Words Matter

American politics has always been rough, far more so in the early days of the Republic, when Congressmen routinely carried guns to work and often threatened to use them. Open violence reached its zenith in 1856 with Congressman Preston Brooks’ near-fatal caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, a beating from which Sumner never fully recovered. Still, it’s been a while since a candidate felt he could reach for a gun and, at least rhetorically, threaten the president, as Todd Staples did in his “Come and Take It” ad during his campaign for lieutenant governor of Texas. But then, we’ve never had a black president before. Bigotry is rarely on overt appeal in the increasingly personal attacks on President Obama, but as a friend of mine, who is also a judge, said, “you don’t have to scratch very deep” before you get to the issue of race. Similarly, historians long denied that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, pointing to all kinds of other explanations – from Northern industrial expansion to the South’s embrace of a pastoral way of life to the preservation of the union – in an effort to refute the importance of race in the most critical event in our history. But it’s hard to imagine the war without slavery or to overstate the role of brutal language and imagery in any discussion of race in America. I believe absolutely in free speech, but I find the escalation of violent rhetoric a deeply worrisome thing.

Carpe Diem

The Dow was up again last week, closing just below its all-time high. Meanwhile, Russian troops seized the Crimea; violent protests gripped Venezuela; Uganda passed a law sentencing homosexuals to life imprisonment; sectarian killings remain epidemic in Iraq and Burma; 10,000 have died in the Central African Republic; car bombings killed 90 in Nigeria; violence ripped through Thailand. Here at home, a huge storm brought heavy flooding and mudslides to the West, but no relief from crippling drought; a growing wealth gap continues to erode our belief in opportunity and community; an unrepentant Arizona legislature turns to spot checks of abortion clinics. Each day seems to bring a new crisis from an unexpected quarter. It’s exhausting to feel so helpless in a world beyond our control.

So why would the market gain 49 points on Friday? Is this just more evidence of Wall Street's obliviousness to suffering in the world? Undoubtedly. But I like to think there's another message. The cataclysmic tone of today’s news merely amplifies what people have understood for millennia: we aren’t in control of our destiny. One response is to lock our doors and turn out the lights. In individuals that’s called depression; in nations it's called isolationism. Another is to accept the limits of our power and engage with the world as we find it. Beneath the chilling headlines, people get on with their lives, affirming their resilience and investing in a future they can’t foretell. That's called living. In the face of tragedy, life remains a wonder.

Nor Any Drop to Drink

Here is all you really need to know about this winter’s meteorological divide between the inundated East and the parched West:

The map shows a line just east of the 100^th meridian that divides America into a wet half and a dry half, a map that has remained essentially unchanged since Americans began aggressively settling the west 150 years ago. John Wesley Powell, who navigated the Colorado River despite having lost his right arm at Shiloh, argued then that the West was far too dry for intensive development. But his prescient words were drowned out by Charles Dana Wilber’s crackpot theory that “rain follows the plow.”

And so, in southeast Nevada, which gets 4.2 inches of rain a year, we built the sprawling city of Las Vegas, home to two million people and endless fountains. And in California, where the worst drought in memory threatens drinking water supplies and agricultural production, we have created in the desert of the San Joaquin Valley “one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions” by extracting so much groundwater that the land itself is sinking.

Through a long history of damming, drilling, diversions, and water grabs, we have dried up the West’s rivers and extracted its ground water at rates that, it’s now clear, are unsustainable. Over the years, prophets have tried to tell us so – Wallace Stegner in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), John McPhee in Encounters with the Archdruid (1977), and Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert (1993) – but we didn’t listen.

Beyond Chocolate

“Saint Valentine is a third-century Roman saint associated since the High Middle Ages with a tradition of courtly love.” It wasn’t exactly courtly love that four members of Al Capone’s Italian South Side gang had in mind when they lined up seven members of Bugs Morans’ Irish North Side gang against a garage wall at 2122 North Clark Street and opened fire 85 years ago today. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre, fought to control the bootleg liquor business, is Prohibition’s defining event. It’s an era we tend to glorify, filled with wonderful names (“Machine Gun” McGurn, Antonio “The Scourge” Lombardo, “Hop Toad” Giunta), although it was marked by murder, political corruption and income inequality (Capone made $100 million a year).

