June 29, 2013

Finest Hour 135, Summer 2007

Page 25

“Let Us Preach What We Practise”: The Fulton Speech and Today’s War

It is time to adjust our direction toward the rhetorical path that is central to influencing world opinion.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

By Christopher C. Harmon

Through June 2007, Dr. Harmon was Kim T. Adamson Chairman of Insurgency and Terrorism, Marine Corps University. In September he takes up a new position as Professor of Counter Terrorism at the George C. Marshall Center in Garmisch, Germany. The second edition of his book, Terrorism Today, appears this October from Routledge. This article is derived from his remarks to the Washington Society for Churchill, a Churchill Centre affiliate, at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington on March 4th.

Very early in 1946, Winston Churchill arrived in America for two months of rest and a speaking tour. Although he was Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, he carefully disavowed any official role. He came to America as a “counselor and compatriot.”¹ At the dock in New York City, after the liner Queen Elizabeth had pulled in, Winston and Clementine descended into a crowd peppered with reporters.

Q. Will you comment on the socialist program of the Labour Party?

A. I never criticize the government of my country abroad. I very rarely leave off criticizing it at home.

Q. Do you expect to eat much in America?

A. After rationing I hope to make up for lost time.

Q. What is your reaction to the fact that you will be [staying] in Florida near Al Capone?

A. You refer to the former distinguished resident of Chicago. I had not addressed myself to the problem.

The Churchills received many invitations they could not accept—such as one to visit Dwight Eisenhower’s hometown in Kansas, and to fish with Ernest Hemingway in Cuba. Bookings on the statesman’s schedule did include addresses in Miami, Fulton, Williamsburg, the Pentagon and New York City. All the speeches were covered by the press, but it was the one in Missouri that made the largest headlines. The New York Times pronounced: “Mr. Churchill came with a message of such interest and importance to our country, to his, and to the world at large that he converted his presence at Fulton into a historic event.”²

The Fulton Address

At Westminster College on March 5th, President Harry Truman introduced the great Englishman, who paid generous tribute to his hosts. But Churchill’s mind was troubled by the rise of Soviet power vis-à-vis Europe and America.

He had closely watched the USSR as it made, first, an amazing comeback after 1941, and then remarkable territorial gains in the heart of Europe. A Soviet state of 180 millions, dominated by one man, now also dominat ed the ancient capitals of Eastern Europe: Prague, Berlin, Vienna, Riga, Warsaw, Tallinn, Budapest, Bucharest, Vilnius, Sofia.

Historians quarrel even now over how the Cold War began, but Churchill felt he knew. He had brooded on the matter for several years by the time of his visit to Missouri. He was a historian; more to the point, he had made, and lived through, the relevant history.

Taking the long view, Churchill knew the wartime Big Three collusion had been somewhat unnatural, for he understood Bolshevism. He had witnessed Soviet misbehavior during war, and his memoranda and state papers display particular anger at Moscow’s violence towards the Poles, the people over whom Britain had entered war.

Suppose Churchill had been able to forget that in 1939 the Soviets had invaded eastern Poland almost as hastily as the Nazis had taken western Poland. In 1943, his doubts would have stirred, or even surfaced, when Germans removed the soil over mass graves at Katyn; the Soviet NKVD had murdered and buried 8000 Polish officers on that spot near Smolensk. Then, the next year, came the appalling immobility of the Red Army when Polish citizens rose up, hoping to liberate Warsaw from the Germans. The Russians seemingly preferred to see the brave destroyed. Nineteen forty-five brought the disappearance into Soviet jails of sixteen Polish emissaries who in March had ventured from London to Moscow at Stalin’s invitation, a shock to all British statesmen.

There had been a slow and disturbing change in Soviet rhetoric. Spokesmen of the Kremlin were recurring to the old communist notion that World War II began in capitalist combinations against the innocent; they were now suggesting that similar combinations could lead to World War III. An ugly moment came on 9 February 1946, when Joseph Stalin made it clear in a speech that the good will engendered during the war was gone, and that the future held dark prospects for “another imperialist war.”³

All these signs of chill preceded the Fulton address. There was as yet no NATO. There was no Truman Doctrine for protecting Turkey and Greece from communist expansion. There was the “Long Telegram” from American diplomat George Kennan in Moscow to the State Department, discussing the eerie changes in Moscow and calling for “containment.” But it had not yet been published: the following year, as an article by “X” in Foreign Affairs, it would cause a stir.

