The strategic imperative of “straight talk”

We have pointed out that at the time of the Great Depression it was not FDR’s early measures from the centralized command of a greatly enlarged federal government that brought us out of the depression and led to a renewed wealth, prosperity and leadership of the free world, rather it was the preparation that led up to our entrance into World War II against the Axis powers and the focus and increase in productivity that resulted and lasted well into the 1960’s. But it was the focus that ultimately brought prosperity, not the war itself and the even greater regulation and centralized central government intervention that was part of it. That focus led to enormous productivity increases that created a boom when the wartime regulation, necessary as it was to win, was lifted.

Many quite respectable scholars even argue that the New Deal measures prolonged the depression. The problem today seems to be that though President Bush declared a War on Terror, there is nowhere near the well-nigh universal focus on winning that led to the atmosphere of breakthroughs in technology and production that ultimately created the boom after World War II that lasted so long.

How important focus is in such matters can be illustrated by another well-nigh universal effort that helped to prolong the post World War II boom. It was born in the cold war defeat we temporarily suffered when the Soviets launched their Sputnik. If you would ask the late Jim Webb (the man who ran NASA in arguably its best years as a government entrepreneurial effort, not the present senator) to what he attributed the efficiency and effectiveness of NASA when he ran it compared to other agencies of the federal government, his answer was always the same. “It was simple, “ he would say, “the President said we’re going to the moon and everybody got behind that one idea.” Later historians would say that he quarreled with JFK about that singular focus but the president insisted and everybody got behind. Together with JFK’s decision to cut taxes it was one of the few really effective and lasting accomplishments of his administration that was so tragically cut short.

The spin-off of new products that came from that mentality of “we’re going to the moon” and so many uniting behind it and the productivity of a government in achieving a clear goal was comparable to that which occurred in World War II when as a people we articulated a nation-wide and well-nigh universal desire to defeat the evil axis powers. When we did, at least for a time, win the Cold War, it was because Ronald Reagan, in the face of the same contempt that we see today of John McCain and particularly Sarah Palin from those whom Thomas Sowell has so accurately called “the anointed,” made it clear that those in Congress and the press and halls of academe who liked the idea of the Soviet Union advancing leftist ideas would not stand for the idea of what this nation is about and that the general will would under his leadership override their contempt for our founding ideals..

The problem with the War on Terror that President Bush has led us into is that there does not seem to be this requisite focus and yet without that focus we are far less likely to have the economic “surge” that we need to revive our economy and restore our leadership in the world with the requisite clarity that will call others to our side. Yet the evil of the Wahabbi brand of Islam in the hands of the likes of the Taliban and the evil of the Iranian foreign policy in the name of the Shi’ite Supreme Religious Council are every bit as evil as Soviet communism, as was the Ba’ath Socialism of Saddam Hussein before we led a coalition to topple him.

The President has spoken of the “hijacking” of the religion of Islam but he has not shown the leadership to articulate a national will against it equivalent to that which led us to victory in World War II despite allied losses greater than those of the Axis of evil we were up against in that war. The challenge now before us is to select a Commander-in-Chief who will supply that missing articulation of the national will, who will not be backed off by false cries of being “anti-Islamic” and of “offending the rest of the world” from speaking the truth about the evil we are up against. President Bush has spoken of the evil, at least in the early days of this war, and mentioned how unfathomable it is to us as a people, but he seems not to have followed through with the further articulation we need to have to proceed to win completely against it, which is the “American way of war,” in the well known phrase of the great military historian Russell F. Weigley.

As Thomas Sowell has so accurately and brilliantly pointed out in a number of articles there is absolutely nothing in his past or all of his skilled rhetoric and soaring generalities about “change” that indicates that Barrack Obama has this ability without which we cannot win this war. John McCain is glib but not gifted with oratorical ability and sometimes seems to stumble when he attempts to be oratorical, a limitation which he clearly understands. But it is also clear that he, from his formative experience in life, as well as his heritage, understands the totality of war and the necessity of the will to win that will gather the nation behind him. He is far more likely to damn the torpedoes of “world opinion” and call out the evil that has become so dominant over much of the rest of Islam for what it is, which is an absolute strategic necessity. And without it we will have neither victory in the war nor economic recovery and triumph after we win because we will lack the national will necessary for a U.S., and world, victory against the manifest evil that we face. The Obama camp likes to claim that John McCain does not have a skilled understanding of economics, but then, neither, his critics said, did Ronald Reagan. But he understood economics sufficiently to know that the will to win coupled with the economic pressure, in this case swerving the oil weapon decisively out of the hands of our opponents, would lead to victory. In World War II the regulation, such as rationing and price controls, necessary during the war itself, constrained growth while incentivizing productivity and innovation. And when those regulations were lifted the economy revived and boomed.

What Reagan understood in the revolution in which John McCain was a foot soldier, is that economic growth spurred by reduced taxes and the lightening of regulatory burdens, combined even with some deficit spending of the sort necessary to make up for, in Reagan’s case, parallel economic mismanagement by the Democrats under Jimmy Carter, (comparable to that of Clinton, Kennedy, Frank and Dodd and their cohorts here) is a formula for victory. It is clear that labeling the evil empire for what it was in order to mobilize the popular will was important then and is equally important now. We must not hesitate to label the evil and unduly part of Islam for what it is and only one candidate seems anxious and willing to do that in the necessary manner.

Lt. General Gordon Sumner, Jr. (U.S.A.ret.), R. Adm. Clarence A. “Mark” Hill and Larry Elgin are all members of U.S. Defense-American Victory in Washington, D.C.; they were all colleagues of the late Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who was, among other high ranks, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They have all written articles that have been published on Internet web sites and are particularly concerned with “blind spots” in our strategic thinking with regard to which vision must be supplied if the war against terrorism is to be won.

No. The Depression didn’t really end until Ike started deregulating, undoing all the chains and ropes with which FDR had bound up American Enterprise and Industry. What the war brought us was not recovery but a depression with full employment. Wartime wage controls kept wages so low that the people as a whole were not better off than they were before the war. They just all had jobs. “Patch it! Wear it out! Use it up!” Same slogans.

What the war did do, despite the strangling regulation, was to create an acceptance of new ideas and innovation. Competent entrepreneurs like Kaiser were enabled to come to the fore against entrenched oligarchies. The technology adopted and deployed to win the war spun off afterward into an economic surge that grew under Eisenhower until in the 1950’s, as we say in the first piece the economy reached the level from which it had crashed.

An example came from Eisenhower himself. He saw the autobahn and decided that we had to have something akin to it. For what he saw as a strategic imperative he adopted the federal interstate highway system. While he saw it as a strategic imperative, it clearly had a very strong economic effect.

Our pieces do not say that the economic surge came during the war but rather that they were impelled by it. Reagan realized, as we say, that in order to win without a hot war we had to win economically and so he led us to that win.

Since 1973, as we say, except for the period from 1973 to 1981 when the Saudis pulled the plug, at which point the rated of innovation in oil had risen to 300 %, innovation in oil has basically died except for incremental changes. We have published about this on WND and pointed out some of the answers right in front of us on which our leadership has completely dropped the ball. The DOE ought to be basically scrapped; it has been almost a complete failure; it has subsidized the problem and completely failed to solve it. The biggest example is the ethanol boondoggle.

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