And so we awoke this morning to reports of Afghan rebels of the Northern Alliance, as the Times says, "moving under a deafening barrage of artillery fire and American bombs…pressing an offensive to exploit their success on Friday in capturing the long-prized city of Mazir-i-Sharif." Since September 11, with those ghastly pictures of the World Trade Center in collapse searing our brains, some of us by as little "one degree" losing a friend or family member in the inferno, others of us shaken by a vigil at ground zero, we find ourselves still somewhat numbed by it all. And in response to that cataclysm, for the past five weeks, visions of smoke and fire, missile launchers and C-30 gunboats devastating the Afghan landscape occupied the headlines in our morning papers and saturated our television news. Everywhere we see and hear reverberations of war, our Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell cautioning us about its duration and difficulty.

During this past week, President Bush in his public addresses made reference to what he considers an absolutely vital component in the prosecution of this war on terrorism. Last Tuesday, speaking by satellite to a gathering of Central and Eastern European leaders in Warsaw, the President reminded those leaders of their own experience, as he said, "of suffering under repressive ideologies and trampled human dignity." He declared, "freedom is threatened once again." In the course of outlining the dangers and threats the President continued, "The defeat of terror requires an international coalition of unprecedented scope and cooperation. It demands the sincere, sustained actions of many nations against a network of terrorist cells and bases and funding." And yesterday, addressing the United Nations, President Bush reiterated what he called an American commitment "to choose the dignity of life over the culture of death. We choose lawful change and civil disagreement over coercion, subversion and chaos. These commitments," he continued, "hope and order, law and life, unite people across cultures and continents," and then he made reference to a necessary global coalition standing for these values.

Today, at this 11th hour, of the 11th day of the 11th month, we recognize Armistice Day. Armistice Day! And we are at war. Indeed, we call it the first war of the 21st Century. But since November 11th, 1918, the closing of that "war to end all wars," we have been through World War II, the War in Korea, the War in Vietnam and been held hostage to what we called the "Cold War," a war where so-called weapons of mass destruction, a balance of terror, paradoxically, kept the peace.

Today, on this Armistice Day, as George Bush sews his coalitions and recruits the United Nations for war and for peace, I want to remind us of another President, one who tried for years to keep us "out of war," and indeed won the Presidential election of 1916 on the success of precisely that promise. His war began far away on June 28th, 1914, in Sarajevo, when Gavril Princip, a Serbian nationalist, assassinated Francis Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria—two rounds from a gun rocking the world, loosening the stone that brought the avalanche, plunging Europe into war. President Woodrow Wilson resisted American participation in that European war for nearly three years until the winter and spring of 1917, when the German government announced it would no longer recognize proclaimed American neutrality and that all ships using the sea lanes to France, England, and northern Europe would be subject to U-Boat attack. On April 2nd, 1917, President Wilson advised Congress that Germany's threats amounted to a declaration of war against the United States. On April 6th, 1917, Wilson confirmed, after appropriate Congressional action, "that the state of war between the United States and the Imperial German Government which has been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared." Words can barely indicate the carnage wrought by that war. During the course of those years, 1914-1918, the costs and losses swept beyond comprehension. As Page Smith tells us, "deaths in battle came to nearly ten million. Men listed as prisoners or missing counted up to six million. Since most of the missing were in fact dead, the total of battle related deaths was calculated at almost 13,000,000. The number of wounded and maimed was 20,300,000. To these must be added the millions more who died of disease and starvation, elderly women and children for the most part. Of the dead, 112,500 were Americans, half whom died of the influenza epidemic that swept the military camps in Europe and America." A young Englishman, John Maynard Keynes, found himself appalled at the ravaged French countryside. "The horror and desolation of war," he wrote, " was made visible to the sight on an extraordinary scale of blasted grandeur. The completeness of the destruction was evident. For mile after mile nothing was left. No building was habitable and no field fit for the plow . . . One devastated area was exactly like another—a heap of rubble, a morass of shell holes, and tangle of wire."

Question: How end these horrible catastrophes? How bring nations together so they might broker peace before the slaughter begins? How make this truly "a war to end all wars?"

To answer those questions Woodrow Wilson came forth with his plan for what he called "a peace without victory," "a world safe for democracy." Wilson articulated his dream before the United States entered the war. In January, 1917, four months before the declaration of war in April, he speculated on the essential terms for peace in Europe. He spoke to the Senate of "an international concert" which must, after the war concluded, he said, "hold the world at peace." He continued, "In every discussion of the peace that must end this war it is taken for granted that that peace must be followed by some definite concert of power which will make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again. Every lover of mankind, every sane and thoughtful (person) must take that for granted." Wilson insisted on what he called a "League of Peace" guaranteed by a universal covenant. He insisted, "If the peace presently to be made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organized major force of mankind…There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but organized common peace."

