The American Future by Simon Schama

message,” the general said; but the message was supposed to show, by the sheer numbers who delivered it, that if men in office (especially men in office who had never worn uniform) were sending youngsters to kill and to die, something more was owed the country by way of explaining the precise point of the sacrifice. Intoning "9/11”and “fighting the terrorists there before we have to fight them here” was no longer enough to satisfy the troops, either in the field or at the polling station.
    And there he was again at the Drop Zone, dress uniform and medals replaced by checked shirt and jeans, shoveling his breakfast around the plate in one of the side booths. The instinct in me that wanted to talk to him fought with the instinct that screamed “are you nuts ?” and then won. I slid into the booth and did the introduction. Sanchez is a compact man with widely spaced large, dark eyes and a broad nose, like a sharp prairie marmot in tinted glasses. He could not have been friendlier, but then this is a man who needs friends in the worst way, not to mention readers, for, inevitably, there was a book coming out, Wiser in Battle , the self-exoneration from which he had refrained at the ball. Even so, I was surprised at the bristling hostility to his former superiors in the Bush administration that he was prepared to lay out on the table. I hardly had begun to probe him on the failings of the planning for the aftermath of the war when he finished my sentence for me: “No real strategy, none at all, beyond getting to Baghdad.” It was well known that Sanchez had barely been on speaking terms with the civilian governor, Paul Bremer (who doubtless would have his day in print), and that the two men had agreed on virtually nothing that had to do with how the military might help build infrastructure as well as tangle with the insurgents in Falujah.
    â€œWas that your business, then, putting down the foundations of a working state? Doing the engineering?” I asked him. “How could it not be,” he said, looking up from his breakfast, “seeing as everyone else whose business it was was doing such a poor job?” So Sanchez was not one of those who thought the army was just for fighting. I didn’t have to tease the history out of him. Out without prompting came the honor roll of 1945, many of them West Pointers: Bradley, Eisenhower, Marshall, Clay, the generals who did have the strategy for peace as well as war, generals unafraid of governance. “They were visionaries,” Sanchez said wistfully, “but, heck, they were professionals, real soldiers who knew what they were getting into; who knew how to make things work, a democracy, for instance.” “It didn’t happen this time, did it?” I added gratuitously. “It did not,” he said.
    So, in hindsight, was this a war that at all costs had to be fought?I asked him. Aren’t those the only wars for which the United States should think of sacrificing its children? He lowered his gaze, took a stab at an egg, then looked back at me and said, “Sure.” I didn’t know which of the two questions he was answering.
    4. The trials of the Roman
    The Meigses were staunch Jeffersonians. How could they not be? They were all over America—Ohio homesteaders, Georgia merchants, Philadelphia doctors. They subscribed to the vision of their country as a new polity in the world, the first true “empire of liberty” as Jefferson had put it. The difficulty of reconciling power, freedom, and justice did not dampen their patriotic energy, although Mary Meigs, Montgomery’s mother, feared for the Union should her southern relatives support the expansion of slavery into that empire of liberty.
    Idealism at West Point lived on in one fundamental aspect of the institution, its commitment to civil as well as military engineering. Sylvanus Thayer had resisted teaching the subject alongside the sciences of