Blogs For Victory

Someone tweeted out “what President would you make a movie about?” and this in relation to the excellent Lincoln which covered a short span of time where Lincoln ushered the 13th Amendment through the House. My pick was for a movie about Eisenhower dealing with the period of time covered by the Suez Crisis.

I’ve talked about this before but the more I think about it, the more crucial this event becomes in my mind. It set in motion so many disastrous effects.

First off, it essentially terminated the idea of a treaty as binding on all contracting parties. The genesis of the crisis was Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal which abrogated several treaties – and was also unnecessary because when Nasser nationalized it was only 12 years before the treaty which allowed the construction of the canal in the first place was set to expire. You might think, then, that it was rather trivial and in a certain sense it was – but it was still a violation of a treaty and nobody is allowed to do that. Or, at least, nobody is supposed to do that. If treaties can be broken at will, then what is the point of them?

Well, since then the point of a treaty has been to merely paper over a problem of the moment – something which allows people to say a problem is solved when it isn’t and nobody really has any intention of solving it. The best example of this sort of mindset post-Suez was the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam war. We entered into them without getting South Vietnamese agreement and it was clear from the get-go (and became clearer as time went on) that the purpose wasn’t to end the war but give us time to get out with a “decent interval” before South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese aggression. It would have been more honorable if we had just pulled out without so much as a word of explanation.

But it wasn’t just in the practical sense that it is wrong – it is also in the moral sphere. If your word isn’t your bond then you have deliberately made yourself a bad person. And as has been pointed out, you can’t maintain a level of bad…if you start down that slope you’ll just go from bad to worse. Now we don’t even make treaties – we sign a memo and we’ll honor it, or not, depending on whatever political and economic calculus seems best at the moment. This is how we got into Ukraine – we don’t have a treaty. But there is a memo! The memo doesn’t call for us to render aid…but the Biden Administration needed to make out that Russia was this huge enemy and so when Russia attacked Ukraine is dovetailed perfectly into Administration needs…and so we’ve got a proxy war. We also had agreements with the Afghan government but it was time to leave, so you see how that came out. Why go above and beyond with Ukraine while abandoning Afghanistan? Morality has nothing to do with it – it is all expedience.

But we didn’t have to come here – that is, Eisenhower didn’t have to take Nasser’s side in the Suez Crisis. Britain and France were perfectly within their treaty rights to intervene while Israel was within her rights to assist the Anglo-French because the Egyptians’ were illegally blockading Israel’s access to the sea. We took Nasser’s side ostensibly because we feared a Muslim-world backlash if we didn’t. We should have stood by the law. We didn’t. Now we’re here.

And that is the main point: you can’t go halves. It is all or nothing. You’ll either tell the whole truth, or you will lie. You will either uphold all laws, or you will be lawless. You will either be brave at all times or a complete coward. You can’t be half bad. We tried to be, and now we’re all bad.

And that extended to one thing after another. If our government and institutions are shot through with corruption – and they are – then it all stems from a desire in the past to have it both ways. To have honor while lying. But once you start being bad in one area, you won’t remain good in other areas. After all, you abandoned honor…what’s left to hold on to? To be sure, we don’t have to blame Ike – we can go back to Truman allowing us to fight a war without a desire for victory. We can go back to FDR and his serial mendacity. Wilson implementing anti-American policy to “make the world safe for Democracy”. But I’ll still lay it as Ike’s feet. He was an old school West Point graduate – back when they really did impart, “Duty, Honor, Country” as ideals. He knew the deal, and yet went along with an attempt to reward lying and treaty-breaking. And if someone like Eisenhower could play that sordid game, who wouldn’t going forward?

Everyone would, of course; and they all did. Increasing as time went on and infecting more and more institutions and ever more deeply…until we get what we have today: any person of wisdom assumes the government is lying. All other institutions, as well. Our operational thesis is that whatever they’re saying it is a deflection from what they are doing. And the country is disintegrating because of it.