Liberal Boomers Clinging to a Fantasy of Their Youth

Check out a spectacularly insightful, tightly crafted two-parter, "Preserving a Vision", by Thomas Sowell on why liberal boomers find it next to impossible to change their views in light of reality:

Part I (May 30th)
Part II (today)

Short summary: liberals are faced with the daunting prospect of digging out the very foundations under the story of how they've found meaning in their lives. (Sometimes that's a figurative process. At least once - in our own neighborhood, it became quite literal.) Sowell's pair of columns is (as usual) chock full of facts useful in cocktail-party banter with boomer liberals ignorant (or insistent on a halcyon re-write) of history - especially of the '60s and '70s.

For those liberals who lived through the 1960s, that was often also the springtime of their youth, increasingly treasured as a memory, as the grim realities of old age settle down upon them today. It is expecting an awful lot to expect them to consider any alternative vision of the world, especially one that shatters the beautiful picture of themselves as wise and compassionate saviors of society. But what are the facts?

...Both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans voting for their enactment than the percentage of Congressional Democrats. You can check it out in The Congressional Record. [Rumor has it that Lincoln was a Republican too. - KM]

...For decades, the liberal media and the intelligentsia have had to struggle mightily against good economic news. Their whole vision of the world -- and of themselves -- is at stake...What can the liberal-left do? They can keep pointing out how the bottom 20 percent's share of the national income is declining... Of course people don't live on percentage shares, they live on real income... How do most people get income? They work for it. What happens when pay for work goes up? The gap between those who are working and those who are not widens. Most of the people in the bottom 20 percent are not full-time, year-around workers... Three-quarters of the people in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were also in the top 40 percent at some point over the next two decades... people earning the minimum wage... have declined from 7.8 million to just over 2 million [since 1980], even though the population as a whole has been growing.

Interview or Recruitment Ad? Ahmadinejad's Hidden Agenda

Well, duh... It must be the steady diet of ibuprofen we're on for this wretched thrown back that's dulled our senses to the obvious connection between suicide bomber recruitment and Ahmadinejad's Spiegel "interview". Fortunately Captain Ed picks up the slack:

Apparently Ahmadinejad's attempts to provoke German fringe-dwellers have a ready audience, as Der Spiegel reports that three German women had to be tracked down and arrested after proclaiming their readiness to act as suicide bombers in Iraq...

The interview, in other words, does not exist on a plane of neat intellectual debate without immediate real-world consequences. And SPIEGEL bears responsibility for letting it happen. The more we reflect on it in fact, the more we see it as a case of the media being used like a two-bit hooker. Big personality. Big headlines. Big sales. Next story... just doing our job...

Ahmadinejad meanwhile, is pursuing a strategy of splitting European opinion (assuming he can't co-opt it altogether, which remains a distinct possibility). More importantly, he is influencing European voters in such a way as to put pressure on their leaders to avoid getting too chummy with any emerging U.S.-led coalition of the willing. This is war, folks. SPIEGEL just became an instrument in it.

Lest that thought seem extreme (c'mon KM, nobody is really buying Ahmadinejad's arguments, are they?), try this post from an apparently German blogger.

Rather then [sic] an unintelligent maniac [Ahmadinejad] answers the questions that he is given thoughtful[ly. He] has [a] point in half of them and he defuses lots of his earlier misrepresented statement[s]. His ideas do make sense - I just which [wish?] he would leave the Holocaust out of the game as this just draws the masses against him... [emphasis added]

"[Ahmadinejad's] ideas do make sense"... Ponder that for a moment.

That post didn't take any trouble to find. There are plenty of others just like it. Try this one for example - again, easy to find after a single Technorati search and perusal of half a dozen blogs:

Personally, I think Ahmadinejad highlights the big elephant in the living room, as it were. Right or wrong, that's the issue.

He's referring it seems, to the justification for the existence of Israel. Yes folks, this is 2006. "Right or wrong"... Whatever. It's just the blue team and the red team and there's really no difference between them. No history. No judgment. No question about why Iran has become a fair-weather friend to the Palestinians to the point of steering most of the interview to that topic.

Neither site is on the neo-Nazi fringe. They are both - to all outward appearances anyway - just run-of-the-mill personal blogs out of Europe. The writers fail to comprehend that Holocaust denial and Ahmadinejad's desire to eradicate Israel are of a piece. One does not get Mussolini's trains running on time without Mussolini cracking heads in order to get them that way. Blogger #1 continues, unable to string together two sentences without incorporating Ahmadinejad's talking points almost verbatim:

Yes Iran is cooperating with the IAEA [not true] - they do not seem to have an A-Bomb yet... [are we waiting for the mushroom cloud before we'll believe it?] and yes Palistine [sic for both spelling and fact - Palestine is not a country, but an authority] has a democratic[ally] elected government... But when an Iranian president makes such remarks - especially when he is in the spotlight of American agression he [is] accused of the worst crimes, he is blackmailed and put on mock trial - yet as he states Iran has NEVER attacked a country and probably never will [emphasis added]

"Spotlight of American agression"... always our fault until proven otherwise, and sometimes not even then. Anybody deserves to be listened to if they're against those bad, bad Americans.

This dipstick into European opinion leaves us with the sad realization that many if not most there (and here) believe that the Iran crisis - even perhaps the entire Islamofascist terror nightmare - would all go quietly away if we just toned down the rhetoric and tried to get along better with folks like Ahmadinejad. It's a theme that ShrinkWrapped sounded yesterday in this post ("The War on Terror Paradoxes") in which he notes that the longer we go without an attack, the more people will conclude that the war is a foolish endeavor and we're best going back to business as usual. Kick the can down the road. Hey, it worked in the '90s.

We thought of doing a thorough fisk of the SPIEGEL interview yesterday but stopped short when we realized that virtually everything out of Ahmadinejad's mouth was either an outright lie, a cleverly framed narrowly-true statement that hid a larger falsehood, or grossly misleading in what it left out. In other words: shooting fish in a barrel. Those who like to pin the 'liar' moniker on President Bush would do well to study Ahmadinejad's world-class example.

It's absolutely frightening that many appear to be swallowing this. The statement that Iran has never attacked another country for example, is patently untrue (never mind how blogger #1 can be so sure that it will not do so in the future). OK, it is technically true... if one doesn't count the Iran-Iraq war, or Iran's invasion of U.S. sovereign territory in the form of our embassy in Tehran in 1979, or the many terrorist groups it supports all over the world today, or the aide and comfort it has provided to Al Q'aeda members (documented in the 9-11 Commission report). And never mind the Persian empire, which was a ravenously aggressive opponent of democratic Greece (among others) for centuries. Never mind all that. We assert that we are as peaceful as Switzerland and laugh at your attempts to correct us.

With a ratio of three questions by Ahmadinejad for every two that Spiegel posed - it could be deemed an interview, just not the one that was advertised. Who wants to hear three obscure reporters meekly attempting to defend the principles of Western Civilization with ignorant crowd-pleasing quips such as, "The United States has suffered a de facto defeat in Iraq."?

And what defeat would that be? Perhaps it was the celebration party given by Saddam and his Ba'athists when American deaths exceeded those in Vietnam after harsh chemical attacks? Or maybe it was the purple thumbs and free elections that never happened? Or the WMD that didn't turn up... oh, except after being moved to Iranian client state Syria with Russia's help. Or the continued torture of tens of thousands of women, children and political dissidents in Iraq? Or maybe he's refering to the unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops under president Kerry? Those "defeats"?

Maybe it's a translation 'thing' but we don't think so. The fact that a wild, deeply anti-Semitic liar who will soon have nuclear weapons at his disposal can so easily win over European opinion makes our head hurt as much as our back.

UPDATE: The U.S. is calling Iran's bluff, or rather its insistence that the country is IAEA compliant. Looks like it's time for the old Reagan adage, cleverly borrowed from a Russian proverb: "Доверя́й, но проверя́й", aka "Doveryay, no proveryay", aka "Trust, but verify."

Pouring Money Down the Drain

Op-Ed columnist Eugene Robinson writes in yesterday's Washington Post on the recently issued report by the "Independent Levee Investigation Team, a blue-ribbon panel led by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and funded by the National Science Foundation". They were tasked with finding the root causes of the New Orleans flooding disaster.

We do not call it the Katrina disaster. That storm (a mere category three when it hit the Louisiana coast, lest we forget) was merely the proverbial straw on the camel, as the report amply notes.

Some of the flood barriers were built using inadequate materials, the report says. Others were designed so poorly that they provided weak spots for the waters to exploit. Still others were left unfinished for lack of funds. The Army Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for building the levees that failed, has not yet issued its own final report on the flood and likely will dispute some of the independent team's conclusions. But Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff remarked last week that "had it not been for what appear to be structural problems in the building of the levees, Katrina would have been a bad hurricane" but not an unparalleled catastrophe.

Earthen levees stretching east from the city were built with "highly erodible sand" and other "lightweight" materials, the reports says. "When the storm surge arrived, massive portions of these levees eroded catastrophically." Floodwalls lining the east side of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal were not engineered to keep water from seeping beneath and undermining them. "The result was two massive breaches that devastated the adjacent Ninth Ward neighborhood, and then pushed east to meet with the floodwaters already rapidly approaching from the east from St. Bernard Parish."

Surging water pushed by the hurricane's winds from Lake Pontchartrain into the 17th Street and London Avenue drainage canals remained "well below the design levels, and well below the tops of the floodwalls." Nonetheless, the floodwalls suffered "catastrophic" failures. So even though little if any lapped over the walls, sudden breaches inundated central New Orleans...

And not to make this even more political, but the NSF and UC Berkeley are, in our professional experience, at best centrist and more often deeply left-leaning institutions. (Yes, science is often political.) If there had been a Republican to skewer or a bone to throw to Al Gore, they surely would have done so.

Despite what Al Gore and Ray Nagin would like us to believe, global warming and cold-blooded Republicans are not to blame - at least no more than (and probably a good deal less than) anyone else. Bottom line: New Orleans needn't have flooded. The disaster that unfolded did so - quietly and invisibly - over decades... decades of Democratic government at the local and state levels and (if it's possible to remember back that far) in Congress and the White House as well. Yes, the Army Corps of Engineers is a federal institution, but it hardly exists in a vacuum. Local politics always has an impact, or at least the opportunity to have one. Close observation and protest are always options if things are not going as they should. Remote management from Washington can never do that no matter who's in charge.

No, Democrats don't have a monopoly on corruption but uncontested one-party rule is certainly a breeding ground for it - the primary reason we wish that the Democratic party would return to its Truman/Kennedy roots and provide a realistic alternative that doesn't require dancing with Lenin, Mao and Michael Moore.

Sitting here in Massachusetts we can offer this additional perspective: $15B of your tax dollars has gone to one of the most spectacular boondoggles in highway engineering history - the Big Dig. It's a project that only came about because Teddy Kennedy, John Kerry and former House Speaker Tip O'Neill were once able to bring home pork by the truckload.

We're not holding that project up as an example of how things should be done. It has been plagued by it's own issues of incompetence, overspending, corruption and mismanagement. What is clear from holding the two projects up next to one another however, is that nothing catastrophic was going to happen to Boston if the Big Dig had not been embarked upon. Now that it's nearing completion, we can attest that nothing spectacularly beneficial has happened either. Oh sure, our trek to the airport has been cut from 20 minutes to less than 15, but was that worth fifteen billion dollars of other peoples' money? Money that taxpayers could have spent as they saw fit (now there's a concept for both parties to ponder), or at least used for something more urgent on the national stage? And no, we don't mean the NEA...

The report boils down to this: more often than not, unaccountable people in unaccountable institutions don't do what they say they're going to do, and/or don't do it in the way they are supposed to do it it. The levees were designed poorly and - even when designed responsibly - were often built shoddily. In a highly interdependent system, even one flaw is enough (weakest link theory). The WSJ runs the Robinson piece in its Europe and Asia editions under the headline "Drowned by Human Incompetence". We couldn't agree more. Free markets, rule of law and a robust two-party system with free elections won't cure human nature, but they've proven better at reining it in than any of the alternatives.

What's hilariously ironic is the ad next to the Robinson piece: an ad for Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth", featuring a satellite image of a hurricane swirl emerging from a (big, bad, corporate) smokestack. That's rich. Unfortunately the independent report is unlikely to change the causality shorthand that many have already adopted for what transpired last August:

Corporate greed leads to CO2 leads to global warming leads to hurricanes leads to poor (black) people being displaced from their homes.

We're not making this up. We heard it regularly around here last fall. Alas, reality is a little more complicated. As we (and other notables) have said before, the only thing we have to truly fear is fear itself. And, we should add, incompetence and lack of accountability.

UPDATE: Weren't we just saying that science has become political?

Hundreds of concerned citizens and leaders from across the nation will join Hurricane Katrina survivors Wednesday to call for the resignation of the heads of the National Hurricane Center (NHC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the NOAA Headquarters... advocates will demand that NOAA stop covering up the growing scientific link between severe hurricanes and global warming while insisting on real solutions to the problem of global warming.

Come up with the right answer now! Yeah, that's how Galileo, Newton and Einstein worked...

More Crafty Than the Secular West

We were hoping not to blog further on Iran today. Besides taking on new business obligations that will impinge on recreational blogging much of the summer, we're nursing the mother of all stiff backs, acquired this weekend doing yard work, putting us in a generally foul and distracted mood. Besides, readers should have plenty to chew on with this interview with Ryan Mauro and a comparison of the audition processes for American Idol and the Islamic Martyrs Brigade.

So on a fine spring day when the air is sweet and the flowers fragrant, we'd like nothing more than to sip a second cup of coffee on the porch, take the dog for a slow walk and forget about the troubles of the world. Instead, one of Satan's chief minions has to go and give an interview with Der Spiegel that has (appropriately) drawn splash headlines already on Drudge.

What's immediately clear is that Ahmadinejad did this particular interview with this particular news outlet at this particular time for specific and highly strategic reasons. Regardless of Iran's current credibility in the West, Ahmadinejad at least has far more PR savvy than we do. That's a problem. A big problem. The trajectory of public opinion is what can win wars... or lose them. And when half the population doesn't like to even think that we're in a war, the game is already slanted in the enemy's favor. However horrific and specious Ahmadinejad's arguments may seem to most (and they certainly do to us!), they will probably win him some silent converts at the margins.

Here's why.

The three Spiegel interviewers - because of the eroded, morally relativistic, PC-secular cultural context in which they swim - are ill-equipped to parry Satan's (err, Ahmadinejad's) pointed agenda. Only five questions into it (most of those related to soccer), the tables are turned. Ahmadinejad asks a question he knows will dredge up latent feelings of guilt in the German interviewers and their audience and draw out a careful, defensive, indirect answer:

SPIEGEL: Denying the Holocaust is punishable in Germany. Are you indifferent when confronted with so much outrage?

Ahmadinejad: I know that DER SPIEGEL is a respected magazine. But I don't know whether it is possible for you to publish the truth about the Holocaust. Are you permitted to write everything about it [the Holocaust]?

SPIEGEL: Of course we are entitled to write about the findings of the past 60 years' historical research. In our view there is no doubt that the Germans -- unfortunately -- bear the guilt for the murder of 6 million Jews.

In all, Ahmadinejad asks thirty-two questions in the course of the interview. The SPIEGEL initerviewers ask only twenty! (Five others might generously be classified as follow-ups.) And frankly, most of Ahmadinejad's are better in the sense of being the rhetorical kind that go bouncing around in peoples' minds long after the interview is over. Abhorrent, but better. He is on offense; the interviewers on defense. One does not score points on defense.

Ahmadinejad's is a time-worn tactic - very time-worn: accuse in the course of asking a niggling question that can't be answered cleanly. In Genesis 3:1, we find the serpent asking Eve: "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" Really? Ah, c'mon. Did he really say you'd die? (Implying physical death on the spot.) Really? Gimme a break. You're being deceived. Give me a hearing. After all, you wouldn't want to be unfair or unbalanced or intolerant... would you?

Satan (aka, 'the accuser') uses the fundamental inadequacy of human words in conveying the deep truth of The Word (wordless and eternal) to pull up the edge of the Scotch tape on our feeble faith and understanding of right and wrong. Hmm... come to think of it, Mr. Ahmadinejad, sir, you may have a point... we Germans are guilty... I guess... which makes you... maybe worth listening to after all, even if we remain a little wary.

OK, that doesn't give the interviewers quite enough credit. They tried. It's just that this was not a fair exchange from the beginning. Ahmadinejad is quick to leap on the inevitable small slips in the way the questions are framed:

SPIEGEL: Even though no Western scholars harbor any doubt about the Holocaust?

Ahmadinejad: But there are two opinions on this in Europe. One group of scholars or persons, most of them politically motivated, say the Holocaust occurred. Then there is the group of scholars who represent the opposite position and have therefore been imprisoned for the most part. Hence, an impartial group has to come together to investigate and to render an opinion on this very important subject, because the clarification of this issue will contribute to the solution of global problems. Under the pretext of the Holocaust, a very strong polarization has taken place in the world and fronts have been formed. It would therefore be very good if an international and impartial group looked into the matter in order to clarify it once and for all. Normally, governments promote and support the work of researchers on historical events and do not put them in prison.

The Spiegel interviewers are of course correct that no Western scholars deny the Holocaust. Yet Ahmadinejad knows - far better than they do - that the core of the modern secular, left-wing European belief system has grown too weak to form a compelling counter-argument to his idea that maybe it wasn't so bad. There are limits on absolutely free speech. The nations of the West have done wrong at various points in our histories. Israel does use violence to defend itself. There have been other holocausts (Cambodia, China, Stalinist Russia, Bosnia, Rwanda, etc.) that warrant comparison in sheer numbers if nothing else.

Yet pointing out those sins - some comparable and others laughably off-base - does not give the individual pointing them out a free pass. It does not exclude Iran and Ahmadinejad from scrutiny and comparison to Nazi Germany. Only we can do that to ourselves. Paralysis by guilt is the unique plight of the self-flagellating liberal elite who can never see wrong except in the West... and Ahmadinejad knows it!

A deconstructionism that worships tolerance over judgment, peace over justice and pleasant illusion over truth is ill-equipped to say: "No. You are wrong. In fact, you're absolutely f$%^&g crazy-wrong - dangerous and evil. There is overwhelming fact and then there are a few cranks, whack-jobs and jihadi warriors living on the dole plotting to blow things up. The two do not compare. The two do not deserve equal 'respect'. Averaging out their opinions in the interest of 'fairness' is ignorant and foolish."

We in the West don't like to hear ourselves talk like that anymore. Now that history has ended (so we were told), we think we shouldn't have to speak so harshly and judge so absolutely. It's so... stress-inducing. Get me my yoga. Get me my Evian. I want my MTV!

Ahmadinejad of course, uses all this to his advantage. Scholars? Well who's to say who's a scholar and who's not? Why not make half of them radical Islamic 'scholars' and see what the answer turns out to be? That would be fair, no?

