Stromata Blog

A Convenient Enemy

Bret Stephens’ column in today’s Wall Street Journal puts forward the highly believable theory that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s aspiring Mussolini, has deliberately selected the United States as his enemy. Finding an external foe is a familiar tactic of despots presiding over faltering economies and dying societies, but why has this one fixed on America as the focus of hostility? Why not, say, Moslem terrorists, who have inflicted real damage on his countrymen, or Red China, with which Russia shares a long border and a history of inimical relations? It scarcely seems rational to quarrel with a giant when numerous pigmies are close at hand.

Putin’s conduct is mysterious, yet it is so commonplace that we don’t really see the mystery. Throughout the world, wherever tyrants hold sway, America is their preferred adversary. Historically, superpowers have attracted sycophants. Our country is the first to draw jeers from the very sort of rulers who would be expected to curry our favor (the kind who did curry it during the Cold War, when we faced the problem of how to accept the proffered friendship of right-wing dictators without tainting our cause).

Maybe Hugo Chávez, another minor league Mussolini, offers us a clue to this strange state of affairs. His anti-Americanism is shrill to the point of self-parody, and he has no powerful protectors. He isn’t even an especially popular member of the tyrants’ club, as his poor showing in the recent U.N. Security Council elections revealed. In the past, his reign would have been clownish and short, ending like that of an Arbenz or a Noriega. In today’s world, by contrast, he is perfectly secure from external threat. If the United States were to take any steps to undermine him, the effort would meet furious denunciation – from Americans. Indeed, a Kennedy kinsman and former U.S. Congressman has unapologetically set up a business partnership with Chávez-controlled Citgo, one of the obvious purposes of which is to gain a following for the Venezuelan caudillo within the nation that he excoriates so furiously.

What Messrs. Putin and Chávez and a score of other America-haters – in North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia et al, not to mention the anti-American political parties that dominate much of Europe – have in common is that they have nothing to fear. The United States is a convenient enemy. Portraying it as a sinister force requires no imagination; an entire demonology has been constructed by two or three generations of leftist critics of American society. At the same time, this Satan is passive toward its self-avowed enemies. If President Putin directed his venom at al-Qa’eda or Peking, he would anticipate retaliation. The United States may utter an occasional harsh word. Or it may offer inducements to good behavior, as it did to North Korea during the Clinton Administration, does to Russia today, and may to Iran and Syria in the near future. What it does not do is treat enemies like anything worse than wayward friends.

Saddam Hussein was the one great exception, but the swiftness with which elite opinion repudiated his ouster from power, and the ease with which it has seemingly carried the day with public opinion, makes his fate the opposite of a warning. One might say, only slightly prophetically, Saddam died that Putin and Chávez and Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il might live without fear.

Many people, including most American liberals, are delighted that no one is afraid of us. If we are to wield any influence at all (and quite a few doubt that we should), it ought to be the influence acquired by pure, disinterested benevolence, on the model of Cheeryble Brothers in Nicholas Nickleby.

The world would be a happier place if that strategy had any prospect of success. I see no signs, however, that kindliness in foreign affairs has won us anybody’s love. The reductio ad absurdam was the videotaped testament of a 9/11 hijacker, who offered as a primary reason for detesting America our role in Bosnia – where our soldiers defended his fellow Moslems against our fellow Christians. If that display of disinterest and benevolence won us no plaudits, what ever will?

Not only does that liberal strategy yield no positive results. It also aggravates our problems. In the immediate aftermath of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, there was remarkably little Islamofascist resistance. Mark Steyn visited Fallujah without an escort. That was the period when the world momentarily thought that the “hyperpower” might act powerfully, and no one wished to risk becoming the next Saddam. Libya surrendered its weapons development programs. Pakistan cracked down on free lance sellers of nuclear secrets. The Proliferation Security Initiative garnered more international cooperation than ever before. Syria was compelled to relinquish its stranglehold on Lebanon. Middle Eastern governments made democratic gestures that they hoped would please neoconservatives in Washington.

Then men of ill will figured out that the immediate post-9/11 period was an anomaly. With the victory last month of the Cheeryble Party, followed instantly by intimations that the Bush Administration has given up on the principles that it espoused over the past five years, the convenient enemy is back, more toothless and supine than ever.

This pernicious normalcy effectively abandons the fate of the planet to the worst elements of the international political class. Without the United States of America, there is no active counterbalance against the faux Mussolinis and would-be caliphs. Thus the world is fated to see a steady increase in despotism, warfare, civil strife, impoverishment, fanaticism and genocide. Liberals wish that all away with magical thinking, relying on the tyrants’ club at Turtle Bay to discipline its members. Paleoconservatives fantasize about living comfortably behind border fences and trade barriers. When the history of the coming Dark Age is written – assuming that writers of history survive that epoch – men will have difficulty believing that such illusions once existed and that a potential age of gold was sacrificed on their altar.

A Syllable Too Many

I see that a Washington Post columnist has complained about President Bush’s habit, shared by many Republican politicos, of referring to the party of Pelosi, Reid and Kerry as the “Democrat” Party. Opines Ruth Marcus,

If he wanted to, President Bush could change the tone in Washington with a single syllable: He could just say “ic.” That is, he could stop referring to the opposition as the “Democrat Party” and call the other side, as it prefers, the Democratic Party.

Or the Democratics might try to “change the tone” by ceasing to accuse the President of undermining the Constitution, authorizing torture, lying about Saddam Hussein, plotting to destroy Social Security, etc.

Miss Marcus declares that employing the Democrats’ preferred moniker is “a matter of simple politeness”. I would say that the issue is less politeness than veracity. The term “democratic party” implies a special commitment to popular sovereignty and acceptance of the policy decisions of the masses even if they are unpalatable to social elites. Do today’s soi disant “democrats” have any such commitment? If so, they keep it under a great many wraps.

Earlier this month, the majority party (guess which one) in the Massachusetts legislature decided to ignore the state constitution’s amendment procedure. Supporters of an amendment to define “marriage” as a heterosexual union had gathered enough signatures to place the matter before a joint session of the two houses. To put it on the ballot requires the vote of 25 percent of the lawmakers in two successive years. It was clear that proponents had the requisite 25 percent, so the Democratics simply refused to hold a vote. Whatever the merits of the proposal, that method of disposing of it is scarcely consistent with democratic tenets. If any high-ranking figure in the Party of Democrats has objected to it, he has escaped my notice.

