No Surrender

ONE thing that can safely be predicted in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks is a revival of the old “republic or empire” debate. Patrick Buchanan’s 1999 essay “Is Cataclysmic Terror Ahead?” is being widely recirculated. Sample:

On the day after Pearl Harbor, ex-President Herbert Hoover sat down and wrote to friends: ” You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten.”