Stromata Blog

Not Just “Empty Bureaucratic Twaddle”

Instapundit calls the newly released portions of last April’s National Intelligence Estimate “empty bureaucratic twaddle”, a characterization that is hard to dispute. Let’s remember, though, that the Beltway intellectual universe is rich in twaddle. The important question is which twaddle is true and which is false. The NIE, while not scintillating in its insights, tells us, at least, that the consensus of our country’s intelligence agencies firmly rejects the twaddle about the War on Terror currently being peddled by the anti-war Left in general and the leaders of the Democratic Party in particular.

The central themes of the Democrats’ rather unspecific “smart and tough” War on Terror strategy are –

1. The withdrawal (er, “strategic redeployment”) of American forces from Iraq would reduce the mufsiduns’ motivation to fight us and thereby reduce the terrorist threat.

2. Our most important immediate objective should be the elimination of al-Qa’eda’s top echelons. Troops withdrawn from Iraq should head for Pakistan to hunt for Osama bin-Laden.

3. Increased funding for passive defensive measures like port security would be more effective than taking the war to the enemy.

On all of those points, the NIE contradicts the Democratic message.

The contradiction is most direct on Iraq. The NIE identifies that country as the center of gravity of the War on Terror, the place where defeat will demoralize the mufsidun and victory spur them to greater efforts. Right now, unfortunately, they believe that they are winning. After all, the New York Times says so practically every day! An American pullout could only increase their elation; they won’t be fooled by our labeling it “strategic redeployment”. Contrariwise, if we patiently and persistently hunt down their leaders and kill their soldiers, they will waken one day to the realization that they cannot beat a foe that has overwhelming superiority in numbers, troop quality, technology and cash – and refuses to accommodatingly give up.

Though willing to abandon Iraq, Democrats profess to eagerness for battle in Afghanistan, where, they say, our troops can pursue Osama bin-Laden and the rest of the al-Qa’eda upper echelon. The NIE indicates that those tasks, however satisfying they may be to contemplate, are decreasingly urgent. As the NIE says, “United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations”. It “continue[s] to pose the greatest threat to the Homeland and US interests abroad by a single terrorist organization”, but that threat is less than it used to be.

Instead of a unified, powerful threat, the NIE judges that we face a multitude of relatively weak ones. That is good news in the sense that uncoordinated cells with limited manpower and resources are less likely to be able to launch devastating attacks. It is bad news in the sense that fighting a “diffuse” foe requires more patience than Americans historically have possessed.

The essentials for winning this kind of war are intelligence gathering and preemptive strikes against terrorist groups at the earliest feasible moment after they are identified. Concern for terrorists’ due process rights, which so many Democrats have demonstrated over the past five years, gravely heightens the risk that we will learn about plots only after they kill more of our countrymen.

The Democrats’ substitute for intelligence and preemption is to play pure defense: inspect more cargo containers, tighten airline security (but no profiling, please!), guard buildings more closely, screen baggage on trains and buses, and so on. Putting aside the question of whether these expensive, inconvenient safeguards would be effective, their direction is wrong. They would passively protect U.S. territory when the main terrorist threat lies elsewhere. Note these passages from the NIE:

The jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests. Extremist networks inside the extensive Muslim diasporas in Europe facilitate recruitment and staging for urban attacks, as illustrated by the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings.

* * * *

We assess that such groups [various mufsidun independent of al-Qa’eda] pose less of a danger to the Homeland than does al-Qa’ida but will pose varying degrees of threat to our allies and to US interests abroad. The focus of their attacks is likely to ebb and flow between local regime targets and regional or global ones.

And, in fact, all of the major terrorist attacks since 9/11 have taken place outside the homeland – in England, Spain, Bali, India, etc. For both humanitarian and strategic reasons, we need to place a high priority on degrading terrorists’ capacity for attacking other countries, the very opposite of the passivity that the Left prefers.

The principal solace that the Democrats find in the NIE is its judgment that Iraq has become a “cause célèbre” among the mufsidun, useful for stirring up anti-Western feeling. From that, they infer that the whole Iraqi venture was a mistake. The flaw in that logic is that the NIE is not a comparison of the real world to counterfactual possibilities. It does not speculate on where the war’s center of gravity would be if it were not in Iraq, nor on whether the level of enemy activity would be more or less in an alternative universe. If the Left wants to argue that the overthrow of Ba’athist Iraq had a unique resonance in the Moslem world, without which terrorism would be static or declining, that’s fine, but the NIE doesn’t say anything of the sort.

We know in hindsight that the upsurge of Islamofascist terrorism began in the early 1990’s. Would greater American forbearance toward Saddam Hussein have halted that trend? Or would it have demonstrated that defying the U.S. carried only limited risks, that hirabah was not only pleasing to Allah but not especially dangerous to oneself? Would Islamofascist propagandists have been at a loss to find other causes célèbres? How about in Afghanistan? Or in Israel? Or in one of the non-Islamofascist Moslem states: Pakistan or Morocco or Jordan or Saudi-controlled Arabia? For that matter, as The Mudville Gazette recollects, one of the grievances stressed in Osama bin-Laden’s pre-9/11 fatwas was the Clinton era policy of “containing” Saddam Hussein. One could well have said back then that our sanctions, no-fly zones and inspections were, to borrow the NIE’s words, “breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement”. Don’t we all remember the jeremiads against the U.S. for supposedly denying Arab babies food and medicine?

No one knows what might have been. In this case, though, only one set of guesses is plausible, and those are not the ones that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Teddy Kennedy make.

The Blurb Writers’ School of Journalism

We’re all familiar with the way producers of Broadway flops yank phony nuggets of praise out of negative reviews. “If you pay to see this hideous show, don’t expect an enjoyable evening or that you’ll get a tenth of your money’s worth” becomes “an enjoyable evening . . . you’ll get . . . your money’s worth”.

That’s all in good sport, and readers of theater ads know what to expect. Should we be similarly skeptical of what purport to be straightforward news reports about the contents of government documents?

The first Associated Press story [link probably for on-line Wall Street Journal subscribers only, but AP is, of course, reposted everywhere] on the just-declassified “key findings” of last April’s National Intelligence Estimate reads like a travesty straight out of The Producers. Let’s compare AP’s pseudo-summary to the NIE’s words:

AP: A declassified government intelligence report says the war in Iraq has become a “cause celebre” for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that is likely to get worse before it gets better.

NIE: We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

• The Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

AP: In the bleak report, released Tuesday on President Bush’s orders, the nation’s most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al Qaeda, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach.

“If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks world-wide,” the document says.

NIE: United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations; however, we judge that al-Qa’ida will continue to pose the greatest threat to the Homeland and US interests abroad by a single terrorist organization. We also assess that the global jihadist movement – which includes al-Qa’ida, affiliated and independent terrorist groups, and emerging networks and cells – is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.

• Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.
• If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.
• Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit. Over time, such progress, together with sustained, multifaceted programs targeting the vulnerabilities of the jihadist movement and continued pressure on al-Qa’ida, could erode support for the jihadists.

AP: “The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.”

NIE: We assess that the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is becoming more diffuse. New jihadist networks and cells, with anti-American agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge. The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.

• We assess that the operational threat from self-radicalized cells will grow in importance to US counterterrorism efforts, particularly abroad but also in the Homeland.
• The jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests. Extremist networks inside the extensive Muslim diasporas in Europe facilitate recruitment and staging for urban attacks, as illustrated by the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings.

Summarizing its own spin, AP assures us that “more than three pages of stark judgments warning about the spread of terrorism contrasted with the administration's glass-half-full declarations”.

The parts of the NIE that I have quoted obviously do not present a Pollyannish “victory is just around the corner” assessment of the War on Terror. They do, however, sound very much like “glass-half-full declarations”. The enemy is still fighting and is adapting to our tactics. On the other hand, al-Qa’eda, judged to be “the greatest threat”, has been seriously damaged and disrupted, and Islamofascism, taken as a whole, “is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is becoming more diffuse”.

It should go without saying that, while a decentralized, diffuse, incoherent enemy is hard to eradicate completely, it also lacks the tools for launching truly devastating attacks. What the NIE foresees is a long period of low-grade terrorism, focused more intensely on Europe (not, I note, the leading participant in the Iraqi campaign) and “local regime targets” (i. e., Moslem-run governments) than the U.S. Its assessment (as of last February, when its data gathering was reportedly concluded) is that, at the present time, “the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this Estimate [indicated elsewhere to be five years]”.

That is not good news, but let’s look at the bases for the report’s uncheerful estimate:

Four underlying factors are fueling the spread of the jihadist movement: (1) Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness; (2) the Iraq “jihad;” (3) the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and (4) pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims all of which jihadists exploit.

The report’s opinion of what can be done to mitigate the second factor has already been quoted: “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.” The other factors are not the kind that can be dealt with overnight. Numbers (1) and (4) are longstanding and in large part irrational. Mitigating number (3) requires action by Moslems themselves, which is sadly unlikely so long as so much of the Islamic world refuses to take responsibility for its own future.

