Rethinking Obama

The various news media have presented a spectrum of understandings concerning Barack Obama. He mystifies both liberals and conservatives, both Democrats and Republicans. Those who voted for him, and those who voted against him, are equally mystified as to his essence. The thoughtful reader may quickly dismiss both the demonizations and the hagiographies.

Over time, interpretations of Obama have become nuanced. Observers have watched his actions in a variety of settings, with a variety of people, concerning a variety of issues. What emerges is not the simplistic view of a typical liberal Democrat. Whether one considers the phrase 'liberal Democrat' to be a compliment or an insult, the phrase does not apply in any straightforward fashion to Obama. Although the word 'progressive' has come back into fashion at the beginning of the twenty-first century - it was quite stylish at the beginning of the previous century as well - its application to Obama is not unproblematic. While Obama is in some senses very much a progressive, he also departs from the Wilsonian template. Obama's most obvious deviation from Woodrow Wilson can be found in the fact that Wilson introduced segregation into many branches of the federal government in which African-Americans and whites had previously worked side-by-side.

The questions to be answered are these: What is Obama's ideology? What is his personality? What is his value system? What are his goals? Which means will he countenance to achieve those goals?

Readers will note that the media's interpretations of Obama have carefully redesigned themselves over the years.

Discerning journalists note the tension between various aspects of Obama's persona. These different facets give rise to questions about what lies behind them - Who is the real Obama? Which features does his true personality have? Dinesh D'Souza outlines the competing visions of what Obama might be:

Barack Obama is an enigmatic figure, a puzzle both to his adversaries and to his supporters. Somehow the Obama of the 2008 election campaign seems to have metamorphosed into a very different President Obama. The two men are not merely politically different — different in their policy agenda — but also psychologically different. The centrist, reassuring Obama is gone and has been replaced by a more detached, unreadable and, to some, even menacing Obama. It’s hard for Americans to respond to Obama because we aren’t sure where he is coming from, what motivates him.

The above paragraph was written in 2010, by which time Obama had occupied the White House for about a year and a half. The earliest persona which Obama projected for the nation was a feel-good image, the moderate man of hope and compromise. Earlier personae, which he may have projected in local politics in Chicago, or in his Ivy-League student years, were not broadly presented to the nation.

the dramatic contrast between the two faces of Obama. What then are these two faces? The first is the face of the healer and unifier. This is the Obama who wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope, "We will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break." Obama promised "a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans." The same Obama spoke at the Democratic convention in 2004, in which he said, "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America and an Asian America. ... We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all us of defending the United States of America." That speech resounded with conservative themes, as when Obama described "the people I meet in small towns and big cities and diners and office parks - they don't expect government to solve all of their problems. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and they'll tell you that they don't want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or the Pentagon. Go into any inner-city neighborhood and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn." This is the kind of talk you normally hear at the Republican convention. And when Obama was elected he pledged, "And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too." Let's call the Obama who uttered these inspirational words Obama I.

After his inauguration, a distinctly post-election tone emerged in Obama's words, and that tone was reflected in his deeds. The moderation and conciliation seemed gone; he promoted his agenda assertively, with little regard for the opinions of the voters:

Obama II, a very different character. This is the Obama who lambasts the banks and investment houses and forces them to succumb to federal control; the Obama who gives it to the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies, bending them to his will; the Obama who demonizes his predecessor and his opponents, portraying them as the source of all the problems that only he can solve. This Obama pushed through health care reform, essentially establishing government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy, and he did it without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Nor did it matter to Obama that a majority of the American people, in poll after poll, rejected the proposed changes. Despite Scott Brown's stunning victory in Massachusetts, turning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat over to the Republicans, Obama found a way to make his health care reform the law of the land. This same Obama seeks to impose expensive environmental regulations on companies in the form of cap and trade legislation; he is going to sharply hike taxes on businesses and the affluent; he is scaling back the military budget and has announced a withdrawal of American troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, as before, Obama can be expected to trample over his opposition to achieve his goals. This Obama has dismayed Republicans and conservatives, and an activist Tea Party movement has mobilized against him.

Pulling quotes from the pre-election version of Obama and contrasting them with quotes from the post-inauguration Obama, the contrasts are highlighted.

The obvious question, as D'Souza frames it, arises: "So which is the real Obama?" Voters and journalists phrased it in various ways, but the question was the same. The distinct personae were presented; which one was real? D'Souza, in 2010, proposed a novel solution: neither was real. Instead, "we are in search of Obama III, an account that transcends and reconciles Obama I and Obama II." A deeper psyche might lie behind these two contrasting personae.

To find the common source of these two images, one must attempt to investigate the observable signs of Obama's inner world. Minds are not publicly measurable or visible, but concrete actions, words, and experiences can give clues about what might be in a mind - in this case, in Obama's mind.

To grasp Obama’s story, we have to put aside the multicultural mantras and the conservative boilerplate and enter Obama’s world. Imagine a little boy growing up in the sunbathed beauty of Hawaii, soaking in the culture, hearing about how the innocent natives were crushed and overrun by horrible invaders and profiteers. Imagine a slightly older child on a bicycle on the crowded streets of Indonesia, learning from his stepfather the harsh code of a developing country, shaped out of the history of European colonialism. Now imagine a young man undertaking a journey to Kenya, for many people a journey to nowhere, but for him a journey to his own past, where through inner soul-searching and conversations with relatives he discovers who his father really was, and what he must do to make good on the dead man’s unfulfilled dreams. This is Barack Obama. But for him these aren’t imaginings; they are memories. These memories are formed out of the indelible ink of experience, and they have by his own account marked the man. By attentively examining his experience as he tells it himself, and as elaborated by others who have researched his background, we can understand Obama in a way that he has not been understood before.

The set of experiences, then, which shaped Obama's psyche include: living the first ten or more years of his life with no personal contact from his biological father; living those years in an environment, carefully designed by his mother, which included many Asians and whites, but no Africans or African-Americans; living those years without ever attending an American public school; living most of those years outside the United States.

The first ten, twelve, or fifteen years of Obama's life were, then, filled with factors which nudge him into the role of an outsider: a United States citizen who spent the majority of his time outside the United States; an African-American who was raised primarily, almost exclusively, among whites and Asians; an American child who never attended an American public school.

