This new alliance, even if informal, has greatly concerned U.S. officials in Washington and intelligence operatives abroad who believe the assets and organization of Hezbollah's formidable militant wing will enable a hobbled al Qaeda network to increase its ability to launch attacks against American targets.

Also noteworthy is the prominence of Internet communication in the web of malice. And buried at the bottom of the report, about thirty graphs down, is this, yet another element in the arraignment against bureaucratic paralysis at American intelligence services:

European and U.S. intelligence operatives on the ground in Africa and Asia said they have been trying to convince headquarters of the new alliances but have been rebuffed.

"We have been screaming at them for more than a year now, and more since September 11th, that these guys all work together," an overseas operative said. "What we keep hearing back is that it can't be because al Qaeda doesn't work that way. That is [expletive]. Here, on the ground, these guys all work together as long as they are Muslims. There is no other division that matters."

The ideology of modern liberalism must be understood as itself one of the expressions of the Western contraction and decline; a kind of epiphenomenon or haze accompanying the march of history; a swan song, a spiritual solace of the same order as the murmuring of a mother to a child who is gravely ill.

Evidence of Burnham’s prescience comes to us from former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and his organization Empower.org, who have released the results of “the single most extensive survey of college students' attitudes about terrorism, the Middle East and the Bush administration this year.” The figures are disheartening, and they serve to peel away yet another layer from the façade which conceals the decay at the heart of American education. Fully 37 percent of college students are calmly disposed to announce publicly that they would contrive, if the situation arose, to evade the military draft if asked by their country to serve. A mere 25 percent agree with the statement: “the values of the United States are superior to the values of other nations,” while 34 percent strongly disagree. Even less (16 percent) view Western civilization as superior to Arab civilization, while 43 percent strongly disagree with such an assertion.

This is a crisis of spirit. American students are taught little of the unique goodness of their civilization, of the grand adventure of Western man’s rise from filth, darkness, tyranny and poverty to health, illumination, liberty and prosperity. We have been made ignorant of the great conversation across the centuries between ancients and moderns –- if indeed we even knew that such a conversation existed. We have absorbed the notion that man is just another animal; and therefore his works, superfluous.

The scoffer or the skeptic will look upon these survey results, and the many others like them, and reply that the academy is not supposed to teach the superiority of one thing over another; is not supposed to endorse moral gradation, or to inculcate “values”. The academy must transmit fact alone, abjuring judgment, and allow the individual student to formulate his own values and criteria for judgment –- or nonjudgment. The academy, he will say, embodies a culture of “moral freedom,” as the sociologist Alan Wolfe calls it. It is the model of an open society. All questions are open questions –- except, of course, for the question of whether all questions are open questions.

But the academy can claim no better in the area of fact. Only 19 percent of the students surveyed know who the National Security Advisor is; only 32 percent the Secretary of Defense; and less than half the Secretary of State. One student named Tony Blair as the man who runs the United States Defense Department.

And so we have eviscerated the vast but delicate edifice of virtue and honor that once comprised our intellectual patrimony; and we have assailed the very notion that such things are precious. In their place we have elevated trivia. I am reminded of the great C.S. Lewis, and his lament in his classic essay The Abolition of Man:

And all the time –- such is the tragi-comedy of our situation –- we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible . . . In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

can continue to generate wealth, as it always has done, or it can be hobbled and interfered with and prevented from generating wealth and doing other things natural to it. But it cannot be replaced by a machine which has been designed so that everybody will be happy.

It is the socialist’s dream to transform an organic thing into a mechanical thing; but of course, as the countless socialist experiments in human misery attest, one cannot make an organic thing mechanical without killing it. And, Mr. Bowman points out, when the economy is unhealthy, as perhaps it is now, the socialists rise up from the fever swamps of ideology with their siren song of the machine which makes everybody happy.

Update: For a nice example of James Bowman's professional talent, check out this brilliant review of Black Hawk Down.

