Stromata Blog

Quote of the Day

ShrinkWrapped summarizes a radio commentary on what would follow a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq. The commentator is Time magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief, and the report was on National Public Radio, so these are not the opinions of a bloodthirsty neoconservative warhawk.

Ghosh started by describing how the Sunni tribes have been breaking their ties with al Qaeda and forging alliances with the Americans in Iraq. He offers several reasons for this and does not hesitate to describe the current alliances as based more on bottom line utility than any profound philosophical awakening to the value of Democracy. He also points out that the recent statements repudiating al Qaeda by the leader of the Sunni scholars and Imams in Iraq is extremely significant. His conclusions are striking. He makes it quite clear that any efforts to withdraw would endanger all of these advances. The tribes, for purposes of self preservation, would not only immediately drop out of the fight against al Qaeda, but the Sunni provinces would in short order become al Qaeda mini-states, offering a source of manpower, training, funding, and support that they currently do not have anywhere in the developed world.

Do critics of the American presence in Iraq have reasons (other than sheer hope) for thinking that forecast is wrong? Or do they view the prospect with indifference? There isn’t a third choice.

Libertarian Blindsight

I have no opinion on whether Rudy Giuliani has, as the Cato Institute’s David Boaz asserts, “an authoritarian streak”, though I note that his past public offices – U.S. attorney in Manhattan and mayor of a city that needed to be brought back from the brink of disintegration – aren’t ones that offered obvious libertarian policy options. What struck me, though, in Mr. Boaz’s essay was his matter of fact statement that the next President will “assume executive powers vastly expanded by President Bush”. I suppose that many libertarians, with their tendency to see history with their ideological eyelids firmly shut, believe that blatant untruth.

The fact is that George W. Bush possesses less executive power than any President between William McKinley and Gerald Ford. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, to take a conspicuous but not unique instance, conducted warrantless wiretaps, singled out the President’s political enemies for tax audits, arrested American citizens and tried them before military tribunals, ignored both international and domestic law by inducing cable companies to turn over copies of foreign governments’ communications, immured Japanese-Americans in detention camps without due process, and stymied oversight by invoking executive privilege. Everything that President Bush has been accused of, FDR did.

It is only within the last generation, since the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, that Congress and the courts have weighted down the executive branch with restrictions on what had previously been taken for granted (maybe not always wisely) as inherent executive powers. Libertarians may wish to praise that trend, but they shouldn’t pretend that it never happened. Today’s Presidency is, for good or ill, a shadow of FDR’s or even Dwight Eisenhower’s.

The Immigration Silly Season

The editors of National Review have challenged their counterparts at the Wall Street Journal to a debate on the pending immigration bill, leading Jonah Goldberg to an effusion sillier than anything he has ever said about Animal House:

It’s a shame really, just the other day the editors of the Journal ran that quite good piece by Peter Berkowitz lambasting the left for its refusal to debate first principles while cheering the right for its eagerness to do exactly that. Two days later NR challenges those editors to precisely the sort of debate conservatives take pride in and the response has been (significant?) silence.

Compounding the silliness, he complains that Best of the Web, the Journal’s daily blog equivalent but not the voice of its editorial board, neglected today to mention NR’s challenge, doubtless one of the key events in the blogosphere.

Has the WSJ’s editorial page been silent about the immigration controversy, the way that the Left is silent about, say, long-range strategy in the conflict with Islamofascism? Well, there’s this and this and this and this, plus others for which non-subscriber links aren’t available. And last weekend’s Journal Editorial Report on Fox News featured a debate on the topic pitting two WSJ editorialists against National Review columnist Byron York. And tomorrow morning the WSJ’s Stephen Moore will face off against ueber-restrictionist Mark Krikorian. This adds up to “refusal to debate first principles”?

Actually, the specific debate that NR wants isn’t about “first principles” but a particular piece of legislation, one that the Journal has itself criticized. Maybe a face-off between these two wings of conservative journalism on the merits of that link of sausage would be watchable TV, but I don’t think its absence will be evidence of intellectual stagnation on the Right.

(Update, 6/4/07): Best of the Web passes on WSJ editor Paul Gigot’s response to National Review’s challenge, the short version of which is that he tried to get NR writers to appear on Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report, and they declined. Contrary to what I wrote above, based on advance announcements, Byron York wasn’t on the show. He accepted, then backed out, then was asked to reconsider, then said that he was willing but couldn’t because he had a story to work on.

NR’s rejoinder is that debating on the Journal’s show doesn’t count. That would only be “dueling sound bites”. Apparently, there can be no “open, substantive debate” until the television public is treated to a contest conducted in accordance with the Marquis of Lowry’s Rules.

I’ve been reading National Review since the pre-Goldwater era. Never before have its editors been so embarrassingly juvenile. Perhaps this incident is evidence of the debilitating effect of immigration restrictionism on the conservative mind.

Happy Victims of Global Warming

Celebrity climate alarmists, from Nancy Pelosi to Romano Prodi, have been paying visits to Ilulissat, Greenland, to see Global Warming in action. What are the dire consequences of the Far North’s milder temperatures?

A glacier next to a nearby zinc and lead mine has retreated since the site closed in 1990, exposing an outcrop of metal-rich ore, where drilling will start again soon.

Ships supplying the only factory in town, which processes the local catch for Royal Greenland, a huge state-owned prawn supplier, can now use the harbour throughout the winter (it was previously inaccessible for three months of the year).

The warmer water seems to be bringing back the cod fishery, as well.

But the tourist industry is warming fastest. Around 15,000 tourists visited last year and twice as many are expected this summer. Hotels are booming, and additional tourist guides are being trained.

The tourism boom was foreseen.

As every schoolboy used to know, Greenland was once salubrious enough to attract Viking settlers:

Greenland was warmer in the tenth century than it is now. There were many islands teeming with birds off its western coast; the sea was excellent for fishing; and the coast of Greenland itself had many fjords where anchorage was good. At the head of the fjords there were enormous meadows full of grass, willows, junipers, birch, and wild berries. Thus Greenland actually deserved its name.

Then came the Little Ice Age, and the immigrants perished from malnutrition. Archeologists have found their debilitated skeletons. That is the State of Nature to which the Algore Cult wishes to return the island. The rest of us can rest happy in the knowledge that our carbon emissions are bringing prosperity to a distant corner of the world.

Rachel Carson’s Victims, R.I.P.

Yesterday I attended my niece Dacey’s college graduation. The commencement speaker was Robert Reich, the left-wing economist who served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor and wrote a memoir of the experience that was, he later admitted (unapologetically), partly fictional. (Vide Thomas W. Hazlett, “Planet Reich”.) His exhortations to the graduates were workmanlike. In the spirit of Barack Obama, he warned them that cynicism is the enemy, “cynicism” being the code word du jour for any skepticism about liberal proposals to perfect mankind under the tutelage of a benevolent government.

Well, I’m used to hearing that kind of bloviation at graduation exercises. What irritated me was a preamble lauding the late Rachel Carson on the centenary of her birth. From her Silent Spring, the graduates were told, sprang clean air, clean water and all good environmental deeds.