This is not a new tactic on Iran's part. They have been using the same approach in obscure procedural maneuverings in subsidiary UN bodies for years in an effort to supplant the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and erode free, unfettered debate, replacing them with censorship of 'blasphemy' (against Islam) and the recognition of Sharia law as separate but equal to the UDHR. Detailed official UN accounts of these moves can be found in Robert Spencer's excellent compilation, "The Myth of Islamic Tolerance" which we're still making our way through.

The frightening part is that Europe may be closer than it imagines to the day when its institutions of scholarship have exchanged their plentiful secular Marxists for Islamists and the popularly accepted judgment on the Holocaust mysteriously changes. Given the far-left slant of U.S. colleges and universities, we're close to that day here as well, as Bernard Lewis has opined.

Read the Spiegel piece. Read it carefully. Read it critically. This is what we're up against. It is the sickly-sweet smell of a world view that seems almost reasonable on its surface - words like fairness, tolerance and respect and concepts like scholarly inquiry and freedom of speech used to induce guilt in the listener over minor sins while distracting attention from the wholesale abrogation of those principles in places like Iran.

Ahmadinejad's is a voice that has learned from history. It is a belief system that never really went away - just retreated to polish its game. We will lose only by allowing our own secular worship of victimhood - our perverted sense of guilt and fairness to give it room to grow. Judgment. It's muscle we've grown reluctant to exercise. We need to get back to the gym.

UPDATE: Welcome Zenpundit readers! We're blogging further Wednesday on the interview and Europe's frighteningly uncritical reaction to it.

Interview: Ryan Mauro on Iran

Last February we had the privilege of sharing the speakers' roster at the International Intelligence Summit with wunderkind geopolitical analyst and author Ryan Mauro. (For background, see our IIS posts: I - The Saddam Tapes, II - Notes and Impressions, III - Generals and Fathers Never Die, and IV - WMD to Syria With Russia's Help - in which we linked to a must-read interview Mauro did with FrontPage magazine).

Mauro is the 19-year old author of Death to America: The Unreported Battle of Iraq and founder of WorldThreats.com. He was originally hired at age 16 as a geopolitical analyst for Tactical Defense Concepts. A volunteer analyst and researcher for the Northeast Intelligence Network and the Reform Party of Syria, he is said to be the youngest hired geopolitical analyst in the country. Some kids hang out at the mall and play videogames; others find their niche in the reality-based community and take a running start at life.

We were delighted when Mauro agreed to a ten-question interview with KMaru earlier this week on the topic of Iran. We hope you'll find it as enlightening as we did.

KMaru: There's been a lot of discussion the last six months or so about whether [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad is 'crazy' or 'insane' that seems to want to impose a Western template on a guy who may not be 'Western' at all. Others see him as incredibly rational but with very different priorities in mind (e.g., realization of the prophecy of the 12th Imam). Still others see him as thoroughly versed in Western thinking but utterly sociopathic. None of these seem to do him justice. How would you characterize Ahmadinejad's strategic thinking process? His world view? What are his key assumptions? What are his key blind spots?

Mauro: Ahmadinejad, in my opinion, isn't necessarily crazy, but is part of a crazy ideology that would be viewed as crazy by most Iranians. It is understood by most experts that he does seek to spark a confrontation to hasten the return of the 12th Imam, but he needs to be seen as the victim, not the aggressor, that sparks this confrontation. Any idea that he could lose a war with the so-called "infidels" is thrown out of his decision-making process, because such a war is to be interrupted by the re-emergence of the 12th Imam whose power could easily outmatch the infidels.

This is why, in my opinion, you see him increasing the support to insurgents in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole, besides the obvious fact that pro-democratic developments in the region threaten his regime. Either the US will have to withdraw or confront Iran, making Ahmadinejad look like the victim. His favored scenario, I believe based on my analysis (rather than top-secret memos), would be a limited Israeli strike that fails to decapitate the regime or destroy his WMD programs. That would justify the use by Iran of all the tools at their disposal, and possibly undermine the popular resistance to the mullahs inside of Iran.

However, it is important to note that while there are power struggles and policy debates among evil men who run Iran, that doesn't mean some are "less evil" and can be trusted to divide the regime. Even the so-called reformers or moderates, like Khatami and Rafsanjani, are radically anti-American with the same objectives. And no amount of moderates in the government take away from the fact that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and his Council of Guardians, ultimately makes the calls.

KMaru: One school of thought seems to see current Iranian politics as the consistent and logical flowering of what was seeded with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Another sees Iran as an essentially modern nation with strong secular-liberal tendencies that's been 'hijacked' only very recently by a few 'mad mullahs' that the vast majority of the population absolutely despises. I.e., there's a huge potential for a moderate middle to seize an opportunity to overthrow the regime. What do you see as true about each of these viewpoints? Where does each one depart most from the reality you observe? How do you assess the potential for regime change before the nukes are completed?

Mauro: I believe that if, immediately after 9/11, we had aggressively supported democratic Iranian institutions with hundreds of millions of dollars just like Reagan did with Solidarity in Poland, there is a very strong possibility this regime would have fallen.

I don't believe Iran will use nuclear weapons until an arsenal is established. According to Western intelligence estimates that I trust, we have a 1-3 year gap before Iran actually puts together nuclear weapons, although being able to make a warhead to fit on a ballistic missile is another story. However, if Iran has a sophisticated and large enough parallel uranium enrichment program, allowing them to utilize thousands of centrifuges, it is theoretically possible they the materials for nukes already. However, regime change can happen very quickly, so we do have time to stop this if we move quickly.

KMaru: What could we be doing to drive regime change in Iran that we aren't doing (or at least aren't saying we're doing) today? Which individuals or groups we should be looking to as the best 'levers' for such regime change? What do you see as the best and most-likely outcomes of a change in regime? (given that those are probably different!) What are the key risks we should watch out for? (E.g., a PR-driven 'regime change' that leaves most of the bad actors in place, one that gives bad actors the validation of a supposedly free popular election, or change to a regime that does less international boasting but that nonetheless continues pursuing its nuclear weapons program).

Mauro: There are lots of Iranian organizations we can support. We can support moderate Shiites in Iraq who have a following in Iran, use the Kurds in northern Iraq to reach out the Kurdish minority there, and we can support the trade and labor unions, student and womens' rights organizations. The State Department can name dissidents being held in Iranian prisons and the President can tell their stories during his speeches, giving hope to the Iranians and bringing international attention to the human rights issues. The number of people and organizations we can support is enormous.

At this time, I do not support backing the Mujahideen-e-Khalq resistance group, currently listed as a terrorist organization. I know there are good people in the organization, and understand they don't want to leave the MEK to join an umbrella alliance to topple the regime. However, from my research, I am convinced that the MEK is widely hated in Iran for a variety of reasons. Yes, they represent an "easy" way out as they have the means to militarily fight the regime if we give them weapons, and they have good intelligence sources. But supporting them will betray the trust of the Iranian people.

Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah, is working to form an organization to bring together anti-mullah groups and topple them. He opposes military force against the mullahs and has called for targeted sanctions. Sanctions on military items and against specific companies helping the Iranian government and military, and specific individuals in the regime are the way to go. Sanctions that target the country as a whole, like we did to Iraq in the 1990s, are immoral and will work against us.

KMaru: If you could emphasize just three facts about Iran's preparations so far (e.g., military, social, etc.) for confrontation with the West that would galvanize U.S. public opinion if they were featured on the front page of the New York Times, what would they be?

Mauro: I would emphasize all of Ahmadinejad's statements about the United States as being evil, predicting the destruction of the U.S. and Israel, and denying the Holocaust. Second, I'd give proof that Iran is harboring Al-Qaeda members and emphasize Iran's role in killing our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Third, I'd have an article about the dispersal of the nuclear sites and the creation of command and control sites to make a Western aerial campaign a failure.

KMaru: How do you respond to the view that says Iran's angry, despotic nuclear bluster is no different from that of another regime we've somehow managed to contain over many years: North Korea? What is it that Iran wishes to gain from this confrontation? How do they think about the potential for downside risk?

Mauro: Here's the difference. Most dictators crave power above anything else, and as we saw in Libya, can be forced to choose between certain actions and holding onto their current level of power. However, the mullahs of Iran love power, but follow an ideology that cannot be bargained with. Ahmadinejad simply does not believe Iran will lose such a confrontation. The only way to change his view would be to somehow convince him that his beliefs about the hidden 12th Imam and the end times are false, which will never happen because opponents of his beliefs are labeled as evil infidels. That's the big difference. Other differences involve Iran's active support for radical Islamic terrorists and how the decision-making of the mullahs can't be rationalized without taking into context the extremist religious beliefs.

Here in the West, many can't fathom a leader who would want to provoke a great war resulting in possibly millions dying, including the leader himself. We can't fathom a leader being serious in his predictions about the destruction of Israel. Some observers try to rationalize it by theorizing it's all part of a diplomatic game, with a diplomatic solution.

KMaru: Another comparison: Hitler. Many [including us] have sought to draw parallels between Iran and late 1930's Nazi Germany. What do you see as the places where those analogies stand up best? Where are they less useful in helping us to understand the current situation?

Mauro: The ideology of the mullahs of Iran is very similar to the Nazis. From aspirations of world conquest, to putting the political focus on foreign and domestic enemies to build support, to sheer anti-Semitism, it's virtually the same. Even the American political situation is the same. Americans are growing more isolationist due to the Iraq War, and would rather appease than confront.

The difference is that Iran has nukes, and that the West has the historical experience to know when and how to defeat future Hitlers. We know from the Cold War era how to help people overthrow tyrants. The consequences of inaction are much higher than during Hitler's reign, due to WMD, but the tools at our disposal are also much greater.

KMaru: Some would characterize Russia and China as our last best hopes for dealing peacefully with Iran. Others see them as unlikely to ever be broadly helpful but characterize them as parties we can use to pursue narrow political objectives (even if we have to hold our noses and make unpleasant compromises in order to do so). Still others wouldn't trust them as far as they can spit - especially after Russia's back-door financial interests in preserving Saddam's regime came to light. That school of thought might even characterize Russia and China as sharing Iran's interest in seeing us taken down a peg if not destroyed. How do you see Russia's and China's interests vis a vis Iran? How/where can they be useful in de-escalating or containing Iran's nuclear and expansionist ambitions (if at all)? Where should we steer clear of them altogether? How do you assess the potential for a U.S. strike on Iran escalating into a broader war with Russia or China?

Mauro: Russia and China are not our allies. They have too much at stake in Iran. People often characterize it down to money. Sure, Russia and China are worried about their investments in Iran. However, there's also a geopolitical game going on. Russia and China are seeing their rogue state allies become isolated, or even removed (like Saddam). The main pillars of their power outside of their countries are under attack. I do not see Russia and China ever backing action against Iran. It'd be similar to America backing action against Saudi Arabia, for example, who, while the nation does terrible things, is an important partner for our geopolitical strategy. However, the difference is that the US will hopefully do as much as we can to limit the evils of the Saudis, without threatening our own national security.

The collapse of the mullahs doesn't threaten China or Russia, except in the minds of the many figures in their governments who are paranoid about the growth of democracy and American power. Their assistance to rogue states is based sheerly on power and ambition, not national security.

If the US goes to war with Iran, I don't expect an overt war with Russia or China. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see "corrupt individuals" from either nation help Iran buy advanced weapons, shred documents that incriminate Russia and China, and perhaps even the presence of "former communist" military and intelligence advisors in Iran. In my book and in other interviews I've done, it is clear Russia was helping Saddam covertly, even as Operation Iraqi Freedom progressed. I see no reason not to expect them to try this in Iran.

KMaru: A lot of attention has been paid to Iran's mixed success in developing long-range ballistic missiles, yet very little has been paid to highly successful efforts, sponsored by an Iranian government ministry to recruit suicide bombers (e.g., 55,000 just this spring in the wake of the Danish cartoon flap) or to the threat of container ships, 'fake' commercial airliners, speedboats and the like. If we assume that at some point Iran will have operational nuclear weapons, how do you think they will deliver them? What do you see as some of the targeting scenarios they might pursue? (E.g. Israel first, then several U.S. cities over many months; one massive, global, multi-point strike; a few big public venues; European capitals because they're easier to get to, a 'warning shot' test by Iran in the Iranian desert, etc.)

Mauro: Iran's training in terms of nuclear weapons is currently focused on EMP detonation. A missile is shot into the air with a nuke and creates an electromagnetic pulse which, if done correctly, can knock out all the electricity over most of the North American continent. Power grids and computers knocked down. Economy destroyed. Command and control with military assets overseas end. Most of our technological advantages become obsolete. It's really a nightmare scenario and is much more effective than detonating a single nuclear weapon inside a city.

[This has been a hotly debated topic on various blogs and at the IIS. For one thing, it's more difficult to achieve the desired effect than some might imagine. A 1.4 megaton test blast 400 kilometers up over the South Pacific in July, 1962 impacted a wide area, but turned off only some of the lights in Hawaii, 1,300 kilometers away. It seems unlikely that the Iranians would achieve that much blast yield or altitude on their first go. The fact that it can be launched from a ship offshore however makes it a very serious threat. Whether it is stylistically consistent with Islamofascist terror patterns to date is another open question - a point that may be moot as the conflict escalates. More on EMP here; much more here. -KMaru]

KMaru: As you know, the range of 'intelligence' estimates on Iran's nuclear weapons production capability ranges from "they have several operational warheads already" to "they won't have anything useful for 5-10 years at least". There does not seem to be even a plurality of opinion around any particular timeframe. What do we really know about Iran's state of nuclear warhead production capability? When might they have one ready?

Mauro: US intelligence on Iran is extremely poor. Some experts feel they have the bomb-grade material already. Most feel that all the necessary materials and components for a nuke should be assembled within 1-3 years. However, keep in mind that in recent history, the CIA has only overestimated an adversary's WMD, specifically nuclear, capabilities once--in Iraq (and the case is still open on that given the evidence that WMD went to Syria with Russian assistance).

Estimates saying up to a decade or more are based on Iran's overt declarations, but mostly everyone knows there are hidden sites and there is hidden enrichment going on. I think the intelligence community is also being overly careful due to the intelligence failures in Iraq. Now, instead of looking at things with the worst possible outcome and preparing for it, the enemy's activities are being given the benefit of the doubt. Things are more likely to be overlooked, and warnings about an enemy's advancement will require an even greater standard of proof--which is impossible to do when your intelligence operations are not being effective.

KMaru: Other than late-night orders for Dominoes Pizza from outlets near the Pentagon, what early warning signs would you look for in advance of a U.S. and/or Israeli strike on Iran? What form should such a strike take? What would be its objectives? Timeframe? Follow-through actions?

Mauro: There are so many variables involved in predicting such a strike, I prefer not to guess. Some sources are saying late 2006/early 2007 is the "deadline" the US is pushing. Some say the Israelis are only willing to wait less than a year, perhaps even less than six months. Others say that the U.S. feels we have a 3-year time period to work with before using military force. I believe there's a big debate going on and there's no firm answer.

I do not believe Israel should participate in an air strike. The first step to prepare for a war is to isolate Iran via diplomacy and sanctions, and to support the democratic revolution. Revolution may be the quickest and safest way to topple the regime. However, we should never rule out force. If force is used, we need to topple the regime as quickly as possible because they will be expecting us, and will be prepared to use the first explosion as a trigger to unleash every weapon they've bought, and every terrorist at their disposal. It will be the confrontation with the infidels that Ahmadinejad has prepared for, and eagerly waited for. Regarding the specifics of a war, General Tom McInerney [USAF retired, 1994] has written on this and is an expert. I suggest looking to his writings for a very respected opinion on how a war would be carried out.

[E.g., see this article by McInerney in the Weekly Standard last month. We attended and reported on McInerney's talk at the IIS. While he is most definitely an expert on how to conduct an air campaign, he seemed woefully underprepared - at the time anyway - to address serious "what next" questions, contingencies or interdependencies with other branches of the military or political groups on the ground. As the saying goes: the military is great for breaking things and killing people (something that may be required in this case). They are not as good at "everything else".]

UPDATE: On a related note, the NYT reported yesterday that the U.S. is considering opening direct talks with Iran - all except for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, that is - raising the question of what the NYT means when it says "administration". European "allies" (oxymoron, much?) and murky, unnamed State Department sources (even further left than the CIA) are once again using the Fourth Estate to signal to the Iranians exactly what they've suspected all along: that over the last 40 years or so, we've grown far too eager to roll over and have our collective belly scratched rather than face harsh reality and follow through on what we've said all along - no nukes in the hands of the mullahs.

American Idol vs. Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement

Yesterday's long piece ("Watering Down Ahmadinejad...") pulled together several threads on Iranian preparations for war. In doing so, we may have given insufficient emphasis to one of them. This post seeks to correct that. Our focus today is the so-called "Headquarters to Commemorate the Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement" which, if Monty Python were running it might be called "The Ministry of Blowing Yourself to Smithereens and Taking as Many People With You as Possible". And it might as well be that fantastical for all the general public is likely to know about it.

A search of the NY Times since 1981 for any mention of the group turns up... zilch (including alternate phrasings). Same with the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. The Times of London does a little better but chooses to feature sources dismissing the agency and its function as "symbolic". Tell that to the victims of suicide attacks in Israel and elsewhere. While you're at it, click on the Religion of Peace ticker at left (or here). It's showing that the number of Islamic terror attacks (not dead bodies, but attacks - i.e., a lower number) have passed the 5,000 threshold as of this week.

By all accounts, the group was set up by the Iranian government in 2004. An English translation and image of the original application in Farsi are here. It's not terribly complicated: name, birth date, contact information (no e-mail; only phone and street address), preferred target, statement of intent and signature.

No need to know where you went to school. No essay questions about why you want to 'work' for jihad. No criminal background checks. No drug testing. No long legal waiver or privacy disclosure. As of this March, one can even apply on-line. The actual website gives a '403 Forbidden' error. Have we gotten smart and shut off access from U.S. web servers? We sure hope so. Where's the ACLU on this brazen repression of free speech when you need 'em!?)

Some perspective on the numbers: As of this week, a spokesman for the agency, one Mohammad-Ali Samadi reports that 55,000 "volunteers for martyrdom-seeking operations" have signed up. As of late March, Jihad Watch links to an article reporting 53,900. For comparison, it's been reported that 7,000 people auditioned for American Idol this year in San Francisco alone. Until recently, auditions used to be held in only 6 or 7 cities.

Do the math. It's pretty close. Fifty thousand people, plus or minus.

Imagine all of the first-round American Idol wannabes standing in line for a thirty-second shot at fame. Then imagine the same number standing in line in Iran for an entirely different "shot" at fame that will last as long as the blast impulse of whatever explosives the Iranian ministry happens to be featuring this month.

