I’ve mentioned American novelist and conservative opinion columnist, Mark Helprin, on multiple occasions. John Anderson’s article in the LA Times is a good read. Recieved via email, I’ve made it available here.
A new novel by Helprin – “Freddy and Fredericka” – is due out in July.

Matt Labash;

These days, Canadian publications are chockablock with surveys showing that Canadians see themselves as something akin to a superior race. The prime ministers of what was once a reliable ally that ponied up in times of war have treated us like traffic-light squeegee-men when we’ve stopped at their corner, asking for assistance with our latest military adventure. They have spurned our missile-defense shield out of spite, even knowing it would save their Canadian bacon. Their legislators have publicly called us “bastards” and stomped on our president in effigy. Their citizens have booed our children at peewee hockey games.
Being bloodthirsty Americans, we have naturally fired a few warning volleys in lieu of slapping them with a restraining order. A few years ago, my friend Jonah Goldberg from National Review wrote a piece elegantly titled “Bomb Canada,” encouraging us to smack Soviet Canuckistan, as Pat Buchanan calls it, “out of its shame-spiral” since “that’s what big brothers do.” Canadians responded as Canadians always will when faced with overt aggression. They wrote inordinate numbers of letters of concern, exercising what Canadian writer Douglas Coupland calls their “almost universal editorial-page need to make disapproving clucks.”
[…]
So I spent three days on Nexis kicking up every comparison-survey and statistic I could find on American/Canadian values. I became so gripped with the subject I could have been mistaken for a Canadian.
This unscientific research quickly confirmed that Canadians are bizarrely obsessed with us, binge-eating out of our cultural trough, then pretending it tastes bad. Plainly the two things Canada needs most are a mirror and a good psychiatrist.

Indeed.

Victor Davis Hanson notes the growing numbers of critics and naysayers who are stepping over each other to pile onto the New Middle East bandwagon. (Reminder to passengers – you’re supposed to be relieved and happy that your best hopes worst fears for American defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq did not come to pass.)

This newfound turnabout follows the successful election and its aftershocks in the region. Before then, it had become a sort of D.C.-insider parlor game to look back at the conflict in the aftermath of September 11 an catalogue our mistakes.
Without much appreciation that error is the stuff of war, that by any historical benchmark the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was nothing short of miraculous, that our ongoing assessments of success and failure changed hourly within the fluid 24-hour newscycle, or that acrimonious hindsight was often used to save face about earlier wrongheaded pronouncements, we continued to tally up the “I told you so’s.”
Lapses were, of course, numerous and easy to spot from our armchairs in America the morning after – laxity in securing borders and arms depots and reforming the Iraqi army, a too-prominent televised American profile from the Green Zone, tardiness in elections, too large and plodding an interim American bureaucracy, slowness in dispersing allotted aid, the April pullback from Fallujah, and so on. Add in Abu Ghraib, plus Syria’s and Iran’s agents and subsidies, and the reconstruction proved more difficult than the three-week victory might otherwise have presaged.
Many erstwhile supporters from the boomer generation – one that is more utopian and therapeutic than practical and tragic – simply bailed on the entire enterprise. They would not return until the successful elections on January 30 and the amazing aftershocks throughout the Middle East convinced them that their continued hypercriticism might leave them on the very wrong side of history.
Lost in all this self-examination and lamentation was any appreciation for the extraordinary things that went right – often against overwhelming odds and in the face of sharp criticism and mistrust. In the past, I have cited the ostracism of Yasser Arafat and the withdrawal of troops from Saudi Arabia – both controversial at the time – as key events that began to change the calculus of the Middle East in our favor. But there were other developments that are likewise scarcely mentioned today that have made all the difference between sure failure and our present achievement.

They’re worth revisiting.