Critical Skills

In the fifth article of his series on the American way of war, we confront the six strongest conservative counter-arguments to his thesis — including the “no second 9/11” insurance-policy argument, the domino theory, the 2007 Iraq surge, and the constitutional war-powers debate — giving each its full weight before delivering a summation grounded in the evidence of three completed wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The series concludes not as anti-war polemic but as a demand for the strategic clarity that Clausewitz, the Founders, and six decades of catastrophic evidence all require — and asks whether we will apply those lessons to the fourth war now unfolding.

In 1919, J.T. Canales was the only Mexican-American in the Texas Legislature — and he filed nineteen charges of misconduct against the most powerful law enforcement institution in the state. Texas Rangers threatened his life. The committee questioned his sanity. He testified for six hours, forced sixteen hundred pages of atrocities into the public record, and lost his career for it. Then he co-founded LULAC and spent fifty years building what the hearing room denied him. This is the story of a man who did not change the verdict — but changed the record.

Vietnam’s Paris Peace Accords were violated before the ink dried. Iraq was declared “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” — then lost forty percent of its territory to ISIS within thirty months. Afghanistan’s three-hundred-thousand-strong army dissolved in eleven days. In this fourth article in the Eight Critical Skills war series, we examine the final scenes of America’s three longest wars — the helicopter evacuations, the collapsing armies, the enemies walking into presidential palaces through the front door — and ask what, precisely, eight trillion dollars and nine hundred thousand lives purchased. The answer, in every case, was the precise opposite of the promise. Non-partisan. Data-driven. Devastating.

Bayard Rustin organized the 1963 March on Washington in seven weeks, personally taught Martin Luther King Jr. the principles of Gandhian nonviolence, and co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was the civil rights movement’s most technically brilliant mind — and was deliberately kept in the background because he was openly gay. He served the cause anyway. This Courage and Consequence profile examines the strategic sacrifice of a man who built what others took credit for, and the cost of principled service in a movement that practiced one form of justice while denying another.

Most people have heard about Oskar Schindler. He saved 1,100 Jews. A movie. Almost nobody knows Irena Sendler — and she saved 2,500. No movie. A Polish social worker who walked into the Warsaw Ghetto every day for over a year, carrying forged papers and a death wish from the Gestapo. She smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out — in ambulances, coffins, potato sacks, and through the sewers — and buried their real names in glass jars under an apple tree. She was captured, tortured until her legs were broken, and sentenced to death. She never gave up a single name. Her story was buried for sixty years until four high school girls in Kansas refused to believe a single sentence in a magazine. This is her story.