In the language Churchill used at Fulton there is no more ominous phrase than “Iron Curtain.” The Soviets hated the hard ring of that metaphor, and the Soviet newspaper Pravda rankled when Churchill did not attribute the term to its originator, which, it said angrily, was first used by Josef Goebbels in February 1945. In keeping with long tradition, Pravda was wrong. In fact, the phrase went back long before that.⁴

Churchill himself had used the term in a letter to President Truman on 12 May 1945, nearly a year before Fulton, when it already had the grim connotations later broadly understood. The Prime Minister’s letter spoke of the melting away of the American and British armies, the Canadians’ inevitable departure from Europe, and the difficulty of working with the French. He vividly described “this enormous Muscovite advance into the centre of Europe,” adding, “An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind.”⁵

Some criticized the Fulton speech as militaristic, but there are many sunny aspects of the address. The archetypal old Tory spoke up for the United Nations, the new “world organization”—as the planned entity was known during war years.⁶ I don’t think this was a pained genuflection to American internationalists, to the foundational meetings at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco, or to Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy. Churchill’s praise for collective security was consistent with his life-long teaching.

On record was his public support in the 1920s for the League of Nations; his effort for collective security in the 1930s. It does not go too far to say that his Fulton text might shock conservative readers today, with its positive views on the nascent UN. Churchill even argued for a standing military force of components contributed by member states, at the ready for international peace-keeping. The United Nations has always had a small Military Staff Committee for just such work, even though the Cold War flash-froze it in embryo form.⁷

Churchill never felt that a world organization precluded regional security arrangements among individual partners. He always said, as in Washington in May 1943,⁸ that beneath the umbrella of the “world organization” there should be strong, inward-looking regional arrangements to deal with normal security concerns. These, together with the UN superstructure, would constitute “the Sinews of Peace” in the postwar world.

For Churchill the first of these was the British Commonwealth, which he still spoke of as the British Empire. A close second was the Anglo-American alliance. At Fulton he spoke with his usual richness and warmth on this topic, calling for “fraternal association” and using the phrase “special relationship.” Here was a foreigner who openly regarded American power as good for the world. He thought it a very good thing that the atom bomb was still a monopoly of the United States, that it would be criminal to let that change in the short term.

The Associated Press suggested in its wire story from Fulton that Churchill had proposed a military alliance between London and Washington. He did not say that, but he certainly came close. The press knew where his heart was. Transatlantic bilateral rapport was central to his view of world security—and British self-interest. Consider the remarkable praise he had heaped upon American military power—memorably at the Albert Hall on American Thanksgiving Day, 1944. A few days after Fulton came his speech at the Pentagon, praising U.S. military performance in World War II, delivered to a glittering array of officers including Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Spaatz and Admirals Leahy and Nimitz. The Englishman’s conviction was that the American military partnership must anchor the postwar era.

Churchill did not cultivate these linkages in the expectation of war. He believed in the power of deterrence. Most of his talk on his 1946 American tour was of constructing peace. Even at Fulton he told the audience explicitly that he did not think the Soviets wanted war. The broader message was: mankind has the power and the opportunity to save its future. In a metaphor Churchill ascribed to an author he’d been reading on his trip, he spoke of a “Temple of Peace. Workmen from all countries must build that temple [with] ‘faith in each other’s purpose, hope in each other’s future and some charity toward each other’s shortcomings.’”

Today’s Long War

Churchill’s emphasis on allies remains sound policy today. Good alliances are a requisite for what has rightly been called a “global war on terrorism.” The fight is unusual, and without true precedent. It bears many aspects unlike either World War II or the Cold War.

Deterrence and negotiation with al Qaeda is hardly possible. Our enemies are not just without uniforms; they are usually unseen. Most do not work for a state; many are stateless, even fugitives. The Taliban, al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamia, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, and their ilk live and fight well below the governmental level—they are what political scientists call (in a phrase Churchill might have detested) “sub-state actors.” Churchill had experiences with “terrorists,” but he spoke of terrorism on relatively few occasions.

Ours is a new generation facing a somewhat new generation of conflict, a product of devolution, not evolution, in moral and martial terms. Terrorism is housed in the basement of barbarity, and Churchill, who hoped to construct a Temple of Peace, would be appalled to know how many terrorists there are today.

