In early August, members of the Witherspoon Society, a “progressive” religious advocacy group affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA, attended the “Ghost Ranch Week of Peace” in rural New Mexico.

Recently Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to target Europe with missiles if the United States deployed components of a limited missile defense system to the Czech Republic and Poland.

The 1960s was nirvana for American liberalism. From the day John F. Kennedy inspired a new generation of Americans to the time that newest of the new generations, my generation, now entering our sixties, rebelled against the war in Vietnam, it was both the best and worst of times.

Five years ago 19 Islamist Jihadists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. In carrying out their “martyrdom missions,” the Jihadists joyously embraced death, confident that, obedient to Allah, paradise awaited them.

Reasoning by historical analogy is dangerous. Georges Santayana notwithstanding, history does not repeat itself. Rather, the value of history is in what we learn from the past. Failures are as instructive as successes, if not more so.

When Hamas terrorists tunneled from Gaza into southern Israel, killed two Israeli soldiers and abducted Corporal Galid Shalit, that probably put the nail in the coffin of any prospect for a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority.

“War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. Countless duels go to make up war, but a picture of it as a whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance.” – Carl von Clausewitz, “On War,” page 1.

In the early 1950s, when I was barely in grammar school, my father got religion like a case of the flu. And not just any religion. He caught the Chattanooga-Tennessee-Born-Again-

War is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.
— Carl von Clausewitz, “On War,” 1832

Can you name the war which so far has claimed over 6,000 American lives, more than half that number being innocent civilians?

While I cannot say I look forward to Christmas, I celebrate it, even if less enthusiastically as time passes. Perhaps it’s the “bah humbug factor” that comes with fading eyesight and the other vicissitudes of what is, however — at least for now — still preferable to the alternative.

Thirty years ago, in the wake of the Vietnam War, historian James Clay Thompson warned: the primary lesson learned was that the United States should never again go to war in a former French colony located on the other side of the globe, in a land with a tropical climate, against an insurgent force supported by a sympathetic communist regime in a contiguous state.. Thompson acknowledged the lesson’s limited applicability.