Kind of.
Author Andrei
Cherny wrote about the Berlin airlift in his new book
The Candy Bombers. Mr.
Cherny works in the Arizona Attorney
General's Office, in the division I interned last summer. It is interesting how themes repeat throughout history and only if we could learn from them. After WWII, the United States was the moral authority and leader in the world with its impeccable performance with difficult situations. It is too bad the United States, in recent years, has given the world a reason to question its moral authority, with Guantanamo Bay,
Abu Ghraib, water boarding (note that some Japanese soldiers during WWII were prosecuted for water boarding US troops, it is most definitely torture, thank you Senator McCain for
voting for the torture bill), extraordinary rendition, the "CIA torture flights" and other things. The US did not do this kind of low-level stuff during WWII, which that War was perhaps the biggest threat to modern
democracy. Remember the
Nuremberg Trials to prosecute the Nazis? Seems like
amuch better idea than locking "terrorists" up in some random prison.
Story about Mr.
Cherny's book in The Washington Post today:
From Berlin to BaghdadBy
Ruth MarcusWednesday, July 23, 2008; Page A15
The city is in dire straits -- its economy shattered, its citizens desperately hungry. Random violence is rising, electricity is sporadic. Three years after the invasion, hope for a brief occupation has faded. The mission is to build democracy from the ruins of dictatorship, but sober analysts question whether a flaw in the national character makes freedom unattainable.
This is not Baghdad 2008 but Berlin 1948, which makes the reunified German capital a particularly fitting venue for
Barack Obama's speech tomorrow. The lush
Tiergarten where
Obama will speak was then a wasteland where Berliners struggled to grow vegetables in the shadow of the bombed-out
Reichstag.
Sixty years ago this month, Berlin stood on the pivot point of history. The Soviet Union choked off food and fuel for the western sector of the divided city. The United States launched an improbable mission to supply it by air.
And a Utah farm boy named Hal
Halvorsen, flying C-54
Skymasters in the relentless shuttle, made an impulsive promise to the scrawny children gathered behind the barbed wire fence at Berlin's
Tempelhof airport: He would drop some candy for them. Operation "Little Vittles" eventually delivered tons of chocolate, attached to tiny parachutes fashioned from handkerchiefs.
The story of the Berlin Airlift and
Halvorsen's mission is told in "The Candy Bombers," a new book by Democratic strategist Andrei
Cherny. If the plural of anecdotes is not data, the stacking of historical analogies is not sound policy. Yet, as
Cherny writes,
"Their story has powerful resonance for our own time. In confronting the Berlin blockade, America went to battle against a destructive ideology that threatened free people around the world. In a country we invaded and occupied that had never had a stable democracy, we brought freedom and turned their people's hatred of America into love for this country, its people, and its ideals."The lessons of the Berlin Airlift are anything but simple, which is what makes it such a useful historical moment.
Cherny's book is something of a Rorschach test on Iraq: The message readers receive may depend on the mindset with which they arrived.
Thus,
Obama can rightly point to the airlift as evidence that maintaining America's moral voice is an essential component of its foreign policy. The United States stands to gain as much from a modern-day Candy Bomber as it risks losing from
Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo. Those who doubt the capacity of government, in the aftermath of Katrina, to mobilize quickly and implement deftly can take heart from the example of organizational whiz Bill
Tunner, who turned a slapdash operation incapable of supplying Berlin into a precision drill that kept the beleaguered city going through a long winter.