John Fund has called attention to other not-so-Democrats:

From the outraged cries of affirmative action diehards, you would think the dark night of fascism was descending with the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative [approved by 58 percent of the voters on November 7th]. Mary Sue Coleman is president of the University of Michigan, which has already spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars defending its racial preferences in courts. She addressed what Tom Bray of the Detroit News called “a howling mob of hundreds of student and faculty protestors” last week. “Diversity matters at Michigan,” she declared. “It matters today, and it will matter tomorrow.” Echoes of George Wallace, who in 1963 declared from the steps of Alabama’s Capitol: “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Ms. Coleman isn’t the only Michigan official to employ Wallace-style rhetoric against MCRI. Detroit’s Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick told a fundraiser last April that the measure would usher in an era of racial prejudice. “Bring it on!” he bellowed. “We will affirm to the world that affirmative action will be here today, it will be here tomorrow, and there will be affirmative action in the state forever.”

Have any Democrats rebuked this defiance of the will of the people? Again, I haven’t heard them.

It’s true that a democratic system can (and should) include checks on the rash impulses of the populace. That is why Massachusetts, for instance, interposes a series of hurdles in the way of constitutional amendments: gathering a large number of petition signatures, gaining the approval of 25 percent of the legislature in successive years, receiving a majority vote in a referendum. Those requirements are not anti-democratic. But what should we call someone who arbitrarily changes constitutional procedures to ensure a predetermined outcome, regardless of what the electorate thinks, or who determinedly refuses to abide by laws enacted after all of the procedural safeguards have been observed? Declining to apply the label “democratic” to a party dominated by men of that tendency strikes me as nothing worse than scrupulously accurate use of words.

Pronominal Sensitivity

Eric Rasmusen took time off the other day from mathematical economics to explain, as well as I’ve ever seen anybody do it, why “gender-neutered writing” is an act of cold-blooded murder of the English tongue:

“He or she” is verbose, “they” and indirect ways [of avoiding the generic “he”] obscure meaning, and alternation [of “he” and “she”] or “she” alone are constant burps in the writing as the reader runs into each oddity and thinks to himself, “Ah, feminism again,” either with pleasure at the political sentiment or irritation at the political advertisement.

I understand why feminists write that way. It is very much like Cato ending every speech, even if it had nothing to do with foreign policy, with “et Carthago delenda est” – “and Carthage must be destroyed”, which he thought the most important item on the agenda. . . .

I am no feminist, but if someone wrote an article arguing for feminism, I would not say it was badly written merely because of the subject matter. Rather, gender-neutering is bad writing because it causes the writer to introduce elements that serve no purpose as far as conveying the subject at hand, merely to make a political point. What he would admit otherwise was the very best possible way to convey his meaning must be altered for the sake of feminism.

It is worse than that, actually. Many writers who have no strong affinity for feminist ideas employ “he or she” out of simple fear that they will otherwise be accused of demeaning women. Conventional foolishness is sure that the world is full of females so easily offended that they will react with fury at the sight of a masculine pronoun not securely attached to a male individual.

But almost all women are more sensible than that, and the world would be a better informed place if the few who are not would be given more occasions to act outraged. If Christians demanded that every writer, whatever his faith, capitalize pronouns that refer to God, sensible men would pay much less attention to Christianity. Feminist tics deserve the same degree of acquiescence.

No Salvation in Pork

From OpinionJournal Political Diary (still only $3.95 a month and bound to become even more entertaining as Speaker Pelosi settles in):

A Polling Company exit poll finds that 62% of last week’s voters said they wanted fewer federal government services and lower taxes against 25% who said they want more federal government services and higher taxes. It’s still a conservative country, folks – in fact, these numbers track fairly closely to the sentiments expressed by voters after the GOP’s sweeping election victory in 1994. But here’s the most startling difference: This time, only 21% of voters said they thought Republicans would spend less than Democrats. Ouch. It’s amazing Republicans didn't take a bigger shellacking than they did. . . .

John Berthoud, president of the National Taxpayers Union, confirms that overspending was a big part of the GOP's drop-off with voters. Five of the six Republicans who lost in the Senate and most who lost in the House were “big spenders,” he tells me. “The attitude of our members,” he says, “was that Republicans walked away from the base, the base didn't walk away from the Republicans.”

At a minimum, serving pork to constituents wasn’t a political shield. I suspect that it never was. While Republicans were in favor on other grounds, a record of getting funding for local projects may have been a mild plus to incumbents, but not many voters are so fond of the local bike path that they’ll put it ahead of larger concerns about the direction of government.

Be that as it may, last year’s pork certainly won’t help the GOP now, so why not make a start toward regaining a reputation for fiscal responsibility by trimming the appropriations bills pending before the lame duck session of Congress? As OpinionJournal PD also notes,

[I]t’s a mystery just how much pork is contained in these bills because the appropriators treat this information as a highly classified state secret. Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, has been raking through the Defense appropriations bills and spotted some 2,070 slices of bacon – and the group is still counting. Among the projects fingered so far are a $1 million alternative energy research program in Alaska (where else?) and $2.6 million for the Northern California Institute for Research and Education. The group expects to unearth many more millions of dollars in unjustified spending favors for individual Congressmen when the flyspecking is done.

Other bills contain such urgent necessities as $229,000 for dairy education, $500,000 for an athletic field in Yucaipa, California, $1 million to promote tourism in Kentucky, $20 million for a wood research institute, and $100,000 for California wineries. All worthy projects by some standard, I’m sure, but more properly funded by local government or private enterprise than by the nation as a whole.

It’s highly unlikely to happen, but I will regard as heroes any and all members of Congress who vote to zero out every earmark for the rest of the 109th Congress. For next year, I suggest replacing the current system, under which projects get money more on the basis of who backs them than what they’re good for, with an Infrastructure Commission, modeled on the reasonably successful Military Base Closings Commission. Let communities submit their funding requests related to transportation, culture and recreation to a nonpartisan panel, which would then rank them in order of urgency and importance. Congress would then decide how much money to appropriate, and that would determine which got funded. Proponents of the 501st highest-ranked project would be unhappy if only the top 500 got federal dollars, but they would have the consolation of being well up on the list the following year. Bridges to nowhere would have no chance, and maybe even Senators from Alaska would come to accept that reality.

Cold War Deja vu: The “Realists” Aren’t

After the Cold War had been going on for a couple of decades, everybody with pretensions to being a strategic thinker knew one thing for sure: The Soviet Union was a stable, deep-rooted superpower, with which the Free World would have to live for the indefinite future. Only ignorant ideologues like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan thought otherwise.

Not all the experts reached that conclusion by the same route. Some on the Left persisted in seeing communism as no more than “liberalism in a hurry”: a viable system, widely acceptable to its people, that was bringing increasing comfort and prosperity as it converged with the social democratic West. On the Right, there were no illusions about communism’s fundamental inhumanity, but also no doubts that it would endure. The “realist” policy of détente grew out of the premise of Soviet invulnerability. That premise, in turn, rested on two main assumptions: that communism had a powerful appeal throughout the world and that the hedonistic populations of the Western countries would not sustain a long period of confrontation. The realists believed, in their hearts, that the Red Tide could only be channeled, not turned back.