Four months later, in April, in his war message to Congress, Woodrow Wilson envisioned "a concert," he said, "a concert among the peoples of the world of purpose and action to activate the principles of peace and justice as against selfish and autocratic power…" And during the early months of the war he referred again to what he called a "universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free."

Woodrow Wilson's dream became the world's dream. In January, 1918, he responded to a German probe for United States war aims, and during the course of a history-altering address to the Congress on January 8, 1918, he outlined his terms and projected his dream. This address, decisive in the twentieth century, included Wilson's crucial Fourteen Points. He saw in those Fourteen Points a prescription, he said, "that the world be made safe and fit to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation, which like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression."

These Fourteen Points became, following intense international discussion, debate, wrangling, clarification and nearly a year of horrible human waste on the Western front—Verdun, the Argonne Forest, the Somme, hundreds of thousands of deaths, desolate cities and ravaged countryside—these Fourteen Points became the essentially agreed upon terms accepted by the Germans and the so-called Central Empires as their war effort collapsed and they considered armistice and surrender.

To Woodrow Wilson these Fourteen Points, as he asserted, "promise the end of Imperialism," and the right to national "self determination." The global map would change. And for the Germans, the apparently vanquished, Wilson promised "a peace without victory" and he offered, he said, "place of equality among the peoples of the world— the new world in which we now live—instead of a place of mastery."

But the most important point among the fourteen is number 14. It reads: "A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike."

A League of Nations: A League of Nations the official policy of the United States, its principle war aim. One observer wrote, "The fourteen points changed the world's chemistry. In Italy, candles burned under the President's picture in peasant homes." The San Francisco Chronicle labeled "the Magna Carta a small-time franchise compared with the proclamation of international liberty and democracy contained in the Presidential deliverance." Wilson's Secretary of Agriculture, David Houston, reported of a rancher in Cut Bank, Montana, who had three sons in France. He expected one or two of them to be lost. Yet, they were, as he remarked, "my contribution to my country's cause and to the cause of civilization. What I ask is that they not give themselves in vain." He contented himself to offer them, as he said, for the day "when men may go about their business free from apprehension and disorder, till the nations can take steps to see that there shall never be another tragedy like this. See that they do not die for anything less worthwhile. Fix the matter so that neither Germany nor any other nation can ruin the world."

But of course, not everyone expressed euphoria. Many saw Wilson's dream and document as idealistic, visionary and impractical. A prominent journalist wrote to one of Wilson's closest confidants from France: "Here, as in England, one often has the uncomfortable feeling that the Government leaders support Wilson more or less with their tongue in their cheeks, as a matter of policy. They want our powerful armies and our vast money resources, but they really think our war aims, as expressed by Mr. Wilson, a kind of moonshine…one cannot look to the French for the greater moral and political leadership. They are too close to the actual fighting; men cannot think with guns going off in their front yards. They are less interested here than in England in the League of Nations, or in any constructive policy. All thought is here centered upon rooting the Germans out of France; getting them away from Paris so that Big Bertha will not be shooting into churches and killing orphans. One sometimes actually feels like a kind of fool theorist to introduce here the subject of the League of Nations." Indeed, to this observer it appeared clear that Britain and France sought to crush Germany so severely it would never recover as a European power. He despaired, "(Germany) must pay for the war, pay for the rehabilitation of Italy, France and England, give up all its colonies. Pay. Pay. Pay."

Nonetheless, those Central Empires agreed to an Armistice on the basis of Wilson's Fourteen Points, and on November 11, 1918, the papers were signed on the train of the French Commander, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Ecstasy erupted throughout the allied world. City streets exploded in joy and celebration. and yet as the exhilaration and optimism wore off, Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson's Press officer and biographer, warily observed, "The fate of a drama lies in its last act and Wilson is now coming to that. Can he dominate this seething mass of suspicion and disbelief? No European statesman, I am firmly convinced, believes in his inner soul that Wilson's program is anything but a wild dream, very pretty, but quite outside the realm of practical politics…"

He continued, "Occasionally in Wilson I see a likeness to those rare moralists and idealists who from time to time have appeared upon the earth and for a moment, and in a burst of strange power have temporarily lifted mankind to a higher pitch of comportment than it was equal to…such leaders as Calvin, Savanarola, Cromwell (Interesting these three, zealots, political visionaries eager to scour and purify civic life.)" And continuing his historical reflection, Baker concluded, "Nothing…is ever accomplished without an excess of faith, an excess of energy, an excess of passion." Baker possessed every confidence in Wilson's tenacity and vision. He believed Wilson would represent the best of the American ideal. He mused, "We may even realize the League of Nations of the prophet's dream."

The dream of course, failed. And over the course of the next year it turned into a national and international nightmare. In December, 1918, Woodrow Wilson and a peace delegation from the United States set sail on the George Washington for Europe and the Conference at Versailles. He sadly, but typically, subverted himself just before the midterm election in November, 1918, by insisting that the electorate defeat the Republicans and send to the United States Senate enough Democrats to sustain their majority. His bitterly partisan plea backfired, and the Senate became Republican, its Majority Leader and Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee the Senior Senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge.