Perpetually playing the role of outsider has taught Obama the peculiar ways in which he projects his various personae, and the content of those personae.

All of the above represents the state of the public's understanding of Obama circa 2010. As time elapses, more data become available; Obama's policies and words continue to unfold, revealing more clues as to the common root of his various exteriors. By 2012, a more nuanced understanding of Obama was within reach.

Obama's mysterious policy actions, and cryptic statements, give clues about an underlying ideology which is aimed, not at America's role in helping other nations lift themselves to a first-world standard of living, but rather at a process in which the United States would lose a significant amount of its economic, military, and political status among the world's nations, and a process in which the average American family would see its net worth and its real income shrink. These, it emerged, were Obama's goals. In 2012, D'Souza wrote:

Obama is not merely the presiding instrument of American decline, he is the architect of American decline. He wants America to be downsized. He wants Americans to consume less, and he would like to see our standard of living decline relative to that of other nations. He seeks a diminished footprint for America in the world. He detests Americas traditional allies, like Britain and Israel, and seeks to weaken them; he is not very worried about radical Muslims acquiring a nuclear bomb or coming to power in countries like Tunisia and Egypt. He is quite willing to saddle future generations of Americans with crippling debt; he has spent trillions of dollars toward this end, and if he had been permitted, he would have spent trillions more. He has shown no inclination, and has no desire, to protect America’s position as number one in the world; he would be content to see America as number 18, or number 67, just another country seated at the great dining table of nations. The strength of my thesis is that it is completely congruent with who Obama is and what he does. We don’t have to assume that he is always getting results opposite to what he intends; we simply have to see that he intends the results he is getting. He emphasized in his inauguration speech his goal of "remaking America" – and he is doing it, recognizing that in order to remake America he must first unmake America.

Between 2010 and 2012, as a clearer understanding of Obama emerged, the reading public became aware that Obama neither liked nor trusted America as a civilization, as a society, or as a culture. Of the many attempted explanations for Obama's 2012 reelection, none have countenanced the notion that his general policy direction was popular. He was reelected despite his policies and despite the murky ideology that fueled them. Obama has no confidence in the United States Constitution, a document which codifies the governmental process which is most apt at preserving and protecting freedom. Obama has no affection for the worldview embodied in texts like the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, and no affinity for the ideas and writings crystalized political, religious, and economic liberty in America - ideas and writings like those of John Locke, Thomas Paine, George Washington, and the others who together made possible the highest degree of freedom to be found among the nations of the world.

Directed by his own inner ideology, which see America as a neocolonialist oppressor rather than as a liberator, Obama finds little or nothing laudable in the American tradition. Forgetting, or choosing to ignore, that the United States was the incubator for abolitionism and for women's suffrage, his ideology categorizes American success as a priori evil. Rather than see America as having the opportunity help other nations rise in economic and political freedom, Obama believes that the United States must decline in order for others nations to grow. His ideology is captive to zero-sum thinking, not only in matters of economics, but in matters of cultural and political capital as well. Rather than see the United States as a leader of nations, a first among equals, in a scenario in which a rising tide lifts all boats and prosperity can flourish simultaneously in many nations, Obama asserts that only by diminishing the United States can he offer a chance to other countries. D'Souza continues:

Never before in American history have we had a president who seeks decline, who is actually attempting to downsize his country. Presidents are elected to protect and strengthen their country, so why would a president weaken it? We cannot answer this question without understanding Obama himself, his background, and his ideology. Without such understanding, we are vulnerable to all kinds of crazy theories. I am certainly not one of those who say that Obama hates America, or that Obama is a traitor, or that Obama is a Manchurian candidate who is being manipulated by some secret cabal. Not so – Obama is doing these things because of who he is, because of what he believes. He subscribes to an ideology that says it is good for America to go down so that the rest of the world can come up. He wants Americans to be poorer so that Brazilians and Colombians can be richer. He thinks it would be beneficial to us and to the world for there to be many rich and powerful nations, with no single nation able to dominate or dictate terms to any other. Obama is a visionary for global justice. He wants to set right the ship of the world that, in his view, has been tilted to one side for nearly five hundred years, ever since Western civilization began to

flourish in the sciences, in technology, and in political development. Obama sees Western Civilization's forward movement not as illuminating a path which other nations might follow, but rather as a form of theft. Rather than encouraging the third world to develop itself as the first world has done, Obama wants to dismantle the first world. He does not envision the possibility of the first world helping, or working in partnership with, the third world; he believes that only harm can come from the first world, and nothing beneficial. His solution, in light of his beliefs, is to deflate the first world. The humbling and humiliation of the first world is on Obama's policy agenda.

While the use of terms like 'liberal' and 'conservative' and 'Democrat' and 'Republican' leads quickly to oversimplification and overgeneralization, it is nonetheless true that many - not all! - of Obama's opponents, who are called and would call themselves "Republicans" or "conservatives," mistakenly attempted to understand Obama through the template of traditional American leftism - the Democrat Party and its version of liberalism. Obama is not cut of the same political cloth as George McGovern or Franklin Roosevelt.

Obama is not a conventional liberal; he is not from the same mold as Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, or Jimmy Carter. Rather, Obama draws his identity and his values from a Third World, anti-American ideology that goes by the name of anti-colonialism. Obama’s philosophy can be summed up in David Gelernter’s phrase: America the Inexcusable. Notice that this is an affirmation of American exceptionalism, but exceptionalism of a special kind. According to this ethos, America is exceptional in being exceptionally militaristic, violent, greedy, selfish, and rapacious. For Obama, America is the plunderer; and he is the restorer. Traditional Democrats want to preserve American leadership and have America be a model for the World; Obama wants to displace American hegemony and realign America in the world. Traditional Democrats want a bigger economic pie so they can redistribute income in America; Obama wants to curb America's growth and redistribute wealth globally so he can reduce the gap in living standards between America and the rest of the world.

As an axiomatic principle, Obama's desire to humble the United States explains other policy decisions. Seen in this light, Obama's educational policies are not about education, but rather about weakening the nation; his environmental policies are not about the environment, but about weakening the nation; his healthcare policies are not about healthcare, but about weakening the nation; his economic policies are not about prosperity, but about weakening the nation; his energy policies are not about supplying the United States with fuel, but rather about weakening the nation. Only when understood from the standpoint of Obama's desire to harm the United States to his policies make a sort of consistent sense.