From the early 1970’s, when President Nixon adopted détente as the centerpiece of his Administration, until Ronald Reagan’s unexpected election to the Presidency, the advocates of victory over communism were relegated to the policy backbenches. With the Democratic Congressional takeover last week and the President’s rush to bring on board the same right-of-center realists who scoffed at Ronald Reagan, it is possible, even likely, that resolute opposition to Islamofascism will be banished to the wilderness of right-wing magazines, talk radio, blogs and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, that it will be 1973 all over again.

It’s odd that events in Iraq have pushed the mood among the policy making elite so swiftly toward accommodating the current adversary. The Vietnam imbroglio, which soured the previous generation of mandarins on energetic anticommunism, was a middle-sized war that lasted over a decade and claimed the lives of 50,000 American soldiers. The Iraqi campaign is a low intensity conflict against an enemy that couldn’t carry the sandals of the Viet Cong and whose foreign sponsors are far less formidable than the Soviet Union, Red China or even North Vietnam. Yet this modest obstacle appears to have inspired the same hopelessness that marked Cold War “realism”.

That Islamofascism might be no more robust than communism, and that Americans are no more decadent in the early 21st Century than in the late 20th, are possibilities that realists can’t seem to comprehend. Nonetheless, both are eminently reasonable.

Islamofascism was nearly invisible 25 years ago, the predilection of a small core of clerical fascists on the margins of Islam. The sole exception was the aberrant mullarchy in Iran, which had taken power under peculiar circumstances, was well isolated from the Moslem mainstream and was generally thought unlikely to outlive its charismatic founder. Otherwise, the great divide in the House of Islam pitted various strains of conservative or radical secularism (Atatürk, Nasser, the Ba’ath Party) against each other and against inward-looking religious traditionalism. Groups like the Moslem Brotherhood were persecuted everywhere except in the tolerant West, where they had no visible following. Western Moslems acted much like other old-fashioned minorities, acquiescent in the values of the dominant culture and trending toward assimilation.

If that picture has now changed completely, it is not because the Wahhabis and Salafists and Twelver Shi’ites have proselytized the Islamic world with brilliant theological polemics. The rising popularity of Islamofascism correlates almost perfectly with its employment of conspicuous terrorist tactics and the West’s supine response. A series of perceived victories, from the “expulsion” of American troops from Lebanon in 1983 through Western governments’ humble apologies for allowing cartoonists to draw pictures of Mohammed, has convinced millions of Moslems that the conquests halted in the 16th and 17th Centuries are about to resume under the leadership of figures like Osama bin-Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrullah.

Doesn’t it look that way? Haven’t the infidels lost a series of wars against the faithful – Israel and America in Lebanon in 1983, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Israelis against Hezbollah this year, the Americans in the near future in Iraq? And isn’t Iran about to show the hollowness of Western threats by obtaining its own atomic bomb? And don’t infidel politicians, journalists and clerics acknowledge their moral inferiority by decrying insults to Islam and rebuking “Islamophobia”, meanwhile keeping politely silent about the persecution of Christians by Moslems? And haven’t those Western leaders who continue to resist the will of Allah been rejected by their own political parties or at the polls?

There was, it is true, one brief, now forgotten, interruption to the new jihad’s string of successes. For about two years after April 2003, Islamofascism was forced to retreat. Its eccentric hanger-on Ghaddafi disarmed his Libyan regime. Arab countries held what were, by historical standards, free and open elections. The Cedar Revolution overthrew Syrian control of Lebanon. Iranian dissidents staged massive street demonstrations.

Then, unable to withstand continued pinprick violence in Iraq, the morale of Western opinion makers collapsed. In place of high hopes for democratic reform, Moslems heard a litany of recriminations and regrets. The Western media, in tune with the spokesmen of leading political parties, declared that attacking an inveterate fascist regime had been a dire mistake whose perpetrators deserved condign chastisement. The implication was that, in the future, vociferous anti-Westerners may safely engage in one-way warfare: They can treat us as enemies, and we will not reciprocate.

Saddam Hussein ignored the Gulf War cease fire accords, tried hundreds of times to shoot down American aircraft, subsidized suicide bombers, celebrated 9/11, refused to cooperate with inspections to determine whether he was complying with restrictions on his weapons programs, bribed Western politicians, maintained close contact with terrorists, and failed to fulfill even one of the conditions that President Bush declared he must meet if he wanted peace with America.

As a reminder, here is what the President said in a speech to the United Nations on September 12, 2002:

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi’a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

Saddam Hussein remained defiant. Now Moslems are told that he was an injured innocent. If that is so, and if dominant opinion in the West is determined never to repeat that injustice, what behavior will ever provoke the faint-hearted giaours? Why should any Islamofascist feel threatened? And can any anti-fascist in Moslem lands retain any hope of having useful friends elsewhere in the world?

This plausible image of the state of the world is what makes Islamofascism powerful. When Western supremacy was taken for granted, the movement was feeble. When the West flexed its overwhelming military might, Western concepts of democracy challenged the fascists. When the West lacerates and humbles itself, the mufsidun rise again.

If we diagnose Islamofascism as what it truly is, an opportunistic virus that thrives on Western displays of weakness, the cure is not dauntingly difficult. Maintain a relentless offensive against our self-proclaimed enemies, and Moslems will learn in time that the golden age of the Caliphate is not going to return. At that point, they will turn on the Islamofascists, just as they used to scorn them. Unhappily, a quarter century of superficial triumph, however delusory in substance, will not vanish from the Islamic psyche overnight. Victory will take longer now than if we had started fighting the war when Bill Clinton was President, longer than if we had given vigorous backing to democratic flowerings after the overthrow of the Iraqi Ba’athists, longer than if there had not been an orgy of conspiracy theorizing about the origins of the campaign against Saddam. If we flee from Iraq, accept a nuclear-armed Iran and bow before demands for concessions to Moslem minorities, it will take longer still.

“Realism”, we can see with hindsight, prolonged the life of the Soviet Union by perhaps a decade. That the heyday of Islamofascism should be similarly prolonged is a sad repetition of history. Still, we have firm grounds for hope that the ultimate outcome will be the same.

Further reading: Mark Steyn, “U.S. Must Prove It’s a Staying Power”

Kibbitzing the Leadership Races

I doubt that outsiders are in a good position to critique candidates for Congressional leadership posts. A party leader’s or whip’s main job is to keep the troops in line. What he is keeping them in line for is rarely his unilateral decision. Hence, an effective vote gatherer with weak principles generally will do more good than a brilliant thinker who can’t keep the cat herd moving in more or less the right direction. Kibbitzers can tell who possesses the secondary qualification, intellectual soundness, but usually not the essential one, political savvy.