As with American Idol, 90% of the Iranian applicants for 'martyrdom operations' can be unsuitable crazies and losers and the system will still yield a few hundred truly determined, truly 'talented' finalists. (Cue tape of Iranian version of Simon Cowell berating the suicide contestants in Farsi or Arabic...)

We'll leave you with that thought.

Have a good Memorial Day Weekend, everyone. Remember to take a few minutes some time before Tuesday to silently thank those brave Americans who really didn't want to die or take anyone with them while defending the freedom of millions of Europeans, Bosnians, Haitians, Somalis, Vietnamese, Koreans, Iraqis, and other peoples regardless of religion or skin color.

We've said it before but we'll say it again: the U.S. remains the only nation on earth that has consistently sought to liberate rather than dominate. Remember the gift that those veterans gave to the world. Millions in other countries do. It is a gift freely given in love - not in some sad, sick effort to kill as many 'infidels' as possible while committing the ultimate nihilism.

UPDATE: Fortunately there are others in Iran who think this is simply nuts. Keep them in your prayers that they can turn a few skirmishes into regime change before the stakes get much much higher.

Watering Down Ahmadinejad: Historic "Slap"... or "Zap"?

Yesterday Iranian President Ahmadinejad was widely reported as having said that the West would "receive an historic slap" if we so much as waved an unloaded BB gun in the direction of Iran. (In the American media it was "a historic slap". We prefer the British: "an historic".)

According to Google News, 56 stories contained that phrase, while a total of 1074 were 'related' to it. By contrast, the rest of Ahmadinejad's remarks - and, we would argue, the most relevant part that sets "historic slap" in its proper context - appeared in only seven, with a total of 619 'related' to it. What is the context of those remarks?

"Today, Iran has mastered the entire nuclear fuel cycle, from start to finish, thanks to young Iranian scientists. The enemies are looking to plot and want to create differences among Iranians to stop us getting our rights. But if they do the slightest damage to the Iranian people, if they commit the slightest aggression, they will receive an historic slap." [emphasis added]

A little different, no? Mastery of "the entire nuclear fuel cycle" and "historic slap" are clearly linked ideas... the fuel cycle that's going to be used entirely for generating electricity...

But let's not be too quick to judge. With Ahmadinejad's straight-faced assurance that Iran's nuclear capability is only for peaceful purposes, we can all relax. (Never mind that Iran could have done the nuclear-generated electricity thing sans all the sturm and drang had it simply abided by the obligations it signed onto under the NPT and remained open to IAEA inspections. Never mind that an investment in petroleum refining capacity could have generated far more energy at far less cost than a nuclear program.)

Never mind all that. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt - again.

Perhaps "slap" is really a typo. What Ahmadinejad probably really meant to say was "zap". Of course. That's it. How could we have been so bellicose and arrogant in our interpretation of the nuance of their unique language, culture and customs? When the nuclear power grid goes on-line and Tehran's Sharia-compatible toasters and state-censored televisions get all the domestically generated, CO2-free, Kyoto-compliant juice they need, it will be a metaphorical 'zap' to the ego of insensitive, planet-stomping, war-mongering theocrats like Bush.

Back to reality for a second. Let's go deeper. Another version of the remarks, over at Iran Focus raises even more pointed questions that most of the MSM have chosen to ignore:

"Today we can proudly announce that Iran has at its disposal the nuclear cycle from zero to 100... Any thought of aggression against the rights of the Iranian nation will be met with a lasting and historic slap from the people of Iran. The enemies of Iran know that they are not capable of harming the Iranian nation in the slightest bit from the outside. The enemies failed to prevent the Iranian nation from obtaining [nuclear capabilities] through political pressure, plots, and use of international organisations and today are plotting and trying to create [ethnic] divisions and despair to prevent the realisation of all of the Iranian nation’s rights." [emphasis added]

What's interesting about this longer excerpt is the introduction of a third concept: the West (aka, 'the enemies') have failed - past tense. This is important in that it implies either facts on the ground (nukes already built and maybe already loaded onto missiles on container ships en route to Western capitals) or perceived empowerment - we'd guess both. Unfortunately we can't find a transcript of the full remarks. It would appear however, that the sequencing of the key sound bytes is consistent across many media outlets, as is the gist of the translations.

The idea that Iran believes the West to have already failed in stopping their nuclear ambitions is reinforced by the recent actions (or rather, non-actions) of pretty much everyone in the international community, including the U.S. Although Iran has not rolled its armies across any borders recently (a technical, though hardly meaningful, point of departure from literal Hitlerian analogies in light of Iran's outsized influence in Syria and elsewhere), the state of mind that Ahmadinejad appears to be in is the same that possesses any leader when his aggressive actions have gone unopposed. If they didn't stop us from doing 'x', he thinks (and quite logically) then why would they stop us from doing 'y'? And if that's true, then why should we believe them when they say that 'z' is really truly their bottom line and it "will not stand"?

In short, they are on a roll and they know it.

It is the state of mind that many on the left assume the U.S. president to be in and which they seek to check with their anti-Bush rhetoric. That's an unfair comparison. The U.S. remains the only nation on the planet that routinely intervenes in world conflicts or acts as global cop... and then leaves. Ironically we get criticized for doing that in the same breath that we're accused of imperialist ambitions. The two notions are irreconcilable, of course - something that hasn't stopped the antiwar movement from ascribing motives that don't make sense on their face. Back to Iran...

Imagine further that instead of having to cut deals for college money, career training and plumb assignments in order to meet military recruiting quotas, the only guarantee you had to offer to those interested in serving their country was certain death. Tell your mom she can rest easy. She won't have to worry about paying for college! As Iran Focus reports:

Mohammad-Ali Samadi, spokesman for the Headquarters to Commemorate the Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement, a government-orchestrated campaign to recruit suicide bombers, told the state-run news agency Mehr on Tuesday that the group planned to officially announce the existence of the new [suicide bombers'] garrison in a ceremony in Tehran’s largest cemetery on Thursday afternoon... more that 55,000 “volunteers for martyrdom-seeking operations” had been registered so far... In February, the group launched a new recruitment drive for suicide bombers in Tehran to fight against “Global Blasphemy”. [emphasis added]

Not surprisingly, we haven't heard about this in the MSM. (Three, count 'em three articles are referenced on Google News this morning.) Too dangerous. The public might overreact. It might spawn anti-Islamic incidents (whatever that means - ignoring the fact that there are anti-Christian incidents all over the Islamic world almost daily). It might add momentum to Bush's casus belli. We don't want to be on that side. Let's not report it. (Interestingly, this article by the BBC on Ahmadinejad's remarks contained the "mastered the entire nuclear fuel cycle" phrase as of last night but does not contain it this morning. Same article. Interesting. Are we being educated or led by the nose?)

There's something else even more interesting about the suicide bomber recruitment article though, and we didn't notice it until we'd pondered it a few times: February. What happened in February? "Global Blasphemy" - what does that mean? Why would the state of Iran launch a suicide bomber recruitment campaign in February, confident that it would be wildly successful? The Danish cartoons. Note the dateline: February 1st. The utterly un-spontaneous Danish cartoons that actually ran last year. Many are under the mistaken impression that peace-loving Danish Muslims opened their newspapers, saw the original cartoons, choked on their pastry and ran out into the streets in their bathrobes shaking their fists and shouting slogans. They did not. As Bernard Lewis noted in his remarks at the Pew Forum last month:

The news story, as it broke, was that a Danish newspaper had published a series of cartoons offensive to the Prophet, and that this had led to spontaneous outbursts of indignation all over the Muslim world. Now, there are several problems in this. One of them was that the spontaneous outbursts of indignation didn't occur until slightly more than four months after the publication of the cartoons. It's a little difficult to follow, I think you'll agree. The second problem was that when the spontaneous outbreaks of indignation did occur all over the Muslim world, in the remotest parts of northern Nigeria, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and elsewhere they had an ample supply of Danish flags of suitable size and texture for trampling or burning, as required. Obviously, this was something carefully prepared over a period of time. [emphasis added]

Carefully prepared by Iran (a point that others have made elsewhere). What's the larger point? Just this: Iran is preparing - intelligently and relentlessly - for all-out war with the West utilizing nuclear weapons and clandestine suicide bombers. Simple as that.

That's not exactly a surprise to those who've been following this, but also not easy to learn by reading the New York Times. What caused them to get to this place is not even worth pondering any more. Their emboldened state of mind, investment in weapons delivery vehicles (the 55,000 being far more important in our view, than the semi-functional long-range missiles) and the nuclear warheads to go with them is not something that can be de-escalated by showering Iran with economic incentives or showcasing our deep empathy with Palestinian grievances, Persian culture or CIA misdeeds vis a vis the Shah in the 1970's.

We recently watched PBS' American Experience show entitled "The Man Behind Hitler", with Kenneth Branaugh narrating the recently released diary of Joseph Goebbels. Chilling stuff. Full of lessons for today. Unfortunately some are drawing the wrong lessons (comparing Joseph Goebbels to Karl Rove), but that's another story we won't waste pixels in fisking.

What is clear from the show is that as early as 1921, Goebbels (age 24) was ranting privately (and soon publicly) about ridding Germany of "dirty Jews" of Hitler being "a god", about a German reich that would one day conquer Europe, and a reichstag that needed to be dissolved because it did not represent the will of the people (a little different from Republicans who are trying to instantiate discipline in voter registration procedures and get more issues voted straight up in Congress and out of the hands of fillibusterers, elite judges and sclerotic committees... but we digress - again.) One needn't even be fully aware of what we know came next in Germany in order to think: this guy is whacked; this guy has a major chip on his shoulder; this guy is determined; this guy means what he says; this guy cannot be negotiated with.

By 1939 of course, all of this became obvious to the world. Had we taken Hitler and Goebbels at their word (rather than attempting to explain their words away in order to comfort ourselves, or attempting to snow them with appeasement), the world would have been much better off.

One can see Joseph Goebbels in Karl Rove or say, the Ayatollah Khomeni - but not both. One can see Adolf Hitler in Bush or Ahmadinejad - but not both. We've made our choice. We urge you to make yours. Those watching PBS specials 67 years from now will sit in judgment.

UPDATE: More on the suicide brigades here in Friday's post.

Marxists, 9-11 and Sovereignty - Maintaining the City on a Hill

Wretchard has a must-read post over at Belmont Club on how the War Against Islamofascism (can we start calling it that, please?) is pushing to light several long-simmering home front battles left over from the Cold War:

Until [9-11] it was possible to treat many ideologies respectable since the 1960s as harmless forms of iconoclasm, posing "provocative" but fundamentally hypothetical views. But when attacks on the US homeland made it categorically necessary to answer the question: 'are you willing to fight our assailants', many sincere ideologues paused, shook their heads and said: 'No. In fact I am morally obligated to help our assailants'. When Noam Chomsky went out of his way to support Hezbollah it wasn't inexplicable, it was logical. His long articulated hypotheticals have simply become actuals... [emphasis added]

From the Marxist perspective at least, the Cold War ended not in defeat, but in a negotiated armistice; with surrender on the economic front offset by a capitulation to it by the West on cultural matters. People might have to work in private companies, it's true, but all the accompanying baggage of traditional culture like religion, sexual mores, notions of objectivity, etc were forfeit; and that was more than compensation. That was the tacit 'deal' and the EU, UN and cultural institutions were going to carry it out. By slow degrees the Western world was going to be politically corrected, multiculturalized and transnationalized.

Such an ideal is not very far, he notes, from that which John Lennon put forward in the innocuously titled, 'Imagine'. The song is a juicy if belated target into which others have also shot flaming arrows - a fantastical world in which borders and bullies are banned and we're not supposed to ask too many hard questions about how or why that happens.

'Imagine' is also a world without ideals - without a shining city on a hill to show how things can be. It is a world where rather than turning on other lights on other hills, many would seek to terrascape the hill (no gated communities), dim the light (so as not to offend anyone who wants to look at stars) and push everyone to live in equal muddy squalor on the plain.

America (and Americans) can get arrogant, yes. So can Belgians, Cambodians and Tanzanians. That's human nature. But at its best, American Exceptionalism simply says: look, we tried this thing and it seems to work for us and yeah it has it's flaws but if it's so terrible why does everyone keep wanting to get in so badly and why do those who hate and resist the tenets of our system tend to be tyrants - petty (think European elitists), powerful (think Stalin) and otherwise (think Castro, Chavez, Arafat, etc.)?

We wax lyrical, but with purpose.

We've been thinking lately about sovereignty - about how the War Against Islamofascism is connected to the global warming kerfuffle, the Clintons, and illegal infiltration - among other things. (As Mark Steyn notes, 'illegal immigration' is an oxymoron - meaningless without respect for the laws, language and traditions of the nation into which one seeks to immigrate. When Americans go abroad, host countries expect nothing less and call us boorish and worse when we do not do exactly what we're asking Hispanic 'visitors' to do.)

This is an incomplete thought, but a common thread seems to be conflict between those who believe that all countries are created equal (or if not, should be treated as such anyway) and those who believe that all people are - and that that trumps everything. The former view makes the UN a great idea, and world government a fairly small step from there - bound to be benevolent because with national laws and borders effectively eradicated there wouldn't be any conflict (a nonsensically fantastical leap based on nothing). In that world view, individual human beings are secondary to the great sweep of nations and their deals. In such a world it is perfectly logical to throw treats to a misbehaving Iran without a thought as to what that might say to the people of Iran.

Which brings us back to the simmering Marxism that Wretchard has identified. One commenter put it beautifully with this personal story:

My family hails from Europe, and I am an artist who has worked in Entertainment and Media most of my life. Consequently, I have always had friends and family who were anti-American. To me this seemed natural and appropriate. I agreed that America needed chastisement for its myriad sins. I thought this would help bring about a better America on the ashes of the old racist, war-mongering America.

But, on 9/11, I realized that these people didn't want to philosophically destroy America, in order to bring about a better America. No, instead, they REALLY wanted to destroy America. That was a real shock to me.

My wife is a first-generation immigrant... Her family grew up Christian on the island of Mindanao [Muslim-dominated part of the Philippines]

On 9/11, my wife said the following words to me,

"If they destroy America, people in the Phillipines [sic], and other third-world nations, will have nothing to hope for."

That broke my heart.

We need to make sure America sticks around. Wasn't it Lincoln who said, America is the last, best hope of mankind.

He did. And so, in effect, did Ronald Reagan. That does not mean that we must let all mankind in. Some misunderstand that conclusion. We do not block the gates out of greed or even fear (at our best we don't, anyway). We block the gates so as not to see the fragile model we hold up for the world destroyed by those who don't see the value in it. Which brings us back to Mr. Chomsky.

We'd happily trade him for a few hundred hard-working Mexicans who want to learn English, build the hill a little higher and proudly display our light for all to see. On second thought, he's probably not worth that much. Chavez or Castro might go for it though...

Rewarding Bad Behavior - More Wishful Thinking on Iran

Michael Ledeen's scintillatingly logical (and funny) mock letter to Ahmadinejad yesterday - written, he says, by a Reagan administration official - is set off by a fuzzy-headed piece in this morning's Boston Globe. It betrays itself in the frighteningly ignorant headline: "US could benefit from a give-and-take strategy with Iran". Where to start...

Although it is customary in Washington's corridors of power to caustically dismiss the reformers, they do play a role in the nuclear deliberations.

In what sense is the alleged dismissal 'caustic'? (We'll speculate that one of the authors had a run-in with Donald Rumsfeld once and has forevermore concluded that the man is worthless because he is truthful, blunt, and doesn't vacillate on decisions once made.)

Is it not possible instead that these alleged reformers are being dismissed precisely because it has been empirically demonstrated that they in fact have no power to influence the nuclear program - at least none that they have chosen or been able to wield? In such a climate, 'dismissal' is only 'caustic' in the sense that it is logical. As in, "he caustically corrected the child who insisted he could fly by jumping from a 10th story window"... because the child was not only wrong but dangerously so.

The very term 'reformer' also begs the question: what is it that these individuals have done that leads us to believe they're able or willing to 'reform' anything? Without power, the idea of 'reform' is speculative potential. The idea of a car... without an engine or gas to run it. By that definition everyone reading this is an Iranian reformer. It's just that we don't live in Iran... or speak the language... or hold any office... but we'd be on that side if we were! It is a designation devoid of meaning. Good-feel cocktail talk.

What is a 'reformer'? We have at least one recent example: Maurice the token Jewish Iranian legislator whose mind we cannot know but whose actions (under duress) we can. When pressed, he publicly defended measures his government is taking that - without a whole lot of imagination or historical perspective it's easy to see leading to his watching a few million of his fellow faithful killed en masse. That kind of 'reform' potential is buried so deep as to be meaningless. With all due respect to Maurice and the untenable position he finds himself in (and if he doesn't find it untenable, we question his religious loyalty... and his sanity), there's not a whole lot of influence he's going to wield in a Muslim nation that's declared it will wipe Israel off the map at the earliest opportunity and in the most spectacular fashion possible.

Furthermore, having given these mysterious moderates 27 years to show themselves and flex their muscles, is it not simply rational to dismiss them - or to be more precise, to dismiss their ability to do anything substantive right now? It is akin to Europeans who would wish to bring American Democrats back to power. Good luck. Easy to say. Hard to do at a distance. Likely to backfire - especially if one throws carrots to their opposition.

If it were possible for the Iranian 'refomers' to do something, now would be the time. Which gets to the question the authors set out to address: what can we do about that? That's a decent question, but let's start with what history tells us we shouldn't do.

In 1930's Germany, there were 'reformers' or 'moderates' or non-Nazi factions or whatever one wishes to call them. Historians have speculated that had a hard line been drawn earlier, Hitler's populist groundswell would have been slowed and those critics given room to oppose him. In other words, precisely the opposite of what happened. Precisely the opposite of what the Globe article's authors propose on Iran. This is not an unprecedented problem in world history. Why then, is the same misguided Chamberlainian formula still up for debate?

And if that isn't enough, we have the example of North Korea - a nation (or rather, a man) grown bolder in action with each appeasement, but bolder in words with each firm line in the sand (something we've seen precious little of lately). That can be confusing to minds trained to see all sides of an issue even when one is patently wrong. As is true in basketball so it is in foreign policy: watch the body, not the head.

The Globe's editors and writers have been head-faked by Ahmadinejad (not that that's a surprise). Anything to get him to stop talking tough! It scares us!

No. Sorry. What scares us is not his rhetoric but the resolve we cannot see: those hundreds of centrifuges whirling away 24/7, several hundred feet underground, all in the interest of... cheap electricity.

Yeah, right.

Let's be plain: no amount of coaxing and pandering and appeasing on our part is going to strengthen the 'reformers'. It will make their position substantially worse. We know this from talking to the anti-Ba'athists in Iraq, from former Soviet dissidents, from Chinese and Vietnamese and Camobian refugees who share our values. Watching the most powerful nation on earth suck up to their oppressors does them no good. As 444 days of American captivity showed in 1979/80, it was only when the threat of force became credible (with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan) that the Iranian radicals finally backed down.

