The Whole Thing

Reality Really Bites

Tom Daschle, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Ted Kennedy, and Wesley Clark are all appalled, shocked, scandalized by the new RNC ad entitled "Reality": On MEET THE PRESS, Daschle called it "repulsive and outrageous," and stated his belief that the Republicans "ought to pull the ad." "We all want to defeat terrorism," he said, but "to chastise and to question the patriotism of those who are in opposition to some of the president's plans I think is wrong." Ted Kennedy spoke of an "attempt to stifle dissent." Clark spoke of the president violating his "pledge... to not exploit 9-11 for political purposes."

The 30-second ad in in its entirety runs as follows:

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."
CHYRON: Strong and Principled Leadership
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: "Our war against terror is a contest of will in which perseverance is power."
CHYRON: Some are now attacking the President for attacking the terrorists.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?"
CHYRON: Some call for us to retreat, putting our national security in the hands of others.
CHYRON: Call Congress Now
CHYRON: Tell them to support the President's policy of preemptive self-defense.
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN ED GILLESPIE: "The Republican National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising."
CHYRON: Ed Gillespie
CHYRON: Chairman, RNC
CHYRON: The Republican National Committee paid for and is responsible for the content of this advertising. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee. www.gop.com

As Professor Dauber has patiently ranted at Ranting Profs, strongly disagreeing with someone else's "model of strategic defense" is not the same as impugning their patriotism. This argument would be valid - indeed, it should be self-evident to anyone who claims to favor any discussion of policy alternatives at all - even if the ad mentioned the Democrats, or for that matter even mentioned 9/11, or for that matter came right out and said, "Those Democrats, especially Daschle, Kennedy, Clark, Kerry, and Dean are pushing a totally back-assward response to 9/11 that would destroy the country if followed." Of course, the ad does not even mention 9/11. It doesn't even specifically identify those calling for "retreat," or make any statements about anyone's love of country. All in all, it's kind of soft, even cerebral, as 30-second political ads go. Osama Horton it's not.

When the ad was first unveiled last week, I watched Donna Brazile on CNN move in the space of one sentence from bemoaning the supposedly unfair attack to noting that the Bush excerpts came from a speech "proved to be a pack of lies." Ms. Brazile must have been thinking of the Summer talking point that falsely accused Bush of lying about the supposed Iraq-Niger uranium connection. Recycling this old Bush-lied lie was not enough for her: She chose to compound it. Since then, up to today's political shows, Democratic leaders, candidates and consultants have all been offering variations on the same theme. Someone, somewhere in the Democrat braintrust seems to have decided that counterattack, rather than active defense of Democratic policy alternatives, was the way to go. They don't seem to mind that this unanimous response amounts to the entire party standing up, raising their hands, and shouting, "It's us! We're the ones in favor of retreat and putting our national security in the hands of others! All of us!"

What the Democrats otherwise ALL seem to be saying is that it's okay - totally peachy and anyone who disagrees is squelching free speech - for them to accuse Bush & Co. of wasting lives in Iraq through incompetence and corruption, of intentionally letting Osama go free, of lying over and over again on matters of the highest life-and-death importance, of destroying the Constitution, of, as Clark would have it especially, committing the greatest strategic blunder since Napoleon marched on Russia (if not since Alcibiades went after Syracuse), and on and on and on day after day after day - but that any response at all, even if it's just a few generalizations describing the Bush strategy, excerpts from widely seen speeches, and suggestions that those who disagree might be WRONG in a way that might MATTER, goes beyond the bounds of acceptable political discourse.

Yeah, that sure sounds fair!

What the Democrats are really afraid of is that Bush has not yet begun to fight, and, even more, that he may not have to fight very hard. They know that they are on the wrong side of contemporary history, that what Marxists might call the "political conjuncture" simply does not favor them: Bush is heading into '04 with the incumbent advantage, the united party advantage, the recovering economy advantage, the in-party during wartime advantage, and the traditional Republican financial advantage. Much could of course change between now and November of next year, but these factors as well as long-developing social, economic, and demographic trends suggest at least the possibility of an historical re-alignment that puts the Democrats in long-term minority status, if it doesn't sooner or later send them the way of the Whigs.