Having said that, I’d like to put in a positive word for John Boehner, who appears to have led the House Republicans capably since taking over from Tom DeLay and is also a solid conservative with an unblemished record. He is, indeed, one of the few members who has never engineered an earmark, despite having long been in a position to grab goodies for his district. I see no reason why any conservative should complain if he is reelected. An across-the-board housecleaning in the wake of last week’s defeat may sound attractive, but cleaning up substantively, i. e., restoring the GOP’s role as the party of conservative ideas, is vastly more important. Any need for a symbolic change at the top can be met by replacing Roy Blunt, the unimpressive whip, with John Shadegg. I don’t know whether Rep. Shadegg would do a better job, but he can’t be very much inferior operationally and is certainly better on other grounds.

Over in the Senate, Trent Lott is running for whip. I can’t improve on what A Chequer-Board of Nights & Days has to say about that:

No. No. No. Trent Lott was a lousy Majority Leader who was consistently outmaneuvered and forced to capitulate by minority Democrats. He was and remains a human gaffe machine. There is no reason to believe that he would be an effective Minority Whip and there is no way that Republicans shouldn’t demand that he be shunted off to the side. I don’t know how tough Lamar Alexander would be as a Whip, but I am willing to take a chance on him. Anyone but Lott.

Well, maybe not Olympia Snowe.

About the Democrats, I will say only this: If John Boehner’s first choice for his number two man were an unindicted Abscam co-conspirator with a record of delivering pork to campaign contributors, no one would ever trust his judgment again. Of course, anyone who trusted Nancy Pelosi’s judgment in the first place is a fool.

A Sense of Disconnection

A poll taken just before the election (thanx to Sound Politics) reveals a seeming paradox. It was conducted in Washington State, where Republicans fared badly last Tuesday, failing to unseat a Senator with less than a 50 percent approval rating and losing a bunch of state legislative seats. The reason looks obvious when one reads President Bush’s ratings for job performance (30%–60% unfavorable), handling the economy (28%–60% unfavorable (the Dow had just hit a new record and unemployment fallen to a five-year low)) and handling the war in Iraq (20%–69% unfavorable).

But then there is, “Do you approve or disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism?” The response: 49 percent approve, 40 percent disapprove.

It may be that neither terrorism nor Iraq was crucially important to Washington voters. Their astonishing misperception of the state of the economy may have overriden lesser considerations. Assuming, however, that their votes were influenced by what exit polls said were two of the biggest issues in this election (after “corruption in government”), the natural inference is that they view Iraq and terrorism as independent concerns, with the former being more significant, not offset by good performance on the latter.

It’s possible to argue that the Washington voters are correct not to link Iraq to terrorism, a plausible position if the criteria for a connection are stringent enough. Let’s suppose arguendo that the terrorists currently setting off bombs in Iraq are homebodies who would never threaten any place else and that the National Intelligence Estimate that the New York Times leaked before the election was wrong to conclude that “perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere”. Can it really be the case that the President’s handling of a distant, low intensity war, even if less than stellar, outweighs success in keeping the country safe from a repeat of 9/11? Or does the public imagine that preventing terrorist attacks is such a simple matter that success deserves no credit?

Recent news reports indicate that the absence of attacks is not due to any loss of interest by aspiring terrorists. Britain’s MI5 says that it knows of 200 active terrorist cells in that country alone. Counterterrorism experts are also worried, according to CBS News about plots to bomb transportation systems in Europe. And, as has been widely reported, al-Qa’eda’s capo in Iraq has proclaimed that his mufsidun intend to follow up American retreat from that country not by fading away but by taking the war to American soil. “We swear we will not rest from our jihad... before blowing up the filthiest house, dubbed the White House.”

To date, the U.S. has fought the enemy in Iraq and has not been attacked at home. Is it prudent to assume that there is no cause and effect? If that was the nation’s assumption when it voted to put the Democratic Party into power in Washington, we can only hope that there is still truth in Bismarck’s dictum that God has a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.

Further reading: James Lewis in The American Thinker:

Withdrawal would embolden Hamas and Hezbollah and weaken Iran’s natural enemies—the Sunni Arab countries, including the Sunni Gulf states. In Afghanistan, the Taliban would be reinvigorated, and in Pakistan the Al-Qaida-supporting elements in the military and secret services might try—again—to launch a coup. A successful Al Qaida coup in Pakistan would give Islamofascists not just one, but two nuclear-armed states.

The US held on in Vietnam for fourteen years. We gave Vietnamization a chance. The 12 million Iraqis who voted for parliamentary parties deserve a chance to see their elected government work.

Gitmo Alibis

One of my law school professors, a renowned litigator who had handled many pro bono criminal defense cases, used to tell us that there was no tactic more foolish than to let one’s client get on the stand to “tell his story”. The usual outcome was to eradicate whatever reasonable doubt might be present in the jury’s mind.

I remembered that as I read David Frum on the alibis of some of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

One detainee, a Kuwaiti national named as an al Qaida operative on a captured al Qaida hard drive, was captured as he tried to flee from Afghanistan into Iran. He insisted that he had no association with any terrorist organization. What then had brought him to Afghanistan? His answer: He had donated 750 Kuwaiti dinars (“not a lot of money” he added) to an Islamic charity to dig wells in Afghanistan – and had decided to travel from Kuwait to see that his money was properly spent. (Set 4, ISN 229, p. 4)

Another detainee, a Yemeni, explained that he had come to Pakistan to study medicine at a university. Unfortunately, the particular university he had selected lacked any medical faculty. He ended up instead studying Koran in a student guesthouse – and when one of his housemates suggested they take a sightseeing tour of Afghanistan, he agreed to go along. The housemate’s name? He had forgotten it. (Set 3, ISN 679, pp. 2-7)

A detainee identified by eyewitnesses as a Taliban military judge who inflicted hideous punishments on hundreds of accused, explained to the tribunal that he was in fact only a humble chicken farmer. The question, “What did you feed your chickens?” baffled this detainee. He answered: “A mixture of foods they sell in the bazaar” (perhaps at the Afghan equivalent of Petco). (Set 3, ISN 581, p. 8)

The scores of lawyers who troop down to Gitmo to give legal aid to these victims of “American injustice” could have used my professor’s advice.

Quote of the Day

Donald Rumsfeld, speaking today at Kansas State University:

We meet today at a time of peril for our nation and for the principles that it represents. In a sense, this is not new. In different ways, at different times, and from different sources, our nation and our values have been threatened since our very beginnings.

But today, in the first war of the 21st century, we face an enemy that, in many ways, is unlike any our country has ever faced. We are engaged in a new and unfamiliar war that our country does not yet fully understand. One that requires us – our country, our government, our military – to think and act differently. . . .

I’ve talked about the similarities of the Cold War with the struggle against violent extremism, but this long war in the 21st century presents unprecedented challenges – wholly unlike any the United States has ever faced.

