I read for the first time today what Kennan wrote in 1946. I replaced in my mind the words “Soviet Union” with “Al Queida” and “communism” with “terrorism.” From this vantage point, the last paragraph becomes particularly insightful into our current situation.

WORD FOR WORD | COLD WARRIOR
The Man Who Took the Measure of the Communist Threat
By PETER EDIDIN in NY Times:

GEORGE F. KENNAN, who died Thursday at 101, was “the nearest thing to a legend that this country’s diplomatic service has ever produced,” the historian Ronald Steel has said. He was the man who proposed “containment,” the cornerstone of the cold war, as a way to oppose the Soviet Union.

The idea of containment was worked out by Mr. Kennan in 1946, when he was the chief of mission in the United States Embassy in Moscow. The State Department had asked for help in understanding the Soviet state, to which he responded with an 8,000-word cable, known as the “Long Telegram,” which offered a detailed psychological, historical and political interpretation of the Soviet Union.

The telegram is remarkable for Mr. Kennan’s clear-eyed, prophetic view of the Soviet state, and for his confidence in American society and its ability to counter the challenge of Communism. In 1946, when most of the world was bewildered and frightened by the rise of the Soviet Union, he felt certain a dictatorship could be defeated by a free society, so long as it kept faith with its own traditions and institutions.

Excerpts follow from the original telegram sent to the State Department, replete with missing and superfluous words, as well as words added in brackets by a reader at the State Department trying to make better sense of the text.

861.00/2 - 2246: Telegram
The Charg