When required action does not materialize, delusion often takes its place. It is delusional for this nation, which cannot summon the will even to inspect the baggage in its airplanes, to believe it is capable of remaking the Arab world by reforming its governments, politics, and culture after an imagined conquest by small expeditionary forces equipped with revolutionary weapons that do not yet exist in full.

Mr. Helprin’s melancholic vision, which attempts to pierce the discursive welter of day-to-day media chatter, arraigns the president, his administration and his strategists for the fundamental sin of irresolution in the face of the enemy. And perhaps the principal aspect of this irresolution is manifest in the unwillingness of Mr. Bush to effect a substantive increase in military capacity (this charge is largely a recapitulation of Mr. Helprin’s similarly arresting piece back in April).

We fought for a year to save Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein. Why will Saudi Arabia, if it is not an enemy, not allow us the same bases from which we protected it, to protect ourselves? What relationship with them, exactly, do we wish to preserve? They are used to buying whatever they need, and over many years they have bought us in many ways. Immediately after Sept. 11, they dropped oil prices. This was more than anti-invasion insurance, it was blood money, and there is only one decent way to return blood money. Ask the widows, widowers, grieving parents, and orphans of Sept. 11. Ask them how grateful they are for the five-month $6 reduction of the price of a barrel of $24 OPEC oil. Ask them if they want to preserve the status quo and stable relations with the country of Osama bin Laden and 15 of his hijackers. And when you have their answer, which you already know, ask the president. Ask him whether he has run a war or built a mountain of paper. Ask why he stopped short after Afghanistan. And ask why, a year after Sept. 11, he is a president more of word than deed.

Much as I admire Mark Helprin, I would like to believe that he is overstating his reproach here; but I find that I cannot bring myself to dismiss it as irretrievable exaggeration. These are serious criticisms, well documented and energetically delivered. They cannot be glibly dismissed.

It has been a long time since this journal felt so despondent about the Democratic Party. The United States is today engaged in perhaps the most important foreign policy debate in a generation. In response to a reverberating catastrophe and a terrifying threat, the administration of George W. Bush has proposed a radical new doctrine to govern America's role in the world, one that commits the United States to war in Iraq and perhaps beyond. Foreign leaders warn that by assuming the right to attack sovereign states on the basis of a potential threat, the Bush administration is rewriting the rules of the international system and lifting a taboo that has kept large chunks of the globe at peace. Retired American diplomats and generals worry that war with Iraq could radicalize much of the Muslim world. The highbrow press increasingly writes and talks of little else. And yet with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman, the leaders of the Democratic Party have nothing serious to say.

Those are tough, agonized words coming from committed liberal Democrats. One wonders if they will have any tonic effect.

The modern assumption that conservatives should automatically oppose conservation is a fairly recent development. It dates back to the rise of the conservative think tanks in the late Seventies.

Previously, Republican Presidents had played key roles in helping Americans enjoy our majestic landscape. Abraham Lincoln set aside Yosemite as a public trust. Ulysses S. Grant made Yellowstone the first national park. Teddy Roosevelt glamorized conservation. Dwight Eisenhower built the interstate highway system that made it feasible for average families to visit the national parks. Richard Nixon signed into law the Endangered Species Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The new intellectual economy that emerged in the later Seventies —- with corporate interests funding conservative think tanks that in turn subsidized the brightest Manhattan and Beltway intellectuals —- brought many advantages to the Republican Party. One unfortunate side effect, however, was that it brought to dominance pundits who not only were beholden to industry, but who lacked the average American's love of his nation's beauty.

Alright. But liberal environmentalism —- utopian, militant, disdainful of tradition or habit or compromise —- has produced and cultivated its own pathologies, which call out for thoughtful, substantive opposition.

Underlying liberal environmentalism is the assumption that the world would be paradise if every single person died tomorrow. Obviously, nobody actually believes that. What environmentalists feel deep down is that the world would be paradise if everybody died … except, of course, for them and their friends. In reality, environmentalism is essentially a form of status competition in which environmentalists demonstrate their moral superiority to the mass of humanity.

Unfortunately, the GOP’s current stance of pure negativism tempered by bouts of me-tooism can't effectively attack the status-seeking motivation behind modern environmentalism.

Mr. Sailer has ideas —- a whole panoply of fascinating ones, several of which I highlight here:

• End the Forest Service’s long crusade to slash the number of visitors to America's most spectacular natural setting, Yosemite Valley. Documentaries have shown forest rangers lamenting that all those tawdry tourists were interfering with their personal opportunities to commune with nature in solitude. This is liberal elitism at its most noxious.

  Instead, the GOP should offer to increase the camping capacity of Yosemite National Park —- by making habitable again the second most beautiful valley in California, Yosemite Valley’s once lovely little sister Hetch Hetchy Valley. The city of San Francisco drowned this valley in 1913 by building a dam across its outlet, breaking John Muir's heart.

  The idea, floated in 1988 by Reagan Administration Secretary of the Interior Dan Hodel, of pulling down the dam and restoring the valley for camping still makes sense. A study projected that visitors would increase from 40,000 annually to 1,000,000.