The ruling may mark the beginning of the end for public schools as we have known them for generations. This prediction depends on a great many things -- most notably the willingness of the public schools to undertake the reforms necessary to be competitive -- but if the ultimate demise comes, the public school bureaucracy, centered primarily around the teachers’ unions, will have only itself to blame. The public schools constitute a monopoly; and like any monopoly they concentrate a disproportionate bulk of their resources and effort on protecting the monopoly from external competition, which, taking into account the inherent inefficiencies surely to develop absent said external competition, will probably overcome the monopolists when the monopoly is broken. To protect the monopoly is a rational enterprise from the perspective of the monopolists; to defeat it is rational for patrons, who are, in this case, the children and their parents. The rhetoric of church-state constitutionality, which comprised the formal substance of this debate was, excepting the ideologues who likewise endorsed the unconstitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance, largely a sheen with which to disguise the real essence of it: a struggle to preserve a monopoly. Reason magazine’s Mike Lynch refines this point well:

In a country that relies on publicly funded vouchers to help pay for higher education and pre-school, the only question people will have decades from now is why First Amendment concerns were ever an issue. Few worry that the state is supporting religion when a college kid spends a Pell Grant at Georgetown or Notre Dame. And government granted child-care vouchers are spent at religiously run daycare centers and preschools with nary a second thought.

The presence of an enormous state-protected monopoly in such a crucial social institution as education produced some remarkable distortions which will ramify throughout American society for years to come regardless of what happens next. The influence, for example, of school quality on the real estate market is self-evident to anyone with even cursory experience in such things. Public schools are also a source of explosive tension between inner-city and suburbs, which is in turn a significant element to consider in questions regarding race and poverty, higher education and standardized testing. The dynamics of the public school monopoly formed a kind of subterranean undercurrent for local, state and national politics, often in unforeseen, unremarked ways.

This Court ruling will likely over the long term generate unpredictable shifts and adjustments in these dynamics. Even in the short term it is hard to predict what will happen, other than that many, many poor children will have a better chance to become educated men and women.

I want to buy them away from the god of death you worship. Perhaps I can help them convert to traditional Islam, a religion that abhors murder and suicide. Maybe they'll wish to become Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or atheist. That will be their choice, if I can raise them as Americans.

That gesture pretty well captures the profound, unimaginable sickness at the heart of Palestinian society. President Bush’s well-intentioned effort to reform it seems a pale thing indeed next to this shadow of the unspeakable, this awful debasement of the human spirit.

This same bunch of brilliant legal minds yesterday contrived to interpret that selfsame Amendment as prohibiting the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. This ruling hardly requires commentary; but it is a melancholy fact to face that it does not much deviate from the trend of First Amendment jurisprudence over these last decades.

For those not familiar with him, Evelyn Waugh is also the single funniest “serious” writer I have ever encountered; never have I laughed out loud at a book like I have his.

I fully understand and endorse the reasoning behind treating “unlawful combatants” in war as something else entirely than regular domestic criminals or prisoners of war -- something far more dangerous and less entitled to constitutional rights. But several serious problems present themselves immediately, and cry out for assiduous consideration: (For a somewhat different take on the inconsistencies and prudential mistakes I am about to address here, see Robert A. Levy’s recent essay.) (1) There has been no formal declaration of war by Congress, which declaration would have automatically initiated the machinery, available in both the Constitution itself and in legal precedents, to accommodate our judicial institutions, at least in part, to the reality of war. The failure of the administration to ask Congress for such a declaration, which it surely would have received in overwhelming if not unanimous votes, was in my view one of its first mistakes. The declaration need not have included anything specific about the enemy; it need only have observed the obvious: that a state of war exists between America and those who attacked her. That simple if unorthodox legislative statement would have struck a mighty blow for political, moral and legal clarity -- a clarity which certainly existed already in substance, but was never authenticated in republican form.

(2) The way in which the administration chose to propound and apply its military tribunal policy went a long way to undermining the legal rationale for the tribunals themselves. First in making a categorical distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and then in recklessly abandoning that very distinction in the first high-profile cases (Moussaoui and John Walker Lind, the American Taliban), the administration tacitly cultivated the pernicious idea that the tribunals exist primarily, even solely, so as to increase the likelihood of a guilty verdict. In point of principle, the use of tribunals should have precisely nothing to do with prosecutorial success rates; it should have everything to do with security of sensitive evidence, protection of witnesses, etc. The gravest and most insidious charge among the many leveled against military tribunals has undoubtedly been the assumption underlying much of the discussion that they will be inherently more likely to return guilty verdicts; that is, that they will be in some systematic way less conducive to a fair, rigorous defense. This assumption constitutes a complacent slander of the honor of the men and women of the United States military, who will make up these proposed tribunals; and anyone who holds this view has an obligation to explain why it is he thinks that military personnel will be intrinsically less scrupulous and fair in carrying out legal proceedings than civilian judges and juries. Sadly, in its unwillingness to apply the military tribunal to all terrorism, that is, all war-related cases, the administration has implicitly endorsed a calumny against the military, and thereby eroded, perhaps irretrievably, the moral authority of its proposed military tribunals.