The Globe draws a different conclusion:

The critical question then becomes how can Washington exploit such fissures [in Iranian politics] and keep Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold and actually assembling a weapon. It is important to stress that a relentless policy of pressure is only strengthening the hard-liners who insist that the only manner the encroaching American threat can be disarmed is through the possession of the strategic weapon.

By that logic, we have been strengthening the hard-liners since January, 1981. Which gives us a whole lot more credit as a nation - across multiple administrations of both parties - than we deserve. What they don't put a name to is the opposite of "relentless policy of pressure": appeasement, backing down, saying we didn't really mean what we said and that we are fearful of the implications if we did. Which not only would be stupid in light of history, but uncharacteristic of this president - something for which we deeply admire him.

"Iran must not have nuclear weapon" means... Iran must not have a nuclear weapon. Whatever that takes. (Why that is so is another post - the gist of which is this: the values of the people wielding the weapon matter. Guns don't kill people. People kill people.)

Gambling on the crackpot theory that appeasing Ahmadinejad will somehow - this time, for the first time ever - throw the game to a hazy and unproven group of 'reformers' is simply delusional. In light of history. In light of common sense.

It may be possible to empower them. Demonstrating our weakness - when Ahmadinejad's entire theory of the conflict rests on an assumption that we are weak - is not the way to do it. That is not going to weaken him. It will prove him right and empower him even more.

We will credit the Globe with some modicum of reality:

Nor are the existing attempts to mobilize the Security Council likely to work as divisions among the great powers is only buttressing Iranian resolve and demystifying the once-impressive threat of UN sanctions.

But they don't dally long in the light of truth:

In the end, as distasteful as it maybe, Washington has no option but to engage in a direct give and take with the Iranian regime. A generous American offer of economic concessions and security dialogue may just tip the scales in favor of pragmatists inclined to arrest Iran's drive toward nuclear arms. Should this approach fail, the United States can return to its allies and coalitions of the willing with a credible claim that it has exhausted all diplomatic options and it is time for a viable, multilateral policy of pressure.

"No option?" "generous... offer... dialogue?" Uh, hello? We have the option we are taking right now: letting the regime (and everyone else inside Iran) know that we will not let them develop nuclear weapons and will not be showering them with candy in the meantime, wagging our tails and hoping they like us after all of the contempt they've heaped on us since the Islamic Revolution began.

We have the option of readying special forces and tactical nukes and a fleet of long-range bombers and letting these sponsors of terror and declared enemies of Israel and the rest of Western Civilization know in no uncertain terms that they will not be allowed under any circumstances to wield a power that they will surely put in the hands of their terrorist minions. That is not a threat we take lightly. It will unleash chaos - as we have said before. The chaos that would be unleashed otherwise is worse.

This is not and never has been about economic growth or security. Why? Because Ahmadinejad has said otherwise and why should we second-guess him? It is about crushing the West and putting in its place an expansive and deeply repressive Islamic empire. We shudder to think that some of those writing such articles for the Globe would have been presidential foreign policy advisors had the 2004 election turned out differently...

Hoisted on His Own Petard - An Imagined Bush Response to Ahmadinejad's Letter

Michael Ledeen has an inspired contributor over at NRO:

Thank you for your invitation to accept Islam. As you know, I am a Christian. Throughout your letter you accuse me of being a bad Christian, which leaves me puzzled as to why you think I might make a good Muslim. However, before you proselytize outside your own country, you might want to address the condition of the Islamic faith in Iran.

I am genuinely sorry to hear that so many Iranians, especially the young, have lost their faith because of their profound disillusionment with theocratic clerical rule. Apparently, there is no way for them to distinguish between their religion and your rule. That is understandable since you claim there is none, that your authority comes directly from God and you are ruling in his name. It is no wonder you disdain “liberalism and Western style democracy.” Under it, you would be answerable not only to God, but to the Iranian people, to whom God gave certain “unalienable Rights” that you and the mullahs have chosen to ignore. How ironic that, in the name of God, you deny your people’s God-given rights.

It gets even better.

Madonna and Bold Expression

Another good one from Roger Simon today:

...if she had any real guts, Madonna would dance around on stage as Mohammed in drag.

As a Church of England representative put it: "Why would someone with so much talent seem to feel the need to promote herself by offending so many people?" (For the record, he did not call for burning down the Warner Music studios or killing its executives.)

UPDATE: This concert review is absolutely priceless.

Madonna seemed determined to Leave People With A Message. Thus, words of cod wisdom such as: "There's light even in the darkest places" flashed up on screen - which was nice enough, even if it sat oddly with her previously stated message to "turn the world into one big dance floor".

But Didactic Madonna wasn't finished-Up she went, suspended on a large crucifix, as images of child poverty flickered on the screens. The tour, incidentally, is estimated to gross $200million...

She exhorted us to sing along. But few did. A visibly irked Madonna screamed: "Come on you lazy mother******s! Sing!"

The show ended - rather abruptly - with no encore and with the lights immediately going on, leaving us all looking at one another in a slightly embarrassed fashion, as though we'd just been caught doing something we shouldn't have been.

Maurice - The Token Jew in the Iranian Legislature

During the Iranian dress code kerfuffle late last week, an odd fact emerged in the form of a seemingly oxymoronic person - Maurice Motammed, a Jewish representative in the Iranian legislature. He was widely quoted, explicitly bursting the myth that the new law required religious minorities to identify themselves - yet. (For the record, we're still deeply concerned, but the original story turns out to have been at best misleading.)

Neoneocon has done her homework on that lonely man.

...the 1907 law... ordered that there be representatives of each religious minority: one for each major religion. In fact, the way it worked was that Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians could participate by voting in the election of their respective single representatives, but not in the selection of any other members of the legislature. It was a strictly segregated vote for a very limited representation (Jews were to vote only for the single Jew, Christians for the single Christian, and Zoroastrians for the single Zoroastrian), but it was a slight advance over what had gone before... At present, the old 1907 rule is in force, allowing one representative each from the Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian populations of Iran.

H/T: Roger Simon, who writes of attempts to make the story a partisan tar baby:

Let's leave aside for the moment that Sen. Chuck Schumer was the first politician to howl in protest and that the liberal-conservative dichotomy is so tedious it's in danger of replacing Ambien as the world's most popular sleeping pill... Ahmadinejad has already declared his support for wiping Israel off the map. Dress codes are small change by comparison.

Indeed. Seen in that (proper) perspective, the question turns to whether one would prefer a choice of clothing... in which to be incinerated in a giant atomic fireball.

Reflecting on All Things Clinton

Not that it really matters, but... we were just thinking...

Once Bill (and old buddy Al) are done working the base into a feeding frenzy over global warming, what is Hillary going to do about it on the '08 stump? The answer will either put her in a bind vis a vis her recently acquired hawk credentials, have her working to implement government-driven solutions that will dwarf any of the socialist health care schemes she attempted 10 years ago, or showcase her forked-tongue... which won't be so hard given the MSM's near-instant amnesia for anything that makes Democrats look bad.

Case in point #1: Drudge is reporting this morning that "Gore & entourage took 5 cars to travel the 500 yards from hotel to screening of global warming pic in Cannes..." Couldn't he perhaps do with the little extra exercise?

Case in point #2: Most of the news outlets covering the Clinton remarks (that global warming is a "more profound threat" than terrorism) chose the headline "We Must Get Off Our Butts"... which sounds pro-active and earnest and forward-looking, and well... good. (Why he did not tell Al to get off his butt is an amusing side-thought.) By contrast, the explicit comparison to terrorism makes him look, well... deranged. Grasping. Out of touch. Which would not be in keeping with a guy who feels our pain... which of course he never really did. The latest reminds us of this oldie-but-goody where he called the Iranian leadership 'progressive'.

Our high-schooler is working on a paper on Clinton's second term. We know her history teacher to be a flaming commie zealot of the first-order. The question she needs to answer: were Clinton's second-term policies effective or ineffective? She has an open, critical mind but... we know what will earn her a good grade and it's certainly not using that open, critical mind. Analyzing missed opportunities to nail OBL, researching Jamie Gorelick's infamous FBI 'wall', or challenging the framework within which one ought to evaluate "effectiveness" are not going to help get her into college. Such is the state of the 'liberal' (narrow meaning) academy today.

In other news, a friend and loyal reader reports this recently-overheard conversation in the supermarket checkout line between two teens (thankfully not of voting age... yet):

Bagger: Yeah, Clinton was rated one of the best Presidents ever.
Cashier: It's a shame he died in that plane crash.
Bagger: Yeah, that's too bad.
Cashier: Otherwise he could run again.
Bagger: I think his wife is still alive though.

Oh, the irony. Perhaps they know something we don't...

Playing the Hand We're Dealt

The Anchoress is writing beautifully and poignantly about her dear brother-in-law who is in hospice after stopping a brutal and ultimately pointless round of chemo. That experience, plus more than a year of thoughtful posts building up to it has led to this insightful piece "The Dangerous Prayer of Blessing", about discerning and accepting God's will for one's life (aka, one's 'path', as our yoga instructor likes to say - though she'd most certainly disagree with the Anchoress' conclusions).

Maybe there is something else I am supposed to be doing, that I am not? Maybe I am too much in the world, and there is mystery to which I have not surrendered?

We all think we’re supposed to hear “yes” all the time. And “yes” feels so much better than “no.” Although, for most of us, we can look back on our lives and find a few times when the “yes” we wanted so badly would have been better off a “no.”

I am not proposing that the whole world take a look at the cards in their hand and “fold.” To surrender is not to fold. It is to play the hand you’ve been dealt - to take it as far as you can, in faith and obedience (there’s a word you never hear anymore…)

...God, you dealt me this hand. I don’t particularly appreciate it - it’s not the hand I would have chosen. Therefore, I’ll let you play it, I’ll follow your lead and trust that it will not come up a stinker. Tough to do…it goes against our every instinct. And yet, this is what Christ lived out for us.

Read the whole thing. Anchoress deals well with the obvious objections via more concrete examples. What she's getting at it seems, is the root of an immature, instant-gratification, me-me-me, now-now-now, I-want-it-all culture. And when you stop to consider what that means, it is the very definition of idolatry - putting made things first; putting ourselves at the center of creation. Sure there are things we should not accept without struggle, but as in the serenity prayer, discerning the difference is both really hard and really important.

Nasty, Brutish and Short... (Not to Mention Poor, Isolated and Belligerent)

Dan at tdaxp has just released a long series of posts examining quantitative evidence for (and against) Tom Barnett's theories as espoused in "The Pentagon's New Map". 'tdaxp' has run data on five factors for every country on the planet: Brutality, Nastiness, Poverty, 'Solitude' (we think he means Isolation), and 'Shortness' (of lifespan). The findings? Not exactly rocket science, but it's always nice to have data to back up one's intuition:

Afromuslim countries go to war more often than any other states... Want to die early? Move to an African or Islamic country... We are at War with Africa and Islam... We are at War for Africa and Islam... Averaging these scores together, the AfroIslam model remains the best for describing the Hobbesian states we fight against and for.

Summary of results is here. As we noted last August:

...without Leviathan... life is indeed "nasty, brutish and short". Most people quoting Hobbes forget that first part - about Leviathan. About cops. About power for the purposes of good. About us.

"McCain the Conservative Republican"

Graduating students at the New School were dissing the ex-POW and Arizona Senator. We're laughing for another reason: the NY Times' characterization of his politics:

The historically liberal university has been roiled in controversy in recent weeks over the selection of McCain, a conservative Republican... [emphasis added]

When they refer to Joe Lieberman as a "liberal Democrat" we'll stop calling the MSM biased.

UPDATE: The WSJ carries two editorials Monday, both free at OpinionJournal. The first touches on McCain's poor treatment at the New School commencement in the context of relating Joe Lieberman's vulnerability to the angry left. The second is a transcript of McCain's remarks. As Zell Miller knows all too well, being the center-weight to one's party is not a way to win friends.

Torture at Guantanamo

Torture of the guards, that is:

...detainees had slickened the floor of their block with feces, urine and soapy water in an attempt to trip the guards. They then assaulted the guards with broken light fixtures, fan blades ["improvised weapons"] and bits of metal... detainees were jumping off beds on top of the guards and knocked some guards to the ground... While guards were putting down the fight, detainees in nearby cells began rioting, destroying cameras used to monitor them, fans, florescent lights and other property...

Those rioters would be the same ones treated to 4,200 calories per day of the most healthful and culturally sensitive cuisine(s) of their choice. The reason the guards were in the cell block in the first place? To save two prisoners who had apparently attempted suicide. Reminds us of the scene in The Incredibles when Mr. Incredible gets sued for causing whiplash in a man he saved from a suicidal leap off a tall building.

Wake Up, People! It's 1935, or '36, or '37, or '38, or...

[Scroll down for weekend updates]

Iran Eyes Badges for Jews [and Christians]. Real headline today. H/T: Drudge. As we were saying:

For anyone unfamiliar with the term Dhimmi (I thought I was until I began reading MOIT), we'd strongly encourage ten minutes of Googling on the subject. It is frightening to behold, yet it's a term that - like it or not - we will all need to know in coming years.

What Iran is doing is not some aberration on Islam. It is what the Hadith, Qur'an and Sharia Law demand. It is what Dhimmitude is. This is an Islamic leader fulfilling those religious dictates... because he can.

UPDATE I, (Friday late afternoon): Atlas Shrugs notes the many sad milestones in the 1289-year history of Islam doing exactly the same kind of thing, adding (correctly) that this is not just about Jews but about Christians, Zoroastrians, Buddhists and - worst of all under Dhimminitude - secularlists.

Many are questioning the original story, looking for independent verification. Hot Air blog raises concerns, noting that Amir Taheri (the reporter who broke the story in Canada's National Post) is "a credible reporter" with "oodles of contacts inside Iran", but wondering if "the Post’s sources were [just] guessing what’s likely to happen under the new dress code".

AM940 Montreal names and quotes two informed sources, each of which is absolutely sure: one that the law as specifically described was "passed two years ago" and the other that it was passed but does not include specific colors to differentiate among non-Muslims. (Sounds like a distinction without much of a difference. Iran is also not using swastikas.)

Michael Williams reminds us that Godwin's Law regarding overuse of Nazi analogies creates a boy-cries-wolf kind of climate in which the return of Nazis-in-all-but-name is dismissed until the actual blitzkrieg begins.

Meanwhile we refer new visitors (welcome Real Clear Politics readers!) to this post yesterday in which we asked why Islam couldn't please just grow up? It also strikes us as either deeply frightening (or deeply suspicious) that this story should break at the close of a week that began with the metaphorical tarring, feathering and running-out-of-town of Dutch politician and harsh critic of Islam, Aayan Hirsi Ali.

Blackfive cuts to the chase: "These people are EVIL, and they need to have their a$$es kicked immediately if not sooner." Kesher Talk notes wryly that "You can't say Ahmadinejad doesn't say what he means or stand proudly committed to what he believes in." KT also links to this important comment by Michael Rubin at NRO's Corner today, pointing out that the Nazis borrowed the idea from Iran in the first place!:

The Iranian people are far more tolerant than their leadership, but it is unfortunate that Ahmadinejad could cite ample precedent if he so desired: The Nazi practice of forcing Jews to wear a yellow star had its origins in what is now Iran and Iraq when a ninth century caliph forced his Jewish subjects to wear yellow patches. From time to time, subsequent rulers revived the practice.

Sigmund, Carl & Alfred relate a quip by a television commentator that "...perhaps [it's] time for Iranians that were issued visas to travel abroad, be forced to wear identifying badges." (e.g., Iranian diplomats). And Confederate Yankee references a post by Jeff Goldstein noting that Ahmadinejad's actions (including this one) can be seen in a larger, more ominous (for the rest of the world) context, taking steps, "that a pious member of his sect would before unleashing war". As we've been saying... and saying... and saying.

UPDATE II, (Saturday 9:30AM): Today's NY Post is running with (and adding detail to) the story that Canada's National Post broke yesterday. Simultaneously, the Toronto Star quotes a Jewish Iranian legislator as saying the story is completely false, calling it "an insult to religious minorities here". The Jerusalem Post gets at what may be the heart of the controversy, under the headline: "New Iranian Law to Require Jews to Wear Yellow Band", noting that while the law did not pass, "the idea of religious demarcation [arose] in discussing a law defining Iranian dress code... the idea of external identification of non-Muslim minorities was raised as a secondary motion." Bloomberg (breaking) is running the Iranian denial, but it's a denial worth dicing carefully. The official Iranian line is that "such a bill was never introduced" and "did not pass". What they appear not to deny is that dress codes for religious minorities were discussed as a secondary motion in the parliament... which is plenty odious on its own.

Thought to ponder: We haven't heard of any mobs of angry Jews picketing, stoning and burning down Islamic embassies in the West.

UPDATE III, (9:45AM Saturday): The New York Times is carrying the tiny little AP blurb, buried deep, under the headline "Iran: Lawmakers Debate Women's Clothing". It cites two legislators in Iran, including the bill's sponsor and the Iranian Jewish legislator quoted in the Toronto Star, saying that "the measure sought only to make women dress more conservatively and avoid Western fashions"... as if that Taliban-like provision were just dandy.

UPDATE IV, (1:50PM Saturday): LGF goes sewer-diving at Kos, where they're gleeful at the idea of the Iran clothing story being a bad moment for the right wing blogosphere. Some are even sensing a "neocon plant" aimed at justifying an attack on Iran, just "like the propaganda in the lead up to the Iraq war..." As if such an attack would not already have plenty of merit without yellow stars or Ahmadinejad shaving his beard down to a brush moustache and giving the stiff-arm salute.

When will the left get past its insistence on everything being interpreted through a lens of potential to bring down president Bush? When will they get over a fixaction with inconvenient facts (e.g., about the utterly illiberal and intolerant foundations of political Islam - in word and in practice) being seen as "propaganda"?

At least the right wing blogosphere has been (for the most part) scrupulously rapid (less than 12 hours) and open in correcting itself. We try anyway. MSM retractions, by contrast (e.g., CBS 'memo-gate') seems to require heavy pressure from outside and incontrovertible evidence over the course of months... and still doesn't result in most cases in any clear admission of being in the wrong. (We're still waiting, Dan...)

We'll take fast, messy and honest any day. As we noted in comments earlier this morning, this is one subject - given history - for which "hair trigger" reporting is a good thing. We've seen all too clearly what happens when such early indicators are ignored.

UPDATE V, (2:00PM Saturday): Others (H/T: LGF) are linking to these comments by the ultra-knowledgeable elder-statesman/scholar of all things Islamic, Bernard Lewis at the Pew Forum, April 27th. Well worth checking out in this context.

I am inclined to believe in the sincerity of Ahmadinejad. I think that he really believes the apocalyptic language that he is using... that this is the final struggle that will lead to the final victory and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

...he seems to be succeeding, for example, on the question of nuclear weapons. And every time they make an advance, we move the point at which we won't tolerate it anymore, and this has happened again and again. Each time, we say, the next step we will not allow. We have shown ourselves to be, shall we say, remarkably adaptable in this respect, and this is no way to win friends and influence people.