Miss Carson’s intentions were no doubt benign, and perhaps her book, praised as extravagantly by the mainstream press then as Secretary Reich praises it now, had some beneficial effects. But its primary consequence was the almost complete discontinuance of the use of DDT, still the most effective known anti-mosquito pesticide.

As a direct result of Miss Carson’s good works, malaria, which was dwindling under the impact of DDT by the early 1960’s, is today, according to the Centers for Disease Control,

one of the most severe public health problems worldwide. It is a leading cause of death and disease in many developing countries, where young children and pregnant women are the groups most affected.

At least a million people die of malaria each year, 850,000 of them children under age five, and an incredible 350 to 500 million contract it, suffering symptoms that are often incapacitating. The victims are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where the World Health Organization advocates DDT spraying to help roll back this pestilence, but the political abhorrence generated by Silent Spring lives on. For much more on this grim topic, see Rachel Was Wrong, a Web site hosted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Cultural myths often stand in the way of human progress—in some cases producing devastating consequences. In fact, today millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm. That person is Rachel Carson, author of the 1962 best selling book Silent Spring. Many have praised Carson for raising concerns—some legitimate—about problems associated with the overuse of chemicals. Yet her extreme rhetoric generated a culture of fear, resulting in policies have deprived many people access to life-saving chemicals. In particular, many nations curbed the use of the pesticide DDT for malaria control because Carson created unfounded fears about the chemical. As the world commemorates the 100th birthday (May 27, 2007) of the late Rachel Carson, it is time to acknowledge the unintended, adverse effects of Carson’s legacy and find ways to correct them.

Further reading: John Tierney, “Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science”

The Semi-Last Word on Flight 327?

The Washington Times reports that it has obtained through FOIA, and will publish next Wednesday, a redacted version of a report prepared by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general on the infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 327 of June 29, 2004. Annie Jacobsen, who was on the flight, wrote a series of articles and a book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again, relating her experiences. To quote my own summary:

Annie Jacobsen, with her husband and four-year-old son, were passengers on Flight 327. Also on board were 14 Middle Eastern males who, by Mrs. Jacobsen’s account, acted very strangely. They wandered about the plane, remained standing when the seat belt signs came on, monopolized the lavatories, exchanged odd gestures and, in general, fit her mental template of hijackers. When the plane landed safely, she felt like she had been rescued from the shadow of death. She and her husband immediately gave statements to the FBI. By her account, however, the law enforcement authorities acted as strangely as the men who had frightened her. The group was taken aside as it deplaned but was allowed to proceed after cursory questioning. It was, she was subsequently assured, a Syrian band, come to play a gig at a southern California casino. Its members had been thoroughly investigated and were innocent of any wrongdoing. Her perception of their actions stemmed from cultural differences or maybe (as was hinted after she began writing about her experience) ingrained prejudice against Arabs.

Mrs. Jacobsen’s opinion is that the Syrians on Flight 327 were conducting a “probe” to test airline security and gather information that would be valuable to future hijackers or bombers. In Terror in the Skies, she tells what she saw on the flight, quotes corroborating accounts from several (unfortunately anonymous) fellow passengers, cites other instances of terrorist probes, including one allegedly involving Mohammed Atta, and lambastes the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies for investigating Flight 327 incompetently, lying about what they found and downplaying the weak spots in airline safety. From these data points, she extrapolates that we have little but luck to protect us against a new campaign of domestic terror.

The Times prints only a few paragraphs from the IG’s report, enough to confirm, as others had done, that Mrs. Jacobsen’s description of the band’s conduct was essentially accurate; not enough to tell us whether the incident was in fact proto-terrorism. On the other hand, the excerpts hint that Homeland Security’s investigation may not have shown the highest level of alertness to potential threats:

In response [to information from the flight crew], an air marshal directed a flight attendant to instruct the cockpit to radio ahead for law-enforcement officials to meet the flight upon arrival. After arriving, Flight 327 was met by federal and local law enforcement officials, who gathered all 13 suspicious passengers, interviewing two of them. An air marshal photocopied the passengers’ passports and visas. The names of the suspicious passengers were run through FBI databases, indicating the musical group’s promoter had been involved in a similar incident in January 2004. No other derogatory information was received, and all 13 of the men were released.

The Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC) logs show no entries regarding Flight 327 on the day of the flight. Flight 327 was logged into HSOC’s database on July 26, 2004, four days after the events that occurred on the flight were reported by The Times. The suspicious incident was brought to HSOC’s attention by an inquiry from the White House Homeland Security Council.

So a second suspicious incident involving the same promoter’s employees didn’t rate inclusion in the department’s terrorism database until the White House, presumably alerted by the FBI (Mrs. Jacobsen’s articles hadn’t yet appeared), followed up. Those facts don’t instill a high level of confidence.

My hope, expressed in the book review from which I quote above, was that Homeland Security had checked the musicians more rigorously than it was willing to disclose to an inquisitive passenger. I begin to fear that I was overly optimistic, but we shall have to wait till Wednesday to find out – with the risk that all of the most interesting data are buried in the redactions.

Update (5/30/07): The Washington Times has now published its promised story, including the information that a background check of the Syrian musicians, conducted 11 days earlier in connection with their visa extension applications, found that eight had records of criminal or suspicious activity, that their employer acted suspiciously on airplanes both before and after the June 29th incident, and that the air marshals on Flight 327 singled the men out for attention even before the plane took off. Judging by the reporter’s account (I haven’t yet had time to read the full report), the events were certainly odd. If they didn’t add up to a rehearsal for a terrorist attack, their perpetrators nonetheless should have been ordered out of the country instanter. On the other hand, it is reassuring to think that, despite Homeland Security’s surface insouciance, nothing worse than this has happened since 9/11. I guess that our protectors don’t have to be supremely competent, so long as they stumble less often than our enemies.

So What Is the Democrats’ “Plan”?

A constant refrain of anti-war polemics is that Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. had no “plan” for Iraq. They (supposedly) expected a long-oppressed people to make an effortless transition to free and democratic self-government and thus failed to take the steps necessary to avert the present “civil war” and “quagmire”.

The truth or falsity of this indictment is an interesting subject for future historical debate. It isn’t self-evident that it ought to be at the center of the debate about what to do next. In particular, if it were true, it would not support the position for which it is most ardently deployed, viz., that the United States ought to withdraw its forces forthwith from Iraq. After all, many wars have begun badly. Almost everything that the Allies did during the first years of World War II was a blunder, from giving Poland a guarantee that couldn’t be honored to assuming that the Ardennes Forest was impassable to putting most of the Soviet Army on the extreme western border of its territory to keeping inadequate watch at Pearl Harbor. Narvik, Crete, Singapore, Kasserine Pass. . . . – The litany of failure rolls on. If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had been in Parliament in 1941, they would, I presume, have demanded that England withdraw from Mr. Churchill’s disastrous enterprise.

Critics like Senators Clinton and Obama apparently think that America can rewind to 9/11 and embark on a new course of action unencumbered by all that has happened during the past five and a half years. I have two questions, and a few follow-ups, to pose:

First, since you consider the historical debate so crucial, what is “the plan” that the President ought to have pursued? Presumably, it starts with leaving Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq. By the logic of “the Iraqi campaign has made us less safe”, the continued presence in the Middle East of an anti-American despot financed by oil revenue would have made us safer. The unstated but obvious premise is that our actions provoked the terrorists’ violent response. They would hate us less and be less diligent in trying to kill us, if only we had not made war on Ba’athist Iraq.