There can be no doubt that murderous Communist regimes imprisoned, starved and sometimes massacred their own citizens. But they were nation-states. They had capitals. They had laws and five-year plans. They had diplomats to sign agreements. Unlike the Cold War, our enemy today has no state, territories or citizens to protect. They murder innocent Muslim civilians by the thousands – men, women and children alike. The enemy cannot be deterred through rational self-interest. Today’s threats come less from nation-states but rather from enemies that operate in the shadows, that strike through asymmetric and irregular means.

On 9/11, we saw the deadly effects of this type of warfare. Armed with five-dollar box-cutters, 19 hijackers killed 3,000 Americans and inflicted hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage. In Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgents fashion deadly IEDs and roadside bombs using propane tanks and garage door openers. Nations like Iran and Syria seek to undermine U.S. interests and those of our allies by moving weapons and money to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the future, there could be attacks on computer networks, on water supplies, on communications systems. . . .

In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower, spoke to the nation for the last time as President. He warned of a long struggle ahead. He said:

We face a hostile ideology – global in scope…ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method… to meet it successfully we must carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle – with liberty the stake.

As we look back on those critical years during the Cold War, so too our grandchildren will one day look back on this time as a defining moment in America’s history. History will judge whether we did all we could to defeat a vicious extremist enemy that threatened our security, our freedom, our very way of life. Or, if we left it to the next generations to try to fight an enemy strengthened by our weakness, and emboldened by our lack of resolve.

Over my lifetime, I have had the opportunity to live in times of great consequence, times of war and times of peace. I have met countless Americans from every corner of our magnificent country, and I have developed an abiding faith in the wisdom and good judgment of free people over time to come to the right decisions. I have seen us triumph over dictators and tyrannies of many forms, and I believe that if we persevere today – and I am convinced we will – if we make the right choices, and develop a clear understanding of the war we face today, we can overcome the increasingly lethal threats of this young century.

Despite all the enemy tries to do to make the world think otherwise, America is not what is wrong with the world. America is a force for good. We are on the right side of history. Let there be no doubt that the great sweep of human history is for freedom and we are freedom’s side.

This Ain’t Rocket Science

Science fiction fans and right-wing space enthusiasts tend to be reflexive NASA detractors. Uncharacteristically, I’m not. But this news may lead me to reconsider:

(AP) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Space shuttle Discovery was moved to the launch pad Thursday to await a launch that could be as early as Dec. 6 — an effort to avoid potential New Year’s Eve computer glitches.

The worry is that shuttle computers aren’t designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the first day of the new year while in flight. NASA has never had a shuttle in space Dec. 31 or Jan. 1.

“We’ve just never had the computers up and going when we’ve transitioned from one year to another,” said Discovery astronaut Joan Higginbotham. “We’re not really sure how they're going to operate.”

Starting Dec. 6, launch opportunities would be available as late as Dec. 17 or 18. With a 12-day mission, that would mean the shuttle is back on Earth before New Year’s Eve.

However, NASA was quick to say that even if the shuttle crew finds itself still in space on Jan. 1, procedures could be devised to make a transition if necessary.

I can see it now: Apollo 13 repeated as farce.

This Millennium’s First Great Captain

Fully recognizing that jettisoning Donald Rumsfeld was a political necessity, I nonetheless don’t want to leave the left-wing narrative, taken up all too eagerly by segments of the Right, to be the only version on the table. Judged by his accomplishments, Mr. Rumsfeld has been an outstanding public servant, one of the top two or three Secretaries of Defense in our nation’s history.

As almost everyone seems to have forgotten, the two offensives that he oversaw, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were won far more rapidly, with far fewer American casualties, than any expert predicted. Two successes in particular – toppling the Taliban regime without bringing in tens of thousands of troops for a months’ long slog and seizing heavily fortified Baghdad virtually without a fight – rank with the most brilliant feats in military history. Soldiers will study them for generations to come (provided that those generations don’t speak only Arabic).

The anti-mufsidun conflict in Iraq has been less brilliant. It is the principal, indeed the sole, pretext for declaring the Secretary a failure. And it is true that he has not, despite repeated shifts of tactics, devised a method of decisively eradicating urban terrorism. Neither has anybody else. His critics, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, have yet to propose solutions that are more than half-plausible. The best, a sharp enlargement of our forces to support systematic clear-and-hold operations in terrorist-infected neighborhoods, is politically unsaleable and offers only modest prospects at potentially high cost. Most of the other anti-Rumsfeld tooth-gnashers are incoherent, particularly those who complain that the Secretary sent too small an army to Iraq, then want to rectify his errors by reducing what is there.

There is only one successful model for this kind of campaign: the French victory in the Battle of Algiers, where the victorious army’s methods nauseated France and would not be tolerated by the most hawkish American opinion (albeit they are par for the course for al-Qa’eda). Secretary Rumsfeld has worked energetically to find acceptable countermeasures. Since history argues strongly against the existence of an invincible form of warfare, they will inevitably appear. That they haven’t yet is unfortunate but scarcely blameworthy.

In the meantime, our armed forces show no signs of being “broken” by an often frustrating conflict. American casualties are low. The enemy has yet to win a single skirmish and is unable to hold terrain. All evidence indicates that morale in high. Recruitment and retention are doing well. The Secretary appears to be immensely popular with the rank-and-file. There’s no reason to think that, given adequate backing from the home front, we couldn’t grind down the terrorists through attrition, if nothing more spectacular.

Looking beyond Iraq, the Rumsfeld tenure has been marked by the accelerated adaptation of modern technology to military needs. The ability of our men to see the battlefield, communicate during operations, engage in combat regardless of weather or time of day, and bring maximum firepower to bear with minimal collateral damage is unsurpassed in the history of war. Aerial drones, personal computers, GPS systems, night vision, body armor and a host of other inventions are as much the G.I.’s weapons as his rifle and grenades. In all that, Secretary Rumsfeld has pushed the military further and faster than many high-ranking officers wanted to go. That fact is vitally important. A successful army is always tempted to relax and fall behind its adversaries. So far, American is avoiding that mistake.

History will, I’m sure, decide that some Rumsfeld decisions were ill-conceived. No military commander is infallible, and one could fill volumes with the blunders of Alexander, Caesar, Gustavus, Frederick and Napoleon. What makes a Great Captain is the quality of his successes and the soundness of his judgment. Once the current passions abate, Donald Rumsfeld will, I am confident, be recognized as the first commander of the 21st Century to deserve a place in the pantheon of Mars.

Further reading: Mark Steyn, “Exit Rumsfeld”

Victor Davis Hanson:

Here is the record of Donald Rumsfeld. (1) Tried to take a top-heavy Pentagon and prepare it for the wars of the postmodern world, in which on a minute’s notice thousands of American soldiers, with air and sea support, would have to be sent to some god-awful place to fight some savagery—and then be trashed live on CNN for doing it; (2) less than a month after 9/11 he organized the retaliation against al Qaeda in the heart of primordial Afghanistan that removed the Taliban in 7 weeks, when we were all warned that the U.S., like the British and Russians of old, would fail; (3) oversaw the removal of Saddam in 3 weeks—after the 1991 Gulf War and the 12-years of 350,000 sorties in the no-fly-zones, and various bombing strikes, had failed. (4) Ah, you say, then there is the disastrous 3-year insurgency—too few troops, Iraqi army let go, underestimated “dead-enders” etc.?