I think that the way that Ahmadinejad is talking now shows quite clearly his contempt for the Western world in general and the United States in particular. They feel they are dealing with, as Osama bin Laden put it, an effete, degenerate, pampered enemy incapable of real resistance. And they are proceeding on that assumption...

I think it is a dangerous situation. And my only hope is that they are not right in their interpretation of the Western world. I have often thought in recently years of World War II — you were told earlier that I'm ancient myself. The most vividly remembered year of my life was the year 1940. And more recently I have been thinking of 1938 rather than of 1940. We seem to be in the mode of Chamberlain and Munich rather than of Churchill. [emphases added]

There's much more in Lewis' comments. As we've noted before, he is to understanding Islam what Peter Drucker was to understanding management: someone so wise and well-informed that the world will be noticeably different (and darker) when he goes. Most intriguing to us is a response Lewis makes to a question about whether Islam is redeemable (e.g., can it be made democratic, tolerant, peaceful, etc.?) The questioner had asked, in part what was meant by earlier Lewis comments about Western "[nations] divided into religions" versus Islam as "a religion divided into nations". Short answer: yes, there is hope for the Islamic world to 'grow up' (as the Christian world mostly did). Longer answer: we're still witnessing the direct results of Vichy (read: Nazi) influence in the Middle East from WWII(!!), interpreting those cancerous symptoms as funamentally Islamic where they are not entirely so.

Let's see: Hitler borrows ideas for labeling religious minorities from Iran and then implants Nazi ideas firmly in Syria where Iran can pick up the ball and run with it to challenge Israel... Are we seeing the big picture yet?

UPDATE VI, (Sunday evening): Regime Change Iran has some clear-headed analysis.

Amir Taheri said the law "envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities." This was taken by many to mean that the current law requires it, but the word "envisages" means: To conceive an image or a picture of, especially as a future possibility: envisaged a world at peace.

...no one has yet published a complete translation of the actual text of the law... One would think that the main stream media would publish a complete translation...

If they thought it more important than say, Bill Clinton on global warming, that is...

What does not appear to be in dispute is that those faithful to the Khomeinist revolution will be quickly identifiable, as will as those who are not. This in and of it self would have a chilling effect on the Iranian population... They tend to act incrementally. My expectation is that the regime has drafted a broad and non specific bill and then the committee's over seeing its implementation will slowly and incrementally add ethnic and religious elements to it. Time will tell.

Indeed. Time. If we have any...

Next Steps: The Confrontation With Iran

Analyst and author John Robb posted a tight predictive brief on his blog late last month entitled "Collapsing Iran". It (and the comment thread that follows) are well worth reading. We could argue for equally plausible alternatives to some of his assumptions but not with great conviction. His conclusions are largely in synch with our own. A few highlights:

...a military confrontation between the US and Iran is now unavoidable... in order to guarantee the destruction of some of [Iran's nuclear] facilities, a nuclear weapon must be used. This is not a viable option... Most of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program isn’t contained in the facilities but in the knowledge of its engineers... These problems indicate that the only way to truly realize a reversal in the Iranian program is regime change.

What the regime might be replaced with, how we could hope to do more than take a roulette-wheel chance on the political and social variables falling into place (including our own), and why we might not under the right circumstances, make selective use of nuclear weaponry for bunker-busting purposes are open questions. Robb acknowledges the high uncertainty and risk:

...the US will utilize a rapidly evolving method of air warfare called the “effects-based operation” (EBO). The EBO is a process that incapacitates a nation-state’s systems (typically critical infrastructure) and organizations to achieve desired strategic outcomes. In the past this has meant a combination of precision-guided munitions, special operations, and stealth technology to precisely target critical nodes in national infrastructures and systems... A nation-state that is subjected to this type of attack ceases all governmental and economic function. In sum, Iran would be “turned off” until the regime changes...

Despite the seeming inevitability of this path, the outcomes ("effects") it would produce are far from inevitable. An attack of this type would be a global system shock that is rife with downside risks and uncertainties. Once the attack commences, the shock waves it produces would be far-reaching, unpredictable, and in most cases very bad.

Why Iran would not simply revert to chaos or change to something worse after being "turned off" is something that makes us nervous. Very nervous. This is not like sending a child to his room to cool off. Taking a regime that wants to return to the 7th century and obliging them by sending them halfway there is perhaps a bit counterproductive if the long-term objective is a peaceful, stable Iran that's no longer a global pariah. Robb is an Air Force Academy guy and as such seems to fall victim to the same wishful thinking as other Air Force personnel.

Which is not to say that we have any better options.

The chief risk remains an Iranian nuke being used unilaterally as soon as it becomes available. To our Cold War way of thinking, that seems bizarre. Why would they not use it as a bargaining chip? Why would they not sit on it for blackmail as North Korea has done? Yet using it right away is exactly what we did with the Manhattan Project. Build it; ship it; drop it. Days or weeks at most. Our intelligence is just too crappy to figure out in real time that that's happening. As Richard Perle noted at the Intelligence Summit in February, that's not something we can deal with in a hurry. Our intelligence capability in Iran 'broke' several years ago, and for the stupidest of reasons:

[Perle] related the horrifying story (timeframe unclear but the impression was that it was in the past decade) of a CIA manager who wanted to increase the volume of reporting out of Iran. And he got exactly what he wished for... through the "same bandwidth channel". Lots more reporting... until the mullahs figured out that nobody could possibly be writing that many legitimate letters to their uncle Henry in Des Moines... at which point the entire U.S. intelligence network in Iran was rolled up and summarily executed. Oops.

It would be nice if long and short term goals on Iran lined up (i.e., change to a well-behaved regime inclined to dismantle the nuclear program), but the former may need to take a back seat to the latter in this emergency case. If the alternative is an unchecked nuclear-enabled Iran bent on destroying Israel and Western Civilization, then delaying Iran's nuclear build-up by any means may be our only option. The question then turns to which option is "least bad".

Do Iran's leaders feel their mission (leading Islamic conquest of the West) to be as urgent as we felt ours to be in August, 1945? We suspect that they do. And we reject the notion that our actions have backed them into a corner. Instead, our delay, lack of resolve, desire to bring on board the international community and wishful thinking in general have exacerbated Iran's position.

They laugh at our deference to ideals of restraint and tolerance - ideals that have no meaning in Islamic culture as it exists today. The weaker and more vacillating we are - and the more inclined we are to believe that they accept those norms and values) - the more likely they are to act with force. History is full of examples of that enduring dynamic in human nature and the psychology of power. We reject it at our peril.

Even if a U.S. attack brings chaos or a regime even more resolutely opposed to our values and aims (something that's hard to imagine), it would be a mess with less capacity to lash out and do damage. (Yes, we've heard all the arguments about breeding new jihadists. We don't buy them.) Those at home still opposed to taking any serious action against Islamofascism in general have their heads in the sand. They are going to oppose any initiative on Iran (or anywhere else for that matter) whether we sugar-coat it or not. We're better off not floating such rosy scenarios lest we deceive and surprise ourselves when chaos results.

Chaos may be necessary. Robb concludes:

Despite these well-founded fears, the lack of other viable options coupled with the pertinacious intent of the U.S. administration to stop Iran from building the bomb (heedless of the costs), will likely drive the Pentagon towards this method of attack. To the Bush administration, all alternatives are preferable to a nuclear-armed Iranian clerical regime with de facto control over Palestine’s Hamas, Shiite militias in Iraq, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and numerous other global terror groups. For those contemplating this attack, the Iranian regime, with Ahmadinejad as its public face, has become everything that Saddam promised to be and more. [emphasis added]

Fundamentalism Compared

Sleep-deprived after a Tuesday night spent looking for our dog who'd gone walkabout (he's since returned - bedraggled and tired after 12 hours running who-knows-where, but otherwise OK), we're not going to attempt a cogent essay. Instead, we refer you to a powerful thought meme we picked up in a comment by one Richard Landes over at ShrinkWrapped yesterday. It explains in compelling fashion how a body of faith can mature out of dangerous fundamentalism into a more emotionally mature, tolerant (and, we would add, patiently faithful, forviging) form that merely irritates (rather than feeling compelled to crush) non-believers.

"What Islam needs, and what led Christians to be able to move into a civil society, was the emergence of a form of religious integrity and psychological security that permitted Christians not to feel that the "truth" of their faith depended on dominating others. One historian, reflecting on the notion of tolerance in the Protestant period concluded that it was "a loser's creed" -- ie that only people in the minority argued for tolerance, but when they had political power, they imposed their beliefs on others.

The American revolution and constitution was the first time tolerance was a winner's creed in the history of Christianity. That's the revolution that Islam needs, and in order to do so, they need people courageous enuf to give priority to the early Suras of the Quran (last ones in the collection) that anticipate an imminent day of Judgment and call on people to behave well towards each other (and especially the disadvantaged) in order to be saved, rather than the later Suras (early ones in the Quran) that lay out a theology of dominion." [emphasis added]

This long post and comment thread over at Ambivablog explores a similar question (what is it about religion inciting violence?) from the vantage point of the ancient Hebrew scriptures.

Rolling Over the Low Countries: The Islamist Takeover of Europe

[See Thursday update below]

This morning's Wall Street Journal ($ub$ required) carries a startling page one article on Islamist intimidation in Holland. The piece concerns 36-year-old Somali-born "Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali [who] has been threatened repeatedly with "execution" by Islamist extremists. She lives in an apartment with bulletproof windows, and is driven to work at the Dutch Parliament by armed guards, who vary the route to outfox would-be hit men."

Yesterday, Ali was forced out of parliament and (soon) Holland as well not by the Islamists but (ironically) by fellow politicians angry at her illegal immigration status (something she's publicly acknowledged since 2002). That plus complaints by neighbors fearful for their safety and property values. Does anyone else hear echoes of "keine Juden gewährten" in this seemingly innocuous and understandable desire to look out for one's own in the midst of encroaching fear and oppression? ("No Jews Allowed" signs started popping up around Germany in 1935.) Apparently Ms. Ali sees plenty of 1930's-era similarities, as the WSJ notes:

Born in Somalia and raised in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, Ms. Hirsi Ali says the attitude of her neighbors smacks of World War II-style "appeasement." Others say they sympathize with her predicament but fault her for polarizing society with her attacks on Islamic custom as backward and incompatible with Western values.

Which would be a fine critique except for the fact that the broad sweep of Islam is backward and incompatible with Western values. And Ms. Ali's upbringing ought to give her the perspective to say that with authority. Obfuscating it only delays the day of reckoning.

Of course the objections to Ms. Ali living where she does don't exist in a vacuum now any more than they did then. The WSJ notes the real reasons of those bent on orchestrating Ali's defeat: "growing public disenchantment with her denunciations of both radical Islam and more conventional Muslim doctrines."

Chillingly, we find this elsewhere in the article:

On state television last week, a satirical talk-show host joked about [Ms. Ali's eviction from her apartment], asking a guest -- the Dutch lawyer of an Islamist militant who killed filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 -- whether Ms. Hirsi Ali would be safest living in a mosque, at Guantanamo Bay or "six feet under in a garden." The audience roared with laughter. [emphasis added]

This all in pleasant, peace-loving little Holland.

Though this particular case hasn't drawn blood (yet), it's tightly connected to the fatwah that began with the brazen 2002 assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn and continued with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh being shot eight times, having his throat slit and then being stabbed in the chest in broad daylight on a public street in November, 2004 by a well-educated, Dutch-born Islamic radical. (We'd call that brazen too. It also pops the left's favorite balloon - again - the one about Islamic terrorism being all about poverty and Palestine. Rubbish.)

In case the connections between the three cases seem dubious to anyone, it's worth noting two other things: 1) van Gogh was a friend and supporter of Fortuyn and 2) it was Ayah Hirsi Ali's film 'Submission' (clip here) that Van Gogh was directing when he was killed!

Random this is not.

For anyone unfamiliar with these stories or their context, we'd strongly encourage a visit to the richly detailed Wikipedia links above. One tantalizing tidbit that resonates with current U.S. headlines: Fortuyn was widely derided for his calls to halt Muslim immigration to the Netherlands. Our Dutch in-laws report that many who looked down their enlightened noses at that stance four years ago are starting to see the wisdom in it now. As we continue through "The Myth of Islamic Tolerance", we're increasingly inclined to agree. This is not a religion of peace. MOIT editor Robert Spencer's blog is Jihad Watch. He comments on Ali's case here.

One thing that Spencer's expert contributors to MOIT make clear is that Dhimmitude 'sticks' because of the many fear-compliance reactions of Dhimmi peoples enforcing subjugation on one another. Consider that for a moment. Then think again about the Nazi (and other totalitarian) parallels. For anyone unfamiliar with the term Dhimmi (I thought I was until I began reading MOIT), we'd strongly encourage ten minutes of Googling on the subject. It is frightening to behold, yet it's a term that - like it or not - we will all need to know in coming years. Not surprisingly, the Wikipedia entry on the term reminds us of a high-scoring basketball game: from one end of the court to the other, depending on when you happen to look.

Thankfully the story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali looks like it may have a happy next chapter - for her anyway. Certainly not for Holland or the rest of Europe. She will be moving to the U.S. soon and going to work for the American Enterprise Institute*. (*For consistency's sake, that would be the conservative American Enterprise Institute.) That story and a live link to the entire 10-minute film, 'Submission' are here. We look forward to reading and blogging her stuff.

[Obligatory sarcasm alert.] Word has it that Ms. Ali's gutsy stance for women's rights under Islam will be taken up by the National Organization for Women... any day now. Or maybe not.

There are many other jaw-dropping revelations in the WSJ article. If you don't have a subscription, find a newstand and buy a copy. You won't regret it.

UPDATE I: Kesher Talk has more on how Ali came to have her Dutch citizenship revoked (fourteen years after coming to Holland to flee Islamic persecution, four years after voluntarily revealing that she lied on an application and three years after becoming a member of parliament). Kesher includes a link to an English translation of Ali's resignation speech.

As former Nazi prisoner Pastor Martin Niemöller (a Nazi supporter prior to 1934) is said to have remarked in a poem he composed shortly after WWII: ...Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte. (...When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.) Many versions of the poem are floating around. This site provides a succinct if not definitive history, citing a passage in Charles Colson's book 'Kingdoms in Conflict':

Rev. Martin Niemöller was protected until 1937 by both the foreign press and influential friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he preached. Eventually, he was arrested for treason.

(Interestingly, Colson's 1989 book is acclaimed as both a hard-hitting critique of the 'religious right' and also by James Dobson as something every Christian should have on their bookshelf. It's no mean feat to get both endorsements for the same book!)

Niemöller is referenced by many (in fact more often by the left) as a voice of conscience - something that should argue for the relevance of his words and experience in this context. I.e., in light of what's going on in Europe today.

First they came for the gay right-wing politicians, then for the directors of mediocre short foreign films, then for the outspoken black women who lied on their citizenship applications...

Why should anyone stand up for them?

UPDATE II: Looks like Ali gets to keep her Dutch citizenship. Score one for public outrage.

Go Ahead... Make My Day

It's what we should be saying to Hugo Chavez in light of this.

Venezuela is considering selling its fleet of U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to another country, perhaps Iran [or Cuba], in response to a U.S. ban on arms sales to President Hugo Chavez's government...

If the left is going to accuse the U.S. of being imperialist regardless of what we do, we've got nothing to lose by making it a reality. Florida can sometimes get cold in the winter. We could use a new southern colony now that Panama is outside the fold.

OK, that was a little tongue-in-cheek. A little.

Anyone got a handle on how many illegal immigrants are actually Venezuelan agent-saboteurs?

Unfettered Contempt, Part II

Validating remarks we reported last week from a dinner party guest concerning her Western home state ("Of course it's full of Republican rednecks") is this vitriol-filled blog post:

Idaho, Utah and Wyoming -- with just 4 million people or about 1.5% of the American population -- are the last three U.S. states where a very slim majority approves of the shamed president's wretched administration. Those lonesome states are currently reporting 52%, 51% and 50% job-approval ratings for Bush. Just 16 months ago, the Bush campaign claimed 30 of the 50 U.S. states and 51% of the nationwide vote.

As many on the left are wont to do these days, the writer conflates midterm MSM opinion polls on job approval (that's four red flags right there) with the hard work of fielding an effective opposing candidate. Never mind the fact that some of those who disapprove of his job performance (especially the last few months) do so because they believe he's gone wobbly on conservative principles and promises. That's hardly an argument for electing a candidate from a party that views Joe Lieberman as persona non grata and thinks John McCain is a real Republican.

Note to Dems (and a few of my right-leaning brethren): no matter how bad you think the president is (and we tend to agree with The Anchoress that he's unfairly taking it on the chin), winning an election requires persuading people you otherwise might not like that you have something demonstrably better in the form of a particular human being whose life history and character indicate that s/he's likely to be able to credibly execute on his/her promises. Pointing out how the current president has failed in fulfilling all of his is not enough. Contempt, bitterness and constant criticism from the sidelines are never attractive - to friends, much less voters. As Republican Teddy Roosevelt famously noted:

"It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or the doer of deeds could have them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the Arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but he who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great devotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat."

Plausibly Deniable Dirty Tricks

Two behaviors that Republican administrations have been accused of employing (so-called 'dirty tricks' under Nixon and 'plausible deniability' under Reagan) now seem commonplace at the network started by Hanoi Jane's husband:

CNN aired President Bush rehearsing his immigration speech from the Oval Office... "The president is rehearsing and the network pool inadvertently went to the president as he is rehearsing," anchor Wolf Blitzer explained. FOXNEWS, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and other outlets did not air the rehearsal. The slip comes just six months after CNN mistakenly placed a bold black 'X' mark over Vice President Cheney's face as he gave a speech. [emphasis added]

Two points make a line.

Global Warming, Local Deluge... and Common Sense

As we here in New England shiver our way through a month wetter and gloomier than any May since 1936 - on the verge of breaking all-time records, and with two weeks still to go - Senator Olympia Snow (R-in-name-only, Maine) is concerned about global warming:

"We also need to act urgently on global warming. Reducing our carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 420 million metric tons by 2025 – the equivalent of taking 90 million cars off the road in one year – is one of the most important steps we can take to address global warming. We must act now."

Yeah, now. Right now. Nice timing. Let's make it colder and wetter and take ninety million cars off the road. Her poor rural constituents up where Spring doesn't come 'til the Fourth of July will absolutely love that one. Anyone care to check how often she takes the trainfrom Maine to Washington? Maybe she rode her bike 600 miles through the latest deluge. Riiiight...

Yeah, we know: Global warming won't lead to warming everywhere. You can't draw conclusions from local, temporary phenomena. She's talking about car equivalents. We know all that. At least Ms. Snowe can't be accused of pumping up the global warming media engine on cue on the first 90+ degree day on the East Coast as inevitably happens each year. (Mark our words on that one.)

