Wow. It’s hard to know where to start, particularly as I realize that I should have done a bit more to situate the book before providing an excerpt from the conclusion. Let me do that briefly now, both with a link to the book’s website, and an explanation of at least where the title comes from. Some of you may remember my link to Captain Ian Fishback’s letter to John McCain back in 2005 explaining his vain efforts to try to get his superiors to articulate clear standards of interrogation and describing the abuses he witnessed committed against detainees as the result of the lack of standards. He ended that letter by asking whether we as a people were going to sacrifice our ideals to our security, arguing that our true strength lies in trying to uphold our ideals. For himself, he said that he “would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is America.” I chose that title because it came from a soldier (who has served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan) writing to a former soldier in a way that directly refutes the Administration’s claims, as Sy Hersh quotes in the New Yorker this week, that “Abu Ghraib is just the price of defending democracy.”

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American patriotism is grounded not only in our love for our country itself, but also in our love for the values our country stands for—of the idea that is America, no matter how far short we may fall in practice. It is the idea that knits us together in our vast diversity. It is the idea that our soldiers fight for. It is the idea that all patriotic citizens stand for, even against our own government. It is an idea that ultimately belongs to all the world’s peoples.

Americans are hardly unique in having forged a national identity based on a set of fundamental principles. The French glory in their country’s heritage as the source of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” The English rightly love their tradition of individual rights and restrained rule begun with the Magna Carta. The Chinese venerate many of the principles of Confucianism as part of the bessence of being Chinese. South Africans celebrate ubuntu, the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects humanity. Indeed, a journalist’s story about the near destruction of a fabled Baghdad street of booksellers in the late summer of 2006 closed with a heart-wrenching description of the last bookseller to remain open breaking down in tears. “Iraq,” he said, as he wiped his eyes, “it is the first country. It set the laws of Hammurabi.”

But values play a particularly important role in the American national psyche for a unique reason: Although we inhabit a common land that we love, we do not share a common race, creed, or national origin.

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