All I Ever Needed I Learned from Lincoln

My brother, his wife and my two nephews (12 & 10 y/o) (hereinafter "heirs presumptive") vacationed in Washington this week. Armed only with a 2-bedroom, 1600 sq ft row-house, I abandoned my castle for the kindness and couches of strangers. During the day, the brother's four played DC tourist; I joined for evenings, centered around the gourmand, with multi-flavor epiphany the desert.

So eating Vietnamese, I pontificated about the homesick Senator who craves the food served at the Hanoi Hilton (BYO dog cage). Several Similarly, we gobbled Duck and Garlic Sprouts at President George HW Bush's favorite Sunday supper: the Peking Gourmet Inn on Leesburg Pike in Virginia. And, another night, after some equally history-making tale, I swung back to the Mall's west side, for monuments already-toured now more stunning after sunset.

The Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials are impressive by day. But in darkness, Abe cranks the dial to "11"--and moves beyond his temple steps to address tourists all the way to the reflecting pool. His luminous face is a pied-pipe to young and old, and the crowd slowly advances seemingly to try to touch the hem of his garment, finding it secure "in the hearts of his countrymen."

And the reading improves in twilight. On the left, the ephemeral but impressive Gettysburg address. Opposite is the Second Inaugural Address--worthy of the challenge, especially because Southern surrender would soon follow the speech, and because Lincoln had only a few weeks to live.

The final paragraph of Second Inaugural is its most famous:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Of all the dreams, the most poignant is: "what might of been?"

Yet another passage is no less important and more relevant today. In the second paragraph, Lincoln recalls the unease four years before as the civil war began, comparing the posture of the belligerents:

Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

The dense but lofty phrases carry much. First, Lincoln's affirmation of war has far broader application than the "last" choice of a sovereign. War isn't a simple synonym for "wickedness", as George Weigel, Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, expounded in his article Moral Clarity in a Time of War, 128 First Things 20 (January 2003):

As a tradition of statecraft, the just war argument recognizes that there are circumstances in which the first and most urgent obligation in the face of evil is to stop it. Which means that there are times when waging war is morally necessary to defend the innocent and to promote the minimum conditions of international order. This, I suggest, is one of those times. Grasping that . . .only requires us to be morally serious and politically responsible. Moral seriousness and political responsibility require us to make the effort to "connect the dots" between means and ends.

So the just war tradition is "a sustained and disciplined intellectual attempt to relate the morally legitimate use of proportionate and discriminate military force to morally worthy political ends."--meaning that war can have moral and worthy goals and that war often might be preferable to dishonor, dismemberment or tribute.

Plainly Lincoln rated Union a higher goal than peace. Was he wrong? Our war is much the same. Are Bush and the Neo-cons wrong? Should we look to Cindy and Huffington or similar and give peace another endless, doomed try?

No; Lincoln's message still speaks. We too are assessing a threat--one that desires our death and destruction. Our opponents are war-like (going from Mecca to the gulf in a hundred years, then spreading throughout Magreb in three hundred more), govern through a system binding rules and religion forever (making separation of mosque and state impossible), and scorn tribute, preferring either surrender or death. "Both parties talked of peace, but one of them would make war rather than let the peace of religious plurality survive, and the other would accept war rather than let civilization perish. . and the war came.."

Lincoln had it right all along. We didn't start the fire. But with civilized society a target, we can't quit yet. 'Course, that's not what my heir presumptive's history text advised. . .