Though it falls outside his original target of being within 100 days of taking office, President Barack Obama is keeping a pre-inauguration promise by “mak[ing] a major speech from an Islamic capital” this week in Cairo, Egypt.

Obama made what was considered by many to be the safest (and most “obvious”) choice in selecting Cairo for his “high-profile speech that would seek to mend rifts between the United States and the broader Muslim world.” Unfortunately, by deciding to play it safe, a president whose life to this point has revolved around an obsession with being “historic” missed out on a truly historic opportunity.

Cairo “Feels Bold”

Last December, when the incoming administration first floated the idea of Obama making a major speech from an Islamic capital, pundits, and bloggers alike immediately zeroed in on Cairo as the “perfect” choice – one that is safe, but “feels bold,” in the words of New York Times reporter Helene Cooper.

“Egypt is perfect,” wrote Cooper. “It’s certainly Muslim enough, populous enough and relevant enough. It’s an American ally, but there are enough tensions in the relationship that the choice will feel bold. The country has plenty of democracy problems, so Mr. Obama can speak directly to the need for a better democratic model there.”

The “democracy problems” Cooper and her allies in the media paid lip service to in their pronouncements of Cairo’s perfection are far more than just a passing concern. Just over three years ago, Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak promised nationwide parliamentary elections, a positive development coming on the heels of the first contested presidential election since the 1952 overthrow of Egypt’s ruling monarchy. Unfortunately, “the election was marred by widespread violations, fraud and the arrest and detention of hundreds of opposition supporters,” Saad Edin Abrahim wrote in the Los Angeles Times shortly after the election. That campaign of intimidation, which included the arrest and imprisonment of Mubarak’s chief challenger, resulted in a voter turnout of barely 20 percent and in Mubarak’s allies maintaining their dominance of Egypt’s government.

Baghdad the Clear Choice

If President Obama was as committed to actually being historic as he is to talking about being so, he would have taken advantage of the opportunity left him by former president George W. Bush and made his appeal to the pan-Muslim world from Baghdad, Iraq. A Muslim state by any reasonable definition of the word, Iraq has become, outside the tiny state of Israel, the only functioning democracy in an incredibly volatile region of the world where the U.S. has myriad interests.

Further, the move to normalize relations with Iraq has seen significant progress in recent months, with as evidenced by the Iraqi parliament’s approval of two landmark agreements cementing the American-Iraqi relationship as an alliance of “independent, equal states of sovereignty.”

The Status of Forces and Strategic Framework Agreements, which were passed by a parliament made up of sectarian officially “normalized the U.S.-Iraqi relationship with strong economic, diplomatic, cultural, and security ties” and will serve “as the foundation for a long-term bilateral relationship based on mutual goals,” said President Bush in an address shortly after the agreements were approved.

These agreements were passed by an Iraqi parliament made up of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds – groups which had been fighting a bloody sectarian war against their fellow countrymen speaks volumes about how far Iraq has come in such a brief time.

The recognition and establishment successful, democratic Iraq which is a stalwart U.S. ally would truly be a transformational event in the Middle East – and, by choosing Baghdad as a location for his first major Presidential address on foreign soil, Barack Obama could make it clear to the U.S. and the world – particularly the Islamic world – that he understands the importance of the new Iraq, and that America stands ready to join in an equal partnership with any nation, Muslim or no, which is willing to embrace freedom and peace with its neighbors, and to join the fight against terrorism.

Leave Grudges at the Door

Cooper summed up the “problem” posed by Baghdad as a potential speech site for President Obama in December, writing in the Times that speaking from that particular Islamic capital “could appear to validate the Iraq war, which Mr. Obama opposed.”

Rather than falling prey to such a petty, small-minded concern, Obama and his advisers should have recognized that this was one of several reasons why Baghdad was the perfect location for his pan-Islamic address.

Speaking from Baghdad would have publicly demonstrated the self-proclaimed “non-ideological,” “post-partisan” Obama’s ability to put aside his pre-presidential view on the invasion of Iraq aside and, in true statesmanlike fashion, embrace the Iraqi democracy as the ally it now is. Embracing and honoring the new Iraq in such a public way would have sent an even more powerful message to the Islamic world because of Obama’s opposition to the invasion itself, and because of his opposition to the shift in military strategy that pulled Iraq from the depths of sectarian war and made it what it is today.