If they were just a little bit more grown-up, intelligent, credible, or honorable in their apparent desperation, it would be easier to forgive and even feel sorry for them.

Re-Thinking Iraq: Saddam and the WMDs

Paul Craddick has now added a fourth part to the"Rethinking Iraq" series in which he's been reviewing diverse controversies - subjects of heated discussion especially over the Summer - associated with the war in Iraq. The latest entry concerns WMDs and the familiar arguments put forward by war opponents that the failure to turn up large WMD stockpiles exposes the entirety of the Bush Administration's case for war as false, even criminal. After examining the evidence, Paul reaches the following conclusion:

In light of the preponderance of informed opinion which before the war held that Iraq had not disarmed (entailing both infrastructure and extant weapons), and in light of the fact that infrastructural elements are now coming to light, it seems to me that it is still eminently reasonable to assume that Iraq did indeed have stockpiles of WMD which have so far eluded us – either through being hidden/moved, or destroyed. In any event, nothing yet has emerged – by a longshot – to establish that the war was/is fraudulent on its own terms.

Of course, many of us, including Paul, have argued further that there were multiple justifications for the war, of which the possible existence of deliverable WMDs in Iraq was merely the most frightening, but very few observers, it seems to me, have come up with reasonable responses to certain obvious questions. Paul's conclusions do not rest on any definitive answers to the WMD mysteries, but I have long thought (much of this post was in fact written several months ago) that the questions can be answered reasonably, even if we assume for sake of argument that the state of evidence never progresses far beyond what we currently possess.

1) If Saddam did not possess a WMD capability, why didn't he comply fully with UN inspections resolutions, and thus avoid war?

Even if Saddam had had all or most of his WMDs and WMD equipment destroyed, there are several reasons why he wouldn't want to comply with inspections: The aim of the inspections was not to discover hidden WMDs; the aim was to verify full disarmament or declare non-compliance with disarmament requirements. As Hans Blix himself confirmed, Iraq never offered more than isolated, piecemeal cooperation on matters of substance, and instead focused on stringing the inspectors along by offering superficial procedural cooperation.

Total cooperation would have required, among other things, full access to all elements of Iraq's WMD programs, including technicians and scientists, and all dual use equipment, alongside a full accounting. Saddam never came close to providing this. To do so would have exposed and confirmed his past deceptions - both known ones and new ones - and would have inevitably have added impetus to ever more intrusive and comprehensive efforts.

The end result would have been either real, complete disarmament, including the eradication of Saddam's ability ever to reconstitute the program, or confrontation. Saddam was unwilling to allow the former to occur, and instead hoped to delay and manage the latter - as he had successfully done in the past. Additionally, maintaining uncertainty about his WMD capacities served purposes of its own in managing external and internal threats, and refusing to give in on this (or virtually any) issue served his image as "the one who doesn't back down," which was fundamental to his political effectiveness and aspirations.

2) If Saddam possessed a WMD capability, why didn't he use it?

At no point did Saddam have any reason to believe that what WMD capacity he preserved would be of high military utility on the battlefield. WMDs of the type Saddam possessed even at the height of his military power are difficult to use effectively against a well-prepared, highly mobile force. Additionally, the moment that a single WMD was used, or even discovered in a position where it could be used, his political strategy - which became even more important once hostilities had actually begun - would have collapsed. (Even France had stated publically that WMD use would cause it to reverse its opposition to the war.)

Nor is there any reason to believe that this political strategy was ever abandoned, up to and including the US invasion, and even the present day. To us, Saddam's defeat seemed inevitable, but it may not have seemed that way to Saddam. Even at this late date, we have no reason to believe that Saddam has admitted defeat. Both he and the Iraqi people - including WMD scientists and WMD program officials - may still believe that a Baathist insurgency and other difficulties of occupation may sooner or later force a US withdrawal, and provide him (or his allies) with a chance to re-gain authority - if not over the entire country in the near term, then at least over a secure base of operations. He may even believe that he's re-gained momentum.