There is a danger of constructing straw men, but in this case we have only straw with which to work. I have never heard any opponent of the war offer any more cogent reason to think that Saddam’s best interests were congruent with our own. Their attitude seems much like that of Neville Chamberlain during the “Phony War”. As Hitler’s armies overran Poland, British bombers dropped leaflets on the Rhineland. The Prime Minister refused to authorize the bombing of factories and rail lines, because he did not want to provoke the enemy. It wasn’t until months after the war began that England engaged in any offensive action, and then only in the half-hearted Norwegian fiasco. Should Senator Obama ever turn historian, I wonder whether he will blame English intervention in Norway for inciting Hitler to invade France.

Let’s suppose that our liberation of Iraq drew al-Qa’eda into that country, as we are so often told. If we had not invaded, where would it be instead? Would it have just faded away? I’d think that it would have had a pretty good recruiting pitch, pointing to American impotence in the face of a defiant Saddam Hussein and calling on enthusiastic young Moslems to continue the attack against the infidels and Jews. Where the war’s main battle lines would have been drawn is unknowable, but it’s preposterous to say that we would not be fighting somewhere today. And wherever that somewhere was, we would have to face terrorist tactics, unsatisfactory allies and an unwelcome death toll.

Unless one believes that al-Qa’eda and the other Islamofascists really are reasonable fellows who would have dozed contentedly had we not done them unendurable wrong, it is undeniable that we would be at war today, Iraq or no Iraq. We are fighting on a battlefield of our own choosing, with overwhelmingly strong forces and a friendly, if less than fully competent, local government behind us. The war critics’ argument amounts to this: We would have done better to let the enemy choose the battlefield. We don’t know where we would be fighting in that alternative universe, or who our allies would be, or how much force would be needed. Nonetheless, the critics know the unknown alternative would be materially better than reality.

We should give the anti-warriors the chance to explain what their “plan” would have been and why it would have made the world a safer place. Unfortunately, they are never asked and never come forward sua sponte.

Second, what is your plan now? Senator Obama and his ilk declare that, once we are out of Iraq, our troops will be in a position to wage a “real” fight against terrorism. Could we have a few details?

Would a President Obama, Clinton or Edwards send massive reinforcements to Afghanistan? If so, do they pledge not to withdraw even if (i) the conflict looks like a civil war (civil war has been pretty much the default state of Afghan politics since roughly the time of Alexander the Great), (ii) the current government appears to be weak and inept, (iii) the enemy kills civilians in terrorist attacks and (iv) American soldiers suffer casualties? Oh, and if the enemy in Afghanistan draws much of its strength from across the Pakistani border, will they promise not to leave its sanctuaries intact?

If a prospective President is willing to make those commitments to Afghanistan, why not to Iraq? If not, how long will an Afghan campaign last before it falls victim to the same complaints as the one in Iraq?

Let’s think about other possible fronts: Somalia, Lebanon, a preemptive strike against Iran? I’m pretty sure that, if the Democrats would address the issue, their prospective strategy would boil down to this: Withdraw to our own borders, react to what the enemy does, preferably with indictments rather than Marines, and spread lots of money to as many units of government as possible.

But, again, let’s hear them tell us about their plans, not as abstractions (“fighting smarter”) but as concrete propositions. It would, I suspect, be highly educational for the electorate.

The Alien Back Taxes Kerfuffle

It surprises me to learn that a great many of my countrymen are unaware of how they pay taxes. Ronald Reagan was apparently right when he denounced withholding for making tax collection invisible.

According to news stories, the Bush Administration pushed for stripping the new immigration bill of a requirement that illegal aliens pay two of their past three years’ back income and FICA taxes as a condition for Z Visa status. For that the President has been loudly vociferated. Yet, whatever the broader merits or demerits of the bill, this particular decision is eminently rational.

Most income and virtually all Social Security tax is withheld from workers’ wages, not paid with income tax returns. If José Subrosa uses a phony Social Security number, the government still gets its money. José simply doesn’t get any credit for having paid it. Most likely, he overpays, as he isn’t likely to know how (or have the nerve) to file Form W-4 to claim all of his withholding allowances, much less apply for the earned income credit.

Forcing José to file a de facto income tax return in order to get his Z Visa would make that document far less attractive, stultifying its goal of bringing illegals out of the shadows, and wouldn’t produce any revenue, once the IRS had diverted resources to matching visa applicants with hitherto unaccounted for tax receipts. The Administration rightly saw this process as a money-losing administrative burden.

But what about those aliens who escape withholding by working “off the books”, engaging in self-employment or outright fraud (tactics not peculiar to illegals, of course)? Their tax liability remains exactly the same, with or without a Z Visa. They don’t get a tax amnesty. The IRS can still audit them and can try to collect delinquencies, with the standard penalties and interest. It probably won’t do much, but that’s because the economics of auditing low income taxpayers are unfavorable to the fisc, not because of any special break for working illegally.

There are, I think, tenable arguments against the immigration reform du jour. The absence of a back taxes provision isn’t one of them.

How Many Amnestied Aliens Can Dance in the Nib of a Pen?

The title of this post was inspired by indigesting one quasi-scholastic discourse too many on what “amnesty” metaphysically means. Restrictionists shout that word the way that poor, mad Andrew Sullivan shouts “Torture!”, as if it were a magical incantation that settles any argument conclusively.

About the definition of “torture”, I can see a need for scrutiny, since the real debate (pace His Andrewship) isn’t over whether the rack and the thumbscrew are acceptable methods of questioning but whether waterboarding, sleep deprivation and raucous music belong in the same odious category.

“Amnesty” is a less conclusory term. States enact “tax amnesties” with some frequency. Many bloody conflicts, including the English and American civil wars, have been followed by amnesty for all but a select few of the defeated. Post-apartheid South Africa was widely lauded for granting amnesty to officials of the old regime who gave truthful accounts of their repressive measures.

So why should “amnesty” be a debate stopper? Because the crime in question involves an especially severe degree of moral turpitude, mayhap? I don’t think that anybody on this side of outright nativism believes that.

In sober fact, the American public has no stomach for rigorous enforcement of the immigration laws. It’s easy to be a fire-breathing deportation advocate in the abstract – not so easy to turn in your neighbor’s nanny or the guy who fixes your roof. That’s a job Americans really don’t want to do.

There’s room for rational disagreement about how an overhaul of the immigration laws ought to deal with past offenses. But a level-headed consideration of practicalities is in order, not a moralistic, “never forgive, never forget” crusade.

The Immigration Detour

Pre-Addendum: A cheery hello to visitors from JustOneMinute. Like Mr. Maguire, I cannot figure out how much a Z Visa will cost, but my instinct is that whatever price the immigration bureaucracy decides upon will be higher than the market will bear. In other words, the shadows will remain pretty dark.