As a matter of political necessity and political expediency, Obama has needed to disguise his goal, and thereby enlist the support of environmentalists, economists, educators, and other specialists. But these segments of support become gradually disillusioned by the gnawing feeling that Obama doesn't have their interests at hearts: he mouths environmentalist slogans and issues enough executive orders to appear supportive of environmental causes. Yet, while banning allegedly for environmental reasons certain energy sources in the United States, he facilitates those same activities in other nations. Viewed through the lens of environmentalism, these actions seem self-contradictory; viewed through the lens of Obama's desire to damage the United States, these actions are consistent.

The Obama administration has been blocking oil drilling in America, and it is already moving to restrict and control the use of fracking. Indeed, Obama actively promotes policies that reduce America's access to energy, raise energy prices, and cost jobs which often end up moving abroad. These policies seem not only ill-advised, but politically risky for Obama. So why would he do this? The obvious explanation is that Obama is a dedicated environmentalist, deeply worried about global warming and oil spills and wary of the environmental and safety risks involved in the relatively new technology of fracking.

Obama has made no significant moves to encourage the world's big polluters - mainland China foremost among them - to clean up their environmental usage. Obama sees environmental policy as a tool to harm the United States economy. His feigned passion for environmental causes would quickly disappear if he calculated that they offered him no opportunities injure the American economy.

Yet this environmental explanation of Obama's behavior is clearly wrong. Even as Obama blocks and restricts energy exploration in America, he has been helping other countries exploit their energy resources. Specifically, the Obama administration has bankrolled oil drilling in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. This oil is destined not for export to America, but for Brazil’s, Colombia’s, and Mexico’s own use, which includes selling some of it to the Chinese. Obama also supports massive wealth transfers from the West to the developing world so that developing countries can grow and meet their increasing demands for energy.

Between 2010 and 2012, then, readers and voting citizens got a more distinct concept of Obama as his policy objectives emerged with sharper clarity. Obama was neither a moderate centrist nor a typical leftist in the tradition of America's Democrat Party. Instead, his policies are shaped by geopolitical view in which the third world nations are cast in the roles of victims, America is seen as capable only of exploitation, and the solution to the world's problems lies in the dismantling of America's global influence and demolition of America's domestic prosperity.

WMDs in Iraq

In late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence agencies of not only the United States, but also of many other nations, obtained information revealing that Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in Iraq was manufacturing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), including biological weapons, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons.

While Iraq's technological infrastructure was working at a furious pace to produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build a fission bomb, it was prevented from achieving that goal by the combat that would erupt in March 2003. It did, however, produce large numbers of usable biological and chemical weapons.

As the data became more clear, the United Nations, not the United States, issued several resolutions, which stated that Saddam's government would face consequences if it failed to open its facilities to weapons inspectors. The United Nations hoped to stop WMD production in Iraq and begin dismantling WMD stockpiles.

When Saddam Hussein and the Baath party proved consistently uncooperative, the consequences promised by the United Nations were delivered by a coalition of thirty nations when combat began in March 2003. In the following months and years, the war unfolded, first under the name Operation Iraqi Freedom, and later, in the popular press, simply as the Iraq War.

As the war unfolded, the conflict itself receded in importance, and the news media focused more on the political struggle within the United States. This struggle, over the continuation of the war, the importance of the war, and the justification for the war, became a rhetorical exercise, and the actual facts of the war were increasingly ignored.

The other countries in the coalition, however, remained focused on the reality of the grave threat posed by Saddam's WMDs. The United Nations directed several other governments, including some not part of the coalition, to begin dealing with enormous stockpiles of chemical weapons found hidden in various weapons depots around Iraq.

One of the governments, Germany, assigned the task of dealing with large quantities of WMDs began coordinating and training technicians and scientists to process stockpiles of lethal chemical weapons. A statement issued by the German government says that these

experts will be trained in how to use German technology to destroy the remaining chemical weapons stockpiles left over from Saddam Hussein’s regime.

As the various nations began the UN's work of neutralizing Saddam's vast store of WMD's, it became clear that there were more such weapons to be processed than could reasonably be handled by the member nations of the coalition. The decision was made to hand over the processing of chemical WMD's to the Iraqis, who by now were stabilizing their own free government in the wake of Saddam's demise. The German government stated that it

will provide Iraq with a mobile laboratory equipped with state of the art detection and measuring devices for the analysis of chemical warfare agents, to be used at the remaining chemical weapons sites in Iraq.

Because Germany was not part of the coalition in March 2003, it was seen as more objective or neutral in its handling of the WMDs, and it also gained thereby an opportunity to make an effort even though it had not been part of the initial coalition. Its statement continues:

In this way the Federal Government is making an essential contribution to the first phase of the safe and environmentally responsible disposal of chemical weapons in Iraq.

The technology provided by Germany not only helps to neutralize the caches of WMDs around Iraq, but to do so in a way which was safe and friendly to the environment. Because Germany, as a nation which was not part of the original coalition, had no vested interest in the amounts or types of chemical weapons, it was seen as being capable of producing a responsible inventory of Saddam's vast hoards of WMDs. The German government stated that

This will enable Iraq to analyse the highly toxic legacy of the Saddam regime and to draft a technical strategy for its safe and environmentally responsible destruction.

As an example of one of sites found to being hiding a large collection of WMDs, this description was released about one of the locations:

For many years, grenades filled with the nerve gas sarin have been stored in the bunkers of a former chemical weapons production plant in Iraq. The site also contains several hundred tonnes of chemical precursors for the production of chemical weapons. The exact composition and condition of the warfare agents are unknown. The Federal Government had agreed to assist Iraq with the destruction of its old chemical weapons stockpiles following the country’s accession to the international Chemical Weapons Convention.

As the Iraq war become history, and not a current event, time allows for a more detailed analysis of the data. The record will show that a collection of nations, working loosely under UN leadership, managed to deactivate and disarm a massive stockpile of chemical weapons. The region is today safe from WMD threats in large part due to the efforts of German technologists who began the work themselves and then turned over the completion to the Iraqis they had trained.