He also, I feel sure, would not accept terrorism as a new norm, or apologize for it, as many do now. We must fight the enemy, accept the unwanted challenges.

They come without crisp tactical remedies from the old captains of war. Churchill, I might guess, would have considered the war of 9/11 as profoundly real, protracted and complex. In it, his prudence as a statesman might have helped him more than his mastery of European military history.

While no one can say what Churchill would have done, we do know we have on our hands an unwanted war. So, how are we doing, and, what do we need to do?

The opening campaign was a military one of the greatest boldness. The Americans, British and other allies went into the Afghan lairs of the guerrillas and rousted them out. Bin Laden did not expect this. Neither did many of us. A maker of coalitions himself, Churchill might have admired the way our coalition linked up with Afghans to smash the Taliban, up until then the 21st century’s leading state sponsor of international terrorism. Efforts by the Taliban today to climb back up the southern skirts of Afghan territory are significant, but take little away from the effectiveness of that quick campaign at the end of 2001. In Afghanistan, even a few years of peace is impressive.

There have followed other, lesser martial efforts, especially in the Philippines. In the southern islands, al Qaeda’s ally Abu Sayyaf has been battered and beaten by Filipinos enjoying American intelligence and advice, the latest chapter in a long association between Manila and Washington. Abu Sayyaf is on about its fourth leader now—they keep dying of lead poisoning. Most observers think this organisation has lost whatever religious and political credibility it had.

In the Horn of Africa, we are similarly involved. Our armed forces contribute in varying ways to allied indigenous forces fighting Somali warlords, the North African terrorists, and al Qaeda agents. Our few uniformed men and women in that theater are engaged in civic action more than direct action; they do not often pull triggers. But every day their corpsmen do shoot vaccines into children, and antibiotics into sickly domestic animals. Wells are dug, schools are built. This part of the battle Churchill would have recognized from the old forms of “hearts and minds” campaigns that the British army waged in places like Oman and Malaya.

As this aid work suggests, kinetics is but one part of the grand strategy in the global war on terrorism. And, despite what critics may say, I think there is a grand strategy, and that it has been articulated. The problems come in execution, in the challenges of gaining foreign support, and in the task of meeting the concerns of the citizenry… and if all that were not enough, we have Iraq.

Within our grand strategy for what we must call the Long War, economic elements of national power may be too focused upon—and too drained by—resuscitating Iraq. The war has many costs and they mount up in other theaters. Elsewhere we have aid programs, but there are sticks as well as carrots: the sanctions regimes begun under President Clinton and redoubled under President Bush are difficult to torque down, but they do constrict some of the financial lifelines in transnational terrorism. The United Nations is actually engaged in financial counter-terrorism: a new UN treaty took effect in 2002, and even though many states will not or cannot obey it, the convention does help the U.S. Treasury and State Departments, and foreign partners, who work to freeze enemy assets.

In the field of intelligence our record is mixed. We have made progress at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and yet both still have their difficulties—such as an out-flow of experienced people worn down by the past five years, and the challenges of properly training new personnel. Reorganization, too, comes with new challenges. Churchill’s war lasted six years; he would have faced similar drains had it continued as long as this war might.

There is a mammoth new bureaucracy—the Department of Homeland Security—which does not yet seem to produce intelligence but always clamors for it from others. It is a cliché to say that intelligence is overwhelmingly important in counterterrorism, but it is a cliché because it is so true. For one thing, intelligence is a product of, and a key to, policing; at this stage of the Long War, police are perhaps even more important than soldiers.

In diplomacy, the U.S. was swiftly supported by its NATO allies after 9/11. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked its Article 5 for the first time in a half century of history, declaring that an attack on one is an attack on all. Countries such as Germany and Britain have done a great deal, actually and symbolically. I am disappointed over Canada; I have a very smart Canadian graduate student in class and her disappointment in Canada’s role outruns mine. But for such ills there are tonics. Australia has been a most vigorous and impressive ally. Al Qaeda knows it, too, which explains the overt threats, multiple bombings of holiday spots in Bali, and the other plots within Australian cities more recently.

There are certainly some diplomatic problems as well—including stalemate in the Middle East, and decline in international support for global terror war. These problems merge into the realm of “public diplomacy.”