As for the WMDs themselves, I still tend to suspect that there are WMD materials and possibly even some real WMDs somewhere in Iraq, and that some items may have been successfully moved out of the country, but that the old WMD artillery shells and the like were probably destroyed or discarded, and that any quantities of precursor chem/bio materials are probably much smaller now than when originally observed by the UN. As has frequently been pointed out by David Kay and others, it's also worth keeping in mind that even x-thousand liters of one or another toxin requires only a few tens of barrels for storage, and that a much, much smaller amount is sufficient for re-starting the manufacturing process over again, especially if the "intellectual capacity" has been preserved.

Saddam knew this last point well. He was much smarter and more knowledgeable about and more experienced with WMDs - how they're made and how they're used militarily and politically - than, say, most Bush Administration opponents, and, it's fair to say, probably than a lot of Bush Administration operatives and allies as well.

The Divergence

Inspired by some discussion at Europundits - click on "nadas" underneath Nelson Ascher's latest essay - I intend to begin blogging some notes on the widening divergence of American and European interests, a subject matter that inevitably touches as well on the Islamists, the international Left, and pretty much the whole thing.

Needless to say, it's a huge subject. Rather than try, at this time, to address it comprehensively, I'll attack it in pieces, beginning today with a series of raw comments originally posted as responses to Ascher's essay and to the discussion it engendered. I intend to revise, expand upon, and possibly re-organize the posts over time, and will allow them first to appear as rough drafts. Questions, disagreements, and suggestions will be welcome - either in the comment section or by e-mail.

Oliver Kamm: John Pilger, literary critic

"...when writers take a stand on international politics the intensity of their indignation is almost always inversely related to the intelligence with which they express it."

Already Over

I don't know of anyone who's thinking much further ahead than Wretchard at The Belmont Club. In the latest of a series of posts in which he's been reading between the lines and into the silences, attending to the broad correlation of economic, political, and military forces, and recalling historical precedents of much more direct relevance than the more frequently invoked Vietnam and World War II, he argues that the fight against the Iraqi insurgents has for all intents and purposes already been won - that the Sunni resistance reached its critical point of futility some time ago. In his view, the psychological futility point may still be a ways off, but the only thing that the Sunnis currently achieve by fighting is to dig themselves more deeply into the mass grave of their former privileges:

By destroying infrastructure in the Baghdad area, retarding their own reconstruction and generally raising hell, the Sunnis are ironically assuring the permanence of the Kurdish and Shi'ite ascendancy in Iraq. They are resource poor, in the minority and worst of all, clueless. In hankering after lost glories, they are cutting themselves out of the loop, out of power and out of the future. But the psychological futility point will be reached only much later, almost imperceptibly, when the Sunnis are jolted into reality by a signal event[...] long after their army has lost the field. Then it will hit with a vengeance.

Better late than never, but better earlier than later: If these communities struck on their own against the insurgents, perhaps if the former merely did a better job of isolating the latter and withdrawing support, the world and their fellow Iraqis might still welcome them back like so many prodigal delinquents, but it's also possible that, to paraphrase Golda Meir, we may soon find it easier to forgive them for what they've done to us than for what they will have made us do to them.

The US response to the recent downing of helicopters and other provocations is said to focus on "precision raids," but it has also already included a major 4th Infantry Division operation, dubbed Ivy Cyclone, that for the first time since major combat concluded has deployed air support from fighter-bombers. In the expectation of such escalation, and more, David Warren (whose views on all matters seem to have become more pessimistic since his conversion from Anglican to Catholic) takes the hard line:

In practice, [the only remaining option] means dramatically increasing the cost of harbouring Saddamite and Islamist terrorists, or of espousing their cause. It means reversing the policy of treating the inhabitants of such towns as Fallujah and Tikrit, and such neighbourhoods as Saddam Hussein once favoured in Baghdad, as "innocent bystanders". Many have sided with the enemy, and the rest are intimidated into doing so. To change this situation, the power of intimidation must be reversed. The U.S. must show that it would rather sacrifice Fallujah and Tikrit, than sacrifice all of Iraq.