But as with the other global-warming sycophants, she demands that this issue be seen as more important than a whole lot of things (like terrorism) that it simply is not... and never will be. The solution from the global warming worshipping crowd is always top-down - central planning.

We're from the government and we're here to help you Aroostook County potato farmers buy new solar-powered tractors with this federal government subsidy that you'll be eligible for if you can just figure out how to fill out the tax form to apply for it.

Father knows best.

Meanwhile proving once again that if the left's agenda doesn't exactly match that of the Islamists, it rhymes awfully darned well, Al Jazeera is jumping on the global warming bandwagon. Yes, you read that right. Anything to bash the U.S. Anything to drum up the internal opposition to a president who's got their number and isn't going to be easily swayed by a lot of smooth-talking European diplomats.

OK, full disclosure: the Al Jazeera report is merely picking up on a hand-wringing report on the 'likely' effects of climate change issued by Christian Aid. That affiliation is more than a little bit ironic for OBL's favorite jihad-beheading video distribution service. But you might ask, what does Christian Aid know about global warming? Well... what they've heard. You know. The consensus. The sky is falling.

Fortunately we have people like Steven F. Hayward at the AEI to re-inject a few grains of sense into this conversation and note that the 'consensus' is hardly that. Some arguments will be familiar to global warming junkies but the piece does a better job than any I've seen at succinctly laying out all the major avenues of skepticism as well as alternative solutions. Some may be shocked to discover that if global warming is real and we decide to do something about it there are strategies for dealing with it that don't look anything like Kyoto (aka, Al Gore's wet dream world government run amok). Highlights:

A sensible climate policy would emphasize building resilience into our capacity to adapt to climate changes--whether cooling or warming; whether wholly natural, wholly man-made, or somewhere in between...

First, the transition to a post-carbon world decades from now will come about more quickly and efficiently by keeping energy markets open and unregulated than by subsidizing particular energy technologies or artificially making energy more expensive...

Second, we should implement practical carbon-sequestration measures: the capturing and storing of carbon in any number of places, whether underground, deep in the ocean, or in biomass (think more trees). [OK, he is the Weyerhauser Fellow at AEI. Is planting trees a bad thing?] ...

Third, we should consider strategies of adaptation to a changing climate. A rise in the sea level need not be the end of the world, as the Dutch have taught us...

Finally, we should consider climate modification. If humanity is powerful enough to disrupt the climate negatively, we might also be able to change it for the better... the interval between the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk and Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon was a mere 66 years. It is entirely reasonable to expect vast changes in our technical capacity before the century is out.

From our geology/enviro-studies days we know that sequestration is not nearly as nutty as it sounds, having been after all, the natural mechanism the earth has used since plant life and marine organisms with calcium carbonate shells came into being. Like Hayward, we're also bullish on the human capacity for creative problem-solving and why not? That hubris and pessimism could be combined to reach the conclusion that we can and must do something now using today's technology is an odd mix when you think about it.

We have the power to change the planet but not the power to do so more cleverly and efficiently 50 years from now... or avoid the problem altogether... or realize that the models were flawed and it's not a problem after all?

How's that again?

The only thing that makes us nervous about the last point ('climate modification') is that in the hands of the Kyoto crowd it would be scary indeed. Al Gore turns on the global blast chiller and... Oops. There goes Canada... and Sweden... and Britain. So much for the Gulf Stream. How could we have known? Sorry. Of course if the Islamists get their way and return us all to the 7th century, we won't be needing to worry about any of this. Maybe the lefty enviros and the Islamists are in cahoots in more ways than we think...

We Have Met the Enemy... Sort Of

What would one think of a high level national security document, the first page of which was entitled "Background of the Current Crisis", and which went on to paint a picture of an enemy that was "animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." On-target, right? Candid. Clear-thinking. Another chapter, titled "The Fundamental Purpose of the United States" describes who we are and what we're fighting for, another "The Underlying Conflict in the Realm of Ideas and Values Between the U.S. Purpose and the Islamofascist Design" outlines the deeper rifts with the enemy's philosophy.

One might think that we'd finally gotten our act together, naming the enemy, stating clearly who we are and what we stand for, and laying the groundwork for victory against forces that declared war on us at least 27 years ago. One would also be reading NSC-68 - a document delivered to Harry Truman in April, 1950, a mere eight months after the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon. The only exception would be the word "Islamofascist", which we substituted for "Kremlin" in the original. The first phrase in italics is entirely from the original.

The point? We used to be able to recognize when someone was trying to kill us and marshall the full resources of our national government to combat them. No longer, as Daniel Henninger writes in Friday's OpinionJournal:

Who could disagree? Well, many did--ceaselessly outside the government, mostly in academic centers and policy journals. It was a lively, titanic debate. But not inside the government, or at least nothing that compares to what has been leaking out about the war on terror. The most serious bureaucratic disputes within the government's Cold War intelligence agencies involved disagreements over arms-reduction proposals in the SALT talks and the like. But there was no serious disagreement with the ideology or threat described in NSC-68. Occasionally some in the West's intelligence services who couldn't abide this ideology (or decided to cash out) simply defected; they went over to the other side. [italics in original; bold added]

What they did not do was continue working for the CIA among peers who felt the same way. They did not entertain book offers. They were not celebrated in the MSM as heroes exercising their conscience and First Amendment rights. They physically fled a firing squad, forever shamed and reviled as traitors in their home nation. Some may see that world of 50+ years ago as having been insufficiently enlightened and in other ways it was. We see a world in which, having been given a credible threat by a determined foe we could not abide, we recognized it not as fear-mongering but for what exactly it was and addressed it with unity and resolve.

Henninger's piece is a must read.

New Dog

Almost two weeks late in posting this. Our new boy (a 4-5 year-old border collie mix with some larger breed at around 55#) has been behaving himself reasonably well now that he's realized this is home. Like the rest of us however, he'll be glad when the week's worth of rain (so far) finally lets up here in the Boston area.

Diplomatic Back Channels - The True Story

Visit the lavatory, put down your coffee, finish chewing, prepare supplemental oxygen and then check out this piece by James Lileks lampooning Ahmadinejad's letter to President Bush:

...we seek only peace, and peace is our goal, and there is nothing more we love than peace. Except death. Sorry; forgot. Death is definitely number one.

Reminds of again of the Team America scene in which the Tim Robbins puppet screams "we want $%^&g peace!" while spraying the room with machine-gun fire.

Civil Liberties, Taxes and the NSA Brouhaha

We happened to catch an insightful comment by Mark Steyn on Hugh Hewitt's radio show late last week in which he noted (paraphrasing), that while government collection of information on private citizens is generally something to be minimized (we agree), it is curious that those worked up about NSA 'intrusions' seem nowhere near as concerned about their income tax returns.

I.e., every potentially tax-paying adult is routinely forced under threat of imprisonment to reveal far more about how they conduct their life (who they pay and how much as well as who they are paid by and how much), not to mention carrying the burden of proof in the form of receipts for defending what they have spent, on what and how much, than any social network analysis of phone calling patterns could ever possibly discover. The NSA may figure out that I called my aunt Sally at 3:18PM on Friday the 12th of May, 2006 but what they are really interested in (and only if she is an Al Q'aeda operative) is the fact that I call her at all.

By contrast, it has been 93 years since we acquiesced as a nation to the frighteningly broader powers in the hands of the IRS - the power for example, to paw through not only my phone bills but all of my financial dealings, while putting me in the position of assumed guilt (i.e., tax liability) unless and until I can document my innocence.

Which highlights another point of confusion.

Watching telephone traffic is very different from monitoring its content. It is the difference between the power of a traffic helicopter and the power of someone who has implanted a listening device in the upholstery of my car. We have no objection to the wholesale use of the former - meaning 'we' in the sense of societal consensus. Traffic helicopter images have become the stuff of titillating if increasingly routine television drama (i.e., the car chase on the freeway).

We have justifiable reason to object to the latter (listening-in) if it is done on wholesale basis, if it is a permanent fixture of law (as opposed to a temporary measure to win a war), if it is intrusive and/or if it is done without oversight and justification. None of those criteria are true in any of the NSA stories making the news. Bipartisan Congressional committees have had oversight of these programs under two administrations with no objections for years... until it became politically advantageous for Democrats to raise them. Listening-in has hardly been wholesale - limited as it is to identified Al Q'aeda operatives and overseas calls.

Furthermore, the experience of this country to date would suggest that such measures as the NSA is taking recently are resoundingly temporary. Even a casual review of the intrusions justified during past American wars reveals that they were both more intrusive than the current ones - by far - and that they were rolled back when the enemy was vanquished.

The same cannot be said for the income tax, much less for the thousand other things it pays for - permanent fixtures of a bloated and ever-growing welfare/nanny state our founders would scarcely recognize. 'War on Poverty'? Statistics would suggest that in absolute historical terms (e.g., barefoot, starving kids who never had an opportunity to attend school) it has largely been won - the remaining exceptions and inevitably permanent relative poverty proving the rule. Yet unlike wartime information-gathering powers, the intrusive measures justified by it have not been rolled back - not by a long shot. It would be easy to come up with other examples.

Those sincerely interested in civil liberties (and for the record, that should be all of us) should direct their ire judiciously and consistently if they're to be taken seriously when it really counts. Protecting civil liberties requires vigilance, but it also demands wisdom, forbearance, common sense, timing and an appreciation of the true threats and issues the republic is dealing with. Shrill, unbending absolutist calls to blindfold and handicap our ability to prosecute a war with an emeny that recognizes no such liberties may bring us exactly what we deserve. Thank goodness that - unlike much of the world - the bounds of government power versus individual rights remain open to honest debate among sensible participants in this wonderful experiment of ours.

UPDATE: Marc Schulman has a nice take over at American Future, tracing the president's woes to a failure to bring two parallel worlds together and referencing another article by Mark Steyn. World #1: those actually fighting the war. World #2: those still playing by pre-9-11 rules. That the two worlds oftentimes reside in the same individuals is the source of much cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy.

Bin Laden - Parasite on the Left Wing Blogosphere?

Fascinating theory over at Reason:

Perhaps bin Laden himself turned to the blogosphere after 9/11, in search of theories and arguments with which he might justify his murderous assault. The latest statement reveals the extent to which bin Laden borrows from Western discussions of the Middle East. He seems less a man with a clear religious or political agenda than a parasite feeding off the fear and loathing of his enemies... Bin Laden’s justifications for 9/11 also changed in tune with Western theories... Bin Laden’s parasitical relationship with Western debate really came into its own from 2004 onward. During this period he has sounded almost indistinguishable from various left-wing blogs... Bin Laden frequently drops the names of the anti-war blogosphere’s favorite authors and activists. [emphasis added]

With the 18-page letter to President Bush last week, it seems that Ahmadinejad has taken a page from OBL's playbook. As in Team America: World Police, which we watched for the first time last night (laughing so hard we nearly passed out), the terrorists work hard to co-opt and learn from the West's left-wing. We marvel at how well truth often emulates fiction. There is more concisely expressed geopolitical wisdom in the film's final foul-mouthed monologue than we've seen virtually anywhere else.

Liberals Saving Rats

Last night we hosted my wife's book group at our home. Since I had proposed the book to her in the first place and didn't want to eat alone, I joined them. Aside from our new dog, I was the only male at the table. The book and our brief conversation about it are immaterial to this post.

This post is about unguarded liberal silliness.

As was true last year at another dinner party it didn't take too many glasses of wine before the candid political opinions started to fly. Being largely 'in the closet' on such matters except with my left-leaning wife, I had a fly-on-the-wall position to observe and take mental notes on species liberalis hypocriticus. I thought my silence might have made me suspect. Instead, as a resident of the state of Massachusetts I was assumed to be a silent ally.

Though sorely tempted to engage in debate at several points, I did not. Watching proved more fun than arguing. No minds were going to be changed last night. Some of these individuals are longstanding friends. It is their views not their persons that we choose to lampoon here. Better to wait for an opportunity when I can truly savor the experience of 'outing' myself.

We begin with the rats.

One of the guests lives in what's probably the most liberal zip code on the planet: 02138. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Apparently, they have a rat problem in the city. Her building (otherwise genteel and modern) has a particularly acute rat problem. The condo owners took a vote: something must be done. They took another vote: we cannot kill the rats. Let us trap them, someone suggested. Live. The motion passed. Then we will relocate the live rats... somewhere. Exactly where was not specified. Perhaps to an adjacent town. Perhaps to a bizarre and horrific zoo. Perhaps they will be spayed, neutered, cleaned up and offered as pets. It is unclear whether any rats have actually yet been trapped under this program. What is clear is that there will be much anguish and sorrow if one of them turns up dead.

We move on to the geese.

One of the other guests lives in an exurb of Boston. Her property backs up on a small pond. Canada geese like to congregate there, foul the water, crap on her lawn and multiply without challenge. Apparently there is a dearth of office parks in her vicinity where the geese could instead foul the soles of commuters' shoes. The conversation turned to how to reduce the goose population. Declaring open season on the adult geese never came up - an idea completely out of the realm of conscious consideration. One does not discuss such things in polite company in this state. How would one hunt after all, if one does not understand or condone verbal confrontation much less the responsible ownership of guns?

Finally, someone suggested oiling the incubating goose eggs. Another woman didn't understand the suggestion. What do you mean? Why would you do that?, she asked. To kill the baby geese, the first one responded.

Kill. Babies. Oops. Looks of shock and horror.

A third woman quickly stepped in: She means to abort the eggs before they hatch.

Faces relaxed. Heads nodded.

Of course. That makes sense: 'abort' them. (A 'safe', acceptable thing to do.) Eggs. Of course. Not babies. Not unborn. Eggs are what we have for breakfast. No problem.

The conversation moved on.

For the record, I care little about how exactly the goose population is held in check. What I find remarkable though, is how cognizant a liberal, pro-abortion group is about being on the slippery slope of language on the topic.

Even when the subjects are wild animals, and even within a group they felt was safely homogeneous on the point, there was nonetheless a flash of embarrassment at having used plain language to describe the ending of unborn life - a flash of recognition that the next step on that logical path was verboten - absolutely not up for reflection (much less open discussion).

Don't go there, their eyes seemed to say in unison. Closed subject. Pandora's box. Don't think too hard about it lest we discover that we're more concerned about vermin than about human beings. In a group otherwise inclined to equate animals with people - giving sewer rats the benefit of the doubt for goodness sakes! - the reluctance to make the connection in the other direction was palpable. Next topic. Move on.

After rats and geese, the next topic might seem more mundane, but it did perhaps an even better job of illustrating broad liberal angst and bewilderment at the state of the world today.

One guest (the Cambridgite with the rat problem) hails originally from a very conservative state out West. This is a state where if there were any blogging liberals still living there who managed to get themselves invited to any dinner parties, they'd be writing the mirror image of this post. The president's election opponent in 2004 didn't ever seriously consider contesting this state. What ensued was a lengthy description of her latest trip there:

There is ample parking. The roads don't have potholes. The lines are painted fresh every year. The pace is slower. Things are inexpensive. Everyone wants to help you. They know what customer service means. I never had to stand in any lines. They have bronze statues in the public parks. They invest in civic institutions. The library is modern and comprehensive. The coffee shops are great. Even the gay couple that owns the diner feels at home. Everyone is warm and friendly.

For a moment, I imagined she was on the verge of moving back. (She's lived here for most of her adult life.) She quickly corrected herself however, apropos of nothing: "Of course it's full of Republican rednecks", she said, as if that explained something profound. Never once did she think to make a positive connection between conservative values and the halycon life she had just described. People just happened to be polite and civic-minded. Complete coincidence.

Heads nodded. Of course. Republicans. 'Rednecks'. (Same thing in her view, not recognizing she was sitting next to one.) That completely explained why she wouldn't want to live there.

"The active volcano in the center of town is spewing venomous snakes and molten lava", she might have said. Or, "the place is overrun with lepers, many of whom have bubonic plague; the rest have SARS or bird flu".

Uninhabitable. Vermin. Of course. Why would anyone want to live there? Better to live in Cambridge... where they take tender care of the rats and the geese are all pro-choice.

UPDATE I: I almost forgot... One guest was genuinely confused, to the point of seeming hurt, by the recent decision by Brandeis University (a foundationally Jewish institution) to pull an exhibit of Palestinian 'art'. "How could they do that? Some of the artists are children!", she exclaimed, as if their age excused them from the bounds of civility and decorum - funny little social customs we've come to accept here in the West... things like not strapping explosives to oneself and triggering them in public places. "But I would have thought that a university would be open to all points of view!", she further exclaimed as if the lightest zephyr of right-leaning expression against a steady gale of left-leaning on-campus indoctrination were equivalent to Huns sacking a walled city. Brandeis is one of the most liberal campuses in the country. On a recent campus tour, the guide took positive delight in that fact. For the censorship of Palestinian 'speech' to raise such a fuss when censorship of the opposite point of view has been commonplace is more than little bit hypocritical.

UPDATE II: Welcome Anchoress readers! While you're here, you might want to also check out this update to the bit about the conservative state out West.

Walk Softly and Carry a Stuffed Elmo Doll

A loyal reader tips us off to this excellent, provocative piece (its excellence stemming in large part from its provocativeness) over at Quid Nimis:

...stop clinging to the notion that civility is the mark of civilization. It isn't, if you extend every courtesy to a barbaric enemy. The first obligation of the civilized person isn't to be polite. It is to defend his civilization...

...by the lights stunted morality of much of Western society... every problem is put through the sieve of "What would Elmo do?"

In the real world every one knows and understands and has experienced the immutable fact that you don't get bullied if everyone knows you'll defend yourself. Children who have grown up on the Sesame Street values have never been told the rest of the story. Elmo, after 36 years, is still four. He is still understanding in a childish way, but the rest of us should be understanding the world in an adult way, the way life has instructed us. That we stand up for ourselves and for the defenseless (including those whose lives have already been cut short) even if it means resorting to violence. Disciplined, swift, sure retribution, not farcical play pretend civility that serves only to mock justice.

That's more than enough to warrant a position on the KM blogroll once we get done taking our dog to the vet this morning. Let us riff on it even further for a moment...

What Quid is poking at (not unlike a hornet's nest, we suspect) is the irreconcilability of the left's professed desire for justice (a term more often than not preceded and modified by the word 'social' - whatever that means) and its professed desire for non-violence. It does not require an in-depth review of 20th century history to observe that where the former has been emphasized (i.e., "social justice" as the left typically construes it, i.e., equality of economic comfort), the latter has gone by the wayside.

History shows that breaking eggs (aka, skulls) is just too handy a justification when the goal is beautifully fluffy, symmetrical, cheese-filled omelets (aka a fantastical society of total equality of result, regardless of behavior, talent or effort). All of which begs the question of whether such a 'just' and equal society would in fact be miserable and poor because all incentives for work and creativity would have been crushed under the bootheels of "public good" and the social engineering required to get there. Which isn't really a question at all (or shouldn't be) because we've got history to show us the clear result of such overarching ambitions.