Nor did Ayatollah Khomeini seem in a loving mood 25 years ago when he issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for blaspheming Mohammed in Satanic Verses. That too led to a massacre, the Sivas Massacre, in which 37 people, primarily artists and writers, were incinerated when zealots set fire to their hotel.

Prohibition was the result of American fundamentalists trying to impose their personal morality on an unwilling people, who defied the law and eventually overturned it. Khomeini’s fatwa took things to a new level by making murder the goal, not a byproduct, of fanaticism. Like his predecessors, from Claudius (who beheaded Valentine for protecting persecuted Christians) to Stalin, he achieved his goal by making most of us afraid to speak out.

The heart is the source of love and courage. Happy St. Valentine’s Day.

e pluribus unum

Buried in a blur of ads in last night’s forgettable Super Bowl was an astounding one-minute spot by Coca Cola that featured the music of “America the Beautiful,” sung in eight languages as the camera panned across rugged rural scenery and gritty urban life in a patriotic paean to America. Even though I knew the ad was meant to increase the sales of an ubiquitous brand of sugared water which is very bad for you, I was captivated. This is not the first time Coke has celebrated diverse peoples: “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)” transcended mere product marketing and became a huge hit for The Seekers in 1971. It is perhaps a measure of the difference between 1971 and 2014 that last night’s ad, for all its seemingly saccharine patriotism, had a message with an edge: “America is beautiful. And it is getting more beautiful every day,” illustrated by scenes and people from across the country's physical and cultural landscape, asserts that diversity is not an add-on to white America; it is the core of the identity of an ever-changing nation. So naturally, the ad was greeted with outrage on Twitter from those who were offended by foreign-looking children singing “America the Beautiful” in languages that were not English – although it’s worth mentioning that the girl who sang in Spanish is Puerto Rican, not an immigrant, and the girl who sang in Tagalog is Filipino, whose country was an American possession for 48 years.

The Mantle of Reasonableness

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court last week overturned the state’s 2012 Voter ID law. It seemed a reasonable law, intended only to prevent people who were not eligible to vote from voting. Who could be against that? Unfortunately the state has yet to find a single instance of anyone – a dead person, say, or an “illegal immigrant” – showing up to vote. The law, Judge Bernard McGinley wrote, did nothing “to assure a free and fair election.” On the other hand, there is now evidence that, in its short lifetime, the law inhibited plenty of other people from voting – students and the elderly, poor people and people of color. This was precisely what the law, which passed the legislature without a single Democratic vote, was intended to do. This law, announced the House majority leader after its passage, “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

Beware of extremism clothed in reasonableness, particularly when the evidence is slim. Who, for example, could be opposed to applying hospital building codes to abortion facilities, especially in light of “all” those butcher shops we keep reading about? In a nation where the vast majority believes in God, why not teach intelligent design as a possible explanation of the origins of life? Isn’t education a competition of ideas? Who could disagree that the market allocates resources – including health care – more efficiently than government bureaucrats?

We like our extremists to be wild-eyed and ranting, but they’re way too smart for that.

• Some of you have not been getting the blog regularly because of a glitch, for which I apologize and which I believe is fixed. You can find all the excitement you missed at www.jamesgblaine.com

We’ve Got Shale!

Heavy metals pollute millions of acres of China’s farmland. Less than half the country’s water is safe to drink. Its air kills more than 500,000 people every year. This is the price of progress. Eight thousand miles away, Governor Tom Corbett wants Pennsylvania to be “the Texas of the natural gas boom.” He’s getting his wish. “The amount of clean-burning natural gas being safely produced is nothing short of staggering,” the Marcellus Shale Coalition recently announced. Natural gas, “non-profit” industry shills like the Coalition keep telling us, is wonderful: cleaner than coal and safer than nuclear, it is the energy equivalent of a wonder drug that cures our ailments without demanding changes in our lifestyles.

Except it isn’t. A growing body of research shows natural gas extraction to be anything but benign – most recently, Stroud Water Research Center scientists found that even low levels of fracking’s wastewater were highly toxic to stream organisms.