  Granted, this would force the San Francisco Bay Area to find other sources of drinking water. But the Bush Administration wouldn’t exactly be losing a lot of Republican votes in San Francisco anyway. The political calculus is simple: If you force the environmental elitists of San Francisco to pay for their crime against America’s landscape, you can give Hetch Hetchy back to the American people as a whole. Is this a losing proposition for Republicans? [...]

• Change the Forest Service’s puritanical prejudice that backpacking is the only truly moral way to get outdoors. Merely 2.4% of the population engage in it for at least five days a year. And those enthusiasts are overwhelmingly young white upper middle class males. In reality, Americans are becoming more like Europeans, who demand a certain degree of comfort. The number of backpackers in the Sierras, for example, is down sharply compared to 25 years ago. Rather than considering this a problem, the Forest Service is congratulating itself on clearing the riff-raff out of the mountains so the chosen few can contemplate nature in seclusion.

  In contrast, in the Alps you can wander for a week through the high country carrying just your clothes in your backpack. You make reservations to sleep each night at permanent “high camps,” sleeping on cots in cabins or waterproof tents permanently pitched on wooden platforms, eating meals cooked by the staff. The Swiss Alps are full of hotels, pensions, youth hostels, mountain huts, cog railroads, and aerial tramways. For most people over the age of 22, this beats humping 60-pound packs and sleeping on the ground.

  In the backcountry of Yosemite National Park, there is a similar network of five such camps. They are so popular that a lottery for precious reservations is held every fall. My aunt and uncle tried for many years to win the lottery, but eventually gave up. Despite this evidence that the public wants these modest but not Spartan accommodations, the federal government has refused to allow the system to expand to the rest of the Sierras. Apparently it considers the idea too decadently European. [...]

• The interstate highway system needs to be upgraded to German autobahn standards so that within a couple of decades Americans in the vast “red zone” on that famous 2000 electoral map can drive at German-style speeds across our land. I ought to be able to drive my grandchildren across that vast, flat expanse between Chicago and Denver in under ten hours.

  Likewise, as numerous country songs have pointed out, a small town is a much more tolerable place to live if every now and then you can watch it disappearing in your rear view mirror, preferably at speeds upward of 100 miles per hour. Life in South Dakota would be far more enjoyable if you were only a five-hour drive from both Chicago and the Grand Tetons.

  Today’s cars are getting close to being able to do that. My 200 horsepower sedan, which cost barely over $20,000, can certainly cruise at 100 mph. But the safety features aren’t designed for that velocity. I’d need better tires, more airbags, a somewhat wider track and so forth to make German-style speeds reasonable for a cautious family man like myself. Perhaps electronic auto-piloting will be able to play a role. For the right to drive over 100 mph, I’d be willing to pay more for safety features and put up with a special high-speed drivers’ training course and annual safety inspections. While the death rate in Germany in 1970 was substantially higher per mile driven than in the U.S., the Germans have managed to close 97% of the gap, even as their speeds have increased.

  Today’s American roads are in shameful shape. I recall driving 95 mph in a rattletrap Fiat on a Brussels freeway, a feat made possible only by Belgium’s wonderfully smooth roads. American roads fall apart quickly because American politicians like handing out more road rebuilding contracts to their close personal friends, those generous folks in the road-building industry.

  Interstate highways would have to be redesigned, with three lanes to accommodate cars going 70, 90, and 110+. They’d also need more sweeping curves and broader shoulders. Obviously, American autobahns are more practical in eastern Wyoming than in Vermont, much less in downtown LA. Politically, that ought to be fine with the GOP. One of the purposes of the project would be to prevent the depopulation of the Republican Great Plains and Midwest.

Say what you will about those ideas, they would undoubtedly infuse the environmental debate in this country with new life and seriousness; as well as finally afford the Republican Party some affirmative and concrete material to work with.

There is a new biography of Burnham out, and it is prompting a renewed and well-deserved interest in the man. Roger Kimball of The New Criterion, in a recent review, laments that no one under the age of sixty has even heard of him. Well I am under sixty, and I have heard of him; indeed, I think his Suicide of the West constitutes perhaps the single most perceptive, comprehensive, and assiduous critique of liberalism ever expounded. The thing is clinical in its precision, bereft of bitterness or even partisanship; Burnham is like the physician delivering bad news:

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.

Liberalism is “the ideology of Western suicide”; it developed as a sort of narcotic to dull the pain of our decline and fall as a civilization. As such, it cannot really be reasoned with, any more than one can talk a man out of a fever. It perdures, enervating the will, cowering before those more convicted in their purpose, erecting great towering edifices of distraction and equivocation. If Burnham’s detached doom and gloom seems on occasion overwrought, his penetrating examination of ideology is amply demonstrated in the relentlessness of the anti-American Left, under the auspices of which, I think it is fair to say, any grievance against the West, no matter how tenuous its logic and no matter how violent and regressive its proposed remedy, is perceived as in some way legitimate if it issues from the repressed and downtrodden.