(3) Even had it acted more prudently and with greater principled uniformity in propounding a military tribunal policy, I still think the administration’s policy would have proven inadequate. Because, lawful and serviceable though they are, I do not think the military tribunals, so constituted as they are today in legal precedent, represent a sufficiently robust, sophisticated and plenary body of legal doctrine and procedure to encompass what they must in this great conflict into which we were hurled on September 11. The tribunals are a thin, skeletal outline, incapable on their own of bearing the burden of a daunting task of indefinite scope and duration. This is where Congress, acting independently of the executive, must assert itself boldly and unambiguously, as the rightful and supreme legislative authority in America. Thomas Sowell made this point in a characteristically sharp column some weeks ago. If ever a dilemma cried out for legislative action, it is this! What we need is the machinery and institutions, fundamentally unprecedented, for dealing with a criminal conspiracy which transcends national borders, threatens mortally the survival of civilization, and presents irreconcilable problems for the traditional legal system. What we need is a kind of ancillary legal system that secures for defendants the spirit of American jurisprudence but does not simultaneously lay bare in public the capabilities and vulnerabilities of America’s resistance to those who plot its immolation. Difficult and painstaking though it will surely be, Congress is ideal for this kind of work; and indeed it is the only institution possessed of the necessary authority for creating this new organon of jurisprudence.

Unfortunately, Congress has seemed as yet unequal to the task; has shied from even approaching this solemn responsibility while favoring a host of other deeply partisan and trivial activities; and has generally reflected the impoverishment of our political discourse at a time when richness, subtlety and vigor is required. It should also be noted that this impoverishment is succored immensely by the degraded ideological fatuity of the major human rights and civil liberties lobbies, whose reflexive, intemperate opposition to virtually every effort by the administration to address the unique problematics of international terrorism represents a particularly debilitating triumph of abstraction over practical sobriety. If the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, cannot recognize the plain fact that unabbreviated constitutional rights cannot and should not be extended to those whose expressed and unambiguous intention is to exploit them in order to overthrow the society and polity upon which they are constructed, then a great organization has well and truly succumbed to the syndrome of ideology; and its influence must dwindle for our civilization to endure.

Professor Borjas’ prose is cool and authoritative; his mastery of the subject evident in the ease with which he assembles the data, constructs an argument, and then expounds it with both equanimity and vigor.

Because the foreign-student program provides a rare opportunity for migrating to the U.S., there is a thriving industry of consulting firms [abroad] that grease the wheels of the process. The demand for student visas by Chinese nationals is so strong that, according to a U.S. consular official in Beijing, a fee of $10,000 buys phony letters of recommendation, false evidence of economic support, and even professional actors to stand in during the interview with consular officials.

One knows not whether to shed tears of laughter, rage or joy. Laughter, because such corruption, and the incompetence that cultivates it, is almost comical; rage, because it is infuriating; joy, because what motivates it –- the unrivaled and astounding success of this country –- is in a paradoxical way a high compliment to America. We cannot afford, however, to be flippant with these things anymore; the perils of generalized complacency with regard to who crosses our borders are too great. Professor Borjas sharpens the point:

Between 1981 and 1999, students from [those countries targeted for increased security vigilance, including Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen] received 111 doctorates in nuclear and organic chemistry, with 40 of them going to Iraqi students; 434 doctorates in chemical and nuclear engineering, with 106 going to Iraqis; and 112 doctorates in atomic and nuclear physics, with 31 going to Iraqis.

And he concludes:

The remarkably powerful combination of INS ineptitude and the greed of the higher-education sector has perverted what seemed to be a sensible and noble effort into an economically dubious proposition and a national security fiasco. The foreign-student program shows yet again how our immigration policy has failed to serve the national interest.

• The World Cup is at once the great glory of the sport and its greatest liability: I speak primarily to soccer’s position vis-à-vis Americans. The length between tournaments, while intensifying anticipation and promoting the stakes to a level unparalleled in other sports, nevertheless generates its own fundamental internal problematics, mainly in terms of durability and continuance of interest. Right now I am thoroughly excited about soccer, as I was back in 1994 and 1998; but in the interim years my interest diminishes to a vanishing point. Any sport would suffer from this sort of dynamic ambivalence –- imagine if March Madness were held only once a quadrennial –- but for a sport seeking to emerge from obscurity the problematics of the World Cup are particularly devitalizing to long-term interest, even as they are instrumental in cultivating short term intensity of interest.