In any event, the Peace Conference in Paris turned into a greed-driven, revenge-soaked debacle. Hatred and diplomacy went hand in hand. The peace conference was more about punishment than peace. President Wilson failed to sustain thirteen of his Fourteen Points. The Treaty failed in almost all of its promises of national integrity, ethnic self-determination and colonial liberation. It dismantled the old Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman and the German Empires and transferred their colonies, mandates, provinces and territories to the French, the British and the Italians. It held the Germans solely responsible for the war, its ruins, decimation, and death. It pressed reparations on Germany designed to bankrupt and cripple that nation for a thousand years. The conference maintained a food blockade during the six-month treaty negotiations, starving tens of thousands of men, women and children. It dealt a bitter, harsh, crushing national humiliation for the Germans, the Bulgarians, the Turks. Woodrow Wilson naively, tragically compromised and gave away everything to his cynical and vengeful negotiating companions at the Conference, so much so that some five years later, in 1924, a former Austrian Corporal, driven to the radical right, wrote in his political manifesto, Mein Kamph, "What a use could be made of the Treaty of Versailles…How each one of the points of that Treaty could be branded into the minds and hearts of the German people until sixty million men and women find their souls aflame with a feeling of rage and shame; and a torrent of fire bursts forth as from a furnace and a will of steel is forged from it, with the common cry: 'We will have arms again!'"

The first thirteen points? Gone! But Wilson's fourteenth point? His dream of a League of Nations? He gave away everything else to save it for the Treaty. Baker wrote, "More and more the President was coming to have a kind of mystic belief that the League, if he could get it accepted and organized, would save the world. He seemed even more willing to compromise desperately to get it…Wilson had for long been the prophet of the world;" wrote Baker, "he had now to fight in the dust and heat of the arena in order to save from utter extinction even a small part of his grand plan."

And save The League for the Treaty he did. Wilson's League provided the Preamble to the Treaty of Versailles signed on June 28th, 1919. He brought it to the United States Senate for ratification in July. He introduced the treaty to the Senate as "nothing less than a world settlement." He saw the League providing a mechanism for settling divisive issues and festering resentments, resolving overweening power discrepancies and diplomatic misunderstandings through arbitration, negotiation, compromise. Everything short of war. He perceived a new order among nations representing, he insisted, "the hope of the world" that must not be disappointed. The Covenant placed the United States alongside other nations in the working through of potentially violent disputes, "Shall we," he asked, "Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty? Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?"

Indeed, the opening Prologue to the Treaty of Versailles, the Covenant, included twenty-three articles dealing with the structure and function of the League of Nations. But in Article 10 was the Senate's Reservation. From July through November, 1919, the US Senate discussed, debated, amended, devised, passed and defeated hundreds of Treaty reservations. Senators insulted each other, they lied, they filibustered. But the nub of the debate, the crisis hounding the President and Senate centered on Article 10. The Senate questioned the constitutionality of Article 10. The accompanying reservation written and defended by Senator Lodge of Massachusetts emerged from the Senator's conviction that Article 10 profoundly compromised the sovereignty of the United States and the authority and responsibility of the Congress to shape foreign policy and to decide international issues including the declaration of war. Lodge argued the United States could join the League only with iron clad safeguards that made, "perfectly clear," he said, "that no American soldiers, not even a corporal's guard, that no American sailors, not even the crew of a submarine, can ever be ordered anywhere except by the constitutional authorities of the United States." President Wilson claimed Article 10 to be the very heart of the Covenant, making this nation vulnerable to the same international procedures required of every other member, involving us in international peace-keeping—no special cases when it came to deciding matters of war and peace, life and death. He urged every Senator supporting the treaty to vote against the treaty if Article 10 were in any way modified, changed or omitted. And thus, Republicans who loathed Wilson, who despised his dream, who believed the Covenant a patriotic disaster, along with Democrats who recognized the constitutional risks—Democrats who were resigned or exhausted by the President's willfulness, stubbornness, arrogance, Calvinist-Presbyterian, stroke-exacerbated, self-righteous and implacable resistance to compromise. I can hear Wilson now. "They are not reservations, they are nullifications. No, I shall not accept them." These disparate Senators joined together and on November 18th, 1919, by a vote of 41 to 51, the Treaty lost, the Covenant died, the Dream dissolved.

So, it is Armistice Day. And we are at war. Yesterday George W. Bush, in New York, addressed the United Nations General Assembly, a veiled reincarnation of Woodrow Wilson's dream. The President pled for a global coalition to make war, and to keep the peace. Perhaps, maybe, could that coalition be ultimately—-ultimately-—a League of Nations, and peoples, and races and creeds leading us—O God we beseech thee, as Woodrow Wilson envisioned his League, "leading us out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world has never dreamed of before?"

God grant it may be so.