Despite some obvious defects in his vision, there is great profit to be mined from the elegant and probing body of Burnham’s work. He deserves better than to be disdained and forgotten, though that is often the lot of a prophet.

It is not for non-Muslims to say what Muslims should think. A social mass as large and old as Islam has its own resources, its own internal compasses and its own needs. Muslims will do what they must, and what they can. But non-Muslims will observe what Muslims think. It’s a free country.

This is a discerning and balanced statement. It calls the multiculturalist’s bluff: If we must be tolerant of Islam’s apparent lack of moderates who are free to speak their mind, then we must also be tolerant of free people who elect to speak their mind on Islam. But very few of those stricken by the fever of ideology are willing to extend tolerance to the latter; and therein lies the irrevocable intellectual bankruptcy of multiculturalism.

It is heartening, then, to read an article like this one, which appeared recently in Time: “An Apology From an Arab.” Ali Salem, an Egyptian playwright, concludes his agonized essay with this exactly analysis:

Beneath their claims is a sadder truth: these extremists are pathologically jealous. They feel like dwarfs, which is why they search for towers and all those who tower mightily. We must admit that we failed to teach these people that life is worth living. These extremists exist now, and will exist forever, so the question before us must be, How can we defend both our lives and theirs? We in the Arab world love freedom and want the chance at a decent life. We are not different from you, as it sometimes seems. We may be just temporarily backward. Working together, our governments must decide how, with what culture and by what actions, they will combat the influence of those who hate life.

He is out there, this mystical unicorn known as the Arab Moderate; but his spirit across the Arab nations is almost uniformly crushed under the jackboot of tyranny —- which tyranny has often been abetted by our own Realpolitick calculations over the decades. One hesitates to repose into the facile and ponderous arraignment of realist foreign policy that usually follows the admission of such abetment. Irving Kristol, that great assayer of ideas, proffers a lucid grounding for my hesitance:

There are a great many people who appear to think that a great power is only the magnification of a small power, and that the principles governing the actions of the latter are simply transferable —- perhaps with some modification —- to the former. In fact, there is a qualitative difference between the two conditions, and the difference can be summed up as follows: A great power is “imperial” because what it does not do is just a significant, and just as consequential, as what it does. Which is to say, a great power does not have the range of freedom of action —- derived from freedom of inaction —- that a small power possesses. It is entangled in a web of responsibilities from which there is no hope of escape; and its policymakers are doomed to a strenuous and unquiet life, with no prospect of ultimate resolution, no hope for an unproblematic existence, no promise of final contentment.

Nevertheless, we cannot abjure all responsibility for the squalor of the Middle East; for our footprints are there, usually outlined in petroleum. And this constitutes perhaps the strongest moral case for robustness in the region: We have an opportunity here, which happens to conflate with our cold, Realpolitick interest, to initiate the break up of the blackened crust of tyranny and oppression in the Arab world; and to release the unicorn from the yoke of bondage and fanaticism.

Without a doubt the most frequently used descriptive word over the last 48 hours has been “tragedy.” It should not be. “Tragic” implies a critical degree of senselessness, randomness, and a lack of human control. If an earthquake had struck New York City, thereby bringing down the World Trade Center, we could reasonably call it a tragedy. But we cannot afford to be imprecise and flippant with words; America has spent far too many years refusing to call things by their right name. Our flippancy has made us profoundly vulnerable. If they can strike the Pentagon and destroy the World Trade Center using only knives, what target is not open to them? And what weapon?

What happened Tuesday was a deliberate, exquisitely-planned, skillfully-coordinated massacre of American civilians designed to demoralize our nation. Calling it a “tragedy” lessens the depravity of the act, and lends it an element of respect that it patently does not deserve.

As we mourn the dead and bow our heads in honor and admiration for those heroes who hour after hour risk their lives to assist the wounded, it is also proper to reflect on the awesome task the lies naked before us: Illustrated on September 11, 2001 in the most graphic way in a generation was the central human conflict between civilization and barbarism. There are those in the world who hate us with a fervor that is beyond comprehension —- hate us because we represent a noble civilization and because we do not feel shame in doing so. Once again America must rise from the blood and tears to fight for that civilization. And fight we will, and our enemies will tremble.

God bless America
My home sweet home

[If Saddam Hussein] fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop his program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction.

Hmmmm. Here's some more:

Iraq repeatedly made false declarations about the weapons that it had left in its possession after the Gulf War. When UNSCOM would then uncover evidence that gave the lie to those declarations, Iraq would simply amend the reports. For example, Iraq revised its nuclear declarations four times within just 14 months and it has submitted six different biological warfare declarations, each of which has been rejected by UNSCOM. In 1995, Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law, and chief organizer of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more. Then and only then did Iraq admit to developing numbers of weapons in significant quantities and weapon stocks. Previously, it had vehemently denied the very thing it just simply admitted once Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected to Jordan and told the truth . . .