The report also has ideas about ways to exploit Islamofascist weaknesses, and it is here that it wanders into Pollyanna territory:

Concomitant vulnerabilities in the jihadist movement have emerged that, if fully exposed and exploited, could begin to slow the spread of the movement. They include dependence on the continuation of Muslim-related conflicts, the limited appeal of the jihadists radical ideology, the emergence of respected voices of moderation, and criticism of the violent tactics employed against mostly Muslim citizens.

• The jihadists’ greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution – an ultra-conservative interpretation of shari’a-based governance spanning the Muslim world – is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims. Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists’ propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.
• Recent condemnations of violence and extremist religious interpretations by a few notable Muslim clerics signal a trend that could facilitate the growth of a constructive alternative to jihadist ideology: peaceful political activism. This also could lead to the consistent and dynamic participation of broader Muslim communities in rejecting violence, reducing the ability of radicals to capitalize on passive community support. In this way, the Muslim mainstream emerges as the most powerful weapon in the war on terror.
• Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require coordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders.

If democratic reform efforts in Muslim majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives. Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.

That is the mush that we’ve heard so often from the “intelligence community”, where fear of clear, decisive action and faith in a silent majority of friends that will spring to our side if only we can find the right words to woo them are the overriding predispositions. It’s remarkable that the analysts steeled themselves to state the obvious: that defeating Islamofascism in Iraq is a vital step toward defeating it everywhere, while “perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere”.

Still, whatever its flaws, the NIE findings, read as a whole rather than in the AP’s snippets, lead to several important conclusions:

1. Just as President Bush predicted in his first speech to the nation after 9/11, the War on Terror will be prolonged and often frustrating. Demands for fast victories, perfect plans and zero-defects execution remain as childish as ever.

2. While terrorist clusters are most likely increasing in number, they are decreasing in capability, and they lack a war-winning strategy. As a consequence, their attacks will tend to be uncoordinated mosquito bites rather than hammer blows directed at vital Western interests.

3. Adopting a stance of passive defense, in effect retreating to the homeland and striving to secure it against all possible threats, is a losing strategy even if it could be guaranteed to keep American soil safe. The mufsidun offensive against Europe and non-fascist Moslem regimes would continue and has a high likelihood of prevailing in the absence of powerful U.S. countermeasures.

4. Because the motives that lead men to join the mufsidun are emotional instead of rational, Islamofascist recruitment will ebb and flow rapidly, depending upon current events. That volatility limits the ability of our enemies to make long-term plans and can be expected to lead to rash decision making. Moreover, victories and defeats can swing emotions wildly. Yesterday’s zealot can quickly become discouraged by setbacks to his cause.

5. The emotions that fuel the mufsidun have far deeper roots than recent American actions. They are a pathology within Islam that, ultimately, only Islamic reformers can weed out. In the meantime, we have little choice but to do all that we can to destroy those who are implacably determined to destroy us.

The traitors who leaked “summaries” of the NIE, knowing what it really said, must have counted on its remaining classified. Now that the contents are public, the media will, as AP’s Max Bialystock-like efforts show, do what they can to keep the spin going. Perhaps they’ll succeed, but I suspect that Karl Rove is smiling broadly tonight.

Addendum: Debating on TV yesterday with lefty Jonathan Alter, Hugh Hewitt stuck his neck out only very slightly when he declared that he didn’t believe that the New York Times had portrayed the NIE accurately. The ensuing exchange is a classic of left-wing fantasy logic:

HH: I don't believe the New York Times.

JA: Nobody in government is disputing it, Hugh.

HH: Oh, they are, too. The White House is disputing it, John Cornyn did on this program last hour.

JA: Yeah, they are now. They're trying to get...because they realize that politically, they have a problem. Nobody disputed it.

In the Alter-verse, it appears, every golden word in the NYT must be accepted as true unless it is disputed before it appears.

The Leaks That Might Have Been

WASHINGTON, September 25, 2006 (AP). The political firestorm continued today over leaked excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate. The top secret document, portions of which were summarized in the New York Times, reportedly concludes that the Bush Administration’s “obsession” with capturing Osama bin-Laden and propping up the Hamid Karzai government in Kabul “have made Americans less safe”.

Key Democrats were quick to cite the report in their criticism of the Bush Administration’s insistence on keeping troops in Afghanistan despite mounting casualties, declining public support and rising anger in the Arab world.

“Five years, fifty thousand troops, 500 dead, no results,” is how former Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry put it. “And now we learn, after all that, that we’re in more danger from terrorism than ever before.”

In an op-ed appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Senator Kerry charged that President Bush “has completely lost sight of Iraq, where Saddam Hussein and his known stock of weapons of mass destruction constitute a real threat to Americans. If a dirty bomb hits New York, that’s where it will come from, not from the pathetic fugitive Osama.” The Bush Administration contemplated military action against Iraq in late 2002 but dropped the idea after the United Nations Security Council refused to authorize it and the Justice Department concluded that unilateral measures would be illegal. Senator Kerry and other Democrats have harshly criticized that decision, calling it a repeat of the failure of the president’s father to oust Mr. Hussein after the Gulf War in 1991.

* * * *

WASHINGTON, September 25, 2006 (AP). The political firestorm continued today over leaked excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate. The top secret document, portions of which were summarized in the New York Times, reportedly concludes that the Bush Administration’s indictments of Osama bin-Laden and other alleged participants in the destruction of the World Trade Center in September 2001 “have made Americans less safe”.

Key Democrats were quick to cite the report in their criticism of the Bush Administration’s refusal to negotiate with Mr. bin-Laden over restitution and its insistence on pursuing criminal prosecutions despite legal reversals, declining public support and rising anger in the Arab world.

“Five years, fifty million pages of legal documents, 500 prosecutors diverted from going after street crimes, no results,” is how former Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry put it. “And now we learn, after all that, that we’re in more danger from terrorism than ever before.”

In an op-ed appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Senator Kerry charged that President Bush “has completely lost sight of Afghanistan, where al-Qa’eda and other terrorist groups can operate freely. If an anthrax attack hits Boston, that’s where it will come from, not from the pathetic fugitive Osama.” The Bush Administration contemplated military action against Afghanistan in late 2001 but dropped the idea after military advisers warned that U.S. forces would bog down in the brutal Afghan winter and the Justice Department concluded that violation of a sovereign nation’s territory would be illegal. Senator Kerry and other Democrats have harshly criticized that decision, calling it a repeat of the failure of the President’s father to ensure a democratic transition in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Soviet occupying forces in 1989.

* * * *

WASHINGTON, September 25, 2006 (AP). The political firestorm continued today over leaked excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate. The top secret document, portions of which were summarized in the New York Times, reportedly concludes that the Bush Administration’s opposition to a constitutional amendment recognizing shariah law “has made Americans less safe”.

Key Democrats were quick to cite the report in their criticism of the Bush Administration’s refusal to consider legal restrictions on public criticism of Islam and its insistence on the preservation of the First Amendment despite continuing terrorist attacks, declining public support and rising anger in the Arab world.

“Five years, fifty thousand terrorist casualties, 500 presidential speeches, no results,” is how former Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry put it. “And now we learn, after all that, that we’re in more danger from terrorism than ever before.”

In an op-ed appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Senator Kerry charged that President Bush “has completely lost sight of the need to prosecute terrorists to the full extent of the law. If toxic chemicals poison Chicago, they will come from somebody like Osama bin-Laden, not from Muslim girls who want to wear hajibs and be executed by their brothers if they date infidels.” The Bush Administration contemplated indicting Mr. bin-Laden, a businessman living in Afghanistan, after he admitted involvement in the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It dropped the idea after political advisors warned that prosecution of a prominent philanthropist would antagonize Muslims and the Justice Department concluded that charges based on a confession obtained without the previous issuance of Miranda warnings would be illegal. Senator Kerry and other Democrats have harshly criticized that decision, calling it a repeat of the failure of the President’s father to impose adequate controls over immigration from Moslem countries.

Uncle Osama’s Recruiting Posters

Let’s assume arguendo, over the Administration’s denials, that the leaked highlights from last April’s National Intelligence Estimate fairly reflect the document’s thrust. And let’s pass lightly over the question of how U.S. intelligence agencies get their information about how well or badly terrorist recruiting is going these days. Have they captured al-Qa’eda’s personnel rosters? Or do they depend on impressions that anybody might gather from reading al-Jazeera, al-Reuters and the New York Times? If the CIA has credible data showing that the number of terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. has increased dramatically since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that means a great deal. If it knows only that there are more al-Qa’eda foot soldiers in Iraq today than in September 2002, the interest quotient is much less.

Setting all doubts aside and taking it as given that the American presence in Iraq is an effective talking point for our enemies’ recruiting sergeants, let’s consider what that means.

