The Information Age has spawned two insidious clichés. The one relates to speed, the other to distance, with the first reinforcing the second.

According to the first cliché, the very tempo of human existence is rapidly accelerating. We live today in a “fast” world. Change is omnipresent. Success—even survival—requires that people and institutions be quick, nimble, and responsive. To stand still is to be left behind.

According to the second cliché, distances are collapsing. Oceans have been reduced to puddles, mountain ranges into minor inconveniences. Day by day, the world is shrinking and becoming ever more interconnected.

Now many clichés contain elements of wisdom. John F. Kennedy had it exactly right: Life is unfair. The same with Charles de Gaulle: Old age is a shipwreck.

The problem with the clichés of the Information Age is that they are entirely bogus. Worse than bogus: They are pernicious.

All the yapping about our supposedly fast, flat, and wired world fosters bizarre expectations. Computers, we are told, possess and confer power. Out of power comes mastery.

I recently traveled to New Orleans, my first visit to the Crescent City in more than thirty years. Although I was there to give a talk, the occasion provided an opportunity to assess (however belatedly) the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina nearly five years ago. With that in mind, my host generously offered to give me a guided tour through some of the city’s worst-hit precincts.

Recovery remains a work in progress, with much accomplished and much more remaining to be done. In affluent neighborhoods like the Garden District or at Tulane University where I spoke, evidence of the hurricane’s passing is conspicuous by its absence. In poorer neighborhoods, the scars are omnipresent and raw.

The violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 persists, but Americans, from Barack Obama on down, are eager to declare the Iraq War at an end. Apart from a few diehard neoconservatives still keen to use Mesopotamia as a springboard for the pursuit of imperial fantasies, Americans can’t wait to shake the dust of Iraq from their feet and be done with the place.

Yet even as we leave, we should not forget. Common decency demands that we honor the service and sacrifice of those who bore the burden of waging that war. No doubt some committee will soon start lobbying for the construction of an Iraq War Memorial to be erected on the Mall in Washington. That effort deserves to succeed.

My own view is that every American war, large or small, ought to be commemorated smack dab in the middle of the nation’s capital. Crowding every inch of the Mall with granite and marble war memorials—the bigger the better—just might help deflate the continuing American illusion that we are a peaceful people desirous of nothing except to be left alone. It might help us see ourselves as we really are.

From a short dispatch in the New York Times, appearing on April 5, 2010:

"After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid."

Of the three women killed, according to the Times, one was a pregnant mother of ten. A second was a pregnant mother of six. NATO officials had originally peddled the story that the victims had been stabbed to death by family members prior to the U.S. attack on the compound where they had gathered for some festive occasion. This turned out to be entirely bogus—in short, a lie.

For most Americans, the 30th anniversary of the Carter Doctrine – promulgated by President Jimmy Carter during his January 1980 State of the Union Address – came and went without notice.

The oversight ranks as an unfortunate one. To an extent that few have fully appreciated, the Carter Doctrine has had a transformative impact on U.S. national security policy. Both massive and lasting, its impact has also been almost entirely pernicious. Put simply, the sequence of events that has landed the United States in the middle of an open-ended war to determine the fate of the Greater Middle East begins here.

The Carter Doctrine stands in relation to the ongoing Long War as the Truman Doctrine stood in relation to the Cold War.

Remember Iraq? Most Americans are doing their darnedest to forget the invasion and occupation that began seven years ago this past week. Iraq has become our new “forgotten war.” It wrests that title from Afghanistan, which had languished for years as George W. Bush’s “forgotten war,” until rediscovered and revived by Barack Obama. Such are the ironies of history.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, General Ray Odierno, latest in a long line of U.S. commanders in Baghdad, opined that “People have to get past why we came here.” From the general’s lips to God’s ears: Americans have already dumped from their memory bank the reasons offered up to justify the Iraq war in the first place.

Israeli wariness about the prospect of living alongside a genuinely sovereign Palestinian state is entirely reasonable and perfectly justified.

Given the vast quantities of blood, both Israeli and Palestinian, spilled over the past 60 or more years and given the current realities of Palestinian politics—weak moderates vying for power against radicals more prone to violence than to compromise—it requires a remarkable leap of faith to believe that the so-called “two-state solution” will deliver anything remotely approximating a meaningful peace. Throw in the long baleful tale of Jewish history over the past couple of thousand years, and a Robert Frost strategy—good fences make good neighbors—makes all the sense in the world.

Were I an Israeli Jew, that would certainly be my view. The status quo in the Holy Land might fall considerably short of perfection. Yet from an Israeli perspective, it certainly qualifies as satisfactory.