Competing Values - Political Matrices

Why are tensions and conflicts necessarily part of political life? If asked, the overwhelming majority of voters would certainly say that they desire justice, peace, prosperity, and security. But this apparent agreement does not lead to harmony. Why? At least two reasons are apparent: first, because each of these good-sounding concepts is susceptible to competing definitions (exactly what are justice, peace, prosperity, and security?); second, because while each of these four is desired, they sometimes are in conflict or in competition with each other.

Consider justice and peace. Both are desirable. But if military force is required to obtain justice, then the quest for peace might be compromised: hence the famous tension between peace lovers and peace makers.

Security and prosperity are both appealing; but an economic system which maximizes prosperity is a system which includes risk, and there compromising the sense of economic security.

Political conflicts can therefore arise among voters who agree about the importance of a set of values, but who weigh these values differently when they come into competition with each other.

Political scientists conceptualize this as a matrix with four dimensions. Consider each of the four axes:

• In a system of freely-elected representatives, and of different layers of government, one value will be to move as much decision-making as possible to entities at the lower end of the scale: cities, counties, and townships should have more decision-making power than the state or federal government. Local governments are more accessible to citizens and more adeptly absorb petitions and appeals, and more flexibly respond to them.
• As one nation-state among others, one value is to project an image of strength - politically, economically, and militarily. Weakness is provocative, and the failure to convince other nations of one nation's resolve and willingness to act is to invite aggression.
• The liberty and dignity of an individual are maximized with economic freedom: therefore, one value is to keep taxation at what is agreed to be a practical minimum; to reduce or eliminate governmental spending, debt, and deficits; and to reduce regulation or interference in manufacturing, in consumption, and in the marketplace.
• People enter voluntarily to various associations, the natural organs of society. There are a wide range of such groupings: clubs, teams, music groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce, religious groups, neighborhoods, etc. Just as individuals seek freedom, so the liberty of groups is also a value: cooperative activity should not be impeded by government; therefore, legislation prohibiting actions in private life is to be avoided, to the same extent as legislation prohibiting these social groups from regulating private life is to be avoided. Just as a government has no right to require or prohibit private actions within the private sphere, it also has no right to restrict a private and free association from determining private actions within the private sphere.

If each of the above is considered as an axis along which increasing or decreasing levels of preference for that one value, relative to the other three, is measured, then we have system for categorizing various political points of view. One voter may value the ability of the nation-state to be robust among the other countries of the world, but this same voter may be willing to sacrifice the freedom which the private voluntary associations within society have. A different voter may value the primacy of local governments over national governments, and in the process be willing to sacrifice the notion of a free market, if it is the local and not the national government seeking to regulate.

To the extent that such a framework allows us to accurately characterize political disagreements, it also allows us to perhaps envision the types of compromise which might be negotiated to the satisfaction, if not to the delight, of various parties. To the extent that this framework is nuanced, it allows a more detailed and perceptive discussion than the polemics which distill disagreement to binary opposites: liberals/conservatives, Republicans/Democrats.

Analyzing 9/11

The task of understanding exactly what happened on September 11, 2001 has gone on for a decade, and will go on long into the future. To be sure, the basic events are simple and clearly acknowledged. Nineteen Islamic terrorists, mostly from Saudi Arabia, hijacked four airplanes, flying two of them into the World Trade Center (WTC) and one into the Pentagon. The final plane crashed as a result of passengers who resisted the hijacking; the passengers had learned of the plot, and prevent the final aircraft from reaching its target. Approximately 3,000 people died.

Beyond those basic facts, many details of the attacks remain the topic of research. Discovering the minutia of the plot is difficult because it was conceived in secrecy, and because much of the reporting is biased, coming from sources in the Muslim world. Senator Al Franken offers an example:

Six months after 9/11, the Gallup Poll of Islamic Countries found that an overwhelming majority of those surveyed believed that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been the work of Arabs. Well-educated Egyptians and Saudis believed that the Israelis were behind the murder of the three thousand innocents on 9/11, in large part because of articles in their countries' official state newspapers. One of the widely disseminated stories was that no Jews died in the collapse of the Trade Towers because they had received calls telling them not to go to work that day.

When such stories are widely circulated and believed, the historian's task becomes more difficult. Sources must be examined carefully. Another factor which makes the work difficult is the premature release of information. If data are published while investigation and research are still in progress, the released data can contaminate the data which is still to be gathered by creating expected narratives. If an expected narrative about an event exists, then researchers may be predisposed to fit evidence into that narrative, rather than letting the evidence suggest other possible alternatives. Likewise, witnesses being interviewed may reformulate their memories and statement to conform to the expected narrative. This process may be conscious or subconscious.

The same types of concern are at work when a crime lab is asked to examine a sample, without being told the details of the case from which the sample comes. The goal is to keep the research as unbiased as possible.

Naturally, it is expected that all such data will eventually be made available to the pubic.

Franken offers an example data released prematurely in the chaos and emotional trauma following 9/11:

A clearly rattled Orrin Hatch was all over the news that day, blaming Clinton because he had "de-emphasized" the military. Hatch was also the first to confirm al Qaeda's involvement by disclosing classified intercepts between associates of Osama bin Laden about the attack. Asked about it on ABC News two days later, a miffed Donald Rumsfeld said Hatch's leak was the kind that "compromises our sources and methods," and "inhibits our ability to find and deal with terrorists who commit this kind of act."

Hatch's gaffe was twofold. First, by highlighting Clinton's lack of military preparation, he biased historians' analyses; other contributing variables should have received consideration in the absence of Hatch's emphasis on this one variable. Second, Hatch unwittingly alerted Muslim terrorists to the fact that their communications had been compromised; had Hatch not done this, further data might have been mined from such intercepts. As it was, the terrorists quickly changed their communications protocols.

In hindsight, while Hatch's blunder deprived investigators of valuable data which might have saved lives, it did not contaminate the general understanding of 9/11. But it is an example of the type of slip which could have misdirected the analysis. Franken continues:

The disclosure that al Qaeda was responsible did allow Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) to identify the "root of the problem" just hours after the attack: "We had Bill Clinton backing off, letting the Taliban go, over and over again."