This prospect carries with it what Warren sees as the last remaining threat to the mission:

Yet my biggest doubt about American resolve, over the longer term, is not whether they have the stomach to absorb U.S. casualties, but rather the stomach to do the horrific things necessary to win. They lost Vietnam, after all, from their refusal to utterly destroy the enemy.

Is there any purpose in trying to communicate these themes to the residents of Tikrit and Fallujah in so many words, or can only missiles and bullets speak clearly enough? In either case, we may yet save ourselves and our enemy from the worst. If Wretchard is correct, then perhaps it's now only a matter of finally reaching the losers, like the British at the Battle of New Orleans, with the news that their war is over.

Infinite Justice

Not In Ourselves, But In Our Polls

In a post entitled AMERICAN ATTITUDES? INCOHERENT,
Professor Dauber over at Ranting Profs takes a rant on Fox News' latest opinion polling on Iraq. She congratulates Fox for asking some new questions, but wonders whether the responses make any sense.

Whatever one thinks about polls and polling methods in general, there are few subjects, it seems to me, more vulnerable to bad polling than questions dealing with attitudes towards war casualties. The question that's been asked since at least the end of major combat in Iraq has been whether whatever current casualty rates among American soldiers are "acceptable." To answer the question affirmatively requires respondents to associate themselves with a perspective that, if voiced publically by a politician or pundit, would result in bitter criticism along familiar "well, that's certainly easy for you to say" lines. Mark Shields would be all over President Bush if the latter was caught saying anything even suggesting a blithe "acceptance" of casualty rates. On the other hand, to reply in the negative seems to suggest opposition to current policy: Saying that the casualty rates are "unacceptable" would seem to imply either that one feels the troops are being badly led and deployed, or that they should never have been deployed in the first place. The respondents' three choices - "acceptable," "unacceptable," "don't know/no opinion/not sure" - come down to confessing to Eichmann-like inhmanity, peace activist naivete, or stupid passivity toward the most pressing issue of the moment.

I suspect that many respondents answer the question they guess is really being asked, but that different respondents guess differently, and that, in this specific instance, a human reluctance to call any casualty "acceptable" skews results toward the negative. If the question is asked alongside other questions - regarding overall support for the war, longer-term expectations, etc. - then the respondent is also given a chance to "split the ballot," using one answer to provide his or her main response, and the other, less encompassing question to express whatever reservations. The overall statement is not unreasonable at all: "Every casualty is one casualty too many, but we must stay the course."

The Fox questions seem to offer a similar split ballot opportunity, and it may therefore not be surprising that they appear to give contradictory results. Prof. Dauber wonders how it's possible for majorities to believe both that "supporting the troops" means "bringing them home," but that their mission is "part of the war on terror":

[T]he results are -- well, essentially incoherent. A majority of Americans (but just barely) agree with the Bush administration's argument that conceptually the war in Iraq is a part of the overall War on Terror. A majority believe that "support the troops" means -- bring them home. This is staggering. It means the leftist rhetoric that essentially portrays the soldier, the armed US combat soldier, the strongest, most competent, best trained, best equipped, most professional soldier in the history of the world, as an infantilized victim, needing us to protect them, by fighting for them in the political arena where they are presumably helpless, so we can bring them "home" -- in other words, protect them by returning them from danger to saftey is persuasive to a majority of the Americans those soldiers protect. It is a rhetoric that portrays us as the only ones who can protect them since they cannot maneuver in the political realm. Yet a sizeable majority also believes that the right thing to do is to see things through in Iraq, which is obviously only possible if the soldiers stay in danger.

Though Prof. Dauber might be right about how leftist rhetoric depicts soldiers as victims, I believe she may be overinterpreting the apparent contradictions in the poll results. If you add the three responses together, they make for an entirely reasonable statement: "I'd sure like to see those boys and girls home and safe as soon as possible, but first they've got an important job to finish." Saying they've got an important job to finish doesn't mean that won't ever come home - or won't come home soon enough, all things considered.