Further, such a decision would have demonstrated that the inexperienced American president understands the value of the democratic state that resulted from an effort he opposed, and would have sent the message that Obama truly was what he constantly makes himself out to be: a high-minded statesman who is willing to put partisan ship and petty squabbles aside and to work for the purpose of building and maintaining alliances with members of the international community (in this case, with Iraq).

Tabula Rasa on Israel-Palestine

Iraq is unique in another significant way: it presents the lone location in the Muslim world from which the problem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be addressed free of clouding by the current regime’s statements actions. With the great emphasis Obama has put on “solving” the squabble he sees as the root of all Middle Eastern conflict to this point in his presidency, Baghdad offers an unmatched opportunity to address the Muslim world in general, and the Israel-Palestine conflict in particular, from the capital of a nation whose fledgling government has no history of supporting one side or the other in that millennial struggle.

Egypt can make no such claim. Though it has been party to peace talks and treaties with the Jewish state in the past, it was also an aggressor in the Six Days’ War against Israel, and its northern territory currently houses tunnels through which arms are sent into the blockaded Gaza Strip, where Hamas terrorists employ them against Israeli civilians in the southern cities of Sderot and Ashkelon. Further, senior Egyptian officials have gone on the record accusing the “Jews of Palestine” (modern Israel) of “killing children, old people, and women and ignoring taboos,” and of injecting civil Judaism with “their poisons, which are against all humanity.”

Egypt, in other words, has clearly staked out its position on the Palestinian side of the conflict between the Israeli population and those who virulently – and often violently – oppose them.

From providing cash payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers who died to kill Israeli civilians, to sending surface-to-surface missiles over Jordan and into Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein was a similarly avowed enemy of Israel and supporter of Palestinian terrorism. However, with the overthrow of Saddam and the accession of a democratic government that has few if any ties to the late tyrant, Iraq is now the one nation in the entirety of the Middle East whose slate is virtually blank when it comes to Israel-Palestine policy and interference. In a region as polarized around a single issue as the Middle East is on Israel-Palestine, this virtue provides Baghdad with a value too great to be expressed in mere words.

Standing as Equals

Finally, a decision by President Obama to visit Baghdad as an equal of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would have sent the crystal-clear message to an Islamic world suspicious of American motives that Iraq is not a U.S. puppet state, but that is stands in sovereign equality to an America that is ready and willing to stand on equal footing with any Muslim nation that respects the rights of its people and those of other nations, and that actively repudiates terror both within its borders and without.

Obama’s choice of location for this address could have sent a powerful message to the Islamic world that the face of the Middle East was changing. Further, he could have used this opportunity to signal America’s willingness to deal openly, honestly, and as equal allies with Muslim nations who comport themselves in a manner consistent with America’s interests and values.

Unfortunately, in ultimately deciding to pass up Iraq with all its attributes in favor of a member of the Middle East’s “old guard” that has as few relevant attributes and as poor a record on human rights and honest democracy as Egypt, a president who is desperate to be “historic” and “transformational” missed a golden opportunity to be just that.

What I’m talking about here is far more underrated, and far more consistently historic. You see, tomorrow we will witness that rarest of political occurrences: the peaceful, non-dynastic transfer of power over the mightiest country in the world, yet again, from the outgoing leader of the past eight years to the incoming leader of at least the next four.

The fact that America’s transitions from president to president are so regular, so peaceful, and so orderly has led us to take for granted this occurrence which, in the context of human history, is an incredibly rare and spectacular event.

This is far more rare, and far more amazing, an occurrence than we ever give it credit for. The ancient pioneers of democracy whose tradition we are carrying (and building) on were not able to continue such a tradition.

The legendary democracy of classical Athens, for example, took over a century to establish, then underwent fits and starts during its century and a half of existence, ceding preeminence to tyranny after Solon’s early 6th century tenure, to an an oligarchy during the late-5th century Peloponnesian war, and ending in Macedonian monarchy after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC.

Rome’s fragmented republican system lasted longer (around 400 years if the traditional founding date of 509 BC is accepted), but it endured more upheaval and violence than the halting Athenian system, finally ending in the 3/4-century long inferno of repeated proscriptions, tyrannicide, and seemingly endless civil war.