Documents revealed that Clinton had been briefed on the Taliban, on al Qaeda, and on Osama bin-Laden. Clinton had nixed various action plans to neutralize the threat of al Qaeda, had weakened the intelligence-gathering of the United Stated, and had weakened the military's ability to carry out such operations.

When Clinton left the White House in January 2001, the incoming administration was concerned about the weakened state of both the military and the various intelligence agencies. Incoming National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice noted:

I knew that there was a serious threat. I'd made that clear in a radio station interview in Detroit during the campaign, stating, "There needs to be better cooperation [among U.S. intelligence agencies] because we don't want to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our territory."

Clearly, Condoleezza Rice was well aware of bin Laden long before the 9/11 attacks. Although the various intelligence agencies were aware of the threat from al Qaeda, they had few details, and even fewer concrete suggestions about what to do about that threat. If they had such suggestions, the military lacked the resources to carry them out at that time. The NSC's counterterrorism advisor, Dick Clarke, briefed Rice when the new administration moved into the White House. She recalls that Clarke's presentation was

short on operational content. There was a lot that described al Qaeda but not very much about what to do. He made the point that al Qaeda was a network dedicated to the destruction of the United States. There were numerous slides with faces of al Qaeda operatives and a discussion of their safe haven in Afghanistan. There was very little discussion of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. At the end I asked Clarke and his team whether we were doing all we could to counter al Qaeda. He made mention of some covert activities and said that he would later brief me on some other efforts.

Despite the numerous failures of the Clinton White House, the new administration did not want to spend time enumerating such shortcomings. In support of George Tenet, a Clinton appointee, Vice President Cheney wrote that

I was a strong supporter inside the White House of what Tenet and the CIA were trying to do. When there were suggestions after 9/11 that we have a group similar to the Warren Commission investigate intelligence failures, I had argued against it, saying it would too easily turn into a witch hunt and that what we needed to do was focus on preventing the next attack.

It is worth noting the broad agreement: liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, Clinton appointees and Bush appointees. Al Franken, Condi Rice, Orrin Hatch, Dana Rohrabacher, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Clarke, George Tenet, and Dick Cheney - that is indeed a broad spectrum of political views.

Desert Storm: the View from inside a Tank

The first Gulf War, as Operation Desert Storm is sometimes called, presents the historian with a good object for study, because it was limited in both time and space, allowing the student to capture a comprehensive overview of the conflict. By comparison, a scholar might study WWII for years, only to realize how much more he has yet to learn about it.

There was a clear and defined buildup to the war. Planners and strategists had access to reliable intelligence, knew the terrain, and measured their resources carefully. Historians Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh write:

The Vietnam War had as profound an influence on American calculations as the war with Iran had on Iraq. Key actors in the American political process were determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s: the administration was resolved not to get trapped in an unwinnable war; the military would not allow civilians to impose artificial restrictions that would deny them the possibility of a decisive victory; Congress refused to be railroaded into giving the executive carte blanche to wage war; and the diplomats did not wish to find themselves supporting a military campaign in isolation from natural allies.

But there was more to the Desert Storm strategy than merely working to avoid "another Vietnam," a phrase which was common in public discussions of the conflict. As the Foreign Service's Sol Schindler writes,

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s strategy, crafted by a special team of planners brought in from the Pentagon was fairly simple. The Marines would attack along the coast hitting the heavily fortified Iraqi Army positions. It was thought the Republican Guard would then stream south to reinforce the troops under attack. At that point, the VII Corps under Lt. Gen. Frederick “Freddie” Franks on the left would hook round to come in on their flank and crush the Republican Guard.

Schwarzkopf was commanding a coalition of at least 35 nations. Iraq stood essentially alone, with no material or military support from any ally. The Republican Guard was the elite unit of the Iraqi army. Although the coalition was militarily far superior to the Iraqi army, Schwarzkopf and other planners did not want overconfidence to become a weakness, and so they planned as if the enemy were strong, and attempted to organize a provision for worst-case scenarios. Yet, as is almost always the case in war, once hostilities commenced, the most careful planning and strategizing can quickly dissolve in the fog of war, as something will inevitably not go according to plan. Despite the attempt to foresee every unexpected possibility, there's always one scenario for which nobody accounted. War begins, and plans start to dissolve.

Fighting began not on the ground, but in the air, as Freedman and Karsh report:

The war began at 03:00 Kuwait time on January 17. A million men (with some 32,000 women on the coalition side) faced each other across the border but, as predicted, the initial stage of the war was turned over to the air campaign. The coalition command had earlier intended to begin with a phased campaign; the sustained attacks on ground forces were to be held back for a late stage. In the event, the considerable air armada gathered by the start of the war made it possible to begin attacks on ground forces from day one. Despite the intense speculation accompanying the lapse of the United Nations deadline, effective tactical surprise was achieved. Iraqi air defenses, confused by electronic warfare, achieved little. A high sortie rate, averaging about 2000 per day, was achieved almost immediately and sustained thereafter. A strategic phase of considerable efficiency was directed against Iraq's ability to command and supply its ground forces, and to develop and produce weapons of mass destruction.

Various forms of smart bombs - munitions guided by laser, radio and radar - gave the coalition both control of the air and the ability to inflict devastating damage on the enemy's military installations on the ground. After establishing air superiority, the ground war began, as Sol Schindler writes:

When the signal for the ground war in Kuwait was given, the 2nd Squadron (the Cougars) was more than ready. The troops had trained relentlessly in the desert, were sick of desert sand in their coffee, underwear and bedding, tired of the general dullness and boredom of their surroundings and, at the risk of being politically incorrect, could be described as eager for combat. They knew that only through offensive action could the war be brought to an end and they could finally leave the desert and return home.