• The theatrics players routinely engage in to draw fouls are childish and pathetic. All sports contain this element to some degree, of course; none, however, really approach soccer in ubiquity and sheer outrageousness. Most teams that complain bitterly about poor officiating have only themselves to blame for the unnecessary difficulties they impose on the referees.

• Having said that, it is worth reminding those not familiar with the game that the physical demands of soccer are grossly underestimated by many Americans.

• There is a level of grace and sportsmanship regularly evinced by soccer players (if not fans) unmatched by any American sport with the possible exception of hockey, which is not really an American sport.

• The effort exerted by the American team against Germany was an unusually good example of the ineradicable joy of the human spirit, which at its best great athletic competition is capable of prompting in otherwise ordinary men and women. It is that same joy which in part animates the citizen-soldier across the majesty of Western civilization, from the Peloponnesian War to the beaches of Normandy. Facing a big, strong, disciplined and hugely talented German team, the U.S. put on a dazzling display of the singular beauty of human excellence in the face of adversity, and the unique joy of supreme exertion offered freely.

• I risk transgressing political correctness in saying this, but the United States will be perennially successful, even dominant, in international soccer if and when American blacks get interested in it. All the innate qualities, both physical and intellectual, which tend to produce great black athletes in sports like basketball, football and track can be quite readily transferred to excellence in soccer.

A bit of exegesis is in order: The Court majority, in its boundless wisdom, has declared that despite a defendant being found competent to stand trial, despite his being found guilty of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of peers, despite his being sentenced to death by a sentencer familiar with the case and with the laws relevant to it; despite, furthermore, the consideration and approval of capital punishment by the political community, acting through its lawfully elected representatives; despite, furthermore, the previous case law of the Court itself; despite all these levers for applying through reflection and debate the deliberate sense of the community; despite, in a word, democracy, the Court majority still sees itself as of the greater wisdom. The arrogance is astounding, irrespective of what one might think of the morality of capital punishment.

It seems almost superfluous to say, but I will say it nonetheless, because the dominance of what Father Richard John Neuhaus calls “the judicial usurpation of politics” is so complete as to elide fundamental principles: The Supreme Court majority is not interpreting law, it is making law; and that is properly the responsibility of the American people alone, acting through their elected representatives. If activists and intellectuals believe that execution of the mentally retarded is a monstrous enough practice to merit federal prohibition, then they must take on the burden of persuading the people of the United States of the rightness of their case. If they discover that this burden is too great to overcome, then they can turn to the people of the states severally -- which course of action, incidentally, is precisely what many have taken, with not insubstantial success: 18 states have outlawed execution of the mentally retarded since 1989. What they cannot do, however, without provoking grave offense to the principles of American constitutionalism, is demand that the Supreme Court, an unelected body unaccountable to the people, take up the role of legislator. In so doing, they reveal their indifference to the Constitution and the rule of law. And in obliging them, the Supreme Court majority has diminished its moral authority, and once again undermined the principles upon which it is founded.

We are on the verge of having an entire society acting psychotically. And they're coming here next. That's why our emphasis on the weapons supply -- Iran and Iraq -- is exactly the right one. And that's also why we don't have all the time in the world . . . What I fear is that the sheer number of these atrocities is numbing us to their evil. These young [suicide bombers] and their disgusting mob bosses are evil personified. There is nothing noble, despairing or admirable about them. Somehow we have to resist the insidious way in which they are normalizing barbarism.

That last exhortation is an important one, compounded as it is by the morally dampening effect of 7-second soundbtyes and 40-second video clips, which isolate and dehumanize the savagry and the horror.