Read this way, what's surprising is that as large a number of people answer in favor of acceptability of casualties in the usual question and against bringing the soldiers home as soon as possible in the other question. As a strong supporter of the war, I could still honestly join the majorities for "unacceptability" and "bring 'em home," though I would not do so - not because I consider casualties easy to accept or because I wish to see our soldiers in Iraq a second longer than necessary, but because I'm aware that the first set of answers would be interpreted as "anti-war."

For Some Reason Or Another

For some reason or another, a series of enormously important issues — the future of the Middle East, the credibility of the United States as both a strong and a moral power, the war against the Islamic fundamentalists, the future of the U.N. and NATO, our own politics here at home — now hinge on America's efforts at creating a democracy out of chaos in Iraq. That is why so many politicians — in the U.N., the EU, Germany, France, the corrupt Middle East governments, and a host of others — are so strident in their criticism, so terrified that in a postmodern world the United States can still recognize evil, express moral outrage, and then sacrifice money and lives to eliminate something like Saddam Hussein and leave things far better after the fire and smoke clear. People, much less states, are not supposed to do that anymore in a world where good is a relative construct, force is a thing of the past, and the easy life is too precious to be even momentarily interrupted. We may expect that, a year from now, the last desperate card in the hands of the anti-Americanists will be not that Iraq is democratic, but that it is democratic solely through the agency of the United States — a fate worse than remaining indigenously murderous and totalitarian.

The above paragraph from Victor Davis Hanson's latest essay on Iraq was "thought for the day" at AndrewSullivan.com, and it might well have been the thought for virtually any day over the last several months. With relatively minor alterations it could stand as a leading candidate for thought for the year, and quite possibly as thought for the decade, thought for the generation, even thought for the century.

Except for the opening phrase: "For some reason or another" may have been intended ironically, or it may just reflect a bit of sloppiness. It certainly cannot be taken at face value, for Hanson has shown himself as aware as anyone, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and his bosses, that the installation of Iraq at the center of U.S. policy was not random or happenstantial, but if anything overdetermined. The intersection of the multiplicitious "enormously important issues" that Hanson lists, but does not exhaust, is the inevitable reflection of the multiplicitous causes of war. Indeed, his summary rather conspicuously ignores or at least suppresses the issue of energy resources, which many would reflexively put at the top, and not only because of direct U.S. interest in oil and oil price stability. The geostrategic outlines have been drawn publically, and can be pieced together from Bush Administration statements, but for various good reasons the Administration has been reluctant to dwell on them or to emphasize them too forcefully. It has refrained from frightening observers any more than they were already frightened by the events of 9/11, and it has seen no advantage in placing the wrong kind of public pressure on regimes whose participation in the unfolding war can still be shaped more favorably.

Geology, geography, and geopolitics ensure that the fate of Iraq remains critical to U.S. and the world's interests, just as they also made a Baathist Iraq into a very well-financed threat to those interests. On this score, as typically for an overdetermined strategic interest, each discreet danger acts as a multiplier in relation to each and every other danger. Oil money armed Saddam. A well-armed, well-financed Saddam could directly threaten oil resources in Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and the Arab Emirates, and destabilize and otherwise pressure local U.S. allies Turkey, Jordan, and Israel. A well-financed and well-armed regionally dangerous Saddam could escalate his aggression toward Israel even beyond his former support of suicide bombers. Iraq's situation also gave Saddam tremendous leverage against the rest of the world. At the time of his regime's removal, he had already exposed the weaknesses of two premiere global security organizations, the U.N. and NATO. Any further success on the world stage would have in turn magnified his own regional influence again. This bad synergy of mutually reinforcing threats is exponential, not linear - less like a row of dominos leading to a single endpoint, than like interconnected nodal failures on the way to a network crash.

The elements of this scenario were all visible in the first Gulf War, and, like actors playing different characters of the same general type, they re-appeared again in the sequel, and have undergone yet another costume change for the aftermath now showing in the same theater. At the time of Gulf War 1, the main threat appeared to be Saddam's own aspirations for regional domination, as joined to a direct challenge to an international system based on inviolable state sovereignty. The important fact about Baathist ambitions was not so much that they were grand, but that they were not entirely unrealistic. Following Gulf War 1, those ambitions were put on indefinite suspension, but issues of regional and international influence remained very much in play. Containment was deemed require the stationing of U.S. troops within the borders of Saudia Arabia, and the extended political and economic deprivation of the Iraqi people under U.N. sanctions - both measures serving to inflame regional and international attitudes, especially wherever Al Qaeda sought recruits.