The industrial age is over. It brought great benefits, but the earth and its inhabitants can no longer sustain its human and environmental costs. It arose in response to new ways of understanding the world – and the entrenched powers, both church and state, resisted it with all their might. But what seemed to them the end of the world was but the start of an exciting new age. Today, the entrenched powers, both government and corporate, resist any alternative to the old order of “more is better”. The Inquisition didn’t stop the last paradigm shift. It must not stop this one.

Virtual Disaster

I have long wondered if people who ask you to “friend” them on Facebook or another other social media site have hurt feelings when you don’t respond. I now know the answer. They do not. Let me back up.

When Facebook appeared a decade ago, my children informed me that I was never to sign up. That was fine with me. I do not care what Justine Timberlake ate for breakfast and I only read graffiti on urban walls.

Last week a friend asked me to connect on LinkedIn. One of my children, who shall remain nameless, told me that membership had “no downside” and could even expand the reach of my blog. So I accepted – and I got this sinking feeling when hundreds of emails instantly went out to God knows whom.

Soon I was hearing from people I hadn’t heard from in years. “I don’t want you to take it personally,” wrote one, declining my “offer”. “Is this really from you,” wrote another? Citing an article on the NSA, a cousin wrote, “I wouldn’t put my contacts on LinkedIn for the world.” “It’s really just an avenue for people to spam you,” wrote a fourth. Others I apparently invited included the Harvard Extension School, American Embassy in Bogota and TripCase.

Writing letters of explanation actually did connect me with old friends, although the sense of not being in control was unsettling. Still, with all the real disasters around the world, I think I’ll survive this virtual embarrassment.

Snow

It is absolutely quiet this morning on the coast of Maine. All of nature lies still beneath an eight-inch blanket of undisturbed snow. It follows the curve of the porch railing, covers the branches of the spruce trees beyond, and literally blankets the earth. It is early still, and there is as yet no footprint on the snow’s surface. It is as if no being wants to break the spell of peace that covers the land. I start to read the newspaper, my early morning ritual. Its reports of violence abroad and political bickerings at home are little changed from yesterday or last week. They seem, at least for now, so distant that they come as an intrusion into this enchanted world. I stop reading. Soon enough, I will go out and shovel the steps and start the car, the town’s plow will break the silence of the street, and people will struggle to get to work and to school.

In some places people are suffering terribly from the cold and snow. “In a cold so biting that exposed fingers quickly start to ache,” wrote Anne Barnard recently in the Times, “Syrian children in plastic sandals trudge through mud and chunks of ice, their tiny feet red from exposure” – while I look out at the gently falling snow from the warmth of my study. Something in me wants this morning to last forever, even as I know that the beauty I see is no answer to the injustice they suffer.

Just Wanna Be Me

Sometimes I am asked who I would like to be, and, after all these years, I am happy just being me. But I know who I don’t want to be: Jang Song-thaek, the uncle and former mentor of North Korea’s corpulent young dictator, Kim Jung-un. Jang, who many saw as the regime’s regent while Kim learned the ropes, was stripped of his power, publicly humiliated and forcefully removed from a special party meeting last week. Jang has bounced back before, but two of his closest associates have already been executed, and others coldly denounced their one-time benefactor, while hundreds of party lackeys stared impassively ahead, all dressed identically, their faces showing nothing but a numbing blankness, lest they be singled out for the deviancy of individualism. When the bully is agitated, you do not want to catch his eye. Jang apparently committed many sins during his “dissolute and depraved life”, from fornication to cornering the iron-ore market, but none worse than being a potential rival to his 30-year-old nephew. And so, on the eve of Machiavelli’s 500th birthday, Jang learned the regent’s lesson that dates from Nero’s murder of his mother Agrippina almost 2000 years ago: Beware when they grow up – as Cheney learned during Bush’s second term.

We may never know the fate of Jang, one man in a country that seems to find men expendable. But I will not soon forget the chilling photo of rows of robotic functionaries watching without emotion. I wouldn’t want to be them either.

