His other essays about Lincoln are quite good as well
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB10Aa03.html
February 12 is the birthday of a grim-handed killer who inflicted more casualties on his foes than anything the Russians did in Chechnya. Of course I refer to Abraham Lincoln, whom the Americans have reinvented as a kindly national paterfamilias. War ranks among the strangest forms of willful self-destruction, and America’s Civil War of 1861-65 in turn ranks among the strangest of wars. Three-quarters of Southern military age men served in the Confederate ranks, and of these almost 40 percent fell. What prompted these men to cast away their lives with such abandon, and what motivated their enemies to slaughter them?
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KC17Ak03.html
President Abraham Lincoln famously called Americans an “almost chosen people”. That might qualify as America’s national joke, for you can’t be “almost chosen” any more than you can be almost pregnant.
Lincoln’s oxymoron frames the tension between the religious impulses that made America and the reality that ultimately it is one imperfect polity among many others. America is “a country with the soul of a church”, as G K Chesterton wrote, and by no accident, the only industrial nation (apart from Israel) in which religion plays a decisive role in public life. The central role of religion continues to polarize Americans and confuse foreign observers.