For these reasons, or the broader strategic situation comprised in them, it is foolish to criticize those Americans who in large majorities have regularly replied to pollsters that they believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. There is even less reason to attribute the existence of these beliefs, as many on the left habitually do, to some nefarious Bush Administration campaign of guilt by false association. The Bush Administration could not have been more explicit about its arguments that 9/11 changed its approach to Iraq. At the same time, it is impossible to conceive of Al Qaeda as it was ca. 9/11/01 without including the prior history of US relations to Iraq. That these two avowed and proven enemies of the U.S. were, for their own part, completely aware of their external, objective connections has been confirmed by independent researchers and reporters such as Stephen Hayes as well as by various government intelligence services. Even the New York Times article of several months ago that, through leaks from CIA interrogations of captive Al Qaeda leaders, attempted to debunk the notion of a Saddam-Al Qaeda "alliance," implicity confirmed contacts and negotiations. In other words, Dick Cheney did not, as so many on the left have charged, "lie" or "mislead" or "goof" when he said he could not deny a Saddam-Al Qaeda link: No honest, informed observer could say anything else. That he and the American people generally have maintained their suspicions, even against a massive counterpropaganda campaign in all the major media, is proof of their intuitive strategic insight and stubborn good sense, and of the lack of same in their self-superior critics.

Even without reference to specific historical actors, events, and interconnections, the course of recent history almost amounts to an exercise in physics: The U.S. yielding precisely the surpluses - in military power, wealth, technology, civil society, and so on - required to fill the Middle East's abhorrent vacuums. For a number of practical and historical reasons, Iraq was always the best and most likely first stage in the inevitable project to re-make the region, though events in Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Iran, or Jordan could also conceivably have forced our hand. If, assigning further values to the equation's main variables, we accept further that Al Qaeda and all that it represents were bound sooner or later to provoke a strong response, and that any expedition to Afghanistan alone would be unlikely to suffice in eliminating the threat, then a U.S. strategic initiative begins to look inevitable, and Iraq again looms large as a militarily and politically intolerable complication, second as necessary staging area, and third as independent threat in its own right.

All of those "enormously important issues" mentioned by Hanson, and several other issues as well, were built into the Iraqi challenge and into this moment in history long before George W. Bush assumed office, and any discussion of the war's justifications and outcomes not undertaken in this context simply cannot be taken seriously. If some failure of will, imagination, or insight in the wake of a major terrorist event had forestalled a recognition of strategic imperatives, then the war might conceivably have been deferred, perhaps for years, probably to be fought at much greater cost and under less favorable circumstances, but some version of Operation Iraqi Freedom would inevitably have been tried, if not by our current president, then by one of his successors.

To reprise the earlier networking metaphor, Gulf War 1 was an improvised fix intended to preserve systems integrity; troop deployments, no-fly zones, and U.N. resolutions, inspections, and sanctions were temporary patches; Gulf War 2 has unfolded as an attempt to re-engineer and re-boot after replacing failure-prone hardware. With or without a Gulf War 3, the next step may require a total overhaul of the entire network - or even its full replacement. In addition to being immensely costly in itself, such a project would probably involve the suspension of services (peace and economic development) to most if not all clients. It would aim for resumption of business under conditions somewhat resembling previous ones, but there could be no guarantee of success.

The Proxy War

The reaction and the reaction to the reaction to Malaysian PM Mahathir's recent speech to a world assembly of Islamic political leaders has reminded us all, as apparently some of us need reminding, that antisemitism lies again, or perhaps we should say still, near the core of the world's greatest and most dangerous conflicts. Recent commentary has included economist-pundit Paul Krugman's mind-numbingly superficial and excruciatingly unenlightening New York Times column attempting to hold George W. Bush's foreign policy responsible for a conflict that goes back 1,300 years. This column and its author have already been dealt with, one might wish to say dispatched, by Oliver Kamm, but the exchange of comments that followed the post on Kamm's blog turned inexorably to the clash of civilizations that Mahathir appears to envision, with Islam on one side and the rest of the world, described as under Jewish control "by proxy," on the other.

