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"  The cartoon canaries that flit around the ears of Peggy Noonan lately have been singing sweet martial tales to her, as she stares a hole in the mahogany before her and hopes that the guy at the juke will play sad songs of lost America for her before the Happy Hour snacks run out. She is feeling for her country again, or, perhaps, it is the chicken wings. The canaries are singing elegies for her country again, or, perhaps, it is the Keno machine at the end of the bar. There is rain streaking the windows now. The daylight never had a chance, poor thing. At the end of the first Gulf War I saw something that startled me and gave me pause. More than 20 years later I can still see the image in my mind, so vivid was the impression it made. It was June 8, 1991. America had just won a dazzling victory. We&amp;#039;d won a war in a hundred hours. Saddam Hussein had folded like a cheap suit and slunk out of Kuwait. The troops were coming home and the airwaves were full of joyous reunions. It was good. And on the third day, Poppy rested. Disquieting was exactly the word. It was all such a rolling brag for a brief engagement we&amp;#039;d won with brains, guts and superior technology. More important, the size and nature of the parade seemed to suggest we were forgetting something: that war is a tragedy. People die in wars, the brave are sacrificed. War is sometimes necessary but always a mark of failure, the last bloody stop after breakdowns of diplomacy and judgment on all sides. War isn&amp;#039;t something you throw a fizzy party for while showing off your shining hardware. We had discovered how to brag. We had discovered how to beat our breasts with triumphalism and rub the world&amp;#039;s nose in our superior strength.  Unpossible!  (Also, Peggy Noonan thinks America first &amp;quot;learned how to brag&amp;quot; in 1991. I think Peggy Noonan is to history what fertilizer is to meat loaf.) The world in the 20th century liked the America that could do the job and the Americans who modestly did it. It wouldn&amp;#039;t feel so warmly about an America that made such a show of its prowess and power. Here, with an opposing view, are seven million dead Asian peasants. At the same time, America has to stand, always, for what is right and decent in the world, or it will no longer be America. It needs to be able to do things only it can do at the moment, and do them bravely, successfully-and modestly. And then it can marry Peggy Noonan and live in a nice house with a white picket fence. Which gets me to my dream for the schoolgirls. Dear god, haven&amp;#039;t they suffered enough? John McCain has it exactly right. (I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ve ever written that sentence.) He told CNN that as soon as the U.S. learned that hundreds of children had been kidnapped and stolen away by a rabid band of terrorists in Nigeria, we should have used &amp;quot;every asset that we have-satellite, drones, any capabilities that we had to go after them.&amp;quot; He told the Daily Beast: &amp;quot;I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute I would, without permission of the host country.&amp;quot; He added, as only Sen. McCain would: &amp;quot;I wouldn&amp;#039;t be waiting for some kind of permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s Nigeria&amp;#039;s hapless president. Of course he would, because he&amp;#039;s a trigger-happy fool whom the American people wisely kept away from the national command authority, and the Department Of State, where he would have sent a directive to all the nations of the world that the United States does not have to respect the national sovereignity of any country that insists on having with goofy names. So, my dream: We go in, rescue the kids, get out, go home, and say nothing. Our troops would be happy with that: They like their jobs and like doing good, but the showbiz aspects that sometimes follow their actions only lead to distraction and discord. The White House would have to dummy up too, which would be hard for them. Staffers always want to make a president look good, and Obama staffers seem to think their primary purpose is to aggrandize the president. But there would be no network special with a breathless Brian Williams giving us the tick-tock on how it all went down and how the president kept his cool when all about him others were losing theirs. Now this is that awful moment that occurs in every one of Peggy&amp;#039;s ruminations in which one of the older canaries starts yelling at one of the younger ones, and Peggy starts singing Marian hymns to drown both of them out, and the bartender looks longingly at the telephone and considers calling the cops. To wit, Peggy Noonan, with Chris Matthews, on the occasion of C-Plus Augustus&amp;#039;s carrier landing in 2003. NOONAN: All right. This is what I think it was. It wasn&amp;#039;t just it was showy, it was showbiz, it was &amp;quot;Top Gun,&amp;quot; it was Tom Cruise&amp;#039;s suit, it was all that wonderful stuff. It&amp;#039;s that the American president not only put himself in harm&amp;#039;s way going to see American troopers, but he showed them by coming in on that ship I trust you. The canaries! They&amp;#039;re screaming! Make them stop! What are the canaries screaming, Clarice? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28685/peggy-noonan-bring-back-our-girls-051614/>