Barack Hussein Obama’s accession to the presidency is not being met by military mobilization, riots, or widespread conspiratorial assassination attempts. In fact, it’s not even being met with the protests, the threats of violence, and the widespread claims of “he’s not my President!” which were directed at the last recipient of presidential power eight (and again four) years ago, when we came the closest we have in living memory to breaking our historic cycle of peaceful, non-antagonistic transitions.

Tomorrow’s inauguration of the 44th President of the United States (and the first African-American president) will demonstrate two things above all else:

1. That America, its citizens, and its leaders still respect the rites of democratic succession to such a degree that, for the 42nd time, we have had our electoral say and as a result power is changing hands peacefully, with (despite the far Left’s paranoid claims of the last eight years) no armies being marched on The Mall and no last-ditch attempts being made by the outgoing leader to hold onto power or to keep the presidency within his dynastic line; and
2. That the idea of racism as an institution imposing a glass (or steel) ceiling on the level to which African-Americans can rise is as dead as Nathan Bedford Forrest himself.

Building on #2 above, allow me now to change gears to address the race issue.

The inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America shows once and for all that the identity politics and categorical identification and treatment of Americans according to race, religion, and gender — which has for so long been a key tool in the Left’s political toolkit — is both outdated and irrelevant.

With the swearing-in of a racial minority to the highest office in the world, attempts to supposedly make up for past transgressions by implementing race-based quota systems, rather than actually allowing minorities to succeed on their own merits without the cloud of racial favoritism and “white guilt”-induced pity hanging over their heads, should be recognized as the irrelevant mechanisms of outcome equality that they are, and should be left by the wayside with “separate but equal” and other similarly outdated doctrines.

America as a whole crossed the threshold into a largely “colorblind” society years ago. Unfortunately, as is their wont, politicians and government (particularly on the left side of the aisle) have lagged far behind their countrymen in this area, and have continued insisting on identifying, categorizing, and regulating Americans by their race and gender, rather than by their common humanity.

This will not immediately cease to be the case with tomorrow’s inauguration — but it should, and, with the accession of an African-American to the presidency for the first time in U.S. history, there is no longer any excuse for it not to.

Barack Obama, the neophyte Senator from Illinois and presumptive Democrat presidential nominee (though don’t tell Hillary Clinton that!), has provided example after example of this combination, to which he has added an exploitation of gravely serious issues in hopes of capitalizing politically on history and on the emotions that such issues spark.

The litany of issues and events Obama has attempted to take ownership of via family involvement reads like a proposed script for Forrest Gump 2, this time starring the Obama family tree, played by well-known black actors (since the Obama campaign and its supporters have demonstrated that they care very deeply about the skin color of any actor who would portray an Obama onscreen).

Remember Selma, Alabama? Obama staked his claim to the historic “Bloody Sunday” event there by crediting that activity with his parents’ marriage, and with his birth. On March 2nd, speaking at the 43rd anniversary of Selma, Obama :

“They looked at each other and they decided, ‘We know that in the world, as it has been, it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child, but something is stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala., because some folks are willing to march across the bridge.’ And so they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Ala.!”

Of course, as Jake Tapper wrote for ABCNews the following Wednesday, “Obama was born in 1961; the Selma march was four years later.”

Last year, Obama announced, in an attempt to co-opt the Kennedy legacy in the Democrat party, that he traced his “very existence” to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother.

As the Washington Post‘s Michael Dobbs wrote of that claim at the end of March, “It is a touching story — but the key details are either untrue or grossly oversimplified.” Dobbs continued:

Contrary to Obama’s claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama’s father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.

The most recent — and most heinous — addition to this list of the attempted co-opting of history for personal political advantage came on Memorial Day, May 26, when Obama apparently decided that Selma, the Kennedys, and other exaggerated historical connections simply weren’t enough to build his faux reputation with a big enough swath of voters — so, in a blantantly dishonest attempt to simultaneously pander to the military and Jewish votes, he decided to take ownership of the ending of the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz, as well.

“Despite not having served in the military himself, wrote CBS News’ Maria Gavrilovic:

Barack Obama used his Memorial Day remarks to speak about his family’s service. “My grandfather marched in Patton’s army, but I cannot know what it is to walk into battle like so many of you,” he told a small group of veterans [in Las Cruces, NM]. “My grandmother worked on a bomber assembly line, but I cannot know what it is for a family to sacrifice like so many of yours have.”

Charming.