Now listen to this: What did it admit? It admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability--notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And might I say, UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production

Next, throughout this entire process, Iraqi agents have undermined and undercut UNSCOM. They've harassed the inspectors, lied to them, disabled monitoring cameras, literally spirited evidence out of the back doors of suspect facilities as inspectors walked through the front door. And our people were there observing it and had the pictures to prove it . . .

We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.

Back then, some members of Congress advocated passage of a resolution which exhorted “the president to take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.” The co-sponsors of that bill included one Tom Daschle, as well as John Kerry, Patrick Leahy and Christopher Dodd: all Democrats, all among those who these days are busy “asking questions” of the administration, which is a euphemism for opposing potential military action against Iraq, without actually opposing it —- the temporizing is necessary because 1) opposing it forthrightly may provoke grave political consequences, this being an election year, and 2) the arguments in favor of action were already compelling, even resounding, before September 11, as Mr. Clinton lucidly expounds.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair has shown his mettle. And for that he will always have the gratitude and admiration of this American, natural opponent though I am of his politics. His case against Saddam is even more resounding than Mr. Clinton's; and his sincerity, his moral clarity, is a weapon beyond measure in the struggle for the hearts and minds of our reluctant and oft-scorned friends in Europe. How the British Left must despise him for championing that godawful America and its warmonging president! What a pillorying he must be receiving at their hands! John O'Sullivan says Mr. Blair has crossed his own Rubicon with this tremendous decision, and who am I to dispute him? Let us all raise a glass to our friends across the Atlantic; and let us thank God they are led by a man who loves America.

The fact is, we are at a moment as epochal as the Reformation itself —- a Reformation moment not only for Catholics but for the entire Christian world. Christianity as a whole is both growing and mutating in ways that observers in the West tend not to see. For obvious reasons, news reports today are filled with material about the influence of a resurgent and sometimes angry Islam. But in its variety and vitality, in its global reach, in its association with the world’s fastest-growing societies, in its shifting centers of gravity, in the way its values and practices vary from place to place —- in these and other ways it is Christianity that will leave the deepest mark on the twenty-first century.

Mr. Jenkins lays out a series of facts and calculations which, even for one like myself who was vaguely aware of these things, are frankly staggering:

• “In 1900 Africa had just 10 million Christians out of a continental population of 107 million —- about nine percent. Today the Christian total stands at 360 million out of 784 million, or 46 percent.”

• “Africa had about 16 million Catholics in the early 1950s; it has 120 million today and is expected to have 228 million by 2025. The World Christian Encyclopedia suggests that by 2025 almost three quarters of all Catholics will be found in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”

• “Of the 18 million Catholic baptisms recorded in 1998, eight million took place in Central and South America, three million in Africa, and just under three million in Asia . . . The annual baptism total for the Philippines is higher than the totals for Italy, France, Spain and Poland combined. The number of Filipino Catholics could grow to 90 million by 2025, and perhaps 130 million by 2050.”

Coupled with these sheer numbers is the large and thrilling fact of the organic scriptural orthodoxy of the Christians of the South Hemisphere, who are designated by one scholar the Third Church. They have shown very little patience with, even at times outright contempt for the modernist innovations of the liberal Christians of Europe and America. Perhaps the most famous manifestation of this dynamic was the 1998 Lambeth World Conference of the Anglican Communion, where the traditionalist bishops of Africa and Asia confounded their Western liberal coevals by forcing through with their numerical superiority a resolution declaring bluntly, as Mr. Jenkins puts it, “the impossibility of reconciling homosexual conduct with Christian ministry.” This development was the occasion for great agitation among the progressive churchmen of the West, as it quite plainly turned political correctness on its head. Secure in their faith, illuminated by adherence to an authentic biblical orthodoxy, utterly immune to the whims and fashions of Western intellectuals: the lineaments of the Third Church are emphatically conservative, traditional, orthodox, even reactionary by Western standards. The modernists and liberals of Europe and America, though they dream of pushing progressive innovation farther along the path to —- though they do not see it —- dissolution, have rent the very heart of their churches, and precipitated a vast capitulation to the decadence of modernity; and in so doing they have dispossessed themselves of the magnetic sublimity of their faith, and divested themselves of that ineradicable command that they be “fishers of men.” By contrast the Southern Christians, with their allergy rooted in history to Western egotism, newly received into the faith and charged with a fervor similar to that which impelled the early Evangelists: in them we perceive the essence of the true messenger, who will not presume to tamper with the Message.

I think it was Hillaire Belloc, an English Catholic convert, who said, “The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith.” It appears that he was quite wrong; that rather the Faith lives up to its name, which is catholic, or universal. I have recorded here before the disconsolate and oppressive irony that at the exact moment when Western man turns with longing, even desperation, to religion, the Christian churches have, by and large, secularized themselves. What I had not yet well examined is that the pulsating light of Christian belief has shifted south. And it seems logical, almost predictable, that as it was the tremendous power of Christ incorporating men which stimulated the West’s creative surge from the darkness of Rome’s fall to the extraordinary material prosperity and success of modernity, so it is that the decline of Western man is coincident with his loss of faith in the One who said, “I am the Light of the world.” Mr. Jenkins concludes,

As the media have striven to in recent years to present Islam in a more sympathetic light, they have tended to suggest that Islam, not Christianity, is the rising faith of Africa and Asia, the authentic or default religion of the world’s huddled masses. But Christianity is not only surviving in the global South, it is enjoying a radical revival, a return to scriptural roots. We are living in revolutionary times.

