Andrei,

I do not think your blog post does The Candy Bombers nearly the justice it deserves. I am not aware of a blog posting that has improved the world in any meaningful way--although readers of this site will adduce evidence to the contrary--but your book, which I approached warily and cynically, could do exactly that. Not so much in the way you seem to intend: we cannot have historical writing without analogies, but, honestly, enough is enough. And not so much to judge by your output on this website, as opposed to the sheer loveliness of the volume's prose. For those who prefer blogs to books, consider a typical passage from The Candy Bombers: "One shell hit the riding stables of the Tiergarten, sending a herd of shrieking horses stampeding down the city's streets with their manes and tails on fire...The Siberian [Red Army soldiers] washed their faces in the toilet, believing that this was what they were for. Unaccustomed to electricity, they would marvel at lightbulbs. They demanded the glowing orbs be handed over, held them delicately, packed them away carefully..." Andrei, I thought you were a political operative.

The Candy Bombers counts, first and last, as good history--and, more to the point, one of the finest narrative histories that I have read in years. What makes the book so wonderful is factual significance, not analogical inference (which accounts for my earlier wariness, quickly diminished by the book, but revived by your post). I read the book closely for "lessons" America was meant to apply in this or that precinct, but, other than a few throw-away lines in the introduction, you steer clear from the mischief of obvious analogies. That is why I was depressed by your post, in which you ask if "in this era of Abu Ghraib and a descending situation in Iraq, America is doing the wrong things in the world, when were we most clearly doing the right thing?" Come on.

As Candy Bombers chronicles in gruesome detail, some of the very same pilots who were dropping candy on Berlin in 1948 were dropping bombs and igniting firestorms there a few years earlier. In a similar vein, I can't tell you how many times I've seen soldiers in Iraq throwing candy to kids from their gun trucks--and not a few hundred yards from Abu Ghraib. What does any of this tell us about American foreign policy? Nothing. To paraphrase Robert Kagan, do we honestly think that the candy comes from good America and the bombs from bad America? Or that selflessness and self-interest are inherently incompatible? Of course not.

If good history, as the saying goes, delivers us from plausible historical analogies, Candy Bombers does just that (the questions embedded in Andrei's post notwithstanding). As for these questions and assertions, I do think Andrei exaggerates when he calls the operation "not only the greatest humanitarian effort of all time, but a military operation that changed the flow of history and put America clearly on the side of kindness and decency in the world." As for the greatest humanitarian effort of all time, my vote goes to the allied campaign that culminated in the flattening of Berlin (the airlift, like the bombing campaign, was the product of strategy, not heightened moral awareness; it incorporated various lessons, good and bad, accumulated over the course of nearly a decade and many of those lessons impress me more than the airlift does).

Does the airlift put America "on the side of decency" and thereby disprove the contention that raison d'etat and the demands of humanity cannot overlap? Yes, but this had already been disproved a thousand times over and then a thousand times since. As for what the airlift can teach us regarding a "usable past" for progressives, the direction of U.S. foreign policy, the fate of humanitarian intervention, and all the other questions the post (but not so much the book itself) puts on the table, I'm not sure. But wait. We have also been asked what the airlift can teach us about Iraq. Taken literally--and, trust me, this was how many of us took it and other examples of the genre--it was that American forces would be greeted kindly when they arrived in Baghdad.

Lawrence F Kaplan is editor of World Affairs. He was previously a senior editor at The New Republic, for which he covered the war in Iraq in 2005 and 2006.