But Rumsfeld knew that in a counterinsurgency (cf. Vietnam 1965-71) massive deployments only ensure complacency, breed dependency, and create resentment, and that, in contrast, training indigenous forces, ensuring political autonomy, and providing air and commando support (e.g., Vietnam circa 1972-4) is the only answer—although that is a long process that can work only if political support at home allows the military to finish the job (cf. the turn-of-the-century Philippines, and the British in Malaysia). He was a good man, and we were lucky to have him in our hour of need.

Another Quote of the Day

From The Belmont Club:

There is now a much smaller chance that the terrorist problem can be resolved at a low level of conflict. There is a greater likelihood that it will be allowed by neglect or paralysis to metastize into a canker which will develop into a catastrophic confrontation in five or ten years time. . . .

[T]he US is the world’s security Central Banker. The sheriff of last resort. Other countries could wobble as long as the Central Banker stood firm. Now the Central Banker itself is wobbling. The UK, Europe, etc could count on America to be the security underwriter of last resort. But where do you go when the reinsurer fails?

The answer is all too obvious: If the cops are too timid to protect you, what choice is there but to pay off the robbers?

Quotes of the Day

From the invaluable (but only $3.95 a month) OpinionJournal Political Diary: First, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. describes the job of American forces in Iraq:

That job is to be the biggest, baddest force in the country, ready and able to drop the hammer on any group that tries to get power by any path other than the ballot box. Notice how utterly this situation differs from the Korean war analogy now on every lip. The rest of the job is for Iraqis. They’re the ones who have to figure out how to live with each other. It may take five years. It may take 15. We could afford to have a more relaxed attitude about this (albeit continuously learning how to minimize the cost of this mission to our troops and taxpayers). And let’s be realistic: It will be useful for American interests to have a sizeable, battle-hardened force in the region, increasingly savvy and subtle in local ways, for the foreseeable future.

If the Democrats’ control of Congress makes it impossible to press ahead with more vigor against the mufsidun troubling Iraq, the role outlined by Mr. Jenkins has the virtue of not handing bragging rights to the enemy.

Second, John Fund on the political consequences of creating an immigration “crisis” out of a third rate irritant:

This summer, as polls showed GOP House incumbents increasingly in trouble, the talk in closed-door meetings of GOP members was that the party needed to use opposition to illegal immigration to deflect voter anger on other issues. “The issue is a magic carpet to victory for us,” was the memorable way one anti-immigration member put it. Later that same month, the House GOP pushed through a bill that authorized the building of a massive border fence without adding a sensible guest-worker program to provide a legal means for needed workers to enter the country.

Well, the returns are in and the strategy was a clear failure. GOP candidates who ran almost exclusively on the immigration issue lost in districts that President Bush easily carried in 2004. The most surprising loser was Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, who wrote a book on immigration called Whatever It Takes and yet managed to lose a district Mr. Bush won with 54% of the vote two years ago. Another Arizona GOP candidate, former state legislator Randy Graf, did ride the immigration issue to a plurality win in the GOP primary only to lose badly in a Tucson district last night that Mr. Bush had won with 53%.

The biggest bellyflop on the immigration issue came in Indiana, where Rep. John Hostettler, the hardline chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, lost by a stunning 22 points in a district that gave John Kerry only 38% of its votes just two years ago. “Immigration has never been an issue that brings people to the polls in single-minded desire to vote on that one issue,” says political analyst Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of American Politics. “Voters end up having other concerns, and anti-illegal immigration polling numbers are more often than not political fools’ gold.”

Even if the gold were 24-carat, the ability to spend it wouldn’t be limited to Republicans. The essential element of an effective “enforcement only” strategy, as restrictionists are quite willing to say, is punishing companies that hire illegal aliens. Most of those are small businessmen. Don’t you think that Democrats can find their way to pushing measures that will do the most harm to a natural Republican constituency?

The (Very Mild) Agony of Defeat

Having been a conservative Republican through the 1960’s and 1970’s, I know about losing elections. For kids who first became aware of politics around 1994, tonight must be harder to take. The only people who will be devastated, though, are the political insiders who grew comfortable with the assumption that pork, gerrymandering and incumbency are adequate substitutes for action and ideas. Those work all right when the waters are smooth; in stormy weather, they can’t keep a party afloat.

The most striking facts about this election are, first, the breadth of sentiment among Republicans that our party deserved to lose, second, the complete fecklessness of the opposition party, and, third, the failure of partisans on both sides to face up to the fact that, like it or not, we are in the middle of a long, difficult war, which will only become longer and harder if we pretend it isn’t there.

The masochistic Republican sentiment, which I expect will be trumpeted in tomorrow’s blogs, is understandable. In my own view, the disgruntled gave the Republican Congress too little credit for tax cuts, welfare reform, trade liberalization, judicial confirmations and other excellent achievements, but their lack of gruntlement wasn’t irrational. When the party of limited government increases discretionary spending at a rapid clip and gets cozy with K Street, it isn’t going to please its rank-and-file.

The GOP leadership also, IMHO, committed one spectacular blunder. Egged on by certain right-wing circles (whose judgment is generally better than this), it turned immigration into a major issue, in the transparent expectation of tapping a current of restrictionist feeling. But, as past elections have abundantly proven, the immigration hardliners are a small cadre, almost all of whom vote Republican in any event. Pandering to their whims succeeded only in making a lot of them so angry at President Bush that they became less attached to the Republican Party. The decision to build “The Fence” wasn’t enough to please them, as I’ve noted elsewhere. Instead, they remained angry and evidently infected a portion of the GOP base with their discontent. If illegal immigration had to be addressed at all this year (and it is a festering irritant rather than any kind of crisis), an approach on Mike Pence’s lines would have been truer to free enterprise principles, and the restrictionists might not have sniffed at The Fence if it had been the concession made to them as part of a bigger package.

The conventional wisdom-to-be is almost certain to be that Republicans are the authors of their own misfortunes. Just because it will be conventional doesn’t mean that it won’t be correct.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic success most nearly resembles that won by the GOP sixty years ago on a similarly negative platform. “Had Enough?” was the slogan then. Unhappily for the Taft-Martin Republicans, it wasn’t a persuasive cry they faced re-election two years later. The 80th Congress proved to be a meaningless blip in the Democrats’ 60-year run as the country’s “natural” majority party. It’s highly likely that the 110th will have a similar distinction.