Armor would play a major role in this war. Covering large amounts of desert quickly meant that the infantry would be less crucial than cavalry. Both the Iraqis and the coalition forces understood this. Freedman and Karsh report that

The coalition also had good reasons not to be overawed by Iraq's military capability. The major uncertainties surrounded its readiness and ability to use chemical weapons, and the potential effects of its ballistic missile force. Although fear of an eventual Iraqi nuclear capability was one of the reasons for defeating Saddam, no one thought that such a capability was then already available. Only a limited number of Iraqi divisions were considered compe- tent, and only the elite Republican Guard had modern Soviet T-72 tanks. Nearly half of the troops were mobilized reservists who had shown a read- iness to surrender during the war with Iran when the opportunity arose. There was also evidence that Iraq's less capable and youngest troops were being put in the lightly defended forward positions. The air force had been ineffective in close air support and the pilots were judged to be poor. The chain of command was heavily centralized and unresponsive. Generals who had made their names in the war with Iran were retired, dead, or under arrest. The defensive methods developed during the war with Iran had been based on massive earthworks combined with flooding to channel any offensive onto a killing ground. The Kuwaiti border did not offer the same potential for water barriers, nor were there any natural barriers such as the Shatt-al-Arab waterway. It was also apparent that the Iraqi force on the border to the west was more thinly spread.

In later years, popular memory would confuse and conflate the two Gulf wars, but a decade and significant differences lie between them. In 1991's Operation Desert Storm, both the Israeli and Saudi governments confirmed Iraq's possession of, and willingness to use, chemical and biological weapons; Senator Donald Riegle confirmed that Iraqi used these weapons, and that coalition forces had been exposed to them. Further, coalition forces were exposed to low levels of radiation in form of depleted uranium, a material used in manufacturing armor-piercing shells. The Iraqis did not have a functioning nuclear warhead (fission) during the conflict; one of the coalition's goal was to disrupt the Iraqi weapons program which was in the process of building such warheads.

In Operation Iraqi Freedom, by contrast, which began in 2003, featured less use of chemical and biological weapons; the coalition forces moved so quickly that the Iraqis did not have time to deploy them. Coalition troops found stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons - called weapons of mass destruction or WMDs - as well facilities producing material for nuclear weapons, facilities which had been restarted after the 1991 conflict had ended.

In both conflicts, armor was central. Tanks were decisive in Operation Desert Storm, and important in early phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In 1991's conflict, the superiority of the coalition forces was demonstrated in tank battle between the 2nd Squadron of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment of the VII Corps and the Republican Guard. Sol Schinlder writes:

After two days the 2nd Squadron, which was leading the advance finally made contact with the Republican Guard. The conflict that ensued was overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. One squadron (cavalry speak for a battalion) wiped out an entire mechanized brigade. The entire battle cost the Americans one fatality while they managed to kill hundreds and captured even more.

Both in terms of equipment and in terms of training, the Iraqis were outpaced by coalition forces:

The Russian-built T72 tank was mechanically reliable but inferior to the American Abrams in the guns it used and in its range finders. More important, however, the American crews were better trained, better schooled, better led and infinitely more capable, making the results of the battle logical if somewhat unbelievable. What is truly unbelievable, however, is the faith the American leadership had in the fighting abilities of the Republican Guard, which prevented them from finishing it off.

Coalition officers overestimated the Republican Guard, and did not press the attack as quickly, as far, and as powerfully as they could have. The result was that many from the Republican Guard escaped or retreated, leaving them as threats for later. To which extent this surviving remnant of Republican Guard forces contributed to the second Gulf war, over a decade later, is not clear. But had the coalition been able to neutralize more of the Republican Guard in 1991, the Iraqi army of 2003 would have been to some extent weaker.

Debt, Taxes, and Spending

While it has been clear since the mid-twentieth century, if not earlier, that the United States needed to reduce its national debt, its taxation, and its governmental spending, Congress has not succeeded in doing any of these. This may be in part due to the fact that it is impossible to reduce any one of these alone. Any attempt to reduce debt will fail without simultaneously reducing taxation and spending. Likewise, reducing taxation is not possible without cutting spending and the debt. Finally, a reduction in spending alone will not benefit citizens unless it is accompanied by cuts in taxes and debt.

It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that taxes and the debt can both simultaneously be reduced. In order to trim the debt, it would seem necessary to keep taxes at the current level, or even increase them. But this is not so. It is quite possible to diminish the debt while curtailing taxes, as long as spending is lessened at that same time. The technique is this: to lower spending at a slightly quicker rate than the cuts to taxes. In this way, more money is made available to reduce the debt even while cutting taxes.

Debt, taxes, and government spending form a trio which consistently and inevitably put a damper on the economy. While the numbers change so quickly - amount of national debt, unemployment rates, inflation rates, government spending budgets, tax rates - that any detailed comment about the economy is outdated as soon as it is printed, the general principles remain unchanged. In 2010, Ted Nugent wrote:

President Obama's stated program is to eliminate the tax cuts of President Bush, to raise the top marginal tax rate on the so-called "wealthy" who already pay the vast amount of income taxes, raise Social Security taxes, and provide tax dollars to fund private retirement programs. He supports throwing more tax dollars into the government's feed trough to gobble up. Not me.

Shortly after Nugent wrote those words, taxes on all workers were increased. Every job-holding American is paying more taxes. The national debt has more than doubled in a single four-year presidential term. In the same year, Chuck Norris wrote:

Washington's most recent financial spiral started with the Bush Wall Street Bailout (TARP) of $700 billion (what I call new debt #1). But then it continued under President Obama, who pushed for the next $787 billion stimulus bill (debt #2). And that wasn't enough either. Then they tried the $410 billion omnibus spending bill (with 9,000 earmarks - 60 percent Democrat and 40 percent Republican in origin), which like the others was railroaded through Congress (debt #3). Then President Obama informed us that another $634 billion would be required for a down payment for universal health care (debt #4) and so on. All of that doesn't include other economic stimuli needed on the government horizon, as Representative Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, noted when he called the mammoth $787 billion spending bill "stimulus No. 1."

Note the bi-partisan guilt: both President Bush and Obama supported "stimulus" bills. Both Democrats and Republicans maneuvered to get earmarked funds. The notion that certain companies were "too big to fail" and needed to be bailed out was simply false. If the government had simply refrained from intervening, and let the free market work its own way to equilibrium, the economy would have found a route to self-correction. Perhaps that self-correction would have included major businesses going bankrupt. Although that would have constituted a short-term hardship, the individuals experiencing that hardship would have also found their way to an economic self-correction. Workers laid off would have eventually found new jobs. Stock market declines would have been reversed as new companies emerged to replace the failed ones.