A dimension of our power that is under-used and badly used is the public effort to “tell our story abroad.”⁹ When it comes to reaching out to potential friends, we’re doing very, very badly. I will waste no time enunciating something that has been talked of in this town for years.

We have a problem, and we must face it, belatedly, in this sixth year of war. Churchill would not want us to come here to Old Ebbitt’s just to drink and chatter and complain. He would want us to discuss solutions to the problem…while we are drinking. In that spirit, here are a few considered ideas to improve things a little in American information operations and public diplomacy. I chose to focus here, at the expense of other issues in grand strategy. Call these rubrics “The Four R’s.”

“The Four R’s”

1) Recreate the Bureaucracy of Public Diplomacy

During the Cold War we had an entity—the United States Information Agency—that specialized at reaching over the Iron Curtain, over the heads of despots, to subject populations. Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and like programs were deemed by people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn to be powerful. But after the Berlin Wall came down, so did the architecture of USIA. It was folded into the State Department in much smaller form. Now we have a small office for public diplomacy which has been frequently vacant and often badly staffed. I will not name any of the incumbents of that office. But when I puzzle on why this part of government has done so little for so many years—years the locusts have eaten—I recall an acidic remark incorrectly attributed to Churchill: “an empty car drew up and Clement Attlee got out.”

There is inadequate leadership at State on this issue, and the same is true on the National Security Council— even though one of its six directorships is titled “global outreach.” Our best diplomats are schooled to cultivate foreign diplomats, not foreign populations and news editors. We need a separate bureaucracy with its own culture and the special function of public diplomacy. Before 9/11, we didn’t know we needed this; we should have created it in 2002; we will be suffering for it when 2007 merges into 2008.

2) Resource the Effort

The State Department has been under-funded. If need be I’d take $10 or $15 billion from Defense and real-locate it to State.¹⁰ In the present crisis, instead of doing much more to reach out overseas, we’ve constricted some operations. There are consulates that closed in the 1990s, and so too did some embassy and consulate libraries—yet they are exactly the kind of place that students and other curious people can come to learn about the USA and its policies and its people.

We have set up a TV station that beams in Arabic language to the Middle East—al-Hurrah. The concept is good. It will need better supervision, and it will need resources. So do other radio services which are being cropped back for 2007 or 2008. Our government is apparently eliminating VOA broadcasting in Uzbek, Croatian, and Georgian, reducing VOA and RFE/RL services in the Ukraine and former Portuguese Africa, and reducing broadcasts in Kazakh.¹¹ And then there is this: we are now eliminating VOA broadcasting in the English language. Is this because using English abroad is considered imperialist? Or is it that we are too foolish to see that broadcasting news and healthy entertainment in English is a friendly way to teach other peoples about ourselves?

As a congressional staffer, I observed how quick we are to trim away public diplomacy programs. When cuts were proposed in the National Endowment for Democracy, then receiving a mere $17 million, George Will referred to this as “slaying the butterfly of democracy.” Some critics think our approach to the Long War is too military. Let them speak up! Words are cheaper than weapons, and often more effective.

3) Restore the Moral Impulse and Argument to Diplomacy

In 2002-03 in the war on terrorists, we were too quiet on the moral front. We felt quelled by Abu Ghareb. Now many of our leaders say little or nothing at all, on most occasions, about the moral obscenity of terrorism.

Democracy, the rule of law, and moderation are the best and the obvious alternatives to politics driven by terrorism. That is evident in sad places such as Lebanon, Sri Lanka, the Congo. We should quit apologizing for who we are and make overtly the robust defense that democracy and freedom deserve. No one should defend Abu Ghareb. Nor should we apologize for fighting people who write manuals advising how to torture and how to kill innocents.12 It is time to adjust our direction and proceed with some confidence on the rhetorical path that is central to reaching public opinion in the world. Right action is vital, but we need the right arguments too.

Do public spokesmen know how to make the arguments against terrorism? Do they at least remember the ones that used to be made by Jean François Revel and Ronald Reagan? Do our social scientists teaching here in America recall what they were taught in civics class? I harbor doubts. As a student in graduate school in the late 1970s, I heard a foreign-born student ask our Poly Sci professor for a definition of democracy. He balked, and then asked me, because he knew I was taking a course in political philosophy. “Self-rule under law” is a wonderful, short, powerful definition of democracy.