One possible analysis – the one that the Left implicitly or explicitly adopts – is that our invasion of Iraq and subsequent underwriting of its post-Ba’athist government have aroused fierce anger throughout the House of Islam, motivating young Moslems to flock to the ranks of al-Qa’eda and its siblings. If we had left Saddam Hussein alone, that anger would never have been sparked; as soon as we depart from Iraq, it will abate. Such is the lesson that the Howard Dean/Teddy Kennedy/Michael Moore Democrats want the public to draw from the NIE leaks, but how cogent is it?

A prima facie oddity is that it contradicts one of the Democrats’ favorite shibboleths: that irreconcilable differences existed between the “secular” Saddam and the “religious” al-Qa’eda. If the idea of cooperation between the two is beyond the prospect of belief, why should an attack on the atheistical Ba’athists have incited the wrath of Osama’s acolytes? From the leftist point of view, it seems, Moslems are sometimes all of one mind and sometimes riven by divisions, whichever happens to suit the needs of the argument of the moment.

Why, indeed, should any Moslem, outside the Ba’athist ruling circle, have felt sympathy for Baghdad’s preening tyrant? No rational observer can doubt that Saddam brought on his own fate. Having been left in power after his crushing military defeat in 1991, he devoted the next decade to antagonizing powerful enemies, almost as if he wanted America to put finis to his regime. The crowning folly was his refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, from which it was natural to conclude that he had much to hide. The Left may think that he was entitled to a presumption of innocence, but it’s hard to see how Arabs, living where attitudes toward due process of law are rather casual, would expect the United States to treat national security like a criminal trial.

Perhaps, then, the Islamofascist volunteers were inflamed less by the invasion than its aftermath. In that case, what enraged them? Abu Ghraib, so often invoked by the Western Left, is an absurdly inadequate irritant. Any Moslem angered by the humiliating, but basically harmless, indignities inflicted on suspected terrorists in that prison ought to be vastly more appalled by random murders of innocent Iraqi civilians. Yet we are urged to believe that the horror at the former led men to commit the latter.

Aside from the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, the American “occupation” has been benign by any reasonable standard. We have let the Iraqis choose their own government, not even vetoing anti-Americans like Muqtadr al-Sadr, poured money into reconstruction and, contrary to what the Left predicted, made no effort to reimburse our costs from local oil revenues. If anything, we have erred on the side of passive benevolence, but I don’t think that Administration critics are postulating that throwing al-Sadr in jail for his easily provable crimes would quiet the “insurgents”.

The idea that America and its allies have inflicted any palpable injury on Iraq in particular or Arabs and Moslems in general is unsustainable. If enmity had not already existed before March 2003, our actions in Iraq would not have created it. At worst, they were the occasion for an outbreak of latent hostilities. Had nothing occurred in Iraq, something displeasing to the Islamofascist psyche would have happened somewhere. As Jim Geraghty aptly says,

Look, not even I would argue that the Iraq war was not a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology – i.e., a reason that Islamists are angry at the United States. But as we have seen in recent months, these folks explode in a murderous rage over rumors of a flushed Koran, cartoons in Denmark, a line from the Pope’s speech, an edition of Playboy in Indonesia, a Salman Rushdie novel. In other words, if it wasn’t Iraq, these people would be embracing jihadism for any one of a million other reasons. It seems to be widely forgotten that all of these groups are outraged over the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, as well. It’s not like al-Qaeda and its affiliates are cool with our first post-9/11 war, and simply object to the second one.

The only way to avoid the confrontation that now happens to center on Iraq would be to adopt a policy of “retreat to the wall”: Wherever the terrorists push, we give way.

Yielding constantly would keep the peace – until we faced demands that we could not accept. Those who scoff at the necessity of fighting Islamofascism here and now either hope that the enemy’s maximum aspirations won’t turn out to be intolerable or imagine that the battle will go more easily if it is fought at a later time in another place.

Is the expectation that a series of easy victories will palliate Moslem anger or that, as the West falls back, it will gather support from currently unfriendly precincts? If so, I’d be interested to know how much the Left is willing to surrender. Will they take in stride the destruction of Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran and Egypt, the replacement by the Saudi oligarchy by an Islamofascist caliphate, the end of the secularist ascendancy in Turkey, the formation of a de facto state-within-a-state for European Moslems, the introduction of shariah into Western judicial systems, the reshaping of social legislation to suit Islamic preferences (from bans on immodest female attire to legal sanctions for homosexuality), the suppression of speech and writings “offensive” to Moslem ears and eyes. . . ? Every item on that list is already a plank of the Islamofascist platform. None of them was inspired by events in Iraq.

There is, let me note, one way in which the Iraqi campaign has unquestionably been a boon to terrorist recruitment. Before Iraq, ill-disposed Moslems might well have seen the West as a unified colossus, against which resistance, however desirable, was futile. Now they are more likely to think that Osama bin-Laden was right: The West is a “weak horse”, many of whose riders regard George W. Bush, neoconservatives and the Religious Right as their true enemies. If mere persistence in pinprick assaults in Iraq can induce a near-majority of Americans to favor precipitate withdrawal, isn’t it obvious that Islamic fascism is the “strong horse”, to which Allah will grant speedy and complete victory?

Al-Qa’eda’s best recruiting posters, I often think, are the front pages of the New York Times.

Further reading: A retired intelligence analyst offers insights into what the National Intelligence Estimate really says, as opposed to the anti-Bush cherries that the NYT has extracted: “What You Won’t Read in the New York Times”; “More of What You Won’t Read in the NYT”.

How Long Till Kristallnacht?

Just before the Jewish New Year, The American Thinker published a long article by Eli Lasky on “The Democratic Party and the Jews”, demonstrating in detail that the opposition party has increasingly become, if not outrightly antisemitic, indifferent to the fate of the 40 percent of the world’s Jews who live in Israel. Very striking are these poll results:

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in late July showed a strong gap between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to support for Israel. Among Republicans, an overwhelming 84% say they sympathize more with Israel than Arab states (which 1% of Republicans sympathize with) compared to just 43% of Democrats who do so (12% sympathize with Arab states) [all italics in original].

Okay, according to bien-pensant orthodoxy that’s just “anti-Zionism”, not antisemitism. But what happens when Israel, a liberal democracy, is compared not to Arab states in general but to a particularly vile terrorist outfit?

These declines [in Democratic support for Israel] are confirmed by a separate Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll regarding views towards Hezbollah, the genocide preaching terror group that launched yet another attack on Israel two months ago leading to a month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah. Regarding whether America should align itself with Israel, Democrats support neutrality over alignment, 54% to 39%. By comparison, Republicans strongly supported alignment with Israel, 64% to 29% [italics in original].

Being unable to make a choice between Hezbollah and Israel is not far different from neutrality between the Jews and Hitler. It is certainly inconsistent with any very high regard for Judaism.

I wouldn’t say that Israel has nothing to do with the anti-Jewish tide on the political Left. Israel seems to be objectionable to the Left for the same reason as the American presence in Iraq: It “provokes” Moslems. (I put “provokes” in quotes, because the Islamofascist variety of Moslem is provoked by almost anything. Recall that, in a videotape made before the 9/11 skyjackings, one of the perpetrators invoked Bosnia – where America had intervened in behalf of Moslems against Christian oppressors – as a motive for attacking us.)

Avoiding acts that might be construed as “anti-Moslem” is now a major preoccupation of the Left, so it is natural for it to want to eliminate the “provocation” represented by the existence of a Jewish state in the midst of the House of Islam. Getting rid of Israel would, however, be a messy business. Contemplating it is made easier if one devalues the kind of people who live there, treating their lives as a matter of little significance and insinuating their involvement in conspiracies to distort American policy in their own selfish interests. The latter is, of course, the point of the notorious Walt-Mearsheimer “Israeli Lobby” paper, which Mr. Lasky, focusing on the Democratic Party rather than the Left in general, does not mention but whose thesis is paralleled in the Democrats’ ranks:

James Moran (D-Va.) felt free in 2003 to state that the leaders of America’s Jewish community sent America into war in Iraq to benefit Israel. These comments were echoed by Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings (now retired) who, on the floor of the Senate, said that Bush had sent the country to war in order to win “Jewish votes” – this despite the fact that American Jews opposed the war by greater percentages than the rest of America and that they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. This is the type of high-level analysis popular on neo-Nazi websites and Arab terror group. Oh, and on leading Democratic blogs, too.

The same theory has been pushed by Mr. Valerie Plame Joseph Wilson, a Democratic hero.

Also unmentioned by Mr. Lasky, possibly because it is almost too bizarre to believe, is the barely disguised antisemitism of the Democratic Senate campaign in Virginia.

Comparisons between anything and Nazi Germany are perilous and almost always grossly exaggerated. We are very, very far from the Holocaust. But maybe we’re not as far from Kristallnacht as we’d like to be.

