Our View

The Longboat Key Planning and Zoning Board should listen to Town Attorney David Persson. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Persson offered a great suggestion last week when the planning board tried to address modifying the town’s sign code. He urged planning board members to look for other towns that have the look board members want and then emulate their codes. To do what board members did last Thursday clearly would have become an exercise in futility.

In typical Longboat Key government fashion, planning board members seemingly questioned every scenario in an effort to guard the Key’s Holy Gates and protect us from sign clutter. Perhaps that’s what they’re appointed to do, but there comes a point.

Especially when it approaches the ridiculous. Take political signs as one example. How many political signs should be allowed on one man’s property? One for every candidate? One for every constitutional question on the state ballot? What about that little thing known as the First Amendment and your right to free speech?

If it were our call, put no limit on political signs. They are American icons. And they’re only temporary. Lighten up.

In the larger context, we would urge the planning board to take two steps: 1) appoint a citizens’ group to find the right towns to emulate; 2) look for ways to allow freedom, not take it away.

+ Jaleski’s hara-kiri
Longboat Key Commissioner Gene Jaleski apparently realized he committed metaphorical hara-kiri Friday in his e-mail to Commissioner Bob Siekmann (see page 1A).

He concluded the best course for himself, the Town Commission and town residents would be his resignation.

What a shame. When Jaleski was elected 18 months ago, voters had high hopes. Jaleski was a populist ready to challenge the status quo. He was an avowed fiscal hawk and bubbled with ideas. He wanted to improve cell-phone service without cell towers; he wanted better alternatives to beach renourishment; he wanted to make Town Hall more efficient.

Alas, the commission and he were not a fit. Jaleski is paying the price. It’s best we all move on — onward and upward.

U.S. Marines under assault again
The 10-part HBO series on the Pacific campaign of World War II just ended. That story of island-hopping was mostly about how the old breed of U.S. Marines fought die-hard Japanese infantrymen face to face in places such as Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Guam and Okinawa.

We still argue about whether it was smart to storm those entrenched Japanese positions or whether all those islands were strategically necessary. But no one can question the Marine Corps’ record of defeating the most savage infantrymen of the age, thereby shattering the myth of Japanese military invincibility.

Since World War II, the Marines have turned up almost anywhere that America found itself in a jam against supposedly unconquerable enemies — in such bloody places as Inchon and the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, at Hue and Khe Sanh during the Vietnam War, at the two bloody sieges of Fallujah in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan.

Over the last two centuries, two truths have emerged about the Marine Corps. One, they defeat the toughest of America’s adversaries under the worst of conditions. And two, periodically their way of doing things — and their eccentric culture of self-regard — so bothers our military planners that some higher-ups try either to curb their independence or to end the Corps altogether.

After the Pacific fighting, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson wanted to disband the Marines Corps. What good were amphibious landings in the nuclear age? Johnson asked. His boss, President Harry Truman, agreed and didn’t like the cocky Marines, either.

Then came Korea — and suddenly the Pentagon wanted more Marines. The fighting against hard-core North Korean and Communist Chinese veterans was as nasty as anything seen in three millennia of organized warfare.

The antiquated idea of landing on beaches proved once again a smart way of outflanking the enemy.

The Marines survived Korea, Louis Johnson and Harry Truman — and continued to carve out their own logistics, air-support and tactical doctrines. Marine self-sufficiency was due to a lingering distrust of the other services dating back to the lack of air and naval support in World War II and to Marine paranoia that the other services liked their combative spirit but not their independence.

We are once again seeing one of those periodic reexaminations of the Corps. This time, the old stereotype of the lone-ranger, gung-ho Marines supposedly doesn’t fit too well with fighting a sophisticated urban counterinsurgency under an integrated, international command.

After all, America is fighting wars in which we rarely hear about the number of enemy dead, but often hear a great deal about the need to rebuild cities and infrastructure. In Afghanistan, there have been rumors about a new medal for “courageous restraint,” which would honor soldiers who hesitated pulling the trigger against the enemy out of concern about harming civilians.

The Marines are now starting to redeploy to Afghanistan from Iraq and are building a huge base in Delaram. They plan to win over southern Afghanistan’s remote, wild Nimruz Province, which heretofore has been mostly a no-go Taliban stronghold. While NATO forces concentrate on Afghanistan’s major cities, the Marines think they can win over local populations their way, take on and defeat the Taliban and bring all of Nimruz back from the brink — with their trademark warning “no better friend, no worse enemy.”

So, once again, the Marines are convinced that their ingenuity and audacity can succeed where others have failed. And, once again, not everyone agrees.

The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, retired three-star Army Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry reportedly made a comment about there being 41 nations serving in Afghanistan — and a 42nd composed of the Marine Corps. One unnamed Obama-administration official was quoted by the Washington Post as saying, “We have better operational coherence with virtually all of our NATO allies than we have with the U.S. Marine Corps.”

Some officials call the new Marine enclave in Nimruz Province “Marinestan” — as if, out of a Kipling or Conrad novel, the Marines have gone rogue to set up their own independent province of operations.
Yet once again, it would be wise not to tamper with the independence of the Marine Corps, given that its methods of training, deployment, fighting, counterinsurgency and conventional warfare usually pay off in the end.

The technological and political face of war is always changing. But its essence — organized violence to achieve political ends — has not changed since antiquity. Conflict will remain the same as long as human nature does.

The Marines have always understood that. And from the Marines’ initial mission against the Barbary pirates to the battles in Fallujah, Americans have wanted a maverick Marine Corps — a sort of insurance policy that will keep them safe, just in case.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of “Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome.”