On August 17, 2009, President Obama addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars:

“But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is a — this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

This is either true or not true. If true, then winning the war in Afghanistan is fundamental to the defense of the homeland, and there can be no sacrifice too great. Because the last thing we want to be engaged in is a half-hearted, one foot in, one foot out, kind of war. If it is a war of necessity, then there is no question about giving the generals all the troops and equipment and support they need for as long as they need. America’s at war, dammit.

But David Brooks in this morning’s Times just blows past the basic question– do we need to win this war or not? Instead he dwells on Obama’s feelings and his level of determination. Brooks doesn’t believe Obama is really telling us the truth about how he feels about the war. He thinks the president needs to spend some quality time looking at himself in the mirror. “If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now.”

Actually, no. I don’t really care about President Obama’s feelings about the war. I care about his judgment. And if he says we must win this war, then we must win this war. If he’s changed his mind, then we need to have new goals articulated, and we need to achieve them. We can’t just increase or decrease troop levels depending on the president’s serotonin levels.

I do want to know more about what the President means when he says “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” I thought most of those plotters died in the attack, or have been caught or killed since, with the significant exception of Osama bin Laden himself. (How is it that this lunatic, flitting from cave to cave, supposedly on and off dialysis, under constant surveillance from our hundreds of millions of dollars of drones that cruise the area, is able to survive while the comparable uninsured American, during the same time period, has probably suffered the fatal consequences of our patchwork health-care system? Just asking.)

And I’m troubled about the basis for Tom Friedman’s judgment that we really don’t need to win the Afghan war. In the first place, Friedman was such a great champion for the Iraq pre-emptive war and then for repeatedly calling for staying the course “just another six months” that in many circles, six months is now simply referred to as a Friedman Unit. (At last count, the Iraq war, from March 19, 2003 to now has required 19 Friedman Units, soon to be a smooth 20 to 1 error in judgment.)

Now we have a new Friedman measure of progress in the world, from a column this week. Progress is now to be measured by “when a key player in the Middle East actually does something that puts a smile on my face.” Oh Oracle of Delphi, how far we’ve fallen! Somehow the idea that I’m going to be spending the rest of my life peering into that Friedman mustache trying to find traces of a smile makes me, how to put this delicately, have flashes of driving the big white bus.

Friedman blows past the basic question of whether or not we must win this war to keep America safe. Friedman gets the big questions completely backward: the real question seems to be not must we win, but how hard will it be to win: “We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.” So under Friedman’s logic we wind down the Afghan war even it means the possible destruction of America. Since it’s too hard to win. Gee, Tom. WWII was hard, too.

And that kind of logic ought to be enough to lower everyone’s serotonin levels.

Delighted as I was to be greeted Friday morning by David Brooks’s book reviewish column headlined Genius: The Modern View, and as much as I admire Mr. Brooks, I was surprised to discover that he wasn’t writing satirically when he described the path to genius. According to the two new books he was discussing, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle and Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, you can develop your children into geniuses. All it takes is 10,000 hours of focused practice at an early age, plus a dash of family tragedy and toss in some neighborhood inspiration. Get the ingredients right and, ta—dah! Instant Mozart.

I must beg to disagree. I was privileged to have grown up alongside thousands of “geniuses” of the 10,000 hour class. I went to the Interlochen summer camp for the arts as a youth (Slogan — Home of the Gifted Youth of America — weren’t we special!) and two of my children went to the year round arts academy there. By now almost a hundred thousand gifted youth from all over the world have gone through Interlochen, and they provide some 10% of the personnel of all the leading American orchestras. Interlochen alumni are prominent in all fields, including Larry Page founder of Google, the composer George Crumb, opera stars Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Jessye Norman. Many of these young people were the bright and often brilliant ones who put in their 10,000 hours. But only a very, very few of them have a certain level of gift that is completely beyond anything 10,000 or even a million hours of focused work can give you. These are the geniuses. And their gift came from inside, not from a parent dying at 12. Not from the good fortune of having a novelist living down the street.

Where did this 10,000 hour belief come from, this notion that a large numbers of hours of focused work will make little Sally over here into a genius? Brooks says Mozart was a good musician at an early age but would not stand out among today’s child performers. I don’t think you could find a serious musician who would agree. Mozart was not only one of the most gifted pianists and violinists of his era, but his compositions by the age of ten were masterful. By the time he wrote his ninth opera, the delightful and still frequently performed Finta Giardiniera, he was just eighteen.

How did this 10,000 hour concept evolve from being a requirement for competence into a false promise for the achievement of genius? You can trace some of this to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, from which too many people take away that Bill Gates became a programming genius because he had the opportunity to get his 10,000 hours on a computer early on in his life. But Gladwell didn’t discover this 10,000 hour rule, he just popularized it, acknowledging the source as Daniel Levitan, who wrote, This is Your Brain on Music. But Levitan didn’t claim that 10,000 of focused work would make anyone a genius either. All he says is that it will make you a virtuoso. Are virtuosos the same as genius? I gotta tell you, after having spent my own 10,000 hours and more at Interlochen, virtuosos are a dime a dozen.

Where did Levitan get the 10,000 hour genius concept from? That would be K. Anders Ericsson, who did the actual pioneering work. Ericsson is quoted, in an essay about him on his home university website, Florida State, “How, then, does Ericsson account for standouts such as Mozart, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods? Surely their prowess is evidence that they are beneficiaries of random gifts of greatness. Not so, says Ericsson, whose landmark findings attribute the expertise of such phenoms not to their inherent talents but to, in a word, practice.”

There you have it, the all-that-makes-Mozart-special-is-10,000-hours meme started here, with Ericsson answering his own rhetorical question, and sweeping Mozart into the same hopper as two high-performing athletes. I could see how Ericsson might be able to say that his research actually included Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But unless Ericsson is a couple of hundred years older than his bio indicates, he can’t have much of a clue about how Mozart became a genius.

I believe that thinking is all about making distinctions. When we fail to make distinctions, or even worse, sweep ideas that ought to be kept distinct into one larger idea that now automatically loses its validity, then we really aren’t helping move things forward. No Mr. Ericsson, I respect Mr. Woods for his hard work and great achievement. But I know Herr Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart after a fashion, and I can tell you that Tiger Woods, virtuoso that he is, is no Mozart.

So unless little Louie was born a genius, all the work in the world is not going to make him one.