual rights and liberties. That President called on America to serve its brightest angels of inclusion and freedom. This President appeals to the darkest instincts of our nature to impel us to bind ourselves in new fetters with the destruction of our heritage of freedom and liberty in the elusive pursuit of an imagined security.

Our oldest ally, France, was present at this nation’s birth and acted as midwife and Godparent to the infant. It was French regiments and a French fleet that brought Lord Cornwallis to bay on the littoral at Yorktown, not Washington's rabble in arms that won the day. It may have been the weight of American arms that tipped the balance against the Imperial German Army breaking the stalemate of the trenches in World War I, but it was the French and British sacrifice that brought that conflict into stalemate. It way have been the industrial strength and the weight of American arms that dealt the coup de grace to the Third Reich, but the Wehrmacht was already reeling under the weight of the relentless Soviet advance after Stalingrad. Since that last great war Germany and France have become the cornerstones of a strategy that, in partnership with Britain and the United States weathered a half century of stalemate and broke down the wall between East and West. Whether in the United Nations or the councils of NATO our oldest ally and our erstwhile enemy have been our partners in trying to bring about a more peaceful and equitable world.

The Iron Curtain has rusted away and NATO’s unity of purpose has been diluted by the inclusion of our former adversaries of the Warsaw Pact. Of the old partnership only the special relationship of a people divided by a common language survives. In the present conflict between America on the one hand and the emerging Franco-German partnership on the other there is no divergence of objective. Both sides of the discussion aim at disarming Iraq. The difference is drawn by the seeming anxiety of the Bush Administration to launch the 3000 missiles and smart bombs it has targeted on Baghdad. The cost in treasure of the administration’s course is immense. The cost in human terms will be far greater. Even our British junior partner is questioning the wisdom of proceeding to a harvest of death and destruction without a second Security Counsel resolution. Wielding the implicit threat of dismantling NATO the Administration is trying to drive the reluctant nations into acquiescence. In doing so they risk destroying the very alliance that has kept Europe free from a major conflict for half a Century. Three of the five veto powers of the Security Council have announced that they oppose an immediate resort to military force. Undeterred the Administration is using the same technique. At home the Son of Patriot Act, developed in secret by the Ashcroft Justice Department, threatens to further erode Constitutional protection of those very concepts of individual liberty and freedom that Lincoln fought to preserve and to which France was the surrogate parent. Abroad the simplistic slogan, “You are either for us or against us” substitutes for diplomatic consultation with our friends. At home those who question and refuse to meekly fall in rank behind the Judas Goat are labeled as Un-American.

Like Lincoln’s generation we are tested. The question is whether this nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to its preservation can long endure. The issue, my friends, is in doubt.