Further, according to Gavrilovic:

Obama also spoke about his uncle, who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz. He said the family legend is that, upon returning from war, his uncle spent six months in an attic.

Now, Barack Obama has never been known for having the best grasp of history, geography, or international affairs — something that he demonstrates in nearly every speech and at nearly every event. However, a statement of that sort, while possibly attributable to sheer, monumental ignorance, rings far more of blatantly dishonest revisionism, complete with a healthy disrespect for the intelligence of his veteran and Jewish target audiences.

The truth here is quite simple, and Mr. Obama comes down directly on the wrong side of it. As any child who paid attention in school knows, Auschwitz was liberated on on Jan. 27, 1945 by the Red Army of the Soviet Union, which was moving through Poland on its march to Berlin.

The U.S. was fighting the Battle of the Bulge at the time — on the other side of the Rhine River. In his attempt to stake a familial claim to the end of the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz, Mr. Obama appears to have inadvertently enlisted his poor uncle in Joe Stalin’s Red Army.

What a multicultural, international history the Obama clan has! A screenplay for Forrest Gump 2, indeed.

Mr. Obama has absolutely no excuse for getting those facts wrong; after all, he was serving in the United States Senate in January 2005, when the United Nations General Assembly marked the 60th Anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation — again, by the Russians — and when Vice President Dick Cheney joined the presidents of Poland, Russia, France, Germany, and Israel for an event at Auschwitz itself. Did Senator Obama simply forget about this historic commemoration of the notorious concentration camp’s liberation by the Red Army 60 years before? Or did he conveniently ignore it in hopes of slipping one past his audience, and gaining support and votes for his bloodline claim to the end of the Holocaust?

This capitalizing on the horror of the Holocaust and the Auschwitz liberation is, of course, inexcusable for countless reasons. The lying about familial involvement, though, is so profane that it borders on evil itself — especially in light of the fiery protestations that emanated from the Obama campaign after President Bush dared use the 60th anniversary of Israel’s foundation to warn against the dangers of appeasement.

Obama supporters railed ad nauseam about the “political treason” committed by the President in that speech by referring to Nazi Germany “in the very nation that was carved out from the horrific calamity of the Holocaust.” Fairness would dictate that a boldfaced attempt to falsely stake a familial claim to the ending of the Holocaust itself would provoke a similarly vitriolic response. However, I would not suggest that anybody hold their breath waiting for such a response to come.

Mr. Obama has been struggling to capture the military and Jewish votes, due to his vigorous anti-military stances and the support he has garnered from the leaders of Iran (whose President denies the Holocaust altogether) and the terrorist group Hamas. Blatantly calling soldiers and Jews stupid by attempting to put such a blatant lie over on them should not help gain their support — nor should the continued exaggerations and stumbles that Obama continues to perpetrate and to endure at seemingly every event allow him to continue projecting the aura of unfailing Messiah that so many followers have seen, and so desperately wish to believe in.

Blogger Dan McLaughlin wrote back in 2004 about the attempt by many politicians to “substitute biography for policy,” saying:

his is a second and related example of the Democrats taking a tried-and-true campaign tactic and trying to pass it off as a strategy, and another one in which Kerry represents a nadir. Again, all candidates use their biography when possible to shore up both the strong and weak points in their images. But what we’ve seen increasingly from Democrats is efforts to use biography as a shield to cover the candidate’s policy positions. Get asked about gun control? Don’t talk about the issue – go hunting! Get asked about war? Talk about your service record!

…As a practical matter, there are two problems with this approach. First, voters aren’t stupid; a dove with medals is still a dove, and a hunter who favors gun control is still in favor of gun control. Second, nobody has enough biography to cover every issue, and the need to have something personal to say on issue after issue is one of the roots of the exaggerations and resume-padding that got Gore and Kerry into so much trouble. Look at Bush and Cheney for a comparison: Bush’s bio story is well-known, but he rarely tries to connect it to a particular policy debate, and Cheney only reluctantly talks about himself at all despite having a genuinely impressive up-by-the-bootstraps story.

Mr. Obama’s need to expand his biography, often at the expense of the truth, in order to make up for his lack of experience and policy savvy will come back to bite him — especially if historical gaffes of this level continue.

As MSNBC’s Mark Murray wrote after the Selma exaggeration, “What is it about politicians trying too hard to be part of history? Sometimes, there isn’t a destiny; that’s ok too.”

