Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and the End of the Libya Civil War

President Abraham Lincoln is surely the most eloquent president America has ever had. And, if we exclude the almost miraculously heaven-sent Gettysburg Address, his Second Inaugural Address is considered by many to be his finest.

The Second Inaugural Address is a short speech which summarizes the reasons for the American Civil War, the wrongs righted by that war and the marks it left on the nation and its citizens, both black and white.

As we celebrate with Libya its liberation from the tyranny of the Qadhafi reign of terror, I thought about the Second Inaugural Address. What would Mr. Lincoln have said today to Libya and the world?

Certainly, he would have acknowledged that this time justice won, with the help of the Divine, and thus saved an innocent and beaten down people who were long ignored in their suffering.  

Certainly, he would have thanked the Almighty for the deliverance granted to the Libyan people, and especially for those brave freedom fighters who fought their way along the desert roads from Benghazi to Tunisia and back to Tripoli.

Certainly, he would have wished fervently that the war would not forever scar the country, but that its citizens would come together to build the nation they long for and deserve if they are able to secure it.

Mr. Lincoln, being the great orator he was, would have found the proper words to describe the evil visited upon the Libyan people by the Qadhafi cohort, something none of us has yet been able to do, for the thrust and parry of war has occupied our minds and prayers and has made us rush to our maps more often that usual, so that now we know where Benghazi is and how difficult was the six-month journey the freedom fighters made to arrive finally in Tripoli this last weekend.

But, I believe Mr. Lincoln would have ended his speech about the liberation of Libya with the same words he used in his Second Inaugural Address to bring cloture to the America Civil War.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”  ______President Abraham Lincoln, 4 March, 1865.