In a way, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are in a worse position. Despite Harry Truman’s “do-nothing 80th Congress” rhetoric, the Republican majority did quite a bit, including repeal of wartime wage-price controls (which leading liberals wanted to make permanent), passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (over a Truman veto) and enactment of the Marshall Plan. Next year, the majority party’s leadership will be far to the left of the mainstream of Congress, with its extremely narrow majorities (or majority; as I write, the balance of power in the Senate isn’t determined) dependent on members who ran as moderates or conservatives in Republican-leaning districts. The Democrats will be in a good position to harass the Administration and perhaps impose defeat in Iraq. Their positive accomplishments will be ignominiously paltry. By 2008, I expect the electorate to be heartily sick of their shrill impotence.

I could almost relax and look forward to a happy November 5, 2008. The problem is that America and the world can’t hibernate until then. If Congress insists on withdrawal from Iraq, Hassan Nasrallah has already told us the mufsidun propaganda line: Anyone who puts his trust in America is a fool, and the triumph of the jihad is inevitable.

We can’t wish Islamofascism away, and every victory it can claim is bound to enhance its prestige and power, both in the Middle East and, increasingly, in South Asia and Europe. Sure, there’s an ocean between us and them. Perhaps, if we do nothing, massive terrorism won’t become a reality over here. But a confident Islamofascist movement, backed by a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, will have little trouble overthrowing the fearful, weakening regimes in Saudi-controlled Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf emirates, or at least compelling them to subsidize terrorism. Nancy Pelosi’s grand strategy, to the extent that she has one, is to move the focus of the War on Terror to Afghanistan. Why does she imagine that the enemy will follow us there rather than descend on the rich pickings in the Gulf?

Anyone who thinks that we and the world have nothing to fear from a Middle East dominated by fanatical, anti-Western ideologues, or to worry about from a Europe and Asia with an expanding population of Islamofascist sympathizers, belongs in the cock-eyed company of the America Firsters. Putting the War on Terror on hold for two years while John Conyers assembles “evidence” for his grand conspiracy theories just means that we will have to deal with a more dangerous enemy when we wake up again.

Oh, well. There were times when the will to defeat communism seemed at a vanishingly low ebb. The West has reserves of strength, and I remain confident that, fifty years from now, there will be more cathedrals in Tehran than mosques in Chicago.

Tonight is a disappointment. It is not the moment to say “Kismet”. Nor is it the time for those of us who wish to press ahead with the War on Terror to sink into a quagmire of recriminations. Let’s learn defeat’s not-too-disguised lessons and get on with our work.

Two Endorsements Worth Noting

Orson Scott Card is a liberal Democrat – he never speaks at a science fiction convention without slipping in a plug for income redistribution – who is voting Republican this year:

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that’s the War on Terror.

And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election.

If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case – if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.

But at least there will be a chance.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America’s role as a light among nations.

But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party seems hellbent on losing it – and in the most damaging possible way – I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its own temporary partisan advantages.

To all intents and purposes, when the Democratic Party jettisoned Joseph Lieberman over the issue of his support of this war, they kicked me out as well. The party of Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan – the party I joined back in the 1970s – is dead. Of suicide.

On the other side of the partisan divide, Hassan Nasrallah, capo of the Hezbollah terrorists and the Iranian mullarchy’s man in Lebanon, looks forward to the aftermath of American abandonment of the war against the Middle Eastern mufsidun:

The Americans will gather their belongings and leave this region – the entire region. They have no future whatsoever in our region. They will leave the Middle East, and the Arab and Islamic worlds, like they left Vietnam. I advise all those who place their trust in the Americans to learn the lesson of Vietnam, and to learn the lesson of the South Lebanese Army with the Israelis, and to know that when the Americans lose this war – and lose it they will, Allah willing – they will abandon them to their fate, just like they did to all those who placed their trust in them throughout history.

He doesn’t mention Republicans or Democrats, but I think we know how Hassan would vote.

Redefining “Misrepresentation”

A commenter takes exception to my reading of Friday’s New York Times piece on the state of Ba’athist Iraq’s nuclear weapons know-how. To some extent, his argument is rational, if not persuasive. He contends that the Saddam regime could have been “contained” indefinitely and had no interest in sharing deadly secrets with terrorists. Well, maybe. Hope springs eternal, and it is comforting to think that our avowed enemies don’t, in their hearts of hearts, really mean to do us any harm. He and I are unlikely to reach agreement on that (now hypothetical) question, no matter how many pixels we expend.

What is less rational, but very typical of the Left these days, is his accusation “that you have misrepresented the NY Times article in order to advance your specious thesis”. I quoted the Times verbatim and linked to the story, too. Any reader could decide for himself whether my interpretation (or, to be more precise, Jim Geraghty’s interpretation, which I quoted) made sense. Even if I am completely off base, I don’t see how “misrepresentation”, which implies distorting a passage or taking it out of context, can be an issue.

To take a parallel that was recently in the news, the Times misrepresented Senator Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” comment when it wrote:

Mr. Kerry’s prepared remarks to California students on Monday called for him to say, “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.” In his delivery, he dropped the word “us.”

As everybody knows by now, and as the Times has acknowledged, the Senator’s spoken words diverged from his (alleged) written text in more ways than the omission of a single word. For instance, he never mentioned President Bush. “Misrepresentation” is clearly the right term for the original report.

By contrast, a number of bloggers got the quotation right but contended that it wasn’t intended to demean American soldiers. I don’t think that view passes the giggle test, but I wouldn’t say that those who advance it are misrepresenting anything. They are wrong but not mendacious.

Unhappily, the contemporary Left is highly prone to turn all disagreements into charges that its opponents are lying. Thus leftists repeat endlessly that the President “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs when, at worst, he erroneously trusted the overwhelming consensus of the intelligence community. The concept of honest mistakes, or even of good faith differences of opinion, no longer seems to be part of the intellectual furniture of much, if not all, of the Left.

It used to be that liberals thought conservatives were “the stupid party”, and conservatives that liberals were too clever by half. Now, as Charles Krauthammer puts it, conservatives think liberals are stupid, and liberals think conservatives are evil. The old set of beliefs led to vigorous argumentation but was, at root, consistent with domestic tranquility. Neither side doubted that the other, wrong-headed though it was, had the common good at heart. That mutual good will is now vanishing. I suspect that even the Left will regret it someday.

“The Hardest Victory Is Over Self”

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.

– Aristotle

If “Ted Haggard” had been a Jeopardy answer, I doubt that I could have come up with the correct question yesterday. Today, he is, of course, known to everybody as yet another instantiation of “Christian hypocrisy”. David Frum shreds the glee with which the anti-religious greet the exposure of sinners in clerical garb:

In every other avenue of life, we praise people who rise above selfish personal wishes to champion higher principles and the public good. We admire the white southerners who in the days of segregation spoke out for racial equality. We admire the leader of a distressed industry who refuses to ask for trade protections and government handouts. We admire the Arthur Vandenbergs and (someday) the Joe Liebermans who can reach past party feeling to support a president of the opposing party for the sake of the national interest.