Apparently it’s not “ok” enough for the Obama campaign, which continues to conduct itself as though it is, in fact, auditioning not only for the Presidency, but for a familial role in Forrest Gump 2.

Update 3/27@1639CDT: The Obama campaign has retracted and corrected the Auschwitz liberation claim.

Regardless of the thought process behind it, this is a dangerous undertaking as, while history appears to repeat itself in loosely-defined cycles (especially on a large scale), events and people are never exact duplicates of their forbears, and situations are never directly repeated.

If the attempt to use history as a predictive method is risky in the hands of those who actually know history, though, then the danger of such an attempt grows when carried out by someone ignorant of historical fact – and, I would argue, is even greater when the pontificator has only partial knowledge of past events, for in that case the gaps can be filled in (and other details left out) both at will, and with great amounts of creativity.

Such is the case with Scottish novelist Robert J. Harris, author of Imperium and Pompeii (as well as Fatherland, and alternative-history novel in which the Nazis were victorious in World War II). Harris penned an op-ed, entitled “Pirates of the Mediterranean” (also published as “The ‘war on terror’ that ruined Rome”), for the Sunday, October 1 edition of the New York Times, in which he compared “President Bush’s War on Terror” to what he characterizes as a Roman overreaction to a pirate attack on the Roman port of Ostia in 68 BC which ultimately, in his view, led to the end of the Roman Republic.

Unfortunately, Mr. Harris falls into the third category discussed above – he appears to be ignorant of just enough facts that he can play fast and loose with those which suit his purpose, ignore those that don’t, and maintain plausible deniability for the woeful inaccuracies in the information he creates to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

Harris begins:

In the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The novelist begins by treating this as a book or film, with time, character, and location consolidation. Ostia, the port at the mouth of the Tiber, seven miles from Rome, was in fact attacked in 68 BC by pirates who had been terrorizing the Mediterranean for years.

However, the “senators” in question (who were referred to as legates by Plutarch, and as praetors, or magistrates, by other sources – not senators) were actually kidnapped 370 miles from Rome, on the road to Brundisium, on the southeast coast of Italy.

One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself. Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: No nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. …But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights.

Harris has stumbled across a truth here, but his embellishment clouds the prospect of his full understanding of just what it was he got right. An attack on Rome’s infrastructure would have been a blow to Roman confidence and security – because of Rome’s food-import situation. By this time, Rome was a complete buyers market with regard to grain; shipments were constantly coming in from around the Mediterranean, and any threat to that food supply would not only worry Rome’s governors, who needed it to maintain grain distribution to people “on the dole,” but would foster immediate panic in the famine-fearing citizens of the great city. (An excellent example of this is the riot caused in Rome by the mere rumor that shipments of grain from Carthage might be delayed, or even halted).

However, the 68 BC sack of Ostia was not such a blinding threat to Rome’s food supply. Nearly two centuries from acquiring a protected harbor, Ostia was not yet a major port for the city of Rome; rather, it was utilized for the trans-shipment of goods being transported up the coast from the key ports in the Bay of Naples. According to one classicist, “sacking Ostia was not a main concern of any Roman worried about the piracy that was rampant in the Mediterranean at the time.”

Indeed, Plutarch’s account of the pirate threat, the Lex Gabinia, and Pompey’s offensive neglects to even mention the attack on Ostia – a fact which reveals the overall unimportance not only of this specific attack, but also of the port itself.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But an event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty.

Harris’s last sentence in the above paragraph is representative of the type of embellished or fabricated information and terminology used by the historically ignorant (especially those who do not necessarily know that they are historically ignorant) to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of actual history.

In actuality, there was no Roman “Constitution.” Rome was not governed under anything which we would recognize as a constitutional document; likewise, there was no underlying guarantee or acknowledgement of inalienable rights such as those recognized by our Constitution. The Roman code of morality and citizenship was governed by its traditions and customs – known as the mos maiorum – and by its laws. Never was there a thought of a Constitution as we might recognize it – a situation which possibly contributed to the destabilization of the Republic, as the public trust and tradition were increasingly subverted by leaders in the late days of the Republic.