A friend writes:

I'm just back from Vietnam and Cambodia, after two weeks in Thailand. I imagine you would not recognize much anymore—but perhaps I am wrong about that. The famous hotels of Saigon that you may have known have all been redone, plus myriad new ones have sprung up. In a sense this "Communist" state is more capitalist than George W. Bush's fondest dreams. People who were in Hanoi five years ago told us it had been a bicycle city then; now it is motor scooters—millions of them. And they are being added at the rate of thousands a month, even in a few days. That is the basic signature item of Vietnam's youth culture—scooters and cell phones.

I don’t go to bed at night worrying about gay rights. Chalk it up to the provincialism of growing up Hoosier during the Cold War or perhaps to all those years in Catholic schools. Or blame it on a lack of empathy. Whatever.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t oppose gay rights. I believe in equality. Indeed, I fervently hope that my dealings with others do not betray whatever lingering homophobic (not to mention sexist or racist) inclinations still fester in my sinful soul. That said, advancing the cause of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Americans is just not one of my core issues.

Still, I find myself increasingly irked by the way senior military leaders are responding to this whole “don’t ask, don’t tell” business. Above all, what irks me is their shilly-shallying. Forgive me for being harsh: But the appropriate word is “gutless.”

Several reporters called me this week, asking for comment on the Afghanistan war’s latest milestone: The total American war deaths in that conflict have surpassed one thousand.

My initial reaction was to wonder why anyone would think the issue sufficiently noteworthy to merit a story. It struck me as one of those situations where journalists grab a random factoid and try to endow it with significance, recruiting people (like me) to unearth its hitherto unappreciated meaning.

The real story—which just about no one seems to have noticed—is this: In Washington, the bipartisan consensus in favor of open-ended global war has been restored. As far as national security policy is concerned, this may well stand as the Obama administration’s principal accomplishment to date.

Here is the way that U.S. military officers describe their purpose in Year Nine of the Long War: “Our goal is to take care of the people, not kill the Taliban.” The speaker is Captain Ryan Sparks, commander of the Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, currently engaged in operations that aim to deliver good governance to the people of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.

Yet this sort of thinking finds application well beyond war zones. The same edition of The Washington Post that quoted Captain Sparks included a column in which Michael Gerson paid tribute to America’s “tenderhearted legions.” Gerson was reporting on U.S. military contributions to earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.

I liked it better when the business of generals was to fight wars rather than to promote them. What provokes this comment are the reports earlier this week that General Stanley McChrystal, the officer appointed by President Obama to run the war in Afghanistan, was once again off opining about the course of events to foreigners.

Last fall, with defeat ostensibly looming in Afghanistan, McChrystal made headlines in London when he publicly stated that no alternative existed to his proposed Afghan “surge”—this was weeks before his commander-in-chief back in Washington had weighed in on the matter. This time around, with Istanbul his chosen venue, McChrystal reports that things are already looking up in the war zone—a remarkable finding, given that the reinforcements he insisted were so essential are only just beginning to trickle into the country. "I feel differently now," he told members of the press, "I think we made significant progress in setting conditions in 2009 ... and that we'll make real progress in 2010."

Where does McChrystal find the time for these jaunts? Isn’t running a war supposed to be a 24/7 job?

“No matter how I look at the issue,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this week, “I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”

The nation’s senior serving military officer has decided that the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gays and lesbians serving in the military is simply wrong and therefore needs to go. Mullen’s testimony has earned him plaudits from gay rights activists and their supporters. Writing in The Washington Post, for example, Dana Milbank commended the admiral’s bravery and nominated him for a medal. For their part, unhappy Republicans accused Mullen of kowtowing to the liberals controlling the White House. "This is not about command influence," Mullen insisted. "This is about leadership, and I take that very seriously."

I like senior military leaders who are men and women of conscience. We need more of them.

President Obama gave his State of the Union address all of two days ago, which means that it has already been thoroughly sliced, diced, chewed, digested, and largely forgotten by most Americans who follow politics.

But allow this one belated observation. To judge by the amount of attention it received in his speech, national security qualifies as something of an afterthought for this administration—or perhaps more accurately, the president and his chief lieutenants appear to have little of substance to say.

That the president should have devoted so much attention to the distressed state of the economy is both understandable and appropriate. Ten percent unemployment is simply unsatisfactory. (Whether or not this problem lies within the realm of things the federal government can fix is an altogether different question.)

The Hebrew Bible (Exodus, Chapter 32) describes how the Israelites, their leader absent on Mount Sinai, fell to worshipping a Golden Calf of their own creation. The incident did not end well. The Lord was put out and Moses outraged, expressing his anger by breaking the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were freshly inscribed. Various punishments ensued. Some 3,000 ringleaders were slain. As for the calf itself, Moses “burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.” Yuck.

What is it with Chosen People and the allure of false gods?

Americans, accepting without question that they exist in special covenant with God, are by no means immune to such idolatry. In American politics, Mount Sinai is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the principal inhabitant of that address viewed as a quasi-divine figure.