Those Poor Poor

In an apparent coincidence, Warsaw is hosting both the International Coal and Climate Summit and the United Nations’ Convention on Climate Change. Guess which one the Poles, who rely on coal for 90% of their electricity, like better? While the two meetings have little in common but the word “climate”, both emphasize the impact of coal on “the poor”. Unsurprisingly, they see things differently. There are “1.3 billion people in the world who live without electricity,” said Godfrey Gomwe, of the World Coal Association. “A life lived without access to modern energy is a life lived in poverty.” Coal is here to stay.

Across town, representatives of some of the world’s poorest countries argue that, far from paving the way out of poverty, coal is the major contributor to climate change, whose impacts are already overwhelming the poor. They talk of “climate injustice” and demand compensation.

There seems little likelihood much will change. “Lectures about compensation, reparations and the like will produce nothing but antipathy among developed country policy makers and their publics,” said Todd Stern, America’s climate envoy. Meanwhile, the U.S., which has scaled way back on domestic coal use, now exports millions of tons to Asia.

So we are left with a conundrum: the only path to prosperity we understand is an economic growth so dependent on energy extraction that it threatens to become our road to ruin. In either case, the primary victims are the poor, real people who have become an abstraction. We need a different way.

Don’t Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eggs

The problem with screwing up something as badly as the administration appears to have screwed up the Obamacare rollout is that you don’t just get egg on your face, you create huge problems for those who support you. I still hope that Obamacare is the critical first step toward universal health coverage – and ultimately a single-payer system, which many doctors insist is the only way to provide it. But we are now in danger of heading in the opposite direction, as feckless Democrats rush for political cover. The current comparisons to George Bush’s bungled reaction to Katrina seem unwarranted because (1) Bush hadn’t spent the previous five years planning for a large hurricane and (2) his administration’s response seemed based as much on callousness as incompetence. The Affordable Care Act, on the other hand, was meant to be about compassion – particularly for the millions of Americans without health coverage. It was the president’s signature act and meant to be his legacy. Now its opponents tout it as Exhibit A of government’s inability to do anything.

People warned me that the law was not 11,000 pages for nothing – that it was meant to obscure the giveaways to all manner of special interests, including the insurance companies who now dance happily atop what they hope is Obamacare’s grave. Meanwhile, America continues to have the most expensive, least comprehensive and most bureaucratic (yes, insurance companies are bureaucracies, too) health care of any developed country. We can’t afford to fumble away the chance to change that.

Yomamacare

You’ve got to love the Koch Brothers. Well, maybe love isn’t the right word, but those guys and their proxies pop up everywhere. Their latest stunt is a $750,000 tailgate tour of 20 college campuses by Generation Opportunity, a “non-partisan” 501(c)(4) non-profit that, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision, does not have to reveal the names of its donors. So far, though, it has received over $5 million from groups associated with the Kochs. The motorcade’s mission is to persuade students across America to reject Obamacare.

First stop: the University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game, where, GO spokesman David Pasch emailed the Tampa Bay Times, “we rolled in with a fleet of Hummers, F-150’s and Suburbans, each vehicle equipped with an 8-foot-high balloon bouquet floating overhead.”

Then “brand ambassadors (aka models with bullhorns)” rolled out a full suite of alternative health options, ranging from cardio exercises (beer pong) to balanced nutrition (pizza and beer) to something called “cornholing” (which turns out to be a combination of beanbag and a warning about what Obamacare will do to you).

“And,” added Pasch, “we educated students about their healthcare options outside the expensive and creepy Obamacare exchanges."

The kids had a ball. I mean, free beer, loud music and hot models vs. creepy Obamacare? That’s some choice for college students, especially those still on their family’s health plan.

The Kochs’ (rhymes with “just folks”) commitment to family values and home remedies is unwavering, so perhaps we should call their health-care alternative “Yomamacare”.