The Chip on Bill Clinton’s Shoulder

What is most interesting about Bill Clinton’s interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, scheduled for broadcast on Sunday (“Mr. President, thank you for one of the more unusual interviews,” it concludes), is the ex-President’s monumental sense of grievance. Here is the question (slightly edited from a left-wing blog’s rough transcript) whose answer monopolized the session:

WALLACE: When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of e-mail from viewers, and I’ve got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question: Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and al-Qa’eda out of business when you were President? There’s a new book out, which I suspect you’ve read, called The Looming Tower. And it talks about how, when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said, “I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops.” Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole. . . . And after the attack, the book says, Bin Laden separated his leaders because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is 20/20. . . . but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

In the course of his ensuing tirade, Mr. Clinton calls that question a “conservative hit job”, declares that “you falsely accuse me of giving aid and comfort to Bin Laden because of what happened in Somalia”, and claims that he was lured into the interview under “false pretenses”. On substantive matters, he rants that, while he was President, “President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden” and, indeed, “ridiculed me for trying”. [Not exactly.]

There’s doubtless a case to be made for the proposition that the Clinton Administration did about as much as could be expected to combat al-Qa’eda, given the American public’s general insouciance (which lasted, regrettably, through the first seven and a half months of the Bush Administration). A reasonable man would have made that point and moved on. Mr. Clinton’s motive for agreeing to appear on Fox was, after all, to boast about having raised tons of money for global philanthropy. In that context, he could have brushed aside rehashes of bygone controversies.

But he obviously didn’t want to. His conviction that he is a victim, unjustly deprived of the honor due him for his stupendous achievements, is too overpowering. I almost feel sorry for him – and am once again glad that he was President during our country’s vacation from history rather than now.

Interesting, too, is the desperate eagerness of the commenters on the blog that published the interview’s text to believe that Clinton’s revisionist self-justifications are convincing. One says, “We can make a difference by forwarding the transcript to every friend and relative, regardless of their political stand.” That guy is either a Karl Rove plant or seriously delusional.

Further reading: In the interview, Clinton rests his defense on Richard Clarke’s book Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, citing it as fervently and repetitiously as Hugo Chávez pushing Noam Chomsky to the U.N. In “Bill Clinton’s Excuses”, Byron York observes that this reed, when leaned on so heavily, pierces the ex-President’s hand:

Judging by Clarke’s sympathetic account — as well as by the sympathetic accounts of other former Clinton aides like Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon — it’s not quite accurate to say that Clinton tried to kill bin Laden. Rather, he tried to convince — as opposed to, say, order — U.S. military and intelligence agencies to kill bin Laden. And when, on a number of occasions, those agencies refused to act, Clinton, the commander-in-chief, gave up.

Clinton did not give up in the sense of an executive who gives an order and then moves on to other things, thinking the order is being carried out when in fact it is being ignored. Instead, Clinton knew at the time that his top military and intelligence officials were dragging their feet on going after bin Laden and al Qaeda. He gave up rather than use his authority to force them into action. . . .

[T]he bottom line is that Bill Clinton, the commander-in-chief, could not find the will to order the military into action against al Qaeda, and Bill Clinton, the head of the executive branch, could not find the will to order the CIA and FBI to act. No matter what the former president says on Fox, or anywhere else, that is his legacy in the war on terror.

The most that Mr. Clarke says in Clinton’s defense is that he “put in place the plans and programs that allowed America to respond to the big attacks when they did come, sweeping away the political barriers to action.” Unfortunately, the highest political barrier to action against terrorism is the Democratic Party’s intense and malignant brand of partisanship, which has led it to give the Michael Moore/Daily Kos wing of liberalism a prominent place in its coalition. Bill Clinton could have done much to prevent that, by reinforcing the centrist wing of his party instead of focusing on his own glory and by campaigning vigorously against the lunatic fringe during the past five years. If he wanted to do either, he lacked the will to proceed, just as he lacked the will to wage war on Osama bin-Laden after the USS Cole bombing.

Judged in context, against the fact that no one was calling loudly for decisive action against al-Qa’eda in 2000, that is hardly the worst part of the Clinton legacy. His suicidal negligence regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is far more blameworthy. One could easily downplay his responsibility for failing to preempt 9/11. But, if he insists on revisiting his record and demands that history judge, the verdict can scarcely be favorable to his reputation.

Vide etiam TigerHawk, “Clinton and bin Laden and the perils of citing Richard Clarke”.

The Dialogue We Need

Dialoguing is what well-bred churchmen do these days, and even the Roman pontiff, who is normally not too concerned about winning the plaudits of bien-pensants, feels the pull:

I wanted to extend an invitation to a dialogue of Christian faith with the modern world and to a dialogue of all cultures and religions. I hope that on different occasions during my visit – for instance, in Munich when I stressed how important it is to respect that which is sacred to others – my profound respect for the great religions, and in particular for the Moslems, who “adore the one God” and with whom we are engaged in “defending and promoting together, for all men, social justice, moral values, peace and freedom” (Nostra Aetate, 3) was clearly apparent. I therefore trust that, after the reactions of the first moment, my words at the University of Regensburg can constitute an impulse and an encouragement for a positive, even self-critical, dialogue, both between the various religions and between modern reason and the faith of Christians.

Far be it from me to scorn “a postive, even self-critical dialogue”, but are theological exchanges between Christians and Moslems what the world needs right now? As the violent reaction to the Pope’s Regensburg address, and earlier to the Jylland-Posten cartoons, illustrated, a large number of Moslems seek occasions for feeling offended, then avenge their faux grievances through arson and murder. From the ranks of such people spring the terrorists who have killed thousands of innocents, purportedly in the service of Islam, and threaten to murder more. Those are not the ideal interlocutors in a rational discussion of differences.

We are reassured frequently that the Islamofascists represent only a minority of Moslem opinion. I’m willing to believe that, but it is a sad fact that the Islamic majority is a very silent one. Its chagrin at the use of its religious symbols to sanctify acts of barbarity is, with a handful of praiseworthy exceptions, thoroughly repressed. Isn’t it past time for mainstream Islam to undertake an internal ideological jihad against distorters of the faith? Christians can do nothing to convince extremists that Allah does not desire the murder of Christians and Jews, forced conversions, desecration of houses of worship, honor killings and other atrocities. Mainstream Moslems, on the other hand, should be able to present the reasons why the teachings of their faith condemn such deeds: why jihad is spiritual striving, not holy war; why “no compulsion in religion” is a binding directive; why suicide bombing, the torture and beheading of captives, death sentences against critics, riots over alleged insults, and refusals to accept responsibility for one’s own social and economic problems are abominations in the eyes of God.

Since Islamofascist misdeeds tarnish the reputation of all Moslems and lead many non-Moslems to conclude that terrorism is the essential teaching of Mohammed, isn’t it reasonable to expect genuine Moslems to repudiate – not in vague terms for Western ears only, but with fiery polemics in Arabic, Persian and Turkish – the heresies of the mufsidun? Then no one would be able to say in good faith that Islam is not a religion of peace.

A dialogue within the House of Islam is, so far as I can see, the only way that Islamofascism can be disarmed without war. There is no sign that its guiding spirits are willing to make peace with Christians, Jews, Hindus or secularists, nor that it regards “peace” as anything more than a brief interlude between attacks. If the world is to avoid a generation of incessant religious strife, sane Moslems will have to win away the lunatics’ flocks through persistent, energetic proselytization.

And what if the Islamic majority fails to convert the mufsidun, or does not try? At some point, the rest of the world will stop waiting. I do not relish the prospect of thinking of Moslems in the way that one thinks of communists, as intractable enemies of civilization, but there is a real risk that, by letting their faith be identified with barbarism, they will leave us no choice.

Tomorrow Belongs to Them?

Did you ever imagine that a question like this would be asked by a mainstream reporter in 21st Century America?

Following the “macaca” episode, the Jewish press published stories that appeared on the Internet that explored your possible Jewish ancestry on your mother’s side. You’ve been quoted as saying that your mother is not Jewish, but it has been reported that her father, your grandfather, Felix whom you were given your middle name for, was Jewish. Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews and if so at which point Jewish identity might have ended?

To its credit, the audience booed this intrusion of the Nuremberg Principle into an American political campaign. The questionee, Senator George Allen (R–Va.), reacted angrily, as well he might.

It soon emerged that this attention to the religion of Senator Allen’s forebears has been vigorously promoted on left-wing Web sites by his opponent’s staff. Those same sites, and his opponent’s press releases, routinely refer to him as “George Felix Allen”. Stressing the Jewish-sounding elements in a target’s name is an old-time antisemitic ploy. It was, for instance, a common practice of the vile and now happily departed “Liberty Lobby”.

Since berating people for having “Jewish blood” isn’t regarded by most Americans as, er, kosher, there is a cover story. Supposedly, Senator Allen’s failure to make a big deal about his ethnic heritage shows that he is an antisemite. That “explanation” doesn’t pass the giggle test. Nobody outside the Allen family has any reason to care about the Allen family tree, and the Senator would look quite silly if he were to start proclaiming that Virginians should elect him to the Senate in homage to his grandfather Felix.