But we aren’t participating in them. By any reasonable assessment of numbers, the most significant transformation of Christianity in the world today is not the liberal Reformation that is so much desired in the North. It is the Counter-Reformation coming from the global South.

What were those pulverizing words? “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

Update: Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz pens what may prove to be the definitive case against Iraq, including a systematic register of Saddam's unceasing violations of international law, diplomatic agreements, personal arrangements, and UN Resolutions.

Classical sovereignty is predicated upon the monopoly of legitimate violence within a society. A state must possess this, or it is no longer truly a sovereign state. The state alone has the right to use the instruments of physical coercion and force —- and if the individual uses it, for example, in self-defense, then he or she does so with the understanding that the state may even review the actions to see if they are indeed instances of legitimate self-defense.

Nuclear weapons make hash of this, by providing smaller powers, even non-state actors, the ability to inflict damage to the balance of power beyond that which it can sustain. There is no monopoly of violence where such entities as al Qaeda can acquire the weapons capable of destroying a smaller state, and crippling most others.

Neo-sovereignty requires a radical departure from the normal concept of sovereignty —- it would, in a sense, constitute a higher species of sovereignty, in which one nation acted to preserve a monopoly of mass-destruction weapons on the behalf of those nations that already have these weapons. It would defend itself —- and the world —- by defending the collective monopoly of such power, simply because someone has to do it, and it can only be us.

The main principle that neo-sovereignty simultaneously modifies and preserves is the right of unlimited self-determination by a nation state or by a people or by a sect. But this is not because this concept is being rejected out of hand —- far from it. Rather it is because the advent of mass destruction technologies simply shattered the old concept of self-determination, in the same way that the consequence of pollution requires a radical readjustment of property rights, and a new and dialectically higher concept must be put in its place. And this is what neo-sovereignty achieves.

But there is a major obstacle to its achievement, and it is not likely to be surmounted absent rather cunning Machiavellian means. Put simply: the world will not consent to the dominance of a world power; look merely to the hostility engendered by American power as it is. And only a particularly delusional individual could even conceive of the United States of today marshalling the material force, let alone the political will, to forcibly realize this goal.

The only way for the world to pass through the crisis of world-wide nuclear proliferation —- a scenario that should give every human being pause —- is by the de facto establishment of the neo-sovereignty of the USA by means of carefully calculated interventions in one carefully delimited domain —- namely, the possession of weapons of mass destruction. There may, of course, be many other goods that we would like to see actualized throughout the world —- greater economic prosperity in third world countries, greater freedom of opportunity for all human beings, irrespective of race, gender, creed, sex, sexual orientation, or any other category, in all parts of the planet. These, too, are worthy goals —- but they are not capable of being pursued, let alone actualized, by the USA. But the goal of eliminating any further proliferations of weapons of mass destruction is something that can be brought about through selective and limited actions by the USA, provided the focus is completely centered on the limited principle of neo-sovereignty. And this is something all liberals must understand —- it is only through achieving the goal of stopping the nuclear proliferation that any of the other worthy goals can be achieved. This is first in the lexical ordering of future goals, as John Rawls might put it. Nuclear proliferation must end if mankind can go forward to achieve all the other goods on the liberal list of values.

The next great challenge to the organizational genius of mankind, the principle of neo-sovereignty, is every bit as necessary a step in man's ascent as the consolidation of the Roman Empire, or the advent of Christianity, or the turning back of the Arab Conquest, or the creation of the American Republic; and if it fails to happen, man will face a long dark descent back down several rungs on the ladder of civilization —- just how far down is anyone's guess.

I will say it once again: We have no choice except to ascend the ladder. The threat of nuclear proliferation will not allow us merely to stay still.

Readers may recall that I cited Mr. Harris not long ago for his enterprising work to develop a thesis to describe spectacle of militant, suicidal Islam: the “fantasy ideology.” This new essay also reflects a certain sublimity of mind; a kind of hard-nosed but broad-minded innovation of thought and analysis which recalls the great Cold War strategist James Burnham. Well worth the read: persuasive, arresting; rigorous in approach, unsentimental in argument; prescient, perhaps, in its ominous conclusions.

David Warren does fine work as a journalist, and is full of intriguing ideas and informed conjecture. He has reported, for example, that the military build-up everyone expects to presage the invasion is already largely complete; and that American special forces are already maneuvering in Iraq. Now he gives us this about the awful complications that weapons of mass destruction already present to U.S. action:

At the risk of frightening some readers, it should also be noted that the unpublicized U.S. build-up in the region has been carefully scattered. As I now understand, while the advantage of not putting “all the eggs in one basket” is self-explanatory, there is an especially urgent reason for this. At any moment, before or after the first formal U.S. strike, Saddam is likely to try to hit any U.S. base he can reach with biological or chemical weapons. He cannot be left in a position where a single “lucky strike” could knock out a substantial part of the U.S. force arrayed against him.

