By the time most read this the
election will be over, a new president will have been elected, and everyone,
particularly the media pundits, will be in full throat, telling us what happens
next.
In that light, a little history
to provide some context…
On November 6th, 1812,
the first snow of the year fell on the Russian steppes. Winter 1812 turned out
to be a severe winter. It helped change the course of history.
In the spring of 1812 Napoleon
Bonaparte, determined to provide the final stroke that would give him rule over
all of Europe, decided Russia must be destroyed. He assembled a huge army,
nearly 700,000 soldiers, and headed east on June 24th.
The Russians chose a different
set of tactics then he expected and as the huge army moved east, Cossack units
forced evacuations and then burned everything: crops, farms, villages, towns.
The French army advanced over barren land. Supplies dwindled. When Napoleon
finally brought the Russian army to fight at Borodino (75 – 80 miles west of
Moscow), on September 7th, the fight was bloody (70,000 casualties
on both sides) but inconclusive. Marshal Kutozov, the Russian commander,
managed, despite his losses, to keep his army together, and withdrew eastward
past Moscow. Napoleon advanced on Moscow to find it abandoned, supplies
destroyed, and parts of the city burned. Napoleon thought that with Russian
troop losses, and the ‘loss’ of Moscow, Tsar Alexander I would sue for peace;
the Tsar had other plans.
After a month in Moscow (but no
new supplies), Napoleon decided to chase down the Russian army. The French
departed Moscow on October 19th and met a smaller Russian army on
the 24th near Maloyaroslavets, southwest of Moscow. It was a ‘sharp’
engagement but was again inconclusive, the Russians withdrawing rather than
fight a pitched battle. Napoleon realized the Russians wouldn’t engage; as
Tolstoy said, they would let ‘General Winter’ fight the French. Napoleon turned
west.
By the time Napoleon crossed the
Berezina River in November, nearly 400,000 men in his army were dead, more than
100,000 had been captured by the Russians, more than 100,000 had deserted, and
less than 30,000 remained as effective soldiers.
What lessons might we learn?
1) Things
seldom work out exactly as planned. Napoleon was one of history’s great
“Geniuses of War.” He thought this was a sure thing. His army didn’t even bring
winter clothing.
2) The
other side (and there are always other sides) “gets a vote.” And they will
always do something different then you expect. How different is really the
question. Burn their own crops?
3) Something
else will always pop up (the severe winter of 1812, for example).
And so what does this have to do
with the new president?
1) We
have a huge and growing national debt. There are a host of economic
fundamentals that need to be addressed, such as work-force participation. Make
all the plans you want, but if you don’t deal with economic fundamentals, your
plans will fail. It’s our “winter.”
2) Every
other nation is pursuing its own interests; some of those interests directly
conflict with critical US national interests. And their actions won’t
necessarily provide us “cheap and easy” means to counter them.
3) There
are any number of “wild cards” that are lurking “on the horizon;” solar minimum
for example. If the astrophysicists are right, earth should enter a mini
ice-age some time in the next 5 - 10 years. Shorter growing seasons, less rain,
lower crop yields. Anyone planning for that? And that’s just one possibility.
Point is, the candidates had all
sorts of wonderful sales pitches about this or that. If you remember, President
Bush ran on the platform of reforming education. September 11th
changed that just a tiny bit. The campaign shenanigans are now behind us.
Various reporters will wax poetic about “the honeymoon period” with the new
president. Nonsense. The romance is over; now we’re stuck with whomever.
And the real problems will grow
in scope every day.
As Betty Davis observed: “Fasten
your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Indeed.
The president works for us. The
new president needs to start making real sense and producing real answers –
real fast. And We The People need to
hold them to that.
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