McDonald’s Happy Deal

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan traces the journey of steer 534 from a South Dakota pasture to the take-out window at McDonald’s. By the time his steer gets to a feedlot in Kansas, Pollan can no longer track him individually, and by the time what’s left of 534 ends up between two buns in a Happy Meal, he’s become more vegetable than animal. In fact, the entire meal the Pollan family consumes at McDonald’s is made primarily of corn. “Animals exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass,” Pollan writes, “must be adapted by us — at considerable cost to their health, the health of the land, and ultimately to the health of their eaters — to live on corn.” It turns out that Pollan’s list is incomplete. In a just-released study, “Super-Sizing Public Costs: How Low Wages at Top Fast Food Chains Leave Taxpayers Footing the Bill”, the National Employment Law Project estimates that McDonald’s also costs U.S. taxpayers $1.2 billion a year. That's what we pay in public assistance to augment the “low wages, non-existent benefits, and limited work hours” of the company’s 700,000 front-line workers. And let’s not forget, 534 – and the corn he is force-fed – is also taxpayer-subsidized every step of his short, miserable life.

Meanwhile, the company, its shareholders and its brass are doing just fine: $5.5 billion in both profits and shareholder returns last year, and a CEO earning $13.7 million. Maybe those who excoriate the “takers” in our country should look up as well as down.

Context Matters

To understand something, you must know the context in which it occurs. Take, for example, the phrase, “No need to dress for dinner.” Its meaning differed markedly when uttered on 1930s Park Avenue or 1960s Haight Ashbury. In the former, it meant, you don’t need to put on white tie and tails – what Bertie Wooster called ''the full soup-and-fish”. In the latter, if you came over in anything more than your sandals, you’d probably be overdressed. So too with Obamacare. Some people are so pathologically obsessed with it that they drown out rational debate with barrages of invective against the law and the man for whom it is named. Others, however, talk reasonably about the program’s huge future costs and the unseemly legislative process that turned a good intention into a garbage bag of special interests. We should listen to them. But I hope we also consider the full context of the national conversation. America has over 48 million people without health insurance, which among other things causes 48,000 preventable deaths annually. Estimates of covering them are high: a 5% increase in health spending, about 1% of GDP. The costs of not covering them are staggering on two levels. The first is the impact on our economy from the combination of ultimately higher treatment outlays and lost productivity of the uninsured, both of which are eventually borne by taxpayers. The second is the impact on our community from tolerating the presence of such a large marginalized group. Life is short; dignity is precious.

Mama Warned Me

My mother was displeased when my daughter, Annie, moved to Houston. “I don’t like Texans,” she said. “They’re so conceited. They just talk about how much better Texas is than the rest of America.”

She loved making spectacular generalizations out of very few data points – her opinion was based on two fliers in my father’s World War II Marine squadron, one of whom became my godfather. And in truth, Annie spent two good years in Texas, and one of my closest college friends is from San Antonio.

Still, my mother’s words echo. Texas has always been unruly. After breaking away from Mexico in 1836 and forming a republic, one powerful faction wanted to expel the Native Americans and expand to the Pacific. Texas joined the union in 1845, but was soon gone again, deposing Governor Sam Houston and seceding in 1861. That sentiment never died: over 100,000 Texans signed a secession petition this year.

And emboldened by the country’s most in-your-face Congressional gerrymandering ten years ago, Texas Republicans are leading the fight against Obamacare and manning the barricades against compromise. It’s not just Ted Cruz. Congressman John Culbertson compared the GOP antics to “let’s roll” of 9/11. Steve Stockman and Blake Farenthold talk of impeaching the president. The legislature is considering a nullification bill, and Governor Rick (Oops) Perry opted out of the Medicaid expansion to insure his state’s poor. This week he declared the implementation of Obamacare “a criminal act”.

So guess which state has the worst health coverage in the country?

Yep. Texas.

The Hollow Men

We are the hollow me We are the stuffed me Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! T. S. Eliot

• Yesterday the Republican majority in the House of Representatives voted to cut $40 billion from food stamps and to kick 3.8 million people out of the program. This, in a nation with 46.5 million people in poverty.
• That same majority is bent on shutting down the government at a time when the long-sputtering economy is finally gathering steam.
• It is goading its wretched leadership to default on the national debt when over 11 million people remain unemployed and we are seeking negotiations with Syria and Iran.
• It has voted 41 times to defund Obamacare, treating it as a partisan bill, rather than the law of the land, passed by both houses of Congress, signed by the president, upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that will ultimately insure 48 million people currently without insurance.
• It is eating its own young. The nation’s ten poorest states – Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, New Mexico, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oklahoma – have 44 Republicans in Congress and only 10 Democrats. In Mississippi, the country's poorest state, 40% of all children receive food stamps.
• It is destroying the safety net, which is the glue that holds communities together.
• It is unraveling the social contract, which is the foundation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that these “patriots” claim to revere.
• It is the meanest collection of bullies and hypocrites that have ever claimed to represent America.