Churchill wrote and spoke to this question so often. Two years before his Fulton speech, for example, in August 1944, he was asked how he would judge whether the new Italian government was a true democracy. Churchill described what he called “simple and practical tests” by which democratic freedom can be measured:

Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day? Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent? Are their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free from all association with particular political Parties? Will these courts administer open and well-established laws which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice? Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as Government officials? Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted? Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and striving to bring up a family, free from the fear that some grim police organization under the control of a single Party, like the Gestapo, started by the Nazi and Fascist Parties, will tap him on the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment? These simple, practical tests are some of the title-deeds on which a new Italy could be founded.¹³

A few months later, in October 1944, he said a similar thing in simpler form. In the House of Commons, celebrated over hundreds of years for high-flown ideals and soaring speeches, Churchill declared: “At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper—no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly palliate the overwhelming importance of that point.”¹⁴

The tests and procedures Sir Winston recommended are political virtues for all peoples in all times. They are not “ethno-centric.” They can exist quite independently of Britain or the USA. The virtues of moderate politics, democracy and the rule of law can and should “sell” abroad, not because we invented them; not because they need to sell; but because they are desirable—at least to many people—for their own reasons and on their own terms. Democracy worked in ancient Greece; it works today in Bangladesh and Taiwan and the Republic of South Africa. It might even work in a generation or two in North Korea. After all, look how far it has come in a generation in South Korea.

4) Renew the Rhetorical Fight

If Churchill constantly reminds us of anything, I suppose, it is to attend to rhetoric. Good, bad, or indifferent, rhetoric is a centerpiece of policy. So I submit to your judgment five arguments¹⁵ which we should be using. Most have been ignored by our leaders—especially key people in the public eye who have the opportunity to talk through VOA and al-Hurrah and the International Herald Tribune and the global diplomatic circuit.

These are points we need added to our public diplomacy. You may have your own, which I would welcome; you may wish to strike out one or two of mine, which is fine with me. The point is that the times demand fresh elements in the world’s discussions. We must begin to move people’s minds—fortify our friends and allies.

(1) Al Qaeda’s leaders are not clerics. Most are not even deeply schooled in the subtleties of Islam. Thus they have no credibility when publishing “fatwas.” It is astounding that a civil engineer (Bin Laden) or a surgeon (al Zawahiri) should pretend to tell Muslims how to be holy, or whom to kill between rounds of prayers. Washington, correctly, does not try to explain the Koran; but Washington should deprecate these terrorists’ impudence and posturing as religious interpreters.

(2) Most attacks by “Muslim” zealots have killed or injured Muslims—from Egypt’s Anwar Sadat to the lowliest soul buying vegetables in a bazaar, or seated with friends at a pizzeria. Apparently the U.S. government declines even to count the Muslims murdered by self-described holy Muslims.¹⁶ The tally would be a compelling argument against terrorism—especially for those abroad who imagine that counterterrorism is nothing but Western concern. By the way, any newspaper could make the same count—with the same concentration they now apply to counts of the American war dead.

(3) Innumerable terror attacks have been by Shia against Sunni, or vice-versa. These are unseemly invitations to a war within a civilization. Eventually, a Sunni terrorist, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, stated openly his strategy for war upon all Shia in Iraq. Such declarations should be held up to the cold light of shame, and mentioned frequently in explanation of other but similar attacks by other Zarqawis of the world. I have seen social scientists wax indignant when imagining that the U.S. is waging a war of religious civilizations. How many of these same observers speak up against terrorists who actually do try to set off a war between Muslim factions?

(4) Purportedly aiming at “Jews and American Crusaders,” Islamic terrorists have bombed or shot or burnt alive scores of non-Americans in other countries. In Eastern Africa in 1998, U.S. embassies were targeted but, overwhelmingly, the human damage was to Kenyans and Tanzanians. In Bali, Australian tourists were the target, but many Indonesians and a mix of foreigners died from the Jemaah Islamiya/al Qaeda double-bombing. How can terrorists justify such murders? Their own writings point to their vulnerability on this issue.