In the middle of the world-wide war against terrorism, Congress has one good and palpable reason to concern itself with immigration reform: Illegal immigrants have fashioned a demi-monde, vast and ill-lit, within which our enemies can move with little fear of detection. While the plot to attack Fort Dix looks farcical, because a lucky accident averted it, it offers a glimpse of what is going on in the untended cellars of our society. Probability and common sense suggest that the Duka brothers are not the only mufsidun lurking in those shadows.

As I have argued before, national security demands that the several million people living in this country illegally be brought into the open and that the economic base of the immigrant smuggling, document forgery and allied industries be undermined. Otherwise, terrorists can use for nefarious ends the structure developed for slipping workers across our border and maintaining them outside the bounds of the law.

So far as I can see, the immigration compromise, whatever its merits might be in peacetime, doesn’t meet the essential wartime necessity. Restrictionists may declare that the prerequisites for the new “Z Visa”, which will give previously illegal residents the right to remain here indefinitely, are full of loopholes. Nonetheless, they are onerous enough to raise doubts that more than a small fraction of those eligible will comply with them for the sake of securing legal status. Hence, there will still be plenty of customers for makers of phony documentation and providers of gray market financial and employment services, and the number of illegals will remain too large to make enforcement of the immigration laws practicable.

The guest worker (“Y Visa”) program does even less to let in light. As the Wall Street Journal points out, it “would shift immigration away from family ties and toward a merit-based model that favors better-educated immigrants with higher skills”. At first blush, that is an excellent idea – except that it won’t cut into the business of the alien smuggling rings, which cater to workers with limited skills. And as long as those rings flourish, the mufsidun can use them, too.

Since the proposal will do little to hinder terrorists, I don’t see how it can be regarded as urgent Congressional business. We’ve stumbled along for 20 years since the last “comprehensive reform”, the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which was full of good intentions and unintended consequences. Rushing to enact a thousand page bill based on a deal hastily hammered out a week ago is scarcely a formula for improving the situation. How much real thought underlies the key features of the measure? To begin with an elementary point, does more than guesswork support the view that the Y and Z Visas would be attractive to their putative beneficiaries? And, as Mark Steyn puts it, is “the agency that takes the best part of a decade to process nanny applications and which sent Mohammed Atta his visa six months after he’d died” going to be able to administer radically revised, more demanding programs?

All in all, Kyl-Kennedy is too trivial for the passion that it has aroused. It’s appalling to hear normally rational right-of-center bloggers and commentators explode like Krazy Kos Kids as they heap venom on minions of the Bush Administration. (This phenomenon, too, we have seen in the past.) The only step left to reach exactly the Kos level would be to blame a Jewish neocon conspiracy. It is almost as if the leaders of the conservative movement wanted to demoralize the rank-and-file and demonize the White House. David Frum, to take someone who ordinarily stands out as a pillar of good sense, devotes a long post to arguing, in essence, that the President is a closet leftist who loathes his supporters – as if nothing in his record mattered except immigration. The War on Terror, Supreme Court appointments, tax cuts: Those are nothing in the balance.

If the Paranoid Left comes to power in next year’s elections and proceeds to disarm the West in the face of Islamofascism, a large part of the fault will lie with those molders of conservative opinion who have no evident sense of what is most important in a perilous time. We can live with a flawed immigration policy. We have lived with one for about 80 years. We will not be able to live – literally – with an insouciant attitude toward the enemies of civilization.

Quote of the Night

It’s by Hugh Hewitt, but buried in his debate summary, and Instapundit quoted it, but only near the end of a long, much updated post, so maybe you haven’t all seen this already:

You know what ethanol is? The chemical compound that results when you mix corn and tax dollars.

Someday somebody is going to update Thomas More’s apothegm about 16th Century enclosures: “where sheep eat men”. Ethanol: the way to fuel cars with people.

And I still think that it is ridiculous to be holding 2008 Presidential debates in the spring of 2007! Can’t we find a judge to declare them unconstitutional?

Jerry Falwell, R.I.P.

When Senator Joseph McCarthy died, Dean Acheson said, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum”, which, as William F. Buckley, Jr., observed, “is how a gentleman and a Harvard overseer tells you the deceased was an SOB”. According to an e-mail that Kathryn Jean Lopez received from a reporter in the Congressional press gallery today, news of the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell drew a less sophisticated response:

The reaction from the reporters? Grins and chuckles mostly. One grizzled veteran journalist said, “I hope they (CNN) remember all the horrible things he said.”

Another reporter simply said, “It is a good day.”

The left side of the blogosphere was less restrained.

This outpouring of smirking scorn and undiluted hatred tells us more about the defamers than their target. Dr. Falwell espoused opinions that were often ill-argued, sometimes naive and occasionally, as when he notoriously blamed the 9/11 attacks on America’s moral decay, unreasonable. After a few years in the political limelight, he himself realized that he was not well-suited to a political role, gave up his leadership of The Moral Majority, and turned his efforts to evangelism and education. Yet, at his worst, he was a peaceable advocate of policies that rarely strayed very far to the right of mainstream conservatism. Indeed, one of the criticisms leveled against him in his heyday was that The Moral Majority, for all its pretense of analyzing the issues of the day in the light of the Gospel, did little more than garnish Reagan Republicanism with Biblical quotations.

I can understand how liberals were irritated by the invocation of God’s Word to support tax cuts, just as I am irritated when the Religious Left insists that Jesus would oppose privatizing Social Security. It’s less understandable when irritation metastasizes into a fury that would barely be justified if directed at Osama bin-Laden or Saddam Hussein.

On balance, Dr. Falwell did a great deal of good. He encouraged millions of formerly apathetic Americans to pay attention to public affairs, promoted ideas that were – with conspicuous exceptions – sensible and sober, led an upright personal life, and worked to “de-ghettoize” evangelical Christians. Against these virtues can be set, as already noted, a number of foolish statements. He accomplished less than he wanted to, but most of that was worthwhile. He does not deserve the highest place in American history, but the place he does deserve is more honorable than those who revile him will ever earn.

The War Generalissima Pelosi Can’t End – Part II

Having insisted for a long time that Iraq has nothing to do with, in fact is a distraction from, the War on Terror, the Left cannot argue consistently that an American withdrawal from Iraq will bring the bigger conflict to a close. At most, it can claim that defeat in this battle will make it easier to win the war. (I leave to one side the substantial minority of the Left that denies the existence of any war to win. They are by and large immune to rational argument.)

The Left’s own preferred narrative unfortunately doesn’t support its professed expectations. According to Generalissima Pelosi and her general staff, al-Qa’eda and kindred groups had no interest in Iraq until April 2003, when the Coalition’s armies drove the Ba’athist regime from power. Then the prospect of attacking Americans led them to throw thousands of terrorists into Iraqi territory. They also elevated Iraq to the top of their propaganda menu and whipped up Moslem anger against the giaours’ “aggression” against the dar al-Islām, gaining a harvest of recruits to their cause.

Let’s assume for the moment that the Left has all of that right. What can reasonably be anticipated after America’s abandonment of the government that we have supported in Baghdad?