No, I think that, when a candidate’s operatives go to a pit of anti-Jewish venom like Daily Kos and shout “Jew! Jew! Jew!”, they probably know exactly what they are doing. It is taken for granted among the nutroots that the War on Terror is waged by Jewish neocons in the interests of Israel. What better way to “energize” that element of the Democratic Party’s base than to insinuate that Senator Allen is secretly one of the Tribe?

The Republican Party ostracized David Duke. What are the chances that the Democrats will so much as frown at James Webb?

Quote of the Day

An e-mail passed along on the First Things blog by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus:

Dear Pope Benedict XVI:

We Muslims are not at all violent, not that you said we were, but who needs to read your speech when the local imam, who hasn’t read it either, can tell us what it says? Since peaceful efforts to convince you of our commitment to peace have failed, we hope that the mass riots, burnt effigies, cries of “Death to the Pope!” and a smattering of grenades in assorted churches will exorcise every ghost of the rumor that we are violent, and prove that Mohammed pitched a tent big enough to include interfaith camels. It is hoped that you will rescind your position, even if it wasn’t yours to begin with, lest our peacefulness escalate even further.

Fr. Neuhaus assumes that this missive is “fictional”. “Fake but accurate” is, I believe, the proper term.

Pope and Ayatollah on Reason and Faith

Benedict XVI’s lecture last week at the University of Regensburg, “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections”, is already the most widely circulated (if not read) and most controversial of a lifetime of voluminous and controversial writings. Since the attacks on it, by both Islamofascists and their Western enablers, are in patent bad faith, intended to demonstrate the might of Islamic extremism rather than call attention to a genuine grievance, they don’t deserve lengthy attention. Still, for the benefit of those who haven’t read more than the context-free reportage, here is the passage for which the New York Times demands the Pope offer “a deep and persuasive apology”:

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on – perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara – by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the "three Laws": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an. In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point – itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself – which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation-controversy, edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...”.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn [sic; a typo for “Ibn Hazm” (994–1064)] went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

Quoting Emperor Manuel’s hostile characterization of Mohammed – “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached” – is outrageous, according to the Times:

Muslim leaders the world over have demanded apologies and threatened to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican, warning that the pope’s words dangerously reinforce a false and biased view of Islam. For many [sic] Muslims, holy war — jihad — is a spiritual struggle, and not a call to violence. And they denounce its perversion by extremists, who use jihad to justify murder and terrorism.

Leaving aside the perhaps pertinent fact that the denunciations of those “who use jihad to justify murder and terrorism” are sparse and sotto voce (how many Moslem leaders have denounced the forced conversion of two Western reporters just last month?), it is a simple historical fact that Moslems in the 14th Century had no qualms about making war to spread their religion. (Peter Robinson has an interesting post on Manuel II’s first-hand experience.) To note that fact as a prelude to presenting an argument against religious compulsion no more “reinforce[s] a false and biased view of Islam” than truthful statements about the Inquisition reinforce a false and biased view of Christianity.

If a sincere Moslem or a secularist dhimmi wishes to find something alarming in Benedict’s words, he should look to the last of the quoted paragraphs. Having grounded Manuel’s argument against violent conversions on the principle that “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature”, Benedict questions whether Islam acknowledges that principle. For the purpose of this lecture, he is content to leave the issue hanging. The opinion of Ibn Hazm, as transmitted by M. Arnaldez, may or may not represent the consensus of Moslem theologians. What concerns Benedict is that Ibn Hazm has modern counterparts. An influential school of Christian thought, exemplified by Adolf von Harnack and his disciples, does place God’s will outside the realm of reason, dismissing theology based on an intimate connection between the two as a pagan Greek distortion of the purity of the Gospel. The main body of the lecture recounts the history of the “dehellenization” project and warns against its consequences:

[T]he specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science” and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Benedict’s argument can be summarized thus: God wills what is right, but right and wrong are not His arbitrary creations. They are discoverable through human reason. If we define “reason” to exclude such matters, morality devolves into personal taste or the will of the strongest.

Most worryingly, if God’s nature has nothing to do with reason, we have no basis for declining to be ruled by our irrational impulses, for judging between purported revelations or, indeed, for disobeying a fiend with pretensions to godhood.

Hence, Benedict sees the modern separation between Faith and Reason as an illicit divorce, damaging to both partners.

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably (with ‘logos’) is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great “logos,” to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.

For an indication of how Islam, or a significant portion thereof, will respond to this invitation, let us turn to another recent lecture that was a topic of controversy, not because of its content, about which hardly anybody has said anything, but because the speaker was Ayatollah Mohammed Khatami, former president of Iran and a staunch, albeit allegedly “moderate”, supporter of its current government. The topic of the ayatollah’s September 7th lecture at the National Cathedral was the same as the Pope’s: the relationship between Faith and Reason. There was, too, a superficial similarity to their conclusions. Nonetheless, their positions differ toto caelo.

In Benedict’s mind, Christianity joined Faith to Reason from the beginning. He blames their contemporary separation primarily on dehellenizing theologians and sees that development as culminating within his own adult lifetime. (Cf. his opening paragraph, where he lauds the “profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason” shared by the theological and secular faculties when he was a professor at Regensburg thirty-some years ago.) Khatami, by contrast, doesn’t think that a marriage ever existed and places Reason’s assault on Faith much earlier, at the time of the Renaissance:

If one contemplates on the development of philosophy from its origin to the present, one clearly notices that most thinkers in history have in fact moved between two extremes. Modernism (and modernity) is the last cycle in this process. Modernism contains within itself many philosophical, artistic, scientific, historical and ethical components. The common denominator among all these aspects, however, is the catastrophic transformation that toward the end of the Middle Ages penetrated into the depths of the minds of the intellectuals. The new era that we call the Age of Renaissance not only sought to revive the intellectual and cultural heritage of Greece and Rome, but its main objective was to adopt new approaches and ways of expression in relation to religion and its place in human society. The Renaissance-era intellectuals and thinkers defined human beings in a different light. Instead of turning his back to the world and despising material life as the primordial human being had done, the newly defined man was an individual who turned to the world and material life.

From there he proceeds to the ever popular “Islam as victim” narrative:

Man’s success in controlling the world did not stop there. Rather, it turned into aggression and domination that extended beyond the world of nature and to human societies as well. The development that came to be known as colonialism, and was the natural outcome of the domination of modern science over nature, was extended to human sciences as well. The extreme reaction against the absolute domination of the church over man in the Middle Ages, and the denial of his fundamental rights and freedoms, led to another extreme reaction in the form of an encounter between faith and reason in modern times. In the new environment that was created, instrumental rationality confronted faith. As a result, man showed utmost effort to dominate not only nature; but also once this was accomplished, the strong established dominance over weak societies. After the establishment of what we know as Western Civilization, we witnessed the emergence of a belief in both the dominance of that civilization and in the integration of other civilizations or the remnants of other civilizations into a unified Western one.

Some of us can dredge up instances where “the strong established dominance over weak societies” without the benefit of the Renaissance or “instrumental rationality”. One might also observe that Western Civilization is the first ever to express reservations about the expansion of its own sphere. Certainly no record survives of Moslem multiculturalists bemoaning the uprooting of “weak societies” in Egypt or Persia or Anatolia or Spain or India. Ayatollah Khatami does not explain why European conquest differs in kind from the Moslem conquests of the 7th through 17th Centuries or is a unique product of the intellectual viewpoint of the Renaissance. To probe such questions would spoil the purity of the “victim”.

At one time, according to Khatami, Westerners looked forward to “the emergence of a single grand scientific and industrial civilization”.

This over-optimism is gradually fading, however, and it is being replaced with serious reservations and doubts by even westerners themselves. Despite all efforts aimed at summarizing the entirety of Western Civilization in liberal democracy and the multifaceted justification of this point of view, and dreams of an end to history, the rising crisis of modern rational[ism] and modernism on the one hand and the resistance of other civilizations and smaller communities based on faith on the other, and even the emergence of anti-modernist traditional movements in the twentieth century, has created doubts about the ultimate domination of reason-based modern civilization.

To Benedict, the crisis posed by the split between Reason and Faith lies in the loss of a morality based on reason. Khatami’s “crisis” is merely a matter of relative power. Unspecified internal weaknesses, exacerbated by “the resistance of other civilizations and smaller communities based on faith”, stand in the way of “the ultimate domination of reason-based modern civilization”. To resolve the conflict, which he implies is now stalemated, he calls for “a historic dialogue” between “the Orient [sc., Islam – I doubt that he has much room at the table for the non-Moslem civilizations of China, Japan and India], which by definition means guidance and orderliness” and the West. He conceives this “dialogue” as a political negotiation of the most one-sided variety:

The time has come for the West to take a step forward and view itself from another angle. And this is by no means a call for the West to forgo its lofty cultural heritage and civilization. Neither is this an invitation to obscurantism but an attempt at persuading the West to seek new understanding and to better comprehend the cultural geography of the world.