Warning Shot

Two months have passed since George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin by pleading the Second Amendment. For how else can you interpret the jury’s refusal to convict a man who – in violation of explicit police instructions – pursued an unarmed man in a quiet neighborhood and shot him dead, except as the swagger that comes with carrying a gun? It’s less than a year since Adam Lanza killed 20 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a massacre that led to modest regulations in many states. But fear not, the NRA has risen to the challenge, and its efforts to snuff out any remnants of a national conscience are escalating across the country. Last week in Colorado, voters recalled two state senators who had voted in favor of Colorado’s rational gun laws. Similar efforts are under way in all 50 states. It’s easy to castigate the NRA and leave it at that, but the image of gun-toting yahoos doesn’t really describe what happened in Colorado. Democrats and Independents outnumbered Republicans at the polls, and gun-control advocates, led by Michael Bloomberg, outspent the NRA by 5-1. Colorado’s legislative branches, governor and U.S. Senators are all Democrats. The NRA didn’t just galvanize voters around a single issue; it appealed to a broader sense of alienation among people who feel disempowered. That feeling is not limited to two senatorial districts in Colorado, and those recall elections should awaken us all to the need to start listening, not just to ourselves, but to each other.

It’s Only a Phrase

“There are 78,000 abandoned buildings in this city standing in various levels of decay,” the article begins. “Services have fallen into dysfunction, and debts are piling ever higher. Yet for all the misery, Detroit’s bankruptcy gives an American city a rare chance to reshape itself from top to bottom.” “From top to bottom.” It’s only a phrase, I know, but what if the reporter had written of rebuilding Detroit from bottom to top? Consider the difference in our images of what is happening in that distressed city. In one we picture planners, experts, outsiders, people with the answers imposing their solutions from above. In the other, we start with the struggling communities and impoverished people seeking to nurture whatever will help them survive. We need both approaches, to be sure. Detroit cannot heal all the wounds inflicted by 50 years of disintegration and misrule without a lot of help, but how you describe the problem determines, at least in part, how you define the solutions.

Half a world a way, in the remote villages of Dertu, Kenya, and Ruhiira, Uganda, Nina Munk reports on Jeffrey Sachs’ quest to eradicate poverty from Africa. Yet “with almost every intervention,” writes Joe Nocera, “she documents the chasm that exists between the villagers and those running the project.”

For whom are we building villages and rebuilding cities if not for the people who live in them?  Words matter. You do not build a community from top to bottom. You build from the ground up.

Sneak Attack

I once watched Tiger Woods stop his golf swing a nanosecond before hitting the ball because a spectator had clicked his camera. Woods swings at 128 miles-per-hour, so his back-wrenching reverse was mind-boggling to watch – much like Barack Obama’s back-wrenching reverse on Syria. First, contrary to all theories of the importance of surprise, Obama declares we will attack Syria. He’s a little fuzzy on why – take “a shot across Assad’s bow”? Salvage America’s “credibility”? Reinforce the “red line” against gas? Send a proxy message to Iran? But he’s clear the missiles are coming. Then he pulls the rug out from under everyone, particularly John Kerry, by announcing he will submit the question to Congress, which (a) is on vacation and (b) hasn’t passed any meaningful legislation in years. Yet, with this stroke of inadvertent brilliance, Obama restored the Constitution – which gives Congress the sole power “to declare war” – and placed Congress in a pickle. For how can they shut down the government if they are simultaneously going to declare war? I believe that internationalism and human rights should be foundations of American foreign policy, and there is horrific suffering in Syria. But I don’t see what sending missiles to enforce rules of civilized slaughter in a war in which the good guys may well be worse than the bad guys will accomplish, beyond escalating the carnage. Congress has not declared war since 1941, an interval filled with disastrous efforts to impose American values at the point of a gun.