Looking ahead to the post-bug-out future requires trying to think like the enemy, which entails taking into account the differences between their beliefs and values, and ours. Hidden in the premises of much left-wing discussion of the war is the assumption that those differences aren’t particularly important. If al-Qa’eda plants booby traps for schoolchildren and beheads prisoners, that is merely evidence of the intensity of its grievances. The proper Western reaction is mollification, not military escalation.

On that optimistic view of enemy psychology, how much will the bug-out calm the mufsiduns’ passions? Recall that, again according to the left-wing narrative, al-Qa’eda despised Saddam Hussein for his secularism and therefore could not conceivably have cooperated with him. Yet the Coalition’s attack on Saddam and his replacement by a different flavor of “bad Moslem” allegedly inflamed them to a new pitch of outrage.

Isn’t it more likely that the Iraqi campaign was an excuse rather than a reason for the outrage, and that other American actions would have served just as well? One suggestive fact is that America gets no credit in Islamofascist quarters for what we have done to assist Moslems against their secularist and Christian enemies. American aid was crucial to the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, and we intervened directly to support Moslems in Bosnia and Kosovo. Even in Iraq, we have (shamefully) done almost nothing to safeguard the indigenous Christians from persecution while showing exaggerated respect for what we take to be Islamic sensitivities. None of that weighs in the balance against our Great Satanism.

La Generalissima says that she doesn’t want to retreat across the ocean and ignore the rest of the world. So our soldiers will go on fighting – in Afghanistan, for instance – and will garrison at least Kuwait and the Gulf emirates. Won’t those be “grievances”, too, and inspire al-Qa’eda et al. to rush their forces, freed from fighting in Iraq, to the new battlegrounds? After all, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, just as we invaded Iraq, and there threw out al-Qa’eda’s ideological soulmates. And Osama bin-Laden’s original declaration of war against America emphasized the enormity of our presence in Saudi-controlled Arabia. Presumably, he is no more pleased by U.S. boots on the ground of Qatar or Kuwait.

It is, in short, illogical, in terms of the Left’s own analytical framework, to imagine that our leaving Iraq will have a calming effect on our foes. The war will move seamlessly from Baghdad to Kabul, the emirates and wherever else in prospective caliphate Western targets are found.

In that continuation of the conflict, the enemy will enjoy two advantages that it doesn’t have at present. First will be the momentum that springs from victory; second, the conviction that it has mastered the tactics needed to defeat our superficially overwhelming military supremacy.

Aside from boosting the terrorist cadre’s morale, victory will have important effects in the wider Moslem world. Osama bin-Laden’s jihad is far from the first ever proclaimed by a Wahabbi-Salafist soi-disant imam. These outbreaks were routine in the British Raj. In the past, however, the jihadis were scorned by traditional Moslems, who regarded them as ignorant heretics. Indian Moslems had real, as opposed to puffed-up, grievances, but they weren’t tempted to join forces with what the British called “the Hindoostani fanatics”.

Since those days, the Wahabbi ideology has made great progress within Islam, thanks to generous Saudi financing and the gradual decay of traditionalism. From being an exotic sect, the Wahabbis have grown to a familiar part of the Moslem thought universe. That development alone has blunted much of the scorn they once attracted. Now they are on the verge of laying claim to the first clear-cut Moslem victory over the Christian powers since the day of Suleiman the Magnificent.

Also worth pondering is the impact on the Democratic Party. A portion of its base already reckons American humiliation as a feature, not a bug. Will La Generalissima be able to keep her troops in line behind a long, troublesome campaign in Afghanistan? If (more realistically, when) the mufsidun raise revolts in Egypt, Jordan, the UAE and Algeria, how will rank-and-file Democrats react to deploying American soldiers in defense of dictatorships and hereditary monarchies? Baghdad wasn’t worth 3,000 American lives. Will Cairo be worth 300? Will Amman be worth 30?

By any reasonable inference from the Left’s own presumptions, the post-Iraq war will be fought on terms vastly less favorable to our interests than those that exist today. Like the British after Saratoga, Napoleon after Borodino or Lee after Gettysburg, we will struggle on the defensive against an enemy with the initiative and moral, if not material, preponderance. Welcome to the real quagmire, lovers of peace.

The War Generalissima Pelosi Can’t End – Part I

Morton Kondracke yesterday put forward what he called “Plan B”, a/k/a “winning dirty”, less, I suspect, as a real proposal than as an awful plausibility intended to prod anti-war liberals into thinking seriously about the consequences of an American bug-out from Iraq.

Right now, the administration is committed to building a unified, reconciled, multisectarian Iraq – “winning clean”. Most Democrats say that’s what they want, too. But it may not be possible. . . .

Winning dirty would involve taking sides in the civil war – backing the Shiite-dominated elected government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and ensuring that he and his allies prevail over both the Sunni insurgency and his Shiite adversary Muqtada al-Sadr, who’s now Iran’s candidate to rule Iraq. . . .

Prudence calls for preparation of a Plan B. The withdrawal policy advocated by most Democrats virtually guarantees catastrophic ethnic cleansing – but without any guarantee that a government friendly to the United States would emerge. Almost certainly, Shiites will dominate Iraq because they outnumber Sunnis three to one. But the United States would get no credit for helping the Shiites win. In fact, America’s credibility would suffer because it abandoned its mission. And, there is no guarantee that al-Sadr – currently residing in Iran and resting his militias – would not emerge as the victor in a power struggle with al-Maliki’s Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [“SCIRI”], led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Iran formerly backed the SCIRI and its Badr Brigades but recently switched allegiances . . . to al-Sadr, who’s regarded by other Shiites as young, volatile and unreliable. Under a win dirty strategy, the United States would have to back al-Maliki and the Badr Brigades in their eventual showdown with al-Sadr. It also would have to help Jordan and Saudi Arabia care for a surge in Sunni refugees, possibly 1 million to 2 million joining an equal number who already have fled.

No politically correct left-winger will be able to stomach the idea of supporting the perpetrators a huge campaign of ethnic cleansing for the sake of installing a pro-American dictatorship. But what does the Left prefer? Ethnic cleansing by an anti-American dictatorship? A proxy war among Iran, Turkey and Saudi-controlled Arabia? Endless chaos? Or will these champions of humanitarian values watch the slaughter without concern?

“Plan A” – whether in the form of Secretary Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” or General Petraeus’s “surge” – holds out the reasonable hope of an unambiguous victory and the certainty of a tolerable state of affairs. Against an enemy that relies almost wholly on the murder of civilians, we can bolster a friendly government indefinitely, at a cost in men and money that is well within our resources. It is an elementary axiom of warfare that guerillas cannot win until and unless they gather enough strength to launch conventional attacks. The mufsidun are centuries away from crossing that threshold and receding by the month.

But La Generalissima and her party don’t think that Plan A is good enough. Mr. Kondracke has proffered a shocking, right-wing “Plan B”. What “Plan B” does the Left have?

The Humane Perspective of the Religious Left

The Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson is a pillar of the Religious Left. In his youth, he worked on the staff of liberal Republican Senator Mark Hatfield. Today he is general secretary of the American branch of the Dutch Reformed Church (a far different denomination from what it was in William the Silent’s day). Writing on the modestly named God’s Politics blog (maintained by leftist fakir Jim Wallis of Sojourners), he preached yesterday about how to apply the “lessons of Vietnam” to the Iraqi campaign. The sermon is the usual hogwash, but one sentence struck me. About the other side of the Vietnam debate, he says dismissively, “Despite their dire predictions of outcomes, today U.S. companies are racing to catch up with other corporations heavily investing in Vietnam’s economy.”