By saying this, I point directly to the problem the Bush administration has, in preparing the world for what is to come. They cannot be entirely candid about the enemy's potential strengths, without giving arguments to the “peace constituency”. And yet it is precisely because of the hideous and growing capabilities of Saddam and other regional psychopaths, that the U.S. has no choice but to act —- once again, sooner not later.

In effect, both sides in the debate are wrong —- the people who think Iraq will be a cakewalk, and therefore ask, “What are we waiting for?”; and the people who think, we mustn't attack because it might unleash forces larger than we can contain. The truth, as I understand it, is opposite both propositions: it won't necessarily be a cakewalk, but the U.S. must attack before its enemies are in a position to wreak even greater havoc. The longer he waits, the bigger the final conflagration, and Mr. Bush knows it.

Stanley Kurtz wrote a penetrating piece last week, making a crucial point along these same lines:

Saddam may not yet have a nuclear weapon, or the means to launch his chemical and biological weapons against United States territory. But he clearly does have the capacity to use his weapons of mass destruction against invading American troops. This possibility is well understood by our military, and considerable effort is being expended by our planners to protect against this possibility . . .

What has not been recognized, in other words, is the extent to which Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction has already changed the power equation in the Middle East —- to the point where the American military itself is reluctant to take on Iraq. In fact, even if America's allies in the region give us the basing to accommodate a Gulf War style build up of a vast invading force (and in truth, we can no longer count on such basing), a slow massing of forces may no longer be a secure way to proceed —- simply because our forces would be vulnerable to chemical and biological attack. And that is the real reason, I suspect, why the Pentagon hawks are so intent on moving in quickly, with as small a force as possible. A quick strike by a small force greatly reduces our vulnerability to WMD attack . . .

So the future has arrived. At this very moment, we are in a test to see whether the acquisition of even a modest stockpile of chemical and biological weapons will suffice to deter the United States from attack. If the answer is yes, then in the long run, we face even more global chaos than we do from a popular explosion in the Arab world following an attack on Iraq . . .

So in a sense, Saddam has already won a real victory. Because of his weapons of mass destruction, we have probably been forced to take a key military option —- a large and gradually built up invasion force —- entirely off the table . . .

If we can't take action in Iraq, and keep sufficient troops on hand to deal with the consequences, we shall shortly enter a deeply dangerous new era in which proliferating weapons of mass destruction essentially neutralize America's military dominance, freeing up rogue regimes to act with impunity throughout the globe. More than we know, this may already be happening.

This is a bleak and bitter truth to swallow, its significance resistant to overstatement; and the significance consists most emphatically in the horror of a world where justice is thwarted and paralyzed by the utter callousness of the ambition of tyrants. Such a world augurs a retreat into unspeakable barbarism.

The Soviets thus deliberately exposed soldiers and civilians to unchecked radiation —- in part because the apparatchiks running the show could not be bothered with precautions, but primarily because they were curious as to the effects of prolonged exposure on human beings. They were not concerned to treat the consequent maladies; they merely wanted to record them —- in secret. Kazakh doctors were not allowed to make a diagnosis of radiation sickness. They were instructed to attribute the fourfold increase in diseases to the poor Kazakh diet.

I've often thought it interesting that one of the more facile replies to the charge that Marxism applied produced hell on earth was that Marxism was never faithfully applied. In fact, it was applied with rather astonishing rigor with respect to the ten points elucidated in The Communist Manifesto, and, sure enough, it produced hell on earth.

It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.

Reflection and choice. This could be designated The American Question, for it is the quintessence of American political philosophy: the question of self-government. Enshrined it is also, in the thunderous first words of our own Constitution, to the defense of which Publius lent his energetic pen: We, the People. The remarkable but too infrequently remarked political philosopher Willmoore Kendall would have emended it, with all the pregnancy of the term, to read, “We, the virtuous people.” But that is a digression. The American Question can be stated thusly: Is a large and diverse republic of self-governing people an enduring proposition? I would contend that 225 years on, the answer is still not obvious.