Instead, government intervention ensured that the temporary and transitional unemployment which is part of an economic self-correction became instead a structural and semi-permanent unemployment. Because the major businesses did not collapse, they did not create the space for new start-up businesses which would have taken their places and which would have lent to the economy that growth associated with such new start-ups.

When taxes, government spending, and national growth are cut, leaving room for the free market to energize economic growth, then the United States will have a chance to reverse some of the damage inflicted on it during the last few decades.

The Paradoxes of Modern American Education

The following fictional vignette represents a real and all too frequent state of affairs:

It's another day in the elementary school classroom. While most of the children remain relatively focused on their activities, Johnny, as usual, presents management challenge. The teacher is used to it by now, because he's that way almost every day. Early in the school year, when the pattern became apparent, the teacher conferred with the usual sources of advice - the school's psychologist and social worker - and learned about Johnny's home life. Johnny's parents are either incapable or unwilling to parent properly. Johnny's diet consists mainly of potato chips and cola. He is allowed to stay up as late as he wants, watching cable TV unsupervised, playing video games, or surfing the web. Electronic media has exposed him to unreasonably high amounts of extreme violence and deviant sexuality. Johnny wears whichever clothes he wants - which usually means that he wears the same clothing day after day, without benefit of having laundered the clothes or having had a bath or shower himself. Other children in the classroom complain that "he smells bad," and the teacher doesn't want Johnny to overhear these complaints, lest his feelings be hurt, and yet she is forced to acknowledge that the children are correct in their assertion.

The teacher wishes more than anything that she could simply tell Johnny's parents that they must give Johnny nutritious food, ensure that he gets enough sleep, and limit the hours he spends with electronic entertainment. Why can't somebody force them to be better parents?

The teacher's sentiments are perfectly understandable. Yet there is a danger lurking in what seems to be an obvious, commonsensical, solution to such problems. As much as we want to intervene in the case of negligent parents, we must respect a core American belief which asserts, coarsely phrased, that the government can't move into a person's private life and tell him how to live it.

A public school is a government institution. It's part of the same system that brings you the IRS, the Post Office, the FBI, and the Army. To preserve freedom in our society, which is the stated goal of our governmental system, a government school can't intervene into private life and restructure families - even if it would be good for them. In the vignette above, Johnny would certainly be well-served if, in fact, someone did force his parents to take better care of him. But if the government is the one doing that forcing, Johnny's gain would be the world's loss. While such intervention might improve his life marginally, society as a whole would suffer, because a precedent would be set which endangers the goal of maximizing freedom.

So if it's best to tell the government that it can't intervene in Johnny's home life, are we condemning him to misery? The situation does, after all, have a material effect on Johnny's quality of life: his education is already greatly impaired. If, in the name of liberty, we don't allow governments to barge into homes and regulate parenting, are we consigning some children to permanent neglect?

No. Because while government intervention into home life constitutes a net loss of freedom, the concept of freedom of association allows private sector organizations to influence private life and private decisions without harming liberty. While government bureaucrats should not show up at Johnny's house and tell his parents how to raise him, other, more organic, structures in society can and should do precisely that: neighborhoods, clubs, chambers of commerce, synagogues, mosques, churches, teams, extended family, etc.

In a case of glaring parental neglect, such organizations have the ability and the obligation to intervene. Because they are not part of the government, their intervention does not defile liberty.

Government must not only refrain from intervening in private life, it must also refrain from obstructing those societal structures which can and should so intervene. Sadly, it is sometimes now the case that not only does the government intervene into private matters when it should not, but it restrains those private associations which should intervene. Often citizens are afraid to intervene in cases of parental neglect or domestic abuse, knowing that any altruistic effort in this direction could in fact be seen as actionable by the government: the benevolent intervener might find himself accused in court.

Because freedom is the preeminent public value in the United States, education fits differently into American society than into many other societies. To say that freedom is the ultimate public value does not mean that it is the highest private value. Indeed, if freedom were the highest private value, the result would be an anarchy filled with selfishness and violence; if freedom were the highest private value, it would actually bring about the demise of political liberty; if freedom were the highest private value, it would lead humanity into that famously grim situation described by Thomas Hobbes.

In society, people are free to choose a highest private value: friendship, altruism, charity, family, faith in God, and other ways of finding meaning in life. But in order for each person to have the freedom to find a highest private value, the highest public value must be freedom. If anything besides freedom becomes the highest public value, then the individual is no longer free to choose altruism or friendship or charity as her or his highest private value.

The contrast between the need to place freedom as the ultimate value in the public sphere and the need to allow the individual to choose some other good as the highest personal value becomes perhaps more intelligible in concrete form. There are many specific instances in which this tension manifests itself - in freedom of speech, in economic freedom, for example.

This principle is also at work in education. There is a dynamic at work which limits the effectiveness and quality of American public education. The desire to improve our governments educational system must be limited if it is not to damage our freedom. The utopian drive which lies, explicitly or implicitly, within many political ideologies would have us able to obtain maximum levels of both public education and personal freedom. In reality, however, both of them cannot be simultaneously maximized.

Four instances of the tension between personal liberty and the maximization of public education can be identified.

First, the principle of personal freedom means allowing the individual to make choices which may conflict with any given set of values - simply put, the freedom to make the right choices is the freedom to make the wrong choices. To the extent that parents and children are private individuals and citizens, optimizing government-run education would require compulsion of some type. This is present already in truancy laws and mandatory attendance until a specified age. We allow students to choose from an offering of certain books or courses or schools; the desire to optimize education would deny this freedom to the individual. Likewise, to maximize the achievement of our public schools, the government would override non-academic choices made by the individual student, inasmuch as they affect the educational process. All of this would conflict with the stated value of freedom in society. The society which values freedom recoils at the specter of government officials making endless educational decisions, decisions effecting students, decisions in which students and parents have no say.

Second, the principle of freedom means respecting the parent's authority over the child, even when the parent makes decisions which do not maximize educational achievement. The government, if it is to respect freedom, must refrain from intervening, even if it means that the parents are free to make decisions which will not maximize educational achievement. As much as it might be clear to the public and to common sense, decisions regarding how much sleep a child gets, good nutrition, physical exercise, general transmitted attitudes toward education and learning, etc., lie with the parents, even if the parents fail to make the best choices in these matters. To be sure, society has a duty to intervene in the worst cases of negligence, but even then, it may be society which intervenes and not the government. In any case, there is a distinction between intervening in the worst cases and intervening in cases which are merely suboptimal. An institutionalized respect for liberty shudders at the prospect of government bureaucrats managing a family's private life - determining menus and bedtimes for children, supervising grocery and laundry.