As Mark Tooley observes,

Yes, thirty years later, free enterprise is taking root in still communist-governed Vietnam. But this follows at least 1.7 million killed by the communist genocide in Cambodia in the immediate aftermath of the war, along with tens of thousands murdered by the victorious communists in Laos and in reunified Vietnam. There were also the concentration camps, hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees, thousands of whom drowned at sea, and decades of totalitarian oppression, where free speech and rule of law were extinguished by nightmarish police states.

Yet, to the Rev. Mr. Granberg-Michaelson, the “dire predictions” are disproven by the fact that multinational corporations nowadays find that they can do business with Hanoi. If that is the Religious Left’s standard, what, in the Ground of All Being’s name, so upset them about General Pinochet?

Keeping the Mufsiduns’ Secrets

A frequent complaint against terms like “Islamofascist” and sites like Little Green Footballs and Jihad Watch is that they suggest that all Moslems are to blame for terrorism. That’s unfair, even bigoted, I’ve often been assured: Islam believes in “Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful”. The promoters of Holy War against the infidel are a tiny minority rejected by the Moslem mainstream.

Despite its popularity with the bien pensants, I’m inclined to agree with that view. A documentary has now appeared to back it up with visual and verbal evidence. Here is how novelist and screenwriter Roger L. Simon describes it:

Burke’s doc is a riveting and creatively made film about the most important subject of our time: what to do about radical Islam? It confronts this dilemma in a sly, novelistic manner, inter-weaving the stories of good, moderate Muslims with the Imams and supposedly “true Muslims” who, not surprisingly, accuse the moderate Muslims of not being Muslims at all. Soon enough we learn these Imams are apologists for terrorism and for the worst kind of medieval religious sadism. (One of them enthusiastically endorses the stoning to death of adulterers by holding up a Koran. “I didn’t make this up,” he says proudly. “It is written here.”) The mostly mild-mannered moderate Muslims are shown to be at risk for the lives, some of them accompanied everywhere by bodyguards.

All this is done with the people talking about themselves and revealing themselves (including the Imam responsible for the bloody Danish Cartoons riots). There are no so-called “terrorism experts” or other talking heads interpreting reality for us.

Doesn’t that sound like exactly the kind of film that, say, PBS would want to push in order to demonstrate the folly of demonizing Islam?

Well, no, actually. The documentary was produced for PBS and was rejected. The official excuse is that its production values were lacking. That’s a matter of opinion, of course, but I think that Roger Simon can tell “a riveting and creatively made film” from junk. The decision to axe Islam vs. Islamists was pretty clearly political rather than aesthetic.

And what was wrong with it politically? Can it be that, to at least one segment of the leftist intelligentsia, it is not acceptable to expose Wahhabi clerics as “apologists for terrorism and for the worst kind of medieval religious sadism” or to show how they put other Moslems in fear for their lives?

Suppose that someone had made a similar film in Germany in 1932, “inter-weaving the stories of good, moderate [Germans] with the [Nazis] and supposedly ‘true [Germans]’ who, not surprisingly, accuse the moderate [Germans] of not being [Germans] at all”. Suppose that a movie chain had then refused to show that exposé for political reasons. What would you infer?

Blago Sets a Record!

If there were a Guinness Book of Political Records, Rod Blagojevich would have gained a spot in it today. Governors often have trouble getting their bills through legislatures, but I’m sure that none has ever before done quite so badly at it as this:

The Illinois House today overwhelmingly rejected Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s plan for a new $7 billion business tax.

Not a single lawmaker voted “yes” in favor of the plan when House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) called the resolution, which asked if they supported or opposed the governor’s proposed new tax. But 107 lawmakers voted “no” – a vote against the governor’s plan – and seven voted “present.”

The Blagojevich scheme started life as a nice piece of demagoguery: “Business” would pay hefty new taxes to finance a state-run heath care program and a big increase in education spending (allocated in accordance with the priorities of the teachers’ unions, of course). Unluckily for the governor, he couldn’t just soak the rich in the traditional Democratic fashion by mulcting high-income taxpayers. The Illinois Constitution prohibits a graduated income tax. Taxes on profitable (i. e., successful, job-creating) businesses are also constrained, because another constitutional provision limits the corporate income tax rate to 160 percent of the individual rate.

Governor Blagojevich’s alternative was a tax on gross receipts. He doubtless figured that the “business tax” label would satisfy everybody but troglodyte Republicans, of which the state legislature has fewer and fewer with every election. But the levy’s impact was so plain that Democrats needed only their customary 20/200 economic eyesight to see that it would hit not shadowy plutocrats but everybody who buys goods and services, including all of their own constituents.

One mustn’t expect too much wisdom from Illinois lawmakers, so there is likely to be some dreadful “compromise” that will squeeze the blood from different, less transparent turnips. Nonetheless, it will be pleasant in future years to recall that tally: zero to 107 to seven.

Accountability for Phonies

Holding the government of Iraq “accountable” is the latest enthusiasm on Capitol Hill. The concept is that Baghdad should be required to do a great many Good Things – e. g., “new laws on oil revenue and de-Baathification, constitutional revisions, provincial elections and the demobilization of militias” – on pain of a withdrawal of American troops. Generalissima Pelosi’s current plan is to give the Iraqis 60 days to carry out her ukases. A Democrat-controlled Congress has not yet, after well over 60 days, passed even one of its announced legislative priorities, but Middle Eastern parliamentarians can of course be expected to do better than that.

According to La Generalissima, her approach “will fully fund the troops, honor our commitment to our veterans, hold the Iraqi government accountable and end the war”. Notice what’s missing? She refrains from so much as lip service to making progress in reining in terrorism. Her phraseology is, in fact, preposterous. An American bug-out from Iraq won’t “end the war”, either in that country or around the world. One might as well say that General Meade could have “ended the war” by retreating from Gettysburg.

The premise behind the “accountability” mantra is that our goal in Iraq is to put into place the principles and practice of good government. True enough, that is something that we would like to do, but it is not an end it itself; it is a means to the end of administering a stinging defeat to the mufsidun. We are fighting for ourselves and all of civilization, not just for the civilized core of the population of Mesopotamia. A peaceful, prosperous, well-governed Iraq will be a valuable ally in the War on Terror. It doesn’t follow that, should our dearest hopes be disappointed, the alternative is to give up. A factious, terror-plagued Iraq where the enemy suffers steady attrition of men and materiel is better than one that triumphant Islamofascists can claim as a famous victory.

Global Warming Is for Sissies

This place must have a lot of SUV’s:

The hottest planet ever discovered is charcoal black and makes even some stars seem cool. Scientists think the exoplanet absorbs nearly all the starlight that reaches its surface and then reradiates it back out into space as heat.

Called HD 149026b, the feverish world emits so much infrared heat that it glows slightly. “It would look like an ember in space, absorbing all incoming light but glowing a dull red,” said study leader Joseph Harrington of the University of Central Florida.