As Quid notes (and as we observe in our travels with the religious left here in New England) a selectively happy reading of the Bible does point to the two (peace and justice) being reconcilable... eventually. But it's a narrow reading indeed. As an interesting (to us) side note, the term "social justice" appears not once in the more common translations of the Bible. And where the term does appear - only as a parenthetical heading - the context is almost comically opposite to how the left usually uses it: Exodus 22:16 - If a man seduces a virgin who is not engaged to be married and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife... Oops. Not very Summer-of-Love. Not very PC. Not very... "progressive". So much for social justice.

The reason Quid's piece resonates with us is our life experience... an experience not all that different, we suspect, from that of many readers. Enduring middle school. Goofing off in college. Parenting. Owning a dog. Especially with the latter - since it is very much on our minds recently - one learns that the credible threat of violence, or at least of coercive power (though seldom its actual use - a point on which both left and right misunderstand the current administration) is essential to positive behavior modification... to making the uncivilized pup or stray into a civilized member of the household, the neighborhood and society. It is in fact the very fabric of society. After a brief flirtation with total anarchy in the '60s, even the most left-leaning flower-child will acknowledge that police are useful if only as an alternative to having to admit that the gun lobby was right and purchasing a firearm to defend one's family and property oneself - an ugly task that most of the cerebral class (and most human beings, really) would prefer to outsource to a competent authority.

Where the train leaves the tracks seems to be in the international arena (and in the realm of parenting - but that's another rant). In the post-Marxian hangover from left-wing 1960's anti-authoritarian ideals, there remains a specious but continually attractive misconception that the relations between nations do not require Leviathan. As we've noted before (though not uniquely), a selective reading of Hobbes leaves one considering how bad life must once have been ("nasty, brutish, and short") without the essential qualifier that that state exists only without Leviathan. Without swift, benevolent, directed power. Without the credible threat (credible only because it has been demonstrated from time to time) that if one strays from certain norms or threatens unrestrained violence against innocents for the purpose of conquest - all three qualifiers being important - that one will be stopped. Not talked to endlessly, but stopped.

That is why it was critical that Saddam be deposed (the mere possibility of WMD there having been important primarily because of who was threatening to wield them). That is why it is critical that Ahmadinejad be stopped as well. And that is why in order to retain even a shred of intellectual credibility, the left must project illegitimacy on each of those three qualifiers (restraint, protection of the innocent, and lack of conquering motives) when it comes to this administration.

The Perennial Fecklessness of International 'Consensus'

Iran continues to worry us as much as it has all year. We've been unmotivated to blog it because of the sheer predictability of how things are playing out. Yet that predictability itself seems worth comment this week. Have we learned nothing from Iraq under Saddam? (Or for that matter, Germany under Hitler?)

A lone actor (Iran in this case) has a clear military goal. They have declared it. They are driving towards it relentlessly. As they do so, they throw up chaff but it is we who pick the chaff out of the air and examine it under a microscope, hoping that it is truth.

Iran's enemy (the rest of the world - mostly) is too open for their own good. They (we) are too bent on consensus and rules and appearances and niceties to ever move quickly, cleverly or decisively when the cost of doing so is still modest. The U.S. and the international community - or, more accurately the process in which we that 'community' is participating, is utterly predictable. This fact allows Iran ample opportunity to concoct diversionary tactics and disrupt our orderly attempts at finding 'solutions'. The fact that we may see and reject those tactics makes little difference. They win every time we crank up the rusty wheels of international diplomacy to consider their latest move. They win ever time they slow things down or cause a few less committed individuals and nations on the margins to think maybe this isn't so bad...

A senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the meeting [of the U.S., Russia, China and Germany] agreed that Iran must pay a price for not complying with U.N. resolutions but did not come to terms on what form that would take.

"Pay a price". Isn't that wonderful. What on earth does it mean? Haven't we heard this before? It means everything... and therefore nothing. It is just talk. In Tehran they are laughing their collective a--es off. It is unclear from the article if France was participating in these talks or not. Either way, we don't care. Why Britain was not included is odd - to say the least. Why Germany is involved at all is simply bizarre. And why India is not involved (being as they are, a neighboring non-Muslim nuclear power and increasingly reliable U.S. trading partner and ally) is the very definition of anachronism.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Tass news agency: "All of us agreed that Iran must not have nuclear weapons." He stressed Moscow's desire to draw Iran into "fruitful" negotiations on the issue. Major power political directors will meet on Iran on Tuesday in New York and will likely meet again next week but sponsors -- aiming for unity -- have backed off a timeline for security council action, the U.S. official said. Margaret Beckett, Britain's new foreign secretary, said "No one has the intention of taking military action (against Iran). That was not discussed. It was not an issue." [emphasis added]

What an utterly meaningless pile of weasel words! Desire to draw into 'fruitful' negotiations... By my count that's four qualifiers short of the line drawn in the sand in the previous sentence ("must not have... nukes"). Is anyone connecting the dots here? Has anyone given credence to the very simple idea that there is no "talk" or "process" no matter how clever or unified, that will change Iran's behavior?

As we've said before, diplomacy is necessary and important, but its inherent weakness is that within itself, it does not contain the rules or logic for identifying when it has failed. Credible options beyond the bounds of diplomacy (with time-specific and/or impasse-specific triggers) are necessary in order for talk to be effective.

Or to put it another way: there must be a Cntrl-Alt-Del option available to an intelligent outside party to jolt the system (in this case the diplomatic system) out of an endless and fruitless loop. The UN Security Council is not that Cntrl-Alt-Del. It is, instead, the romantic idea of a Cntrl-Alt-Del. It is the phrase Cntrl-Alt-Del. It is a set of plastic Cntrl-Alt-Del keys... glued to a block of wood. Press them all you like. They will do nothing.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote to President George W. Bush proposing [he claimed] "new ways" to resolve their differences. But a copy obtained by Reuters showed a long [18 page] rambling treatise that focused on American wrongdoings and did not contain ideas for ending the dispute over Iran's nuclear ambitions... a European diplomat who works on the Iran issue but was not authorized to speak publicly called the letter "another tactical masterstroke..."

We're reminded of the Unabomber: an isolated, self-justifying megalomaniac who recognizes no "other": a manifesto that offers no hint of empathy or understanding beyond that which is necessary to explain itself still further and justify its own ambitions. And in that sense, the memo is an absolute masterstroke. What it contains is immaterial. The fact that Ahmadinejad sent it is what the average person will remember. The fact that it (ostensibly) represents the first publicly acknowledged direct communication between the enemies in 27 years is what will be remembered. It could be a list of falaffel recipes and it would have the same effect on the world media.

That effect is to cause those who aren't megalomaniacs, who aren't psychopaths and (this is important) who don't want to believe that such nasty creatures even exist (much less that they would be armed with nukes) to pause and consider: Are we doing the right thing? Is this situation really that bad? Isn't there some third way? Can't it all just end without conflict?

'Pausing' (again) is exactly what they'd like us to do - 'considering' (again) the possibility that Iran's leaders are not bent on what they're bent on. We'd like to believe those things too, but find no reason to adopt such happy delusions. We are allowing ourselves to be had - all in the interest of finding a consensus that (mark our words) will not emerge and will not be effective in stopping Iran's nuclear weapons program if it does. The world will pay dearly for our fecklessness.

UPDATE (3:20PM): The full text of the Ahmadinejad letter to President Bush can be found over at Classical Values, with a link to the pdf at LeMonde.

Dennis Prager is pointing out this afternoon that the letter lines up almost perfectly with the arguments of the left. E.g., the president is not a 'good' Christian, he is hypocritical, he is leading the world astray, etc. Very nice, except that that tactic has been tried before. See: War, Cold. Hello! The man (or rather, his publicists - or whatever they call them over there) reads the Western media. Such a letter is set up to use familiar arguments already well honed by the political opposition.

For those with less time on their hands, key excerpts from the letter can be found here. Also recommended: a succinct analysis by Clarity and Resolve noting that this kind of overture is obligatory before Iran can justify its next round of actions as holy war. I.e., draw the West into a specific rejection of the tenets of Islam. (Had we known, we would have sent Mr. Ahmadinejad an invitation to hear that here on KMaru.)

Related note: we just picked up two books at the library today: "The Myth of Islamic Tolerance", edited by Robert Spencer, and "The West's Last Chance", by Tony Blankley. Watch for reviews soon if our new dog allows us to catch up on sleep enough to stay awake reading 'em.

Legislating Dietary Virtue

Last week it was announced that soft drinks would be made less available to teens nationwide. Not missing a beat, the City of Chicago has announced that it is banning the sale or serving of foie gras within city limits effective in 90 days. Joseph Epstein opines in today's WSJ (subscription required):

Over a lengthy and immoderate life I have eaten a modest amount of foie gras, and have found some of it better than others. But were I to be sent to the gallows or the electric chair, I should not select it when composing the menu for my last meal. The problem with Chicago's banning of foie gras, then, is not a personal one for me, but ultimately a problem of civil liberties: those of fairly high rolling gourmets versus those of geese and ducks... Yet if there is something repellent about the slaughtering of animals, this is very nearly counterbalanced by the sight and sounds of vegetarians in high moral dudgeon. For a pungent example, at a Chicago city council committee hearing on the banning of foie gras, the actress Loretta Switt [sic], an animal-rights activist, compared the forced feeding of geese and ducks to the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

A better analogy might be Guantanamo, where as we reported back in February, detainees are treated to an astoundingly high 4200+ calories per day on average. As we reported last week, Ms. Swit is far from alone in her misguided campaign to bring animals up to a level of respect and good treatment that nobody bothered to accord Terri Schiavo. (Idle question: why is it that women seem to be leading the PETA charge?) Epstein goes on to make some dire predictions for the future of the nanny state (a general term, not meant to apply to Illinois exclusively). They are predictions that, sadly, we wouldn't think it wise to bet against:

Now that foie gras has been banned from Chicago -- the production and sale of it in California is also to end in 2012 -- the way is clear for banning other meats. My own guess for the next banned meat would be veal. The slaughtering of calves to yield veal has long been an object of moral consternation on the part of the tender-hearted. From there pork might next target of the troops of virtue, for pigs, I not long ago read, are more intelligent than horses. After pork, one can see a general ban on all kinds of sausage.

For the record, we begin marching in the streets when they start banning wine and ice cream.

Krauthammer on Hitler v2.0

A must read piece in yesterday's WaPo.

For 2,000 years, Jews found protection in dispersion -- protection not for individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could survive there. They could be persecuted in Spain and find refuge in Constantinople. They could be massacred in the Rhineland during the Crusades or in the Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Insurrection of 1648-49 and yet survive in the rest of Europe.

Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism married to modern technology -- railroads, disciplined bureaucracies, gas chambers that kill with industrial efficiency -- could take a scattered people and "concentrate" them for annihilation.

The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen -- after Hitler had made his intentions perfectly clear -- that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first in 2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49, 1967 and 1973).

But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration -- putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler's work.

His successors now reside in Tehran. The world has paid ample attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Israel must be destroyed. Less attention has been paid to Iranian leaders' pronouncements on exactly how Israel would be "eliminated by one storm," as Ahmadinejad has promised.

Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the presumed moderate of this gang, has explained that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam." The logic is impeccable, the intention clear: A nuclear attack would effectively destroy tiny Israel, while any retaliation launched by a dying Israel would have no major effect on an Islamic civilization of a billion people stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia.

Like Father, Like Son

Next time the media gets all worked up about a Bush 'dynasty', about the president's admitted past problems with alcohol, or about cover-ups and arrogant abuses of power in general, they might take a moment to compare it to this shameless doozy that astute readers have no doubt already seen on Drudge.

Police labor union officials asked acting Chief Christopher McGaffin this afternoon to allow a Capitol Police officer to complete his investigation into an early-morning car crash involving Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), son of Sen. Ted Kennedy...

“The driver exited the vehicle and he was observed to be staggering,” Baird’s letter states...“When it became apparent who it was, instead of processing a normal DWI, the watch commander had the Patrol units clear the scene...” [Thursday's] incident comes just over two weeks after Kennedy was involved in a car accident in Rhode Island. [emphasis added]

It is a well-established fact that a tendency to addiction can run in families. What is less well understood is whether setting oneself above the law and constructing elaborate edifices of barely transparent deceptions can as well. Decide for yourself. At least nobody was killed in this case, though from the sound of it they easily could have been. We reserve our condemnation for the irresponsible pre- and post-accident behavior and alleged lies (in both cases) rather than the addictions themselves. If the President can kick alcoholism and the Vice President can come clean about a terrible accident within an hour, others can too - if they choose to do so.

UPDATE (4:40PM): Well, that didn't take long.

"I know that I need help," the Rhode Island Democrat said at a [Friday] afternoon press conference, detailing what he called a long-term struggle with depression and addiction.

"I struggle every day with this disease, as do millions of Americans," Kennedy said.

He said he would be traveling Friday afternoon to Minnesota to seek help at the Mayo Clinic, where he was treated during the congressional recess at Christmas for an addiction to prescription pain medication. He said he returned "reinvigorated and healthy."

Kennedy, 39, said he had no recollection of the events surrounding the crash into a barricade on Capitol Hill early Thursday morning.

Good for him.

The Moussaoui Verdict

The WSJ ($sub$) notes this morning:

...the courts... can handle one Moussaoui circus, hundreds of such cases could cripple the justice system... America is at war with a relentless enemy, which observes no rules of war and wantonly murders innocent civilians. Fretting over whether enemy agents had dysfunctional childhoods is no way to win that war.

While Peggy Noonan opines at OpinionJournal:

How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason... He knew the trigger was about to be pulled. He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths. He could have stopped it. He did nothing...

Of course he had a bad childhood; of course he was abused. You don't become a killer because you started out with love and sweetness. Of course he came from unhappiness. So, chances are, did the nice man sitting on the train the other day who rose to give you his seat. Life is hard and sometimes terrible, and that is a tragedy. It explains much, but it is not a free pass.

We'll admit to being conflicted on this. We don't like the death penalty - for anything. Ever. Full stop. Don't bother with hypotheticals about my daughters being raped and murdered. We've already had those arguments over late-night beers and can't possibly know how we'd really feel in such a case. It is one of the few beliefs we hold as fervently today as when we were liberal wacko college students.

Among other things, and beyond this particular case, the death penalty is expensive and fraught with moral hazard (innocents who inevitably get sentenced and put to death.) But the argument that has stuck with us the longest is this (origin forgotten): the death penalty is the ultimate in government bureaucracy - like the DMV - but with the power of life and death. Scary. Yes, we appreciate that the procedural checks in a death penalty case are far more robust than the process of getting a drivers' license. But they are not lock-tight. We're human. As such, we fail in perfect judgment even with the best and most humanly just system is in place.

At the same time, we find it difficult to reconcile our lifelong absolutist position on this with the necessities of war. Had Moussaoui taken up an AK-47 and aimed it at troops in the field, or some similarly immediate, proximate and explicit action, we would have no problem whatsoever with a platoon of U.S. Marines raining down fire and death on him and his cohorts.

So we're left this morning feeling great ambivalence about Zacharias Moussaoui.

Had he been sentenced to death yesterday, we would have had a hard time getting emotionally worked up about it. A very hard time. The clinicality and deliberateness of the procedure would have been the only things that would have bothered us - not the ultimate outcome (his death at our collective hands).

Yet the fact that he was sentenced to life in prison does not leave us enraged or discouraged. We can understand that our fellow citizens (some of them anyway), felt it the more enlightened path to stay our hand and be merciful even when it is utterly against all natural reason to do so. If nothing else, it gives us a measure of empathy with our Creator who has had every right and reason to smote the whole sinful lot of us (again). That we're still here is a testament to His ultimate grace.

We can't completely reconcile that position with what we are needing to do on the battlefield: a course of action thrust upon us; a duty we could not have shirked (and must not in the future). The best attempt we can make is by applying analogy and pragmatism.

Killing combatants on the battlefield (a broad and evolving term, we'll admit) is qualitatively different from killing them once rendered harmless in our custody. It is - by way of analogy - the difference between killing a bear in the woods because it threatens one's livestock and safety and killing the same bear caged at the zoo. (Some bears resist capture and some analogies can be stretched to far.)

The pragmatic argument begins by asking: what good would it do now in crushing Islamic terrorism, to put Moussaoui to death? And unlike his counterparts still active against us, the answer is: precious little.

Even the argument for deterrence or setting a publicly inspiring example of stern seriousness doesn't really wash here. The enemy expects us to put them to death. They are at least confused into drawing incorrect conclusions about our resolve when we do not. And isn't confusion part of the art of war? If the enemy chooses to conclude from this case (ironically just as Noonan and the WSJ have tentatively done) that we are on the verge of converting the 101st Airborne into a Buddhist prayer circle, they will find themselves terribly wrong and (hopefully) misguided in other assumptions they might make about us. As Sun Tzu might comment, that's a good thing.

It is a peculiarly American trait - a paradox really - that we can be forceful in shaping our world for the better and yet merciful in the extreme. The two countervailing impulses can and will continue to coexist - not always perfectly, but well enough that each has its shot at holding the day. Our willingness to wage war does not mean that we are about to become a warful society. But neither does our restraint in this case mean that we've gone completely soft. Our entire system is built on keeping these conflicts and contradictions actively boiling in our public discourse, but never boiling over into civil war and division.

The judgment that Moussaoui's life sentence is acceptable must of course be qualified with many things. As Noonan notes:

I hope he doesn't do any more damage. I hope this is the last we hear of him. But I'm not hopeful about my hopes.

We'll admit that the verdict carries some non-trivial risks: holding him incommunicado (no tell-all books or Oprah appearances, please), really truly keeping him locked up for the rest of his life no-fooling-we-really-mean-it (cue tape of Mike Dukakis and Willie Horton - what was he thinking?) and also - and this is a more subtle point - taking full advantage of the introspective and propaganda value of our mercifulness in preserving truly innocent life.

Stopping short with Moussaoui when we were most justified in killing (never fully justified in God's eyes) helps us reflect on a higher image of ourselves not as fools, but as a nation that recognizes the value of human life generally. We do not like to kill. We do not take pleasure in it. Whether it be Terri Schiavo or an 'unwanted' baby-on-the-way, we (at our best) like to think hard about it, not taking pleasure or vengeance or even letting cold economic calculation enter the picture when we have other realistic options available to us (a point lost by most of the left in understanding our prosecution of the war).

Killing him now does not advance our cause in any meaningful way and could in fact have harmed it (a whole 'nother post, that one). Even when we utterly despise the evil actions that a life has brought about, we pause. The same cannot be said of our enemies. It would be nice if the verdict in the Moussaoui trial helped us to pause on other occasions when truly innocent life is on the line.

We're OK with what happened yesterday. We would have been OK if it had turned out differently. We're not going to attempt to reconcile that apparent conflict any further. It is perhaps, our light and our darkness doing battle and calling it a draw in this case.