What this means is that “the Orient and specifically the Islamic Orient, can fill the enormous void of spirituality and estrangement from the truth of existence, which today is the great affliction of our world, by reliance upon its moral heritage and transcendental wisdom”, though the void fillers are cautioned against “ostentation and superficiality”. Meanwhile, Islam, Christianity and Judaism “can help mankind solve modern problems and challenges by a return to their vital, vibrant and common essence”. To a Moslem speaker, unless he has become an apostate, the “vital, vibrant and common essence” of the three faiths is nothing other than the Koran and the teachings of Mohammed. No doubt, though, the ayatollah reckoned on his audience of milk-and-water Episcopalians to hear his words as a plea for a vague, ecumenical spirituality.

And what will Islam yield in return for the de facto accession of Christendom to its creed?

At the same time, the East needs to utilize the rationality and prudence of the West in its worldly affairs and must embark on the important path of development.

Financed, one may be sure, by cash from the repentant Westerners.

Looking from a great distance and with squinting eyes, one may say that both Benedict and Khatami criticize Western secularism, but the differences between their critiques are crucial and deep. Benedict’s is, as he puts it, “from within”. It is also symmetrical: Reason without Faith is incomplete, because it then cannot account for “the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based”. On the other hand, Faith operating independently of reason gives birth to moral pathologies. What is needed is for “reason and faith [to] come together in a new way, [to] overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and [to] once more disclose its vast horizons”.

Khatami concedes that Faith must make use of reasoning of the elementary sort, “the discerning ability of reason”, but his overall stance is that Faith should command and Reason obey. There is no visible space in that hierarchy for the Emperor Manuel’s “Not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature” and hence no hopeful prospect for what the Pope desires: “that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today”.

A Caution for Conservative Malcontents

It’s easy to be a disillusioned right-winger these days, as government spending rises at its fastest clip in years, the Republican Senate Campaign Committee spends millions to help Lincoln Chafee turn back a conservative primary opponent (in return for which the Senator sinks John Bolton’s nomination as U.N. ambassador) and “limited government” sounds more and more like a quaint, last-century pipe dream. If Republicans are going to act like liberals, why not let the real liberals run Congress for a while? Then, when the country gets tired of moonbat antics, we can refight the Gingrich Revolution. Only this time we’ll elect Congresscritters who won’t let their zeal for liberty be softened by the comforts of K Street.

It makes for an enjoyable grumble. Today, however, we got a glimpse of the more than a dime’s worth of difference that still separates the two parties. The House of Representatives voted on a rules change to require the disclosure of members’ tax and spending earmarks. As National Review summarizes,

Under the new rules, the House Appropriations Committee would be required to provide a list of earmarks in each bill: who added them, who will benefit from them, and how much they will cost.

This rule would also apply to authorized spending like last year’s bloated transportation bill, making it even more comprehensive than the earmark reforms proposed in the House lobbying-reform bill. In addition, it would require the disclosure of special tax breaks to single beneficiaries, thus exposing “tax earmarks.” As a House rule change, it would apply only to House bills — but any earmarks added in conference and then returned to the House would also have to be disclosed before a final vote.

If one takes seriously the concept of public scrutiny of lawmakers’ work, that is an obvious and overdue reform. But votes on internal House matters don’t get a lot of publicity. Legislators don’t feel the pressure that led to overwhelming passage of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act earlier this week. Instead, they can follow their real opinions. When they did that, 90 percent of the chamber’s Republicans voted for the anti-earmark rule, and three-quarters of the Democrats voted against (vote totals). That gives us a sign of how the Porkbusters will fare in a Democratic Congress.

It may well be that many of the GOP yeas were reluctant concessions to conservative pressure, but the point to notice is that conservatives can pressure the Republican caucus. It would be nice to have more influence, but greater and greater influence over fewer and fewer members (which is what we will get if conservatives sulk in November) can be attractive only to the right-wing counterparts of the Krazy Kossack Korps.

A Meeting of Right and Left

That Left and Right circle around and meet on the fringes is an almost truism. At first glance, the current issue of Washington Monthly – once distinctive as the home of thoughtful “neoliberalism”, now a quarantine zone for sufferers from Bush Derangement Syndrome – is an illustration. It features a symposium by a bevy of libertarians and paleoconservatives on why a Democratic victory in November would be good for the country. Their reasons are the standards that one hears from right wingers grousing over their third beer: too much spending, too little deregulation, too much confidence in the capabilities of government.

To see how odd it is for these essays to appear in this forum, consider a converse example: What if National Review published a bunch of excoriations of the Democrats, all written by left-wingers and lamenting that the party of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi was too fiscally conservative, insufficiently secular, excessively hawkish and unreasonably skeptical of governmental solutions to all of the problems of mankind. To the extent that NR readers believed any of that, wouldn’t they be inclined to think better of the targets? Gee, I always thought that the Dems were eco-freaks, but this guy says they just want to make life easier for big business. Maybe they aren’t as bad as I thought.

If I felt like venting may annoyance at much that the contemporary Republican Party does and doesn’t do, but at the same time didn’t want to diminish even slightly its prospects for retaining control of Congress, I can think of no better strategy than delivering my denunciations to a readership that all but unanimously regards Big Government as a darn sight better than Godliness. I’m glad to see that Christopher Buckley et al. are running with that scheme.

The War on Terror Log Roll

Jim Geraghty’s Voting to Kill (there’s a title that will make the Angry Left stop yelping about The Party of Death) arrived a couple of days ago, and I’ve been reading it between other pressing matters. The book’s thesis is one that anybody could think up in a minute: So long as terrorism remains a threat, a political party that evades dealing with it will be at an immense electoral disadvantage. Mr. Geraghty, whose “The Kerry Spot” (now renamed “TKS”) was one of the three or four best election blogs in 2004, doesn’t just state this proposition as if it were a self-evident truth. He backs it up with plentiful data from history, polls and, most crucially, leading Democrats’ statements about the War on Terror.

While Voting to Kill foresees a Republican political ascendancy faute de mieux, a lucky accident born of the opposition’s abdication on a life-and-death issue, Democrats and liberals tend to treat the War on Terror as a Rovian “dirty trick”: The President harped on terrorism, they claim, in order to scare voters into reelecting him and hopes the tactic will work again this November.

Kevin Drum, for instance [via “The Left Remembers 9/11”], last seen refusing on partisan grounds to speak ill of the Iranian mullarchy, is incensed that President Bush hasn’t emulated FDR by turning into “a bipartisan commander-in-chief”. “The national security rhetoric from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the administration [is] relentlessly inflammatory and divisive,” he avers. What the President ought to have done was foster national unity by ceasing to advocate tax cuts and conservative social policies.

FDR was surely one of the most partisan presidents of the 20th century, but after Pearl Harbor he announced that “Dr. New Deal has been replaced by Dr. Win the War.” And he made good on that. World War II was largely a bipartisan war and FDR largely governed as a bipartisan commander-in-chief.

Actually, that quote came two years after Pearl Harbor, when Congress, “more conservative after 1942 than it had been since the 1920’s”, had already “abolished New Deal agencies thought to be making no direct contribution to the war effort – the CCC, WPA, and NYA in particular” [Otis L. Graham, Jr. “The Democratic Party, 1932–1945, in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties, p. 1955 (1973)]. Roosevelt didn’t offer domestic concessions to Republicans as a way to bribe them into supporting the war effort. The GOP threw the America Firsters overboard immediately after Pearl Harbor. It then ran as a pro-war party with spectacular results. In November 1942, it gained 10 seats in the Senate and 47 in the House, getting to within nine votes of a majority in the latter. The parallel today would be a Democratic Party in which Joe Lieberman was the norm rather than a remote outlier.

If one takes Mr. Drum’s statements seriously, he must hold the contemporary Democratic Party in very low regard indeed. He intimates that its position on the War on Terror depends not on the merits of the Administration’s policies but on whether it can wring concessions on unrelated issues, as if national security were just another log to roll on Washington’s political river. No hyperventilating Republican campaigner could make a more devastating point.

Frankly, I’d be willing to trade quite a few economic and social chips for acquiescence in the offensive against Islamofascism. The most serious impediment to our efforts right now is the enemy’s perception that, if it just holds out, isolationists will come to power in Washington. So, if Kevin Drum accurately captures the mood of the Democrats, let’s hear their offers. A 20 percent capital gains tax rate for higher troop levels in Iraq? Stem cell funding for approval of the NSA program and terrorist tribunals? Repeal of welfare reform for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities? Now that we know what the Drum Democrats are, let’s get on with negotiating their price.

In Memoriam: Donald L. Adams

[This post is part of the 2996 Project, initiated by Dale C. Roe.]

“Big Don” Adams was 28 years old, an up-and-coming executive at a bond trading firm, the father of a five-month-old daughter, the brother of a Marine Corps lance corporal. Early in the morning of September 11, 2001, he telephoned his wife Heda, at home with baby Rebecca in Chatham, New Jersey, to tell her that he had just heard an explosion. He was on the 105th floor of One World Trade Center; the explosion was 20 stories below him.