Large numbers of American citizens, for a myriad of reasons including sheer demographics, various economic pressures, and the enervation of ideology have been effectively driven from any meaningful political power. Even greater numbers have simply opted out of the political power secured for them by blood and steel; the general alienation experienced by many from their political system is acute. Meanwhile practically no one any longer doubts the peril which darkens the horizon of an imperial judiciary, arrogating to it and drawing within its orbit the authority properly accorded to we, the people. The Left finally caught on to this peril rather recently (though one suspects that many within its provinces have apprehended it at least implicitly for quite a while) with a messy election commencing in confusion and concluding in bitter defeat; the Right first descried it (also owning in part to that underestimated thinker Mr. Kendall) in the Supreme Court decisions outlawing school prayer in the 1960s, and then seized on it with great lucidity, vigor, and abandon in a First Things symposium some years ago denouncing the “judicial usurpation of politics” on the question of abortion. While the Left still recoils in consternation from the logic and implications of that awful topic, no longer does it flay the symposiasts for their anxiety over the naked power of the courts. By now, in 2002, it would be a rather difficult endeavor to identify an influential political observer who does not at least acknowledge the potential of the courts to blunder, polarize, emasculate and finally even tyrannize. And even those friends of First Things on the Right who recorded their alarm and fierce disagreement with the character of the symposium also concede openly that on many occasions the Supreme Court has become a “lawless institution.” We have near unanimity on the conceivable danger of judicial usurpation, if still ferocious discord on how to approach the problem; one need only look to the rancor and volatility of the struggles over judicial appointments for confirmation of this. Those who speak in hushed voices of oligarchy and false democracy are not afflicted by so ineffaceable a delusion as we might think; though when they take to the streets to preen their insensate vulgarity, they seem to know not that they lend force and truculence to precisely the trend they decry: namely, the trend of ineluctable transference of political, social and economic clout from people to elite. First Things called it, with limpid assurance, even impetuosity, “The End of Democracy.”

The miscellaneous prigs and progressives of the Left seem genuinely unaware of the profoundly elitist nature of so many of their ideas; and the ascendance of these ideas in those realms most sensitive to and dominated by the elite —- I think immediately of the pedagogic, the statist or governmental, and the legal realms —- has been of a piece with the anfractuous welter of leftist ideology. I adduce but two examples out of many. Unregulated mass immigration is an idea, and a concomitant policy, imbibed almost without question by the Left; and, with a bit more diffidence and deliberation, by the business-friendly Right. It is also a hugely unpopular idea; most especially among those (in the Southwestern United States, mainly) most directly affected by its consequences. Secondly, there is probably no single component of public life which generates more exactly and reliably the drama of elite versus people than the drama of the multiculturalist ideology. Wherever and whenever the policies of this pernicious illiberal thing are submitted to a moment of democratic accountability, they are resoundingly defeated; only through coercion and manipulation and dissimulation —- in short, only against the principle of self-government —- are its ideas sustained. Even the Hispanic voters of left-wing California, for example, voted down bilingual education in public schools, sensibly discerning that such a policy would very simply result in illiteracy in two languages.

A hard-headed examination, therefore, will tell us that today’s Left is at base an antidemocratic one, blanching at the tastes and prerogatives of a free people. But things are not so obviously cleave along these lines, for there is a similar dynamic behind the trepidation of the Right in exploiting the vulnerabilities of its political opponents, on, say, immigration and multiculturalism, to restate my examples. That trepidation consists in the fact that on so many points the Right is itself linked to an elitist institution: the business corporation. Corporations, and the business class more generally, desire above all else stability in the political realm, even if the position of repose is ultimately inimical to the order which engenders the very stability they depend on. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the greatest dissident against totalitarian tyranny of a century of dissidents, often fulminated with pulverizing eloquence against the “alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists”; against the soulless avarice which drives a businessman, in Lenin’s grim phrase, to sell the hangman the rope for his own hanging. William F. Buckley, Jr. once characterized it this way:

The intellectual inferiority of the defenders of capitalism is less critical a factor in contemporary circumstances than the moral inferiority of capitalists.

Also, I think it too rarely remarked by conservatives how much the business corporation has come to mirror the state in form and in function; that it comprises a limited but potent concentration of power; and that with it the descent, in albeit diminished magnitude, of all the bureaucratic syndromes that so consume the state is steady and sure. The corporation, notwithstanding its very considerable virtues, is fundamentally a centralizing force; and its influence an ultimately mixed one. Burdened by an organic political alliance with this institution, the Right is often left off defending a kind of corporate proto-statism when what it really aims at defending is the admirable basic decency of the free enterprise system, which is just another way of saying the economic system actualizing the principle of self-government. And even those conservatives resistant to this criticism of business would have to acknowledge the often tight and cozy relationship between corporations and the state.

Everywhere self-government is in retreat, assailed by collectivist forces and harried by creeping nihilism which deprives its traditions and institutions of vitality. The Citizen, the basic unit of self-government, once buttressed by these traditions, is being transformed once more into the Subject, deracinated from his moral and spiritual bearings, bereft of all the thick and unspoken, often unperceived, ballast which steadies him in this tumultuous world. Where once tradition and richness formed the panoply of tough and supple defenses for the individual against the world, now we see those defenses failing, with only the state to replace them, or the corporation, which either apes the state or falls before it. The Subject replaces the Citizen, even as his eyes are clouded and his weapons of resistance and counterstrike dulled by the bounty of economic plentitude and the intoxicating narcotics of modern mass entertainment. I do not say that the rout or even the slow dissolution ending in defeat of self-government is imminent, for there are hopeful signs lurking about in unpredictable places, and always the ways of the Lord are mysterious; but as I am in a sour mood, I must confess to sympathy with the words of Salvianus as the Fall of Rome neared: “The Roman Empire is luxurious but it is filled with misery. It is dying but it laughs.” The American Question remains an open one.