We pray a second-order prayer - that we can have the wisdom and courage to pray - that the tiny pilot light of God buried so deep in Zacharias Moussaoui that no human being could ever possibly see it is reignited somehow. It is an irrational prayer - impossible, even insane to our human understanding. And yet, we must remember, it is precisely what God has done for us through his son Jesus Christ - crucified next to a murderer who confessed Him in his final hour.

Noonan puts it nicely:

If Moussaoui didn't deserve the death penalty, who does? Who ever did? And if he didn't receive it, do we still have it?

Good questions. They cut both ways.

UPDATE: U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema to Moussaoui: "You will never get a chance to speak again and that's an appropriate ending." I like it. Even better, a woman delivered the message.

California More Anti-American Than Britain

In light of yesterday's update (scroll down) on the passing of Frenchman thinker Jean Francois Revel (author of the well-worth-reading 'Anti-Americanism') last week at the age of 82, we continue on the theme of "why do they hate us?" (Our "allies" that is - we already know our enemies' answer to that question).

OK, so it's not an earth-shatteringly surprising headline, but Andrew Sullivan (yes, twice in ten days) has some interesting statistics on the bonds of Anglo culture in this piece in last Sunday's Times of London.

...the most telling aspect of Americanisation is anti-Americanism itself. Anti-Americanism, after all, is as American as its opposite. You will find few foreign countries as hostile to Bush as California. The most successful anti-Americans, like Michael Moore, are home-grown. Asked recently whether Americans were “greedy”, 64% of Brits agreed. But 70% of Americans chimed in agreement. Some 26% of Brits believe that Americans are “immoral”; 39% of Americans agreed!

Yes, it’s true. You can’t escape. Britain is not the 51st state and never will be. But 57% of Brits consider America Britain’s most reliable ally. Hate them and love them, you’re stuck with them and they’re there when you need them (eventually).

It’s the meaning of family. And the Anglo-American clan keeps subtly expanding, deepening and complicating itself.

We could do without the tail-between-the-legs wind-up (effectively apologizing for the U.S. and the current administration to his British cohorts), but the overall picture is interesting. It is one of great cognitive dissonance, misapprehension and frustration at the undeniability of our deep cultural, linguistic and religious ties. Like family, we are stuck with one another for better or for worse. No divorce is possible.

The Nanny State Expands

Listening to Bill Bennett interview Rush Limbaugh the other day, we got to musing that Machiavelli himself might blush at how thoroughly Bill Clinton wired the Washington bureaucracy with loyalists prior to his departure - and how utterly un-Machiavellian president President Bush has been in accomodating them. Mary McCarthy is just the most recent and egregious among many Clinton holdover obstructionists - Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Sandy Berger, Jamie Gorelick... the list goes on - who themselves are wired tightly into an MSM that greatly magnifies their impact.

Were the parties reversed, there is little doubt that the same kinds of actions would have been absolutely savaged. People would have been shredded in the press and indicted long ago. People would be in prison. If there were any intellectual honesty on the left, there would be discussion of firing squads.

This post isn't about that. This post is a stream-of-consciousness connect-the-dots rant (in case you hadn't figured that out already).

What this post is about is a more comical (if it weren't so insidious) way in which the impeached-but-didn't-have-the-dignity-to-resign ex-president has continued to act as if he is still president: soft drink access control:

The nation's largest beverage distributors have agreed to halt nearly all sales of sodas to public schools - a step that will remove the sugary, caloric drinks from vending machines and cafeterias around the country.

The agreement was announced Wednesday by the William J. Clinton Foundation and will also likely apply to many private and parochial schools.

"This is a bold step forward in the struggle to help 35 million young people lead healthier lives," former President Clinton said at a news conference. "This one policy can add years and years and years to the lives of a very large number of young people."

Under the agreement, the companies also have agreed to sell only water, unsweetened juice and low-fat milks to elementary and middle schools. Diet sodas would be sold only to high schools.

Here in Massachusetts, where one cannot order a rare hamburger, a plate of sushi, or steak tartar (much less Eggs Benedict - now there's an ironic name for a dish in a post about Bill Clinton and Mary McCarthy) without being warned by the Commonwealth that eating such things is HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH... if you can order them at all, which is a much dicier proposition these days as restaurants buckle under the pressure to drop such items from their menus lest they become raw bait for lawsuits by patrons unfamiliar with the concept of risk and personal responsiblity.

We may chafe at such regulations here, but we don't often think to connect them to a more fundamental natural right of all Americans, namely the right to a Coke and a smile (that would be 'Coke' with a capital 'C', thank you very much): the real thing; the beverage one drinks while watching baseball, after driving to the park in one's Chevrolet, which - sad to say - isn't necessarily a sure thing anymore either.

The Clinton spin is ostensibly about obesity and child health. More on that in a moment. We find it interesting (and convenient) then, that this otherwise obscure non-time-sensitive story should just happen to emerge on the same day.

A Mexican man who at 550 kg (1,200 lb) is possibly the heaviest person in the world hopes to travel to Italy for a life-saving operation to shed weight.

Manuel Uribe, bedridden for the past five years, cannot stand on his own and will need a special flight to take him from Monterrey, Mexico to Modena, where a surgical team has offered to perform an intestinal bypass free of charge.

"I can't walk. I'm can't leave my bed," the 40-year-old Uribe, who weighs the same as five baby elephants, said in a recent telephone interview.

Would this be the same Bill Clinton who used to be (and to many accounts still is) a fast-food junkie? The same Bill Clinton who perhaps harbors some "issues" vis a vis his fat in-laws? The same Bill Clinton who makes a reservation for dozens at a fancy restaurant then doesn't bother to show up or even call to cancel? The same ex-president who supposedly "feels our pain", but only when its convenient for him? Just asking.

Back to childhood obesity. Let's cut to the chase.

Childhood obesity is the responsiblity of those childrens' PARENTS and then, as they grow older the teens themselves. Yes, we know (having two of them in the house): "teenager" and "responsibility" don't often go in the same sentence anymore. Once upon a time they did. Once upon a now, they still should.

It is not the responsibility or even the purview of the state to insulate our children en masse from foods we wish they didn't eat or drinks we wish they didn't consume which are otherwise completely legal (check back in ten years and mark our words on that one) and which in all likelihood are stacked high in their refrigerators at home anyway.

This is not about ignorance - about the state stepping in where individuals can't possibly know better (pharmaceuticals, securities, smoking circa 1950, etc.) This is about wilfill ignorance on the part of adults grown accustomed to outsourcing responsibility to the nanny state in a misguided effort to protect ourselves from the ravages of a relatively short life that will end sooner or later despite all the botox, liposuction and breast implants we may choose to throw at our threescore and ten.

There. We feel better now. :)

UPDATE: Speaking of tyrannies - petty and otherwise - the Wall Street Journal today has a great short obit/tribute to Jean Francois Revel on the editorial page. Alas, only available to subscribers. Money quote:

"The totalitarian phenomenon," [Revel] wrote in National Review in 2000, "is not to be understood without making allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or -- much more mysteriously -- to submit to it. Democracy will therefore always remain at risk."

Villainous Company has more on Revel here.

$3 Gas: Cheaper Than a Jug of Bad Chianti

Fausta has an amusing round-up of the price per gallon of several everyday items:

Tropicana Homestyle Orange juice: $5.49...
College Inn chicken broth... $7.49
San Pellegrino water... $8.04

"I'm Not Dead Yet!" - Communism, Ayn Rand and Latin Dictators

That well-known line from 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' comes to mind today as we ponder the bizarre resurgence of Communism in Bolivia, where President Evo Morales yesterday ordered the eviction and seizure of assets of foreign companies operating in the natural gas sector. That he gave them six months to comply makes little difference. Poison is poison, even if administered slowly.

What was that we were just saying about Atlas Shrugged? In Rand's novel it is a copper company (d'Aconia Copper - with operations in Chile) that is seized. But for a few hundred miles and a different natural resource, the cancerous ideas of Karl Marx are still metastasizing, playing close once again to Rand's original script. Irony (and real danger) abound as we consider the implications of a broader resurgence of Stalinist strongmen (Chavez, Castro, Morales, etc.) and (we thought) discredited ideas in Latin America, porous southern borders and increased militancy here... not to mention increased engagement with those regimes by the wack-job leaders of Iran.

Blogging will be light today as we journey to pick up our new family dog.

Immigration Rally - Chicago

A friend in Chicago reports via e-mail on the immigration march there today, snapping an original photo (see right).

"I just stopped over to see the Chicago immigration march. Impressions: very peaceful group, some chanting, others quietly walking. Well organized, calm. Carrying American flags is a very good touch. The negative: all chanted slogans were in Spanish. Chanting in Spanish cut into point scored on all other fronts."

Our take: They're literally talking to themselves. OK, so there are a lot of Hispanic people in this country (some legal; some illegal). We knew that. What's new?

Peaceful or not, chanting slogans in Spanish seems more consistent with rallying the faithful than with winning hearts or changing minds. Their cryptic yellow signs ("Rights for Immigrants") beg the question: what is it exactly that they want? What kinds of "rights"? For what kinds of "immigrants"? No distiction between legal and illegal? C'mon. That may swell the numbers, but politically that dog won't hunt.

Until such time as we see more coherence, this kind of demonstration will serve merely to make a bunch of people feel like they're doing something, while they accomplish precisely... nothing. Agree with them or not (based on this we can't even tell if we do!), these marchers are being poorly led. Our system acknowledges the right of peaceable assembly. It does not prevent one from being ineffectual.

UPDATE: The slogans also included "we want to pay taxes" and "we want to own homes". Great. Now we're getting somewhere. How about also learning English and obeying our laws?

The War on Terror: An Armchair Quarterback's Guide

In a long, excellent post over at Belmont Club, Tigerhawk carefully lays out assumptions and arguments for how best to deal with al Qaeda, raising the question of how we will be able to recognize victory in the larger war on Islamic terror when it comes:

It is not necessarily obvious how a shadow war will end, even during the waging of it. In 1950, the West had no idea that the Cold War would end 25 years later with the Helsinki accords, 39 years later with the fall of the Berlin Wall, or 44 years later with the fall of the Soviet Union. Similarly, we cannot know today how the war against Islamic jihadism will end, or how clear it will be when the end comes that it has come. Nevertheless, the very ambiguity of this war makes it all the more important to debate the question of victory conditions. There will be no surrender ceremony on a battleship or signing of a cease fire agreement, so we need to know what to look for instead.

He then hints at a subsidiary question that to our view may be even more important: how will we be able to recognize the discrediting of al Qaeda's ideology? (a necessary but insufficient condition for the end of the larger conflict)

Al Qaeda’s ideology has roots that go back a long time. This ideology has significant support throughout the Muslim world and some support in the West. This should not surprise us. Communism also long enjoyed considerable support in the non-communist world, until it was discredited. We should assume that al Qaeda's support will persist until its ideology is discredited... Al Qaeda means "the base." According to its ideology, it does not intend to win the struggle itself, but to create the conditions under which the Caliphate can emerge.
[emphasis in original]

This raises many questions. Among them:

What elements of al Qaeda's ideology are most critical to collapsing the rest of its philosophical edifice? I.e., what are the few 'keystone' precepts among the many we find objectionable?

What are some unambiguous external signs we might look for to indicate progress towards these keystone ideas being eroded or removed?

What subtler changes of mind are necessary to discredit the al Qaeda ideology?

Among which individuals or groups of people are those changes of mind most indicative of larger 'tipping point' phenomena? (As Malcolm Gladwell might put it: who are the super-connectors?)

And while the following question may cut both ways, it is essential to also ask: What kinds of actions (or non-actions) on our part are most liable to reinforce Al Qaeda ideology long term? Tigerhawk asks and answers a closely related and equally important question. In essence: what developments are likely to have no impact whatsoever on the strength and breadth of al Qaeda's ideology... but which some in the West are firmly convinced will erode or destroy it?

“Soft” considerations such as the alleviation of Arab Muslim poverty or a two-state peace in Palestine will have little or no impact on the credibility of al Qaeda’s ideology. There is no evidence that leading jihadis are now or have ever been poor. The sort of people who would be attracted to al Qaeda's ideology are not interested in peace with Israel, only its annihilation. Therefore, these otherwise positive developments will not weaken al Qaeda, at least not in the short term. (Of course, al Qaeda will exploit Arab grievances over Palestine in its propaganda, but that does not mean that recruits who volunteer for al Qaeda, as opposed to national movements such as Hamas or Hezbollah, will cease doing so once Palestine reaches its full potential as a nation.)

Unfortunately, the Cold War experience of discrediting Communist ideology (Soviet and otherwise) is only partially helpful in thinking about how to bring down al Qaeda's. To a large degree, the practical day-to-day falsehoods and insults of Communism were well known to those living them - appreciated much better by them in fact, than by the 'useful idiots' in the West consumed with investing Communism with virtues it did not empirically possess. (Some still do of course. And with fewer Communist states to discredit their ideas, they - quite ironically - have a better shot at regaining credibility than they did say, 30 years ago.)

Were none of this the case (i.e., if the grand dissembling of Communism had not been apparent to those living under it), 'Atlas Shrugged' would not have been such an important and popular revelatory work, nor would that of Solzhenitsyn or any other such dissident writer.

Two things that are different about Islamism (vs. Communism) are: 1) its appeal to divine authority (if only in a mendaciously cynical manner) and 2) its lack of objective criteria for success. In the case of Communism by contrast, everyone knew that those in charge were human, making them much easier and more concrete targets to lampoon. By the same token, ultimate success would be achieved when everyone was equal - a objective if not realistic goal.

Thus it was relatively straightforward to point to particular individuals in charge and note that their material wealth and privilege were not at all equal to oneself or one's neighbors. Similarly, though it took much longer, an individual living under Communism could point to the West and note that we were objectively much more prosperous precisely because we were not striving for equality (risk-taking and distributed authority being essential engines of capitalist democracy). Add to this the nature of the military conflict (nuclear arms race) which could be won through material prosperity and checkmate was a foregone conclusion. That it took 70 years is a tragedy, but also a sober reminder that that may have been easy and short compared to what we are currently facing. Why? Because none of these elements exist with al Qaeda.

The al Qaeda appeal is at least partially, if not consistently or genuinely to the divine (how does one argue with the notion of 77 virgins awaiting the martyr?) The criteria for success are difficult to measure by Joe- (or rather Jamal-) Man-on-the-Street. And the nature of conflict (intermittent, rapidly-evolving low-budget terrorist tactics and almost capriciously unpredictable asymmetrical guerilla warfare) does not play to our inherent, structural advantages (which is not to say we are bound to lose, merely that it will require ingenuity, flexibility and patience.)

In other words, the fruits of our society, including its wealth, freedom and ability to project force won't do it alone when the opponent eschews the first two and plays by rules that can render the latter completely impotent - if not counterproductive. As Tigerhawk notes, it is the will of the people to use the force at their disposal that is one of the critical lynchpins in any conflict.

Victory will therefore entail much more than simply telling supporters of Islamic radicalism (both active and passive) what it is we stand for. To a large degree, they already know. It can't hurt, but it is not sufficient. It will entail making the case for why they should want it. And that is a much subtler task and one which turns our attention to the media. The bias and self-hatred of our own fourth estate is more than a sideshow. It is a critical strategic weakness. If the most visible output of our media is an apologetic if not self-loathing picture of our freedoms and luxuries, then how can we convince others that they would want those things?

To take it in an even more controversial direction: How can we compete against an afterlife of bliss promised by the enemy's perverted religious appeal (the benefits of which are calibrated to the fervor and commitment of one's jihad on earth) when as a society we often seem deeply conflicted about how happy we are?

In other words the promise of HDTVs, 401Ks, women's rights, entrepreneurial freedom and a participatory democratic system are not necessarily going to win us the war for hearts and minds unless those living under Islamofascism are convinced that those things are accompanied by a deeper happiness.

We'll pause there for now, asking readers to reflect on whether or not that insight pushes us to conclude that an enemy whose appeal is to religious virtue (martyrdom, jihad, etc.) can be effectively opposed by promises of exclusively secular rewards. We suspect that in the end it cannot. We suspect that once this conflict has escalated further we will be forced to abandon the PC koan that all religions (and therefore ideologies - since who can say what defines 'religion'?) are deserving of equal respect and tolerance.

It is a treacherous philosophical road to go down, especially under our system of liberal (old meaning) values. It is a road replete with emotional land-mines - as likely to split our forces as to unite them. Yet for precisely that reason we'd be well advised to consider it carefully in advance, lest we find ourselves forced down it defensively after a massive attack, ill-prepared to navigate to ultimate victory for the values we truly hold dear.

UPDATE: In a closely related, well-crafted and deeply thought-provoking piece, in today's WSJ (free at OpinionJournal), Fouad Ajami honors Bernard Lewis:

We anoint sages when we need them; at times we let them say, on our behalf, the sorts of things we know and intuit but don't say, the sorts of things we glimpse through the darkness but don't fully see. It was thus in the time of the great illusion, in the lost decade of the 1990s, when history had presumably "ended," that Bernard Lewis had come forth to tell us, in a seminal essay, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (September 1990), that our luck had run out, that an old struggle between "Christendom" and Islam was gathering force. (Note the name given the Western world; it is vintage Lewis, this naming of worlds and drawing of borders -- and differences.) It was the time of commerce and globalism; the "modernists" had the run of the decade, and a historian's dark premonitions about a thwarted civilization wishing to avenge the slights and wounds of centuries would not carry the day. Mr. Lewis was the voice of conservatives, a brooding pessimist, in the time of a sublime faith in things new and untried. It was he, in that 1990 article, who gave us the notion of a "clash of civilizations" that Samuel Huntington would popularize, with due attribution to Bernard Lewis.

...Jesus had been crucified. But Muhammad had prevailed and had governed. The faith he would bequeath his followers would forever insist on the oneness of religion and politics. Where Christians are enjoined in their scripture to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's," no such demarcation would be drawn in the theory and practice of Islam. It was vintage Lewis -- reading the sources, in this case a marginal Arabic newspaper published out of London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in February of 1998 -- to come across a declaration of war on the United States by a self-designated holy warrior he had "never heard of," Osama bin Laden. In one of those essays that reveal the historian's eye for things that matter, "A License to Kill," Mr. Lewis would render into sublime English prose the declaration of bin Laden and would give it its exegesis.

And then there is this eligible-for-framing money quote from Ajami:

We have come to a great irony: the conservative Orientalist [Lewis] holding out democratic hope for Iraq and its Arab neighbors, while his liberal critics assert the built-in authoritarianism of the Arab political tradition.

It is surpassed only by this direct quote that Ajami relates having come from Lewis himself:

"In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues. In our island [Britain], we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We don't know who we are, we don't know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy."

Read it.

Bonus SAT question and answer: Bernard Lewis is to Islam as... Peter Drucker is to management.