PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

Remember how Americans returned to their lives after WWII, no longer satisfied with some of the injustices at home which they had helped erradicate abroad? Victor Hanson recently returned to his farm in Califorina after a year at the Naval Academy and has reflections of a similiar sort:

On a personal note, this column marks the end of my year-long tenure as Shifrin professor of military history at the U.S. Naval Academy, and a return to a rather isolated farm in Selma, California. My first memory upon arrival in Annapolis on August 8, 2002 — a time of Washington doom and gloom — was picking up a copy of Foreign Policy and reading the cover story, "The Incredible Shrinking Eagle. The End of Pax America," in which readers were assured by Immanuel Wallerstein that "Saddam Hussein's army is not that of the Taliban, and his internal military control is far more coherent. A U.S. invasion would necessarily involve a serious land force, one that would have to fight its way to Baghdad and would likely suffer significant casualties."

As an outsider, the most notable impressions I have had since arriving are the surprising degree of self-criticism of the U.S. military and its willingness to welcome both internal and outside audit — and thus its abject contrast with two equally formidable institutions, the media and the universities, which really are shrinking and have indeed suffered "significant casualties" to their reputations. Again, it is far easier to be a liberal in the supposedly authoritarian military than to be a moderate or conservative on a college campus; students are more likely to be segregated by race in the lounges and cafeterias of "progressive" universities than they are in the mess halls of aircraft carriers.

In the past year I have met midshipmen, Air Force cadets, colonels at the Army War College, officers in the Pentagon, air and naval crews at sea, reserve and retired officers, and a variety of civilian defense analysts. Very few were triumphalists about their singular victories in Afghanistan and Iraq; instead, they were eager to dissect past plans, identify lapses, and encourage candid criticism — both operational and ethical.

Rather different from all that are the New York and Washington press corps and the culture of most universities. Many elites in these two latter institutions have throughout this crisis revealed lapses in both ethics and common sense. There is a general lack of contrition (much less apology) by prominent columnists and talking heads about being so wrong so often in editorializing about the war. Partnerships with fascist regimes were embraced by major American networks — and at home, elite critics got into bed with pretty awful antiwar organizations whose true agenda went well beyond Iraq to involve subverting the very values of the United States.

The media needs to ask itself some tough questions about its own rules of engagement abroad, the use of bribe money, and the ethical and voluntary responsibility of its pundits and writers to account to their readers, when they have for so long consistently fed them nonsense and error. Universities, in turn, must ask themselves fundamental questions about tenure and teaching loads: Why does tuition consistently rise faster than inflation; why is free speech so often curbed and regulated; and why did so many prominent professors, during the past two years, in a time of war, say so many dreadful things about their own military — from general untruths about "millions" of starving, refugees, and dead to come, to the occasional provocateur applauding the destruction of the Pentagon and wishing for more Mogadishus?

Posted by Greg Ransom