He and Heda, whom he simply called “H” (she was “D” to him), had met nine years earlier as students at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He was an imposing figure, 6 and half feet tall, a tackle on the football team, which he captained in his senior year. He remained an enthusiastic football fan after graduation and was also an avid golfer. In 2000 he joined Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., where he became vice president of sales for the company’s electronic trading division.

Here are some glimpses of Don Adams’ too brief life, borrowed, with light editing, from his page at Legacy.com:

Don, I grew up knowing you. For the 16 years I knew you, you were like my older brother. Dwight [Don’s brother] and you were my big brothers I never had. . . . I will always remember the time you picked me up from school and took me to Winslow School to play football, never letting me make a touchdown.

* * * *

I knew Don while in high school. I was two years ahead of him, but we played football together and I will always remember how much fun he was to be around. When I heard of his death in this tragedy, it struck me as odd that a man so full of life and so kind to others could be taken in such a cold and calculated manner.

I hadn’t spoken to Don in more years than I want to admit, but when I heard that he was in the tower . . . , I immediately flashed back to football practice outside the VHS 11-12 building. I can remember him working in blocking drills against me and other varsity members (this would have been his sophomore year I believe) and just getting worked over. It wasn’t because of lack of heart or skill, more because the other guys were older and had some techniques they had learned over time. Don never quit. No matter how a play went or a drill went, he was always jumping back in there and working hard.

By the end of the year, working through some injuries and other stuff that goes with football, Don was a changed man and player. That is the man I will recall fondly.

* * * *

I graduated high school with Don and can remember him playing football. He was liked by everyone. No matter what clique of people you asked in school – jocks, preps, or nerds – nobody could ever say anything bad about him.

* * * *

I was surprised to hear that Don, my good friend from high school, was killed at the Trade Centers. . . . Last time I saw him was graduation day. He looked so full of life. He was on his way to FDU. He talked to me a lot about going with them to school, but I instead joined the service. I know it’s hard to deal with the lost of such a good big guy, but I hope the best for family, wife and daughter.

* * * *

In the summer of ’92 he was a bouncer, 6 feet 5 inches tall, at some long-gone beach bar on the Jersey Shore. She was cute and underage, hoping to sweet-talk her way through the door. “He was nice and let me in,” Heda Adams said of the day she met her husband, Donald Adams.

* * * *

Heda, I was at FDU for about 2 years with you and Big Don. He actually showed me around campus while I was being recruited; he kept telling me to always eat more.

* * * *

[My brother] was visiting many schools in his senior year of high school and wasn’t really impressed with any of them. When he went to FDU that weekend, he thought it would be like all of the rest. Then he met Don, and made his decision. He wanted to be around people like him! Don was a great man and very caring for others. I will never forget what he did for my brother and what he did for our country.

* * * *

I played football for a short time with Don at Fairleigh Dickinson. He was a vivacious and fun-loving guy, who worked hard to win the respect and admiration of his teammates. His physical presence was overshadowed only by his love for life. He will be missed by all who knew him.

* * * *

I was a classmate of Don’s at Fairleigh Dickinson U. and his roommate for the summer session of ’95. Everyone on campus knew “Big Don”. One was easily won over by his charm and personality. It was touching to read about Don and Heda’s first meeting. They could be seen in each other’s company at all times.

* * * *

I met Don through a friend of his in the business. The first time I met him was in Chatham the weekend of New Year’s 2001, right after the 24 inch snow storm. I was visiting a guy I was dating and the town had been closed. Don met us at a mom and pop place for a couple of hours. Heda, you were pregnant with Rebecca at the time, and the sheer joy and anticipation he felt was obvious. He spoke very highly of you, and I remember thinking to myself, whomever he is married to is so lucky to have someone that is so dedicated and in love with her. I ran into Don again in St. Louis the following June just a couple of months after Rebecca was born. He was possibly THE proudest father I’d ever run in to.

* * * *

Don was a wonderful person. I will always remember his big smile when he was in town visiting his friends at LaSalle Bank.

* * * *

On the day of his brother’s wedding [in 2000], Donald Adams insisted on tossing a football around before the ceremony. But as he was passing the ball, he somehow twisted his knee and pulled a ligament.

Several hours later, though, he managed to overcome the pain, wobble down the aisle with a knee brace on and stand as the best man in his brother Dwight’s wedding.

“He just pushed on,” said Dwight Adams, a lance corporal with the United States Marine Corps. “He was awesome.”

May we, remembering this life-filled young American, push on, too.

The Path to 9/11: The Only Lesson We Need

Since I don’t receive either network or cable television, it isn’t likely that I’ll see ABC’s The Path to 9/11. Judging by John Podhoretz’s and John J. Miller’s reviews, that won’t be a grievous loss. The show’s principal merit, it seems, is its tribute to Afghan freedom fighter Ahmed Massoud, assassinated by al-Qa’eda two days before 9/11. Its flaws are what one expects from a Hollywood mockumentary, namely, an itch to “improve” real events. Shakespeare could do that. When ABC tries, it invents scenes that are neither accurate history nor compelling drama. They merely furnish ammunition to Clintonistas, whose real complaint is not that words are put into Sandy Berger’s mouth but that the American public is reminded of how insouciantly Mr. Clinton and his advisors viewed the terrorist threat.

While my sympathy for the allegations of factual distortions is much diminished by disgust at the Democrats’ typically thuggish tactics (such as not-too-veiled threats to challenge the broadcast licenses of ABC affiliates), I do agree that recriminations ought to be limited. Nobody expected an act of war as grotesque as the 9/11 skyjackings. If the authorities had discovered and publicized the plot, how many would have believed them?

The fundamental flaw in our country’s pre-9/11 approach to terrorism was that we treated our openly declared enemies as if they were garden variety criminals. They were allowed to go about their business unmolested until and unless definite evidence of nefarious designs came to light. That is an adequate strategy for dealing with mafiosi, whose conspiracies center around vice, robbery and individual acts of violence. It’s no way to fight a war.

When Osama bin Laden issued a declaration of war against the United States on August 23, 1996, our government’s reaction was – nothing. It was ridiculous for an obscure Arab businessman to start a war with the world’s mightiest nation, so we treated his statement as a meaningless tantrum. Osama might be at war with us, but we were not with him. Five years later, we learned the cost of that asymmetrical attitude.

In a world where individuals or small groups can murder hundreds or thousands (and maybe millions, if they are able to obtain chemical, biological or nuclear weapons), no adversary is so tiny that it can be prudently ignored.

There can be no legal or moral objection to waging war against those who define themselves as our enemies, either in Osama’s formalistic fashion or by enthusiastically applauding the death of Americans and urging others to commit murder. There may be practical reasons to exert less than our full force against particular foes – he who attacks everywhere attacks nothing – but I see no reason why overt enemies, whether al-Qa’eda or Ba’athist Iraq or the Iranian mullarchy, should feel safe from American onslaught. They chose war; let them take the consequences.

That is the lesson we should reflect on tomorrow, as we remember the atrocities of five years ago. It’s obvious, though, that some people refuse to learn. A host of Democratic politicians are taking the occasion to bewail the fate of Saddam Hussein, a tyrant who glorified Mohammed Atta and paid money to encourage suicide bombings. I fear that Senator Jay Rockefeller spoke for much of his party when he declared this morning that, if left in power, Saddam “wasn’t going to attack us”. Implicit in that confident assurance is the belief that all of Saddam’s anti-American rhetoric was just bad temper. So what if he used his oil money to give $25,000 grants to the families of Jew killers and to bribe foreign politicians? Surely he would never have hired anybody to kill Americans. And would never have slipped sarin into hostile hands. He was, after all, “isolated”, just as harmless as, well, Osama bin Laden in 1996.

Don’t Know Nothin’ About History, Miami Version

World War II is the most written about conflict in human history, and it wasn’t all that long ago. You’d think that any American with enough literacy to be, say, a newspaper columnist would have a grasp of the basic facts about what happened. You’d be wrong.

Best of the Web calls attention to a Miami Herald writer, one Leonard Pitts, Jr., who deploys a World War II analogy against the ouster of Saddam Hussein:

On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan launched a sneak attack that devastated the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. And the United States rose in righteous fury, immediately declaring war on Thailand. Because, you know, it was in the same part of the world as Japan and the people kind of looked alike and besides, those Thais had been getting a little uppity and were due for a smackdown.

Which is not the way it happened, of course, but if Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wants to use World War II allusions to describe the War on Terror, I submit that my fantasy comes a lot closer to the truth than his.

As Best of the Web notes, we actually did go to war with Thailand, a Japanese ally, but that isn’t the most historically illiterate notion in Mr. Pitts’ screed. He is evidently unaware that, except for the name “Thailand”, his fantasy isn’t fantasy at all.

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. During the year that followed, the United States sent the great bulk of our armed forces – roughly 90 percent of our manpower – to Europe, where we waged war against Germany and Italy, two nations that had never attacked us. What’s more, our very first major action, Operation Torch, invaded territory belonging to Vichy France, which not only hadn’t attacked us but was a neutral with whom we had diplomatic relations. Talk about distractions!