“Never, in the history of all creeds, has there been more intellectual dynamism, vitality, philosophical diversity, mutual criticism, and natural philosophical liberty than in the history of the Catholic Church.” Professor Kors’ deft command of history is impressive and inspiring:

We live in an age of willful blindness and willful forgetfulness. Philistines do not know that virtually every thrust that they make against Christian belief was anticipated and articulated in the sed contra objections of the doctors of the Church themselves. They do not know that the debates of which the moderns are so proud ultimately resolve into arguments that arose in past ages among Catholic philosophers and theologians -- realism versus nominalism, the limits of natural human knowledge, the tension between philosophical skepticism and rational dogmatism. To cite one example among so many, in seventeenth–century France one found scholasticism of various philosophical stripes, Thomist and Scotist revivals, an Augustinian revival, Cartesian, Aristotelian, and Malebranchist schools of Catholic natural philosophy, a flowering of mysticism as well as debates about the dangers of mysticism. There were deep disputes between Jansenists and Jesuits. Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits debated each other over the nature of non–Christian cultures and the scope and limits of natural law and natural reason. Montaigne, Charron, Mersenne, Gassendi, and the singular Aristotelian Barbay; Pascal, Arnauld, Fenelon; devotees of Suarez, Salamanca, Louvain, the Sorbonne, and Port Royal -- all living and flourishing within the bosom of the Catholic Church.

The American Catholic Church, of course, has been driven to its knees, mostly by grievous self-inflicted wounds; but it is perhaps a worthy enterprise, now more than ever, to remind us of the immense richness and honor of this oldest institution on earth. Professor Kors has done this, with probity and equipoise.

is for Palestine to be a real state with a real army with real weapons and real professional officers. They'll never be a threat to Israel (all the Arabs combined were routinely beaten like a drum by Israel even when the Soviet Union was arming them), but they will serve as hostages to Israel retaliation. Professional generals hate having their nice shiny war machines routinely blown up. So, the Palestinian generals would crack down on the Palestinian terrorists to stop them from provoking the Israelis.

Meanwhile, the apologists for the slaughter of Israeli civilians are all over the airwaves, hectoring and badgering and generally exploiting the liberties of America's open society to advance a cause which treats precisely those liberties with nothing but contempt.

Herewith a single anecdote, reported by the inimitable Mark Steyn, involving the case of Deena Gilbey:

Who’d Deena Gilbey? She’s one of the several hundred foreigners widowed by the events of 9/11. Her husband Paul was a trader with Euro Bank who worked on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center. Mr. Gilbey was British and had been admitted to the U.S. on a long-term work visa that allowed his family to live here but not work. The Gilbeys bought a house in Chatham Township, NJ, and had two children, born here and thus U.S. citizens. All perfectly legal and valid. A few days after September 11, Mrs. Gilbey received a form letter from the [Immigration and Naturalization Service] informing her that, upon her husband’s death, his visa had expired and with it her right to remain in the country. She was now, they informed her, an illegal alien . . . The INS failed to get Mohamed Atta, but they did get Deena Gilbey. Congratulations, guys.

But the disorder of immigration policy is broader and deeper, and more profound, than these momentary lapses of sanity. Consider:

(1) It is mass immigration, haphazardly unleashed by a piece of 1965 legislation, that has made a mess of the nation’s affirmative action policies -- which policies were at their most defensible when they acknowledged and addressed the unique historical abuses of American blacks, but are now at their least defensible, unfettered immigration having degraded them into ugly racialist squalor. (2) It is mass immigration that has effected a steady transfer of wealth and power from the working class to business, by driving wages down, tightening the market for skilled and unskilled labor, and thereby diminishing the influence of labor vis-à-vis capital. (3) It is also mass immigration, and the unwillingness of our public figures to confront it, that has gone a long way to undermine thoughtful discussion of environmental policy -- for if we cannot serious debate the primary cause of population growth, how can we seriously debate environmental policy?

All of this and more the ramifying disorder at the heart of immigration policy has in part produced; and yet it is still very difficult to even approach the subject in the public square without risking immediate vilification. Indeed, none of the three items I have adumbrated here falls under what is traditionally understood as the “conservative” agenda. Yet opponents of our immigration policies are almost uniformly described as “extreme” right-wingers. Witness the treatment of Pat Buchanan. Witness Pim Fortuyn, the eccentric Dutch politician who, upon gaining prominence and popularity with his frank opposition to Dutch immigration policies, was promptly assassinated. He was regularly referred to in the press, both here and in Europe, both before and after his murder, as a man of the “far right,” which is a strange label indeed for an openly promiscuous gay man who favored euthanasia and recreational drug-use. No matter: dissent on immigration, it seems, is alone enough to justify systematic demonization.

Perhaps that is enough of an introduction. The whole introduction enterprise, in the context of this medium of communication, seems rather superfluous: Who will go back and read my introduction in the archives six weeks from now?