What has widely been taken as the key section of Mahathir's speech, which was unanimously applauded by those in attendance and which received nearly unanimous approval by Muslim observers worldwide, ran as follows:

1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack....

We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them....

We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.

Of late because of their power and their apparent success they have become arrogant. And arrogant people, like angry people will make mistakes, will forget to think.

They are already beginning to make mistakes. And they will make more mistakes. There may be windows of opportunity for us now and in the future. We must seize these opportunities.

Though opinion in the West universally condemned Mahathir's invocation of classic antisemitic paranoia, and though Western leaders denied once again that they are at war with Islam, the world's 1.3 billion (or so) Muslims have not, on the whole, appeared to concede either point. It seems that, regardless of what the West thinks or intends, the Islamic world, or a very influential and sizeable section of it, thinks it is at war, and, wherever and however else it may be wrong, the Islamic world has much history and even some common sense on its side. It also possesses the ability to prove itself correct simply by fighting. The only question remaining would then be how many in the West will agree with one of the commenters on Kamm's blog: "I think it's time we realise that values and ideas are something that should be fought for. Violently if it comes to that."

A series of questions flow naturally from this observation: Which values and ideas? How hard? Who will do the fighting - and where?

During the Cold War, the presumption underlying mutually assured destruction and deterrence strategy in Europe and elsewhere was that we in the West would rather risk the virtual obliteration of whole continents, including our own, than yield our freedom. Today, however, as an American, I am forced to wonder how widely shared the sentiment of "live free or die" still is. I believe that it is still generally the reflex here - it's our peculiarly abstract form of nationalism - but I don't have a sense for what motivates the populace "over there": I imagine confusion, denial, and wishful thinking occupying the place in the European heart where the fierce love of tribe and country used to be. It might be interesting to see polling on the subject. In any event, it seems that European leadership and bureaucratic inertia (same thing?) are motivated by a desperation to defer the question, not an unreasonable objective, but it's as true in peacetime as in warfare that the enemy gets a vote.

The Islamic radicals seem, by contrast, to be quite forcefully in favor of "live Islamist or die," though the commitments of the larger Islamic population seem somewhat less sure, thus the resort, turning to the main topic of this discussion, to racism and conspiracy theories. In any event, when "live Islamist or die" meets "live free or die," then it seems inevitable that some amount of dying will be done, and, if history is any guide, it will be done by Islamists in far greater numbers than by the free.

As for Islam and the Jews, there are kernels of truth in Mahathir's hopeless and paranoid ramblings. It is no accident that the Jews have flourished wherever freedom and its benefits are strongest, just as persecution of the Jews so often accompanies a nation's political, moral, and economic decline. In this sense, the Jews do rule the world "by proxy," but it's in a way that Mahathir may be incapable of comprehending - in precisely the same way that he appears incapable of comprehending the dependence of scientific and technological advances on the free flow of people and ideas. The Jew's proxy is freedom - which rules by refraining to rule, and rules most decisively wherever the world is least ruled by ignorance.

Here, the evangelical Christians who believe that God blesses those who protect the Jews are much more right than those secularists whose commitment to unbelief seems to make them blind to all such distinctions. Just as the Christians, after a long and bloody historical adolescence marked by familiar overdone gestures of independence, may have finally, to the great benefit of all concerned, come round to recognizing that Christianity is Judaic, the only hope for Islamists and secularists alike may be to recognize and accept their own religious and historical parentage. (Even the Hindus have lately been casting their lot with the Jews - possibly because the Hindus are finally turning Jewish, or possibly because the Jews have always secretly been Hindu, even if they don't look Hinduish - I'll have to think about this one.)