At the time, many Americans did. They complained about President Roosevelt’s “Europe First” policy and the slow pace of the war in the Pacific. A sign of the disproportion of our efforts is that Japan, a far weaker power, was still fighting months after the Third Reich collapsed.

Japan and Germany had signed an alliance, it’s true, but historians have shown that neither gave more than nominal assistance to the other, and it was clear at the time that no blows struck in Europe would diminish Japan’s war-making capacity.

Does all this mean that FDR was as “stupid” and “incompetent” as George W. Bush, ignoring the real enemy to go after Hitler and Mussolini just because they “had been getting a little uppity and were due for a smackdown”? It wouldn’t surprise me if Leonard Pitts, Jr., once apprised of the historical data, answered “yes”.

Roosevelt, however, did not see Japan and Pearl Harbor out of the context of the worldwide struggle between democracy and fascism. Japan was one of several anti-Western totalitarian states. Overwhelming it, while leaving like-minded regimes intact, would be no meaningful victory. The strategic question was how best to defeat all of the fascist powers, not Japan alone.

Similarly, al-Qa’eda is part of the web of Islamofascism. Its obliteration without anything more, though psychologically as satisfying as hanging Tojo, would not have ameliorated the threat posed by an array of hostile states and non-states that share its ideology, from Ba’athist Iraq to Hamas and Hezbollah to free agent fanatics zealous to kill giaours for Allah. America’s challenge is to render Islamofascism impotent by uprooting its bases of operations and demonstrating that assaults on the West are futile. Until we do that, we will live under the unrelenting threat of more 9/11’s.

Whatever the exact nature of Saddam Hussein’s relationship with al-Qa’eda, he was on the same side, going so far as to erect murals celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers. More concretely, he openly rewarded the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, had plenty of overt connections with terrorist groups, and possessed the wherewithal to support their activities. Iraq was not the sole nexus of Islamofascism, but it was an important one, and the campaign had to begin somewhere. French North Africa was, after all, halfway around the world from Tokyo, yet it was there that the overthrow of the Japanese warlords began.

News? What News?

Yesterday, President Bush delivered a speech describing specifically, for the first time, how the capture and interrogation of terrorist capi has thwarted planned attacks against Americans. The narrative occupied about a third of his text. His summation made it clear why he regards this program, including “secret prisons” and questioning methods that give the ACLU the vapors, as vital to national defense:

Information from the terrorists in this program has helped us to identify individuals that al Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations, many of whom we had never heard about before. They include terrorists who were set to case targets inside the United States, including financial buildings in major cities on the East Coast. Information from terrorists in CIA custody has played a role in the capture or questioning of nearly every senior al Qaeda member or associate detained by the U.S. and its allies since this program began. By providing everything from initial leads to photo identifications, to precise locations of where terrorists were hiding, this program has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they were able to kill.

This program has also played a critical role in helping us understand the enemy we face in this war. Terrorists in this program have painted a picture of al Qaeda’s structure and financing, and communications and logistics. They identified al Qaeda’s travel routes and safe havens, and explained how al Qaeda’s senior leadership communicates with its operatives in places like Iraq. They provided information that allows us – that has allowed us to make sense of documents and computer records that we have seized in terrorist raids. They’ve identified voices in recordings of intercepted calls, and helped us understand the meaning of potentially critical terrorist communications.

That al-Qa’eda hasn’t killed thousands more Americans in the five years since 9/11 is not just happenstance. Our enemies have set new plots in motion, recruited new terrorists, tried to develop biological weapons. Happily, American counter-terrorism efforts have discovered and aborted all of these schemes. If they hadn’t, the last half-decade would have been a far different experience for all Americans.

The President’s disclosures sound like news to me, but our country’s media seem to disagree. Right now, the blurb on the Wall Street Journal’s Web site reads, “Bush acknowledged existence of a secret CIA prison system, denied interrogation tactics amount to torture and said 14 top al Qaeda detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are now in Guantanamo and will be tried.” The full story [link probably for subscribers only] reduces the central portion of the speech to a phrase in paragraph 15: “Mr. Bush defended the handling of the prisoners to date, but wouldn’t discuss interrogation methods, saying they had provided crucial intelligence.” The reader is never told what the “crucial intelligence” was. He might well infer that the President presented nothing more than a conclusory generalization.

Leaving out the facts obscures the usefulness of what the President gingerly labels “an alternative set of [interrogation] procedures”. The question of how to deal with al-Qa’eda prisoners thus wafts off into abstract theory. That may be fine for high-minded advocates of defendants’ rights, to whom defeating our enemies is not worth a minute’s discomfort to any poor, oppressed Islamofascist. They would not like for the debate to focus on, say,

We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. . . .

Zubaydah was questioned using these procedures, and soon he began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th. For example, Zubaydah identified one of [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed]’s accomplices in the 9/11 attacks – a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh. The information Zubaydah provided helped lead to the capture of bin al Shibh. And together these two terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Once in our custody, [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] was questioned by the CIA using these procedures, and he soon provided information that helped us stop another planned attack on the United States.

Reticent though they are about particulars, we have a good general notion of how liberal Democrats would have dealt with the terrorist threat over the past five years. We can be sure that they would not have employed the tactics used to break Abu Zubaydah (“a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden”). Refraining would have meant not capturing Ramzi bin al Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and not “stop[ping] another planned attack on the United States”. Under their guidance, the U.S. today would be a purer place from the civil libertarian point of view. How well off we otherwise be I leave to the reader’s own judgment.

Flames Across the Border

If he were still around, Ben Franklin might be saying to Mexico, “A democracy – if you can keep it.” Today the Mexican Election Tribunal did its duty, confirming that Felipe Calderón won the presidency last July in what was probably the most transparent and fraud-resistant major election ever conducted in this hemisphere. The electoral process was robust enough to put the outcome beyond rational doubt, despite the fact that the winning margin was less than one vote out of every 200 cast. A decade ago, every significant election in Mexico was rigged. The Tribunal’s decision puts the capstone on a remarkable political structure built in an astonishingly short time.

But will it last? The second place finisher, Castroite Andrés Manuel López Obrador (“AMLO” to his hard core of leftist acolytes) plans to stage a “national convention” on September 16th, Mexican Independence Day, at which he threatens to declare himself president of a “parallel government”. It’s conceivable that this pronunciamento will collapse as AMLO partisans take stock of their leader’s slipping popularity and edge away from his cause. If that happy outcome doesn’t occur, the alternatives are pretty awful. Either the government will surrender some of its effective power to AMLO, rewarding his treasonous conduct and nullifying much of the substance of democratic rule, or the country will slide into civil war between the “official” and the “parallel” regimes.

Following longstanding custom, hardly anyone in the U.S. is paying more than a modicum of attention to what is going on to our south. If war breaks out, though, we won’t be able to ignore it. The AMLO forces have a strong chance of winning. They face a Mexican army whose military qualities are untested and can count on aid from Cuba and Venezuela. The legitimate government, by contrast, can expect no help from the United States. Anything that the Bush Administration tries to do is sure to draw strident opposition from both the Left and the nativist segment of the Right.

Mexico would, of course, suffer most from an AMLO dictatorship, which would at best mark a return to corrupt one-party rule. At worst, El Supremo would emulate his amigo Hugo Chávez, wrecking the economy, picking fights with the U.S. and importing Islamofascist terrorists. (The last is not fully confirmed in Venezuela, but Latin American radicals have been developing close ties with their Moslem counterparts and share an overriding hatred of Western society. It’s a match made in Hell.)

From our perspective, a Mexican civil war will be bad and a victory by AMLO’s fascists disastrous. The turmoil will exacerbate our border security problems, jeopardize an important oil producer and give terrorists a safe haven just across the Rio Grande. It is not too far-fetched to predict that, if President-elect Calderón fails to establish himself quickly, the next big theater for American armed forces will not be Iran or Syria or Lebanon but a place much nearer to home.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “Mexican Drama”
A. M. Mora y Leon, “Mexico’s Curse of the Left”
Enrique Krauze, “Mexico: Democracy Under Threat”

The Truth Is Too Out There

Thanks to stepped-up efforts to catch illegal immigrants, we learn that the folks who prate about strange doings at Roswell are on to something after all, at least according to the headline of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement press release (via Best of the Web Today):

ICE arrests 15 aliens in Roswell working for U.S. military contractor

The aliens were discovered painting Lockheed C-130’s. The government thinks they were lured to our world by a mysterious natural phenomenon.

“Aggressive worksite enforcement actions like this help deter aliens from entering the United States attracted by the ‘job magnet,’” said Troy Henley, special agent-in-charge of the ICE Office of Investigations in El Paso.

More likely, they came to support the Roswell in 2002 Worldcon bid, then found that they didn’t have the fare back home. They can’t really have been hoping to find much in the way of gainful employment. After all, who needs a xikplinthi repairman around here?