Located 279 light-years away in the constellation Hercules, HD 149026b is a so-called hot Jupiter, a giant gas planet that orbits very close to its star. It is a scorching 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit (2,040 degrees Celsius), three times hotter than Mercury and hotter than the coolest stars. . . .

“HD 149026b is simply the most exotic, bizarre planet,” Harrington said. “It’s pretty small, really dense, and now we find that it's extremely hot.” . . .

How HD 149026b got to be so hot is a mystery. “We’ve actually done a lot of work to try and answer that question, but the more we think about it, the worse it gets,” Harrington said.

Al Gore or Barack Obama could tell them the answer: It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.

A Reminder About Saddam

Now and then, it’s worthwhile to think about the alternative to the dull, dreary battle against terrorists in Iraq that we must pursue because we had the effrontery to depose a hostile dictator. It isn’t peace and quiet. Visiting Ramadi, W. Thomas Smith, Jr. talks to a Marine major:

At Salman Pak [about 15 miles south of Baghdad], I was there in 2003. We found high quality leather suicide vests, wrapped in plastic, ready for shipment. . . . I wonder what the enemy was doing with those? We actually sent out press releases with pictures in and around April/May 2003, and it was ignored by the mainstream media.

It may not have been ignored completely. Mr. Smith quotes the April 13, 2003, issue of USA Today, describing what perhaps was the same discovery:

U.S. Marines found 310 explosive-packed vests for suicide bombers at an unspecified location in Baghdad, U.S. military officials said Sunday. The cache, discovered Friday, included 160 vests that combined explosives with ball bearings, making them more lethal, Central Command said. CNN reported that the vests were found in a school.

The suicide bomber garb obviously was manufactured by the Ba’athist regime. For what purpose? For internal use only – to blow up prospective Kurdish rebels? And how likely is it that this was the full extent of the Ba’athists’ production of terrorist accouterments?

Meanwhile, William Kristol, plowing through George Tenet’s “self-serving and often whiny recollection of his time as director of central intelligence”, has found a number of buried revelations about what the CIA thought regarding Saddam Hussein’s relationship with al-Qa’eda at the time when the decision to oust the tyrant was being made. This history is being rapidly airbrushed away.

[T]he book provides surprising evidence – some of it new – that Bush was right to take the war on terror to Iraq, and that he might be well advised to get more serious about Iran. Tenet offers this evidence inadvertently, for it undercuts the fashionable critique of the Iraq war that he now seeks to associate himself with. But precisely because the evidence cuts against Tenet's polemical thrust, it should be given considerable weight.

For instance, Tenet devotes several pages to a reexamination of the ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And though he tries to stake out politically safe middle ground – by arguing against imaginary Bush administration officials who claimed Iraq was behind 9/11 – he concludes that Iraq did have a relationship with al Qaeda that the Bush administration was right to be worried about:

The intelligence told us that senior al-Qa’ida leaders and the Iraqis had discussed safe haven in Iraq. Most of the public discussion thus far has focused on Zarqawi’s arrival in Baghdad under an assumed name in May of 2002, allegedly to receive medical treatment. Zarqawi, whom we termed a ‘senior associate and collaborator’ of al-Qa’ida at the time, supervised camps in northern Iraq run by Ansar al-Islam (AI). . . .

What was even more worrisome was that by the spring and summer of 2002, more than a dozen al-Qa’ida-affiliated extremists converged on Baghdad, with apparently no harassment on the part of the Iraqi government. They had found a comfortable and secure environment in which they moved people and supplies to support Zarqawi’s operations in northeastern Iraq. . . .

Thirwat Shihata and Yussef Dardiri, two Egyptians assessed by a senior al-Qa’ida detainee to be among the Egyptian Islamic Jihad’s best operational planners, . . . arrived [in Baghdad] by mid-May of 2002. At times we lost track of them, though their associates continued to operate in Baghdad as of October 2002. Their activity in sending recruits to train in Zarqawi’s camps was compelling enough.

The primary motive for the invasion of Iraq was to prevent Saddam Hussein from expanding his role as a terrorist protector, supplier and financier. One indisputable fact is that we succeeded in that mission. Those who now declare that it should never have been undertaken implicitly regret the lives that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their subordinates thereby saved.

The Astonishing Dominance of the Religious Right

Let’s see. Everybody knows that the Religious Right has a stranglehold on the Republican Party. Everybody also knows that there is little that the Religious Right loathes more than Darwinism. Obviously, then, any candidate hoping to gain the Republican Presidential nomination will have to pander to anti-Darwinian sentiment.

So isn’t it odd that, when the GOP hopefuls were asked during last week’s rather farcical debate whether they disbelieved in evolution, only Messrs. Huckabee, Brownback and Tancredo raised their hands? The three of them together poll somewhere between three and seven percent. The candidates who go along with Darwin must content themselves with divvying up the circa 95 percent that is left over.

It doesn’t look like William Jennings Bryan would feel at home as a latter-day Republican. In fact, if an Australian lefty’s lament is accurate (not that I would bet on it), he still has kindred spirits among Democrat saints.

I hope that, in the next round of debates, someone will ask about the authorship of the works of Shakespeare.

Excuses for Complacency

Surrounding the Angry Left is a calmer, though likewise deluded, zone of opinion, one that doesn’t regard the War on Terror as a neo-Nazi conspiracy but shies away from the struggle as annoying and unnecessary. This spirit of complacency is what makes the Angry Left more than an impotent minority. If its policy positions were perennially ignored, it would fade away, much like the socialists who a century ago seemed poised to become a major force in American life. Instead, it draws strength from successes that it could not win on its own.

The Complacentists are not mad at anyone. They don’t think that the Bush Administration is a threat to civil liberties or seeks to conquer the world in the interests of shadowy Jewish plutocrats. They may even be more than a bit furious with our avowed enemies. While only a minority of Democrats firmly reject Trutherism, it has no following anywhere else on the political spectrum. What allies Complacency with Paranoia is agreement on a single point: The advocates of a forward policy against the mufsidun, ranging from President Bush through Senator Lieberman, want to do too much. We don’t need a War on Terror, because the terrorists are a momentary nuisance that will soon dwindle without our having to expend more than the most limited quantities of blood or money. (Expenditures of toil, sweat and tears are unthinkable impositions.)

The soul of Complacency can be seen in a new Spectator column by Matthew Parris, responding to David Selbourne’s pessimistic assessment of the West’s chances of fending off Islamofascist aggression. Mr. Parris stands somewhere between Anger and Complacency. Though a member of the British Conservative Party, he has long made clear his dislike of America. In this piece, he keeps up that theme, professing to be “nervous that the American empire may lurch dangerously around for decades to come”. Still, he does not sound rabid, and his central argument is the Complacentist one that the world has nothing to fear from “our supposed enemy” [emphasis added].

First, he avers, our most immediate enemies are more like KAOS than the KGB:

Have we not noticed how incompetent are Islamic governments and organisations the world over? Has it not occurred to us that if al-Qa’eda really were as wily and resourceful as we tell ourselves they are, and if their tentacles really did extend as wide and deep as some say, they would be on the advance — not battled into a stalemate by Western security and intelligence? If I were an al-Qa’eda activist I could have blown up Parliament or shot at least one of a range of prime ministers by now. Al-Qa’eda’s failure to infiltrate or penetrate Western structures has been complete.