If a religious leader has a personal inclination toward homosexuality – and nonetheless can look past his own inclination to defend the institution of marriage and to affirm its benefits for the raising of children – why should he likewise not be honored for his intellectual firmness and moral integrity?

Exactly. Some men choose to become Christian ministers because they recognize themselves as miserable sinners and desire both to overcome their own frailties and counsel others against going down the same paths. They may fail, as the Rev. Mr. Haggard evidently did, but their effort is surely more admirable than the self-indulgence of a sinner who praises vice and buries virtue in mockery.

Update (11/6/06): Michael Novak explains “Why Liberals Can’t Be Hypocrites”, at least not about sex:

In order to be a hypocrite, you have to hold to standards higher than your own behavior. Standards in whose light you are, by your own choice, a sinner, in need of repentance and change of life. . . .

Someone wrote a few years back that now that socialism is dead as an economic system, the center of liberal values has migrated to sex and gender. Being a liberal means having a right to do anything that you want sexually anywhere, anytime, and with anybody. Thus, there is no way for liberals to be hypocritical about sex. Except by being chaste.

Blog Headline of the Day

All-Encompassingly sums it up:

NY Times: Documents from the non-existent Iraqi nuclear weapons program pose grave nuclear danger to world

This is National Cliché Day, so I’ll put the straight skivvy in a nutshell:

1. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had the capability to construct nuclear weapons within a dangerously short period of time.

2. Hoping that a murderous, anti-American tyrant, one who erected billboards to celebrate 9/11, would make no use of his capabilities, and would not share information with his fellow anti-Westerners, was an unacceptably risky policy.

3. Because the United States had the means to remove this threat to ourselves and the rest of the world, we had the right, and probably the duty, to do so. That remains true, whether post-Saddam Iraq turns out to be a success story or an ongoing trouble spot. Better that it be a trouble spot without atomic bombs.

4. It is unfortunate and ironic that the public learned of this vindication of President Bush’s policies only through an accidental posting on the Internet and the New York Times’ relentless drive to transform itself from a newspaper into a daily Democrat campaign leaflet.

Karl Rove’s Master Stroke!

Weeks ago, rumors wafted about the blogosphere that Karl Rove was promising nervous Republicans an October Surprise for our side. The sources were deeply anonymous, so I discounted them. Besides, how could the Administration spring a helpful surprise? Suppose that it released, say, ironclad proof that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program that was within a year of building a bomb. The New York Times would sniff “desperation ploy” and would trot out “experts” to explain that the evidence didn’t really mean anything.

But Evil Genius Karl is diabolically clever. Among the millions of pages of documents captured in Baghdad were some showing that Iraq was well along the road to making its own bombs, further, in fact, than Iran is today. Instead of announcing this discovery, Karl, it appears, had one of his minions whisper to a Times reporter that Idiot Bush had let these dangerous secrets be posted on the Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal. The Times, he anticipated, would take the bait by running a story lambasting the White House’s incompetence, never noticing that it was falsifying the left-wing fable that Ba’athist Iraq was no threat to the world. Naturally, the story would run the Friday before the election.

Very clever, Karl. Of course, that kind of cleverness works only if one has stupid enemies.

Further reading: Jim Geraghty, “Shocker: New York Times Confirms Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program”:

Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh... al-Qaeda. . . .

The antiwar crowd is going to have to argue that the information somehow wasn’t dangerous in the hands of Saddam Hussein, but was dangerous posted on the Internet. . . .

I’m still kinda blown away by this paragraph:

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

Is this sentence referring to 1990, before the Persian Gulf War? Or 2002, months before the invasion of Iraq? Because “Iraq is a year away from building a nuclear bomb” was supposed to be a myth, a lie that Bush used to trick us into war.

And yet here is the New York Times, saying that Iraq had a “how to manual” on how to build a nuclear bomb, and could have had a nuke in a year.

In other news, it’s good to see that the New York Times is firmly against publicizing sensitive and classified information. Unless, of course, they’re the ones doing it.

The Politeness of the Blogosphere

Okay, “politeness” isn’t a term often applied to Internet discourse, but what else can one call the Right side of the blogosphere’s general acquiescence in the notion that John Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” statement was, as he now claims, just a “botched joke”?

One of the manifestations of politeness is the gentle, compliant nod as someone caught in a howler stammers forth his demands-suspension-of-disbelief-from-the-yardarm excuse. On this occasion, Senator Kerry asks us to believe that he had in front of him the prefabricated words,

Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.

Yet it came out as,

You know, education, if you make the most of it, and you study hard, and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

Does misreading on that scale pass the giggle test?

There’s really no need to dig any deeper for clues, but it’s also noteworthy that the Senator needed a day to discover this “prepared text” and that his first response to criticism wasn’t to explain what he had meant to say but instead to release a demented rant claiming that the whole incident was the product of “right-wing nutjobs”. Done by a similarly situated Republican, his actions would call forth multiple repetitions of “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”

Eventually appeared a grudging apology that reiterated the cover story and added more insults directed at Republicans who had been so nervy as to take his words at face value. Whereupon, the inclination on the Right was to forgive and forget (even if Jonah Goldberg did later add, “It’s entirely possible I accepted his apology out of the soft bigotry of low expectations”). That was a gentlemanly gesture, but it won’t be reciprocated. The rhetorical war between Left and Right is classically asymmetrical. Recall how often George Allen’s “macaca” – a word that no one had ever heard before – was excoriated, no matter how often he expressed his contrition.

Now, I don’t favor excoriating John Kerry just for the sake of venting at an annoying character. For instance, while his last “botched joke” (“I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone”) deserved more notice than the none that it got, it lacked world-shaking significance. (OTOH, isn’t glib talk about assassinating the President slightly more offensive than uttering a word that might be a racial slur in some language somewhere in the world?) The reason why “stuck in Iraq” shouldn’t be similarly brushed aside is that it tells us a great deal about how the Angry Left views our country.

Senator Kerry drew a dichotomy between education and hard work on the one side and a military career on the other. His message was that serving America as a soldier is a last resort, the kind of low-prestige job that only the desperate accept. In other words, it is an occupation to be shunned. He was, in fact, making an anti-recruitment pitch. If enough young men and women listen to him, the military will become what he falsely claims it already is: to borrow the Duke of Wellington’s memorable phrase, “the mere scum of the earth”.

And what then? Senator Kerry doesn’t like the use that is currently being made of our Army, but does he imagine that we will never need one again? Breaking it in hopes of forcing an exit from Iraq is a prescription for national suicide. Either he – and the numerous Angry Leftists whose blogs applauded his (pre-cover-up) comments – are too foolish to see that, or they don’t care whether their country remains in a condition to resist its enemies. Maybe it isn’t unfair to wonder whether they really regard it as “their” country.