Similarly, there wasn’t “democracy” in Rome any more than there is democracy in America. The Greek-originated word, which literally means “rule by the people” (from the Greek demos, “people,” and kratos, “rule”), is a misnomer for nearly every government to which it has been applied, including both America and Rome. The Senate, the Consuls, the Tribunes, and the Popular Assembly – all were governing positions or bodies, separate and with different powers of governance. Direct democracy was not a factor in the daily governmental decisions of Rome, neither when it was a Republic nor when it was an Empire. The Popular Assembly had a say in legislation, but it was more often than not doing the bidding of one interest group or another. Rome, in actuality, was very much an aristocracy.

Harris continues:

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome [note: again, there was no such thing] had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” – “I am a Roman citizen” – was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.

And the sky was always blue, the birds were always singing, and the water turned to wine whenever we liked!

Or, better yet, reality: The period from 133 to 27 B.C., beginning with the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus and ending with Augustus Caesar, was a marked 106-year period of republican decline. It has been called by some historians the “Period of the Individual,” as many aristocrats were competing at the time for individual supremacy not only over each other, but over the whole of Rome.

The Roman Senate by the early 2nd century BC was no longer the effective governing body it had once been. The Gracchi, Gaius and Tiberius, had instituted popular reforms, granting land, both in Rome and in the provinces, to the people, while also weakening the Senate and giving the great unwashed a greater say in the governance, and ability to hold office, in Rome.

Further, in the early 1st century, strongmen Marius and Sulla, when not putting down rebellion in Africa Proconsularis, were fighting a civil war against each other, which ended with Sulla’s supporters slaughtering the followers of Marius – both real and suspected – and Sulla’s taking up the post of Dictator, which offered no check on his legislative or judicial abilities, as well as no limit on his term of rule.

Sulla did institute his own brand of reform, empowering the Senate once again (after its weakening under the Gracchi) and doubling its number to 600, while reducing the tribunate to what historian Velleius Paterculus called “a shadow without any substance” (2.30), and restricting the Plebeian assembly. The “reforms” of Sulla were by and large in the form of restricting the powers of the populace, and returning them to the aristocracy in the form of the Senate – and attempting to ensure that that was where it would remain, lest the great unwashed have a say in their own governance.

The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year- old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his…to…propose an astonishing new law, the Lex Gabinia.

“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”

Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented.

The Lex Gabinia, named for Pompey’s legate Aulus Gabinius, who proposed the law, was passed in the Roman popular assembly in 67 BC. The people of Rome were overwhelmingly in favor of this order, which elevated Pompey to the equality with, but not superiority over, all other Roman proconsuls; however, it was fiercely debated and its passage was in doubt all the way up to the final vote due to opposition among the aristocrats in the Senate.

The Gabinian law granted Pompey an “extraordinary command,” of three-year duration, for the purpose of subduing the pirates in question. He was not the first general to receive this command against the pirates; in 74 BC, Marcus Antonius, father of Mark Antony, received from the Popular Assembly the same type of extraordinary command that Pompey received in 67 BC; however, Antonius failed to achieve victory against them (as did his father, also Marcus Antonius, in 102). Likewise, Publius Servilius in 78 BC had attempted unsuccessfully to rid Rome and the eastern Mediterranean of the pirate threat.

Once Pompey put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book – the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous”…

Due in part to the resources he was afforded, as well as to his skill in leadership, organization, and military affairs, Pompey was ultimately – and quickly – successful in fulfilling the terms of his command.

Had Pompey been desirous of this command in the first place? Almost certainly; he likely maneuvered as much as possible behind the scenes to gain it, as well, for, like any aristocrat of the day, Pompey was constantly in search of fame and glory, both military and political. However, far from being contrived, the pirate threat in the Mediterranean was both persistent and real. According to Plutarch, in his Life of Pompey, by this time the pirates’ numbers had grown to over one thousand ships and over four hundred captured cities, and they were not only attacking shipping and cities, but also plundering sacred areas and temples around the Greco-Roman world.

“This power extended its operations over the whole of the Mediterranean Sea, making it un-navigable and closed to all commerce,” wrote Plutarch (Pompey, XXV), and it was a great service to Rome and her Italian allies that Pompey finally rid the area of them.

Likewise, there is no evidence that Pompey or his allies accused dissenting voices of being “soft” or “traitorous.” There was fierce opposition to the passage of the Lex Gabinia, but, again, it was not from the populace, who overpoweringly favored the order (Plutarch says that they received it “with excessive pleasure”) – rather, the opposition came from the Senate, and was mounted largely for personal political advantage, rather than out of a sense of patriotism, or of concern for the threat to a nonexistent constitution.

…powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

This last is a combination of multiple orders and historical events in order to drive a fictional narrative. In fact, the extraordinary command bestowed upon Pompey by the Lex Gabinia lasted only as long as the threat against which it was issued continued. The claim that “powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned” is simply not true, for not only did the people have the authority to authorize such a command as the Lex Gabinia, but, as one Classicist and Ancient Historian points out, “Pompey’s exercise of those powers did not hinder, reduce, or subvert the power of the popular assembly” – for, “when Pompey subdued the pirates, his authority under the Lex Gabinia ceased.”

Pompey’s further activity in the East was carried out under an entirely separate order, the Lex Manilia (so named for the man who proposed it, tribune Gaius Manilius), granted by the popular assembly (again, as was their right) in 66 BC for the purpose of waging a campaign against King Mithridates of Pontus – a campaign which had no relationship whatsoever to the pirate threat, or to the authority granted Pompey to subdue the pirates.

The only thing Pompey’s conquest in the East which was even remotely related to the Lex Gabinia was the fact that, without overwhelming success in defeating the pirate threat, the second order probably never would have been issued. As it was, Pompey showed, through his conduct in the campaign authorized by the Gabinian law, that he could accomplish what others before him could not – and he showed it once again from 66 to 63 BC in the Mithridatic war through his success in broadening the influence of Rome, establishing dependent provinces, and defeating a king who had fought against Rome for nearly three decades.

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy – imperfect though it was – rose again

The Republic may well have been doomed “in any case”; by this point, it had been declining for nearly seventy years, since Tiberius Gracchus’ consulship. The populist reforms of the Gracchi, and their reversal by Sulla after his battle with Marius, the continual effort by the aristocracy to subvert the populace for their own gain, the growing expanse of Rome’s provinces, combined with its innate inefficiency, and, yes, the lack of a written Constitution or anything similar, all contributed to the undoing not of “Rome’s [nonexistent] democracy, but of the Roman Republic.

However, the only effect the reaction to the raid on Ostia had on this chain of events – inasmuch as the raid itself served as an impetus for the passage of the Lex Gabinia – was that it provided Pompey with yet another decisive victory, allowing him to climb one more rung up the ladder of power in Rome, and setting the stage for his defeat of Mithridates and triumphant return to Rome, army in tow, and in possession of greater riches than any had imagined.

Upon his arrival in Italy, though, rather than marching on Rome and seizing power (as Harris would have us expect), Pompey simply disbanded his army and made two requests: that the senate ratify his provincial arrangements in the East, and that his veterans receive land on which to settle – not exactly a chief catalyst for the end of a Republic.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

In this, Harris is correct on both counts – and so would the American and Roman in question, as there has been no “destroying” of the American constitution, and there was little or no damage done to the Roman Republic by a law which was active for the length of a three-month campaign against Mediterranean pirates.

The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: It fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate [referring to the “vote by the Senate…to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of "serious" physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy”] does not have the same result.

Beyond the careful effort to remain within the law and the Constitution while simultaneously protecting Americans from a clear and present danger to their security presented by a very real terrorist threat, if the United States experiences the same fate from this Senate vote, and this War on Terror, as that which Rome experienced as a direct result of the Lex Gabinia – an order which lasted for the duration of Pompey’s three-month campaign against the pirates, and then ceased – then we shall then we shall be in very good shape, indeed – despite the disingenuous efforts of Robert Harris and other pseudo-historians to convince us otherwise.

The publication of this “fuzzy-history” op-ed appears to be further evidence of the New York Times’s prioritizing of their criteria for publishing and reporting as narrative first, factuality distant second (if there).

Harris’s op-ed received a poor response from those who actually possess an academic knowledge of the events he so skews in the retelling. “Harris should stick to what he knows…writing historical fiction,” said one Classicist and Ancient Historian. Said another Classicist – and this can and will serve as the last word – “Harris is stretching really far for his parallels, and they fail – to me as a professional classicist and student of things Roman, as well as an American citizen – to convince in any way. He has certainly ignored, could even be said to have abused, the major ancient sources of information; in the attempt to draw a specious parallel with current events, he merely ends up misleading by reference to ancient events that he does not seem to understand.”