Civil War

Among those regions of the country that are culturally self-conscious--northern New England, Southern California, Appalachia--the South has been especially occupied, during the past two centuries, in defining what constitutes its distinctive character.

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Tricks Up Their Sleeves

HISTORIANS will look back at this month and regard it as one of our nation's most important ever. April 2003 will be seen as the month in which we toppled a regime that tyrannized its own people and was a threat to its region and even beyond it. We don't know what the liberation of Iraq will fully mean for the Iraqi people, nor what impact it will have elsewhere in the Middle East. But April 2003 is the month in which we spared the world from further atrocities ordered by Saddam Hussein.

A big accomplishment, yes, but another April--in 1865--remains even more significant.

ONE REASON the coming war disturbs many Americans is that it seems optional. While the fight in Afghanistan was thrust upon us, this conflict is one our country enters by choice. It is a war we wouldn't be undertaking but for the conviction of our leaders--crucially, our president.

But in that, it is not unique in the American experience. If Afghanistan was like World War II in being a war of necessity, Iraq is like the Civil War in being a war of leadership and conviction.

It is easy to forget how optional the Civil War seemed to many at the time.