So long as Islam sets itself against the Jews, it sets itself against the same processes of modernization that Mahathir deludedly embraces, and it is doomed always to be fighting at a disadvantage in the war that it insists on having - whether that war is fought mainly by terrorist radicals and their pursuers, by conventional means, or through colder forms of economic and ideological struggle. By corollary, the apparent ongoing relapse into antisemitism in Europe is one of the clearest signs that European culture has been going dangerously off course: It seems destined to achieve the one thing that historical experience makes it most determined to avoid - becoming a principal battlefield in another catastrophic conflict.

I may have to bow to conventional wisdom and revise the position expressed in my post on Islamic fascism. In combining all of the elements that threaten Pax Americana and global progress generally, Islamic fascism may indeed be emerging as the "main danger," or at least the focus of dangers, for this generation and for the always-unforeseeable future - even if the direct costs of the clash between the West and Islam may eventually be exceeded by its collateral effects.

I still like America's chances in that battle, but only for as long as we remain a proxy in good standing.

Asking the Wrong Question

In a post entitled "Teaching the wrong lesson," Deacon at Power Line reviews another "let's make it simple" piece on the Iraq war, this one by Jonah Goldberg at the National Review OnLine. Though both Goldberg and Deacon recognize that, as Goldberg puts it, "there were lots of good reasons to topple Saddam," each associates himself most strongly with a single simple idea - that the U.S. needed to make an "example" of some country in addition to Afghanistan.

Goldberg enunciates a series of variations on the idea of the new sheriff/new convict/new kid smacking down the worst bad guy/biggest meanest cat/worst bully in order to send a message. For further authority he cites a typically loose formulation from Tom Friedman of the New York Times:

The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world...Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world.

Notice how Friedman's one "real reason" quickly turns into three reasons - "could," "deserved," "right in the heart of that world." Suddenly, the one simple idea turns into the outlines of a complex strategy. It's this kind of messy self-contradiction that has led some observers to accuse Friedman of disingenuousness.

Deacon puts his own position somewhat differently, and more cleanly:

One of the main reasons I advocated going to war was to send a message to other Middle Eastern regimes. The message was something like this: "if you even dabble in terrorism or weapons of mass destruction, we will come after you, and we will do so regardless of what the EU and the U.N. have to say."

To Deacon's credit, he is able to take this line of reasoning another step, and at least face the possibility that he was wrong:

But how does this rationale look now? While perhaps sound in theory, it doesn't seem to have worked out in practice. The unexpected failure to find WMD, coupled with exaggerated but real post-war difficulties, have caused enough erosion of public domestic support for our efforts to "unteach" the lessons of our victory. That is, Middle Eastern regimes now have little reason to believe that we will be coming after them any time soon, at least in the absence of the approval and participation of the EU and the U.N.

As for the "lessons of our victory," these were undoubtedly an aspect of the U.S. interest, though in foreign policy discussion they are usually offered in the language of "credibility" rather than, say, Goldberg's image of "smacking the stuffing" out of a bully. On this score, I'm not so sure the message hasn't been delivered, even if there's little credible threat of follow-on invasions: There never was any likelihood that an Iraqi expedition would be succeeded by a march west, south, or east. The message was one of U.S. committment. A collapse of will could return the message to sender, but that's another issue.

If things are "simple" in Iraq, then they are simple in a different, more general way. There is one truly simple explanation available, but it doesn't tell us much in itself: The U.S. invaded Iraq because U.S. leaders perceived that doing so would be in the U.S. interest. That's the problem with the "let's make it simple" exercise: If your simplism is narrow enough to be meaningful, then you put yourself in danger of simple contradiction. If your simplism is general enough to avoid this danger, then it probably won't be very meaningful.

More important, the key question is almost never Deacon's "how does this rationale look now?" "Now" is trivial. Focusing on "now" leaves you open to one trap after another - overwrought concerns over the post-war state of the military, the belief that a failure to locate battlefield deployable WMDs would exhaust the WMD issue, failure to consider the potential costs of whatever real alternatives to the actions taken, and so on. Even settling the narrowest questions will take a bit more time than has passed at this point - a few more months, or years, or decades.