Apparently, then, Osama bin-Laden’s operatives just got lucky when they bombed the U.S.S. Cole and then toppled the World Trade Towers. Similarly, it’s just a coincidence that, as soon as “Western security and intelligence” began to pay serious attention to them, their successes diminished. Publicly available information – probably far from complete – indicates that al-Qa’eda and similar groups have been plotting furiously for the past five years. Their threats of another “big martyrdom operation” are a staple of Islamofascist Web sites and sympathetic Arab media. How confident is Mr. Parris that their failure to amount to very much stems from nothing but “incompetence”?

Second, he broadens the critique to argue that Islamofascist ineptitude extends beyond the tactical level:

Islam, in its more fundamentalist form, doesn’t work. Serious, committed Islamists are most unlikely to succeed within any structures but their own. Their own, meanwhile, are notoriously inefficient and corrupt. Only by lucky coincidence have much of the world’s known petrocarbons been found beneath Islamic nations, giving them what temporary influence they wield. . . .

This is a battle Islamism cannot win. Fundamentalist Islam is a mediaeval force. It has little to contribute to modern business, science or government, and subsists uneasily in today’s world. Profoundly and essentially reactionary, it hardly creates, innovates or invents, and appears chronically disorganised and prone to internal division and distrust.

In like manner, a citizen of Fifth Century Rome, Seventh Century Byzantium or Thirteenth Century China might have scoffed at the notion that backward hordes could overrun wealthy, civilized empires that outstripped them in every metric of power and prosperity. There are two problems with that argument. One is that history has falsified it over and over again. Material wealth, technological superiority and humane institutions are imperfect insurance against a dynamic, expansion-minded barbarism.

The other flaw is that beating back the barbarians can be a debilitating exercise that exhausts the defenders. If the West allows a large part of the Islamic world to turn into a Wahhabist Caliphate – a likely outcome if we pull back from the Middle East – we will face a nuclear-armed foe with substantial economic resources and a proven willingness to employ terrorism on a large scale. No doubt it will be weaker than the concert of the Western powers. On the other hand, as Mr. Parris notes without recognizing the implications of what he is saying, secondary powers are tempted to combine against a perceived “imperium”, rendering it less than certain that the prospective Caliphate will find no collaborators. In any event, a cold war lasting decades against most or all of the Middle East seems scarcely preferable to several years of hot war against relatively weak non-state actors.

Mr. Parris has a rejoinder to thoughts like those: We don’t face a choice between a short war or a long one, because others will conveniently do our job for us:

[C]ynics would say that we in Europe and America would be best advised to let its most implacable enemies shed their blood and money confronting its advance. In Chechnya, in Southeast Asia, with China, and all across that swath of nations ending in -stan, the struggle between Islam and its rivals is one from which the West can stand aside, leaving both sides to an expensive and wasteful scrap. The Chinese and the Russians are infinitely more savage than we dare be.

Cynics could also take note of the fact that China and Russia, despite clashes with Islam in their border regions, have been consistent aiders and abettors of anti-Western forces, including both Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the mullahs’ Iran. Counting on them to oppose Islamofascism resolutely, rather than reach opportunistic accommodations with it, is a high-risk gamble. Expecting them to take the offensive beyond their own borders and clean out the mufsidun lairs is not gambling, but fantasy.

Mr. Parris calls his policy “containment, not confrontation” and claims to be following the path marked by President Truman. His real model is Mr. Micawber. He hopes that “something will turn up”. Dickens’ comic hero got a fresh start in Australia. For civilizations that try to wish away their enemies, second chances are harder to come by.

Bush Derangement Silliness

Since 1917 there has been one period during which the President of the United States was not one of the 100 (or, for that matter, 10 or 5 or 3) most influential men on Earth. That was while Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke. Though we forget it nowadays, Warren Harding had a great deal of sway (mostly for ill) over what happened in the U.S. and abroad, and Harry S. Truman, at the depths of his unpopularity at home and without majority support in Congress (not even after 1948, if one takes the Southern Democrats into account), was responsible for the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine and the Korean War.

It is thus inherently implausible that George W. Bush has less impact on the world than Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Osama bin-Laden, Queen Elizabeth or various transient Hollywood celebrities. But the BDS sufferers at the country’s largest circulation infotainment mag really, really, really wish that the President would go away, so they pretend that he doesn’t matter. Critics of the Bush Administration perpetually accuse it of “denial”. Well, here is denial on stilts jumping on a pogo stick.

It’s hardly necessary to refute, much less become indignant over, Time’s silliness. Rather, we should take it as a revelation of the extent to which it has become purely a fiction periodical, designed to deliver to purblind leftists a soothing picture of the week’s events. As Tom Gross puts it, “Don’t go to Time for your foreign news” – or your domestic either. But do look at it if you doubt the proposition that a large proportion of anti-Bush, anti-conservative American opinion lives in a self-constructed parallel universe that has fewer and fewer intersections with the real one.

Not Your Grandfather’s Political Passion

A month ago, I opined that the current wave of left-wing paranoia about conservatives in general and President Bush in particular has almost no precedent in American history. In response, a commenter pointed to other times of high political passion and hinted that I was overly alarmed by a not unfamiliar phenomenon.

I’d like to believe that the debate over the War on Terror, nasty and noisy as it is, is more like the Nullification Crisis of Andrew Jackson’s administration, where violent words did not lead to anything worse, than the run-up to the Civil War. But there is a great gulf between name calling and a sincere belief that one’s political opponents harbor secret dictatorial designs and will – in fact, already have – resorted to mass murder to carry them out. Captain’s Quarters reports on a depressing Rasmussen poll. To summarize baldly:

• 35% of Democrats believe that President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance; 26% are not sure; 39% say he didn’t know.

• 37% of Democrats believe that the CIA had advance knowledge of the attacks; 23% aren’t sure; 30% disagree.

That is to say, between three-fifths and two-thirds of the Democratic Party is willing to entertain, or affirmatively embraces, the deranged notion that the U.S. government deliberately didn’t make an effort to prevent the direst act of terrorism in American history. Such is the electorate to which Mrs. and Messrs. Clinton, Obama, Edwards et al. must appeal for primary votes. I seriously doubt that, with the lone exception of the White South in the 1850’s, any major segment of our body politic has ever departed that dramatically from a rational view of its domestic adversaries.

The best that one can hope is that the paranoid-sounding respondents didn’t mean what they told the pollsters. One of Captain Ed’s commenters hypothesizes that many leftists throw around wild theories about the President’s culpability in 9/11 out of no more than zeal to blacken his reputation. In other words, they deploy paranoia as a political weapon. That isn’t much more promising for the future of the Republic than if they put full faith and credit in the conspiracy theories.

Bernard Goldberg has encapsulated our country’s moral and intellectual crisis in the title of his latest book: Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve. I fear that his diagnosis is on the mark.

Addendum: Jim Geraghty: “It’s tough to be a ‘uniter, not a divider’ when 35 percent of your opposition is insane.”