(5) Some legitimate Muslim clerics have spoken up. The Islamic Commission of Spain, representing some 200 Sunni mosques in that country, roundly condemned Bin Laden and al Qaeda for terrorism, publishing a fatwa against them in 2005. That same year, the Muslim Council of Britain condemned the indiscriminate terrorism of London by bomb plots. The clerics went so far as to call upon the faithful in Britain to “unite in helping the police to capture these murderers.” But the bravery of such moderates was barely noted by the Western press, and hardly mentioned in Washington. It should have been detailed in a White House press conference on developments in foreign affairs.

Conclusion

“Let us preach what we practice,” as Churchill said at Fulton, and begin to compete seriously in the struggle for public opinion. No student of Winston Churchill should ever forego the art of rhetoric in the ways we have in these last five years.

We will defeat this latest scourge of militant Muslim terrorism. It is a fierce and ugly ideology. But the same was true of international anarchism, Soviet bolshevism, and Nazi fascism, and all those have been defeated. All violent ideologies, from wherever they come, are by their natures less worthy than democracy.

And so on this anniversary of Fulton, which marked the commencement of a war of ideas more than a stand-off of armies, let us reenergize our convictions. As Winston Churchill said to an ally in a speech entitled “Collective Security” in 1936: all aggressive action must be judged, not from the standpoint of Right and Left, but of “right and wrong….We are in the midst of dangers so great and increasing, we are the guardians of causes so precious to the world, that we must, as the Bible says, ‘lay aside every impediment,’ and prepare ourselves night and day to be worthy of the Faith that is in us.” 17

Endnotes

1. Pilpel, Robert H., Churchill in America: 1895-1961: An Affectionate Portrait (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), section title. The press conference notes quoted are on pp. 214-15.

2. Ibid., 223.

3. Taubman, William, Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982), 133.

4. Pravda, Moscow, 1 August 1946, as reported in the same day’s Associated Press. Robert Pilpel traced the phrase “iron curtain” to a 1942 usage by a German finance minister. Sir Martin Gilbert traced it yet farther back, to the Russian émigré philosopher Vasily Rozanov in Apocalypse of Our Time (1918): “With a rumble and a roar, an iron curtain is descending on Russian History.”

5. “Prime Minister to President Truman,” T. 895/5, on 12 May 1945, CHAR 20/218, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge University. I appreciate the aid of the Archives, and the support of the Marine Corps University Foundation which made those visits possible.

6. Churchill usually restricted his doubts about the United Nations to private discussions with advisers. He did write a caustic passage against the organization as peopled with so many small states as to be a “Babel” at times, but that prose came later, when writing the final volume of his war memoirs.

7. The Military Staff Committee is mentioned in the UN Charter, articles 26 and 47. The committee meets regularly. Yet it is so obscure that when I asked one speaker who had just lectured on UN peacekeeping operations about it, he balked, asked me to repeat the question, and then had no reply. Books on containment and the postwar world also forget the committee. Dr. Janeen Klinger of the Army War College believes that the onset of Cold War made military activity by the UN so unlikely that its military staff committee immediately proved moribund. She points the reader to Eric Grove, “UN Armed Forces and the Military Staff Committee: A Look Back,” International Security, vol. 17, no. 4, Spring 1993, 172-82.

8. A critical meeting between U.S. and British officials took place at the British Embassy in Washington on 22 May 1943. Those present included Vice President Henry Wallace and Sumner Welles, a State Department appeaser before the war and a bitter critic of Churchill’s; in 1946 he would say kind things about the Fulton speech.

9. “Telling America’s Story Abroad” is the official objective of the Voice of America.

10. While the entire budget for the Department of State and our foreign aid program is less than $35 billion, that of the Department of Defense is nearing $500 billion.

11. “Voice of America: Cuts at a Glance,” Associated Press, 23 February 2007.

12. There are several of these, including Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, c. 1994, discovered in Manchester, England, some years later.

13. 28 August 1944; see Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill vol. 7, Road to Victory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 918.

14. Ibid., 1046, speech of 31 October 1944.

15. Harmon, Christopher C., Terrorism Today, 2nd. ed. (Abingdon, Oxford, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2007), ch. 5.

16. It is encouraging that the latest White House national strategy for counterterrorism does make a passing mention of this incredibly important pattern in terrorism.

17. Gilbert, Martin, Winston S. Churchill vol. 5, Prophet of Truth 1922-1929 (London: Heinemann, 1976), 788. Paraphrase and quotations, 24 September 1936, Theatre des Ambassadeurs, Paris.