Third, the principle of freedom means that government schools are under the jurisdiction of elected officials. Obtaining a majority or a plurality of votes in a school board election does not guarantee that the people thus elected will, or can, make decisions which maximize achievement. Indeed, it guarantees that optimization will not be achieved. There is no ideal expert who can refine our educational systems to perfection. Yet the utopian desire will seek to find those who even come close, and place them into positions of power, instead of the freely-elected representatives of the people. However proficient a technocrat may be, the cause of freedom is better served by elected representatives than by appointed experts. Free people must not allow the hope of efficiency to persuade them to relinquish the power of their ballots.

Fourth, the principle of freedom means that the vertical separation of powers - city, state, federal - along with the horizontal separation of powers - legislative, executive, judicial - is necessary to ensure that freedom is protected. But this same mechanism which protects liberty also ensures that policies, like educational policies, will never be completely, or even largely, consistent. To maximize public educational achievement would require a bureaucracy which is guided by a unified vision, and which is largely consistent with itself. While this is certainly impossible, the attempt would be dangerous. Entrusting power and control to a government which is not hamstrung by both vertical and horizontal separation of powers is a sure step on the road to tyranny. It is in the citizen's interest, and in the service of freedom, to ensure that the government is partially handicapped. But this also means that public education will lack a unified program which might optimize it. Despite a great desire improve the performance of the government's schools, it is more important for the sake of freedom that we keep our government weak and fragmented. A strong government might foster the illusion that it can better manage its educational institutions, but will in reality merely reduce personal liberty.

These four tensions reveal why public education cannot be optimized, and why we should not even attempt to optimize it. The effort to maximize achievement in government-run schools cannot lead to the best possible educational outcome, but will certainly result in a net loss of liberty.

Yet society recognizes the importance of education and wishes to maximize it. While efforts to improve education may never yield a utopian purity of achievement, there are promising routes to developing the educational process. While the principle of freedom means that the citizen's life and decisions must be protected from the government at every turn, the tension between the desire for freedom and the desire for refining our educational institutions dissolves when the institutions are neither owned nor operated by the government. Privately-owned schools avoid the four quandaries enumerated above.

Private schools are founded on the principle of free association. Thus the life and choices of the individual are not violated by an institution which she or he has freely joined. It is to be noted that the smaller units of government mimic this aspect of privacy, inasmuch as a city government is more accessible and more responsive than the federal government, and with ease one can leave a city for another, while only with great difficulty can one leave one nation for another. Two routes are thus available for the improvement of education: either privatization, or the complete exile of the federal government from educational matters. In the latter case, state, county, and city governments would be left to the task.

To be sure, smaller local governments have their own weaknesses and flaws, as do privately-owned and privately-operated schools. Any arrangement which removes the federal government from education is good; any arrangement which removes state and city governments as well is even better. A purely private system will not be perfect, and is not a panacea for any set of social ills. But a private system is the best available mechanism for education.

Although the matter at hand is the improvement of education, the funding of education cannot be separated theoretically from its improvement. As matters stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century, greatly reduced funding for education would not be incompatible with simultaneously increasing its quality and increasing teacher salaries, so great is the room for increased efficiency in the use of such funding. Senator Goldwater wrote:

I agree with lobbyists for federal school aid that education is one of the greatest problems of our day. I am afraid, however, that their views and mine regarding the nature of the problem are many miles apart. They tend to see the problem in quantitative terms – not enough schools, not enough teachers, not enough equipment. I think it has to do with quality: how good are the schools we have? Their solution is to spend more money. Mine is to raise standards. Their recourse is to the federal government. Mine is to the local public school board,the private school, the individual citizen – as far away from the federal government as one can possibly go. And I suspect that if we knew which of these two views on education will eventually prevail, we would know also whether Western civilization is due to survive, or will pass away.

Goldwater's way of framing the question is instructive - quantity versus quality. The qualities which one would hope to find in an educational system are those which are a priori unlikely to be found in any governmental undertaking. Even when the government succeeds in shifting its attention from quantity to quality, it is unable to produce, or even properly identify, the desirable qualities.

To put this somewhat differently, I believe that our ability to cope with the great crises that lie ahead will be enhanced in direct ratio as we recapture the lost art of learning, and will diminish in direct ratio as we give responsibility for training our children’s minds to the federal bureaucracy.

In general, the best a government can do is to produce mediocrity. Any effort at increasing quality results in resources being drained from society for a futile effort to improve something which is of inevitable necessity mediocre. This effort will consume not only material resources, but will damage personal liberty in the process, as the demand will invariably arise for more governmental control in order to get everything just right.

Let us put these differences aside for the moment and note four reasons why federal aid to education is objectionable even if we grant that the problem is primarily quantitative.

Goldwater goes on to make his four reasons. First, federal involvement in education is unconstitutional; education is the business of cities, counties, and states, but not of the national government. Second, the need for federal funding in education has never been demonstrated; if more money is needed for schools, money from cities, from counties, and from states is just as effective. Third, federal funding distorts a citizen's perception of the economics of education: federal money is never "free money," but rather it is taken from the taxpayers; it is mistaken to think that having the federal government acquire the educational system from the state or city government will somehow ease the burden on taxpayers. Fourth, federal aid to education inevitably means federal control of education, which can have no good effects but multiple bad effects.

Common sense, and most experienced educators, will inform us that it is not in the interests of a child, or a child's education, that she or he be fed exclusively on potato chips and cola, that she or he spend the majority of her or his time surfing an unsupervised internet, playing unsupervised electronic games, or watching unsupervised television. Yet we shudder to think of government bureaucrats barging into a family home to regulate parental decisions; this would be an unacceptable violation of the personal freedoms on which the United States was founded. Thus the hands of government schools are and should be bound, to preserve liberty; but this binding also means that mediocrity will be product. If, instead, society's influence, rather than the government's control, is brought to bear on such situations, we may often, if not always, find correctives while at the same time preserving the individual from government intrusion.