Elsewhere in this Blog, I have attempted to help people better appreciate where we are with our foreign policy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by discussing four events from our history. Those events are the Fetterman Massacre, the attempted bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota by the James Gang, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

This very interesting article from the NY Times yesterday makes me think I should add a 5th event to the mix. That event is the raid by abolitionist John Brown on the armory at Harper's Ferry in 1859. Like Osama Bin Ladin, Brown planned and executed an event that set in motion a larger scale event leading to significant loss of life and conflict.

Check out the article at this link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/opinion/02horwitz.html?_r=1&th&emc=th