Not long ago I settled into an uneasy concurrence with the Roman Catholic Church, which, as I understand it, holds to the doctrine that while in principle capital punishment might indeed be necessary for sufficiently wicked crimes, as a prudential matter the taking of human life by the state is only very rarely justified. The deterrence argument —- that executing criminals deters others from violence —- strikes me as less than persuasive: I do not deny the fact of the deterrent effect itself, but recoil, to a degree, from the utilitarian nature of it. How can a society justify taking the life of a man on the basis of the purely hypothetical lives that act might save? Capital punishment, I believe, must be defended on moral grounds principally; not on grounds of utility, which has a dangerous pedigree.

The death penalty should never be administered as an act of vengeance, but rather as an act of retribution; the two are distinguished to the extent that the latter is expunged of the sin of wrath. Crucial elements of applicable political theory are preserved in the Declaration of Independence: To secure our rights, including the right to life, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. In the case of a crime of great magnitude and iniquity committed against a man’s right to life, the state is so constituted as to be authorized to restore the just order of things by taking the life of the transgressor. This principle we are duty-bound, in my view, to uphold; what we are not justified in indulging is anger, or the sin of wrath. Capital punishment should be administered with regret, and pity for he that has so violated the sacred bonds of one man to another that he has forfeited his right to life.

All this seems elementary to me. The colossal difficulty comes in the realm of prudence. When is a crime so grave as to call forth the ultimate retributive justice? It is an exacting question; and I do not believe we can avail ourselves to abstract principles with much profit on this matter. Human life resists abstraction to our unending frustration as well as our unending delight. Bathed in the light of this truth, tradition has secured for us a prudential method for adjudication: casuistry, the theory of cases, embodied in the jury trial. Some principles do apply, but they apply broadly, with humility and deference to the individual case, which must finally be decided by a jury of citizens, none of whom is assumed to possess any expertise, save the expertise of living with other men and women in this fallen world.

What galls is the “relentless moral self-congratulation,” as Mr. O’Sullivan acerbically puts it, of the death penalty opponents; which is also reflected in the attitudes of some of the same people when they adopt pacifist postures. Is it not possible to even entertain the idea that choosing not to resort to lethal force when circumstances call for it could be a vicious act? Such absolutism, it seems to me, can only be sustained by a certain deliberate closing of the eyes, a refusal to follow logic to its conclusion. The opponents see the logic of capital punishment through to its grim and as yet hypothetical conclusion quite easily: the state will one day err, and execute an innocent man. But they refuse to see the contrary logic through to its grim and all too real conclusion: the state has erred, and will continue to err, and release men who will kill again.

You should always begin by refusing everything children want, on principle: The sooner they get used to having their desires thwarted and hopes dashed, the sooner they will develop the patience, ingenuity, and stoicism they will need to get around in this world.

--from John Derbyshire's column yesterday.

LAMB: ...when was the first indication that people either in Israel or in Egypt knew that this thing was underway?
OREN: Well, Israel devised a military plan which was ingenuous and daring and borderline insane.

If this doesn't excite your intellect, you're probably already dead.

Neville Chamberlain gave the people what they wanted. If he were alive today, and signed a peace pact with Saddam, he’d be a hero in Britain. Appeasement is today, as it was then, good politics.

Doubt is a writhing, insidious thing; and we must cling to those weapons of the mind and heart which we still have, those which haven’t been stolen from us by the spiritual enervation which threatens the modern world with dissolution; an enervation not unlike that which faced the English when they stood alone against the darkness. A year, not so long a time —- long enough to forget.

As the Roman Empire fell apart, North Africa experienced economic and administrative decay which produced poverty and anarchy, and it was harried on its seaboard by pirates and on its southern frontiers by tribesmen. It got no help from tottering Rome, and it was forced to succumb before the barbarian invasions. It appeared that all civilisation was being totally and finally destroyed. It was during this period, in 354 A.D., that there was born in North Africa a man named Augustine who was fatuous enough to ignore the catastrophe which was about to overcome him, engaged in an exhaustive enquiry into the nature of things which were about to lose their human audience, and set down his findings in manuscripts which seemed destined to be lost almost as soon as they were completed under the sands drifting from the spreading desert across burned and looted cities. It was an insane enterprise: and the most canny of writers composing in the illusion of perpetual peace cannot have hoped for such immortality as he attained. His works are the foundation of modern Western thought.

If that is not enough to excite interest and encourage the intellect, nothing is.

This was a stupendous act of faith. Every expert on international affairs would have told Augustine that he and his work were doomed. Had he not disregarded them, Christendom might have had as insubstantial an intellectual system as Islam, and there is not the slightest indication that anybody could have performed the task in his stead. With magnificent audacity he took as his subject matter a certain complex of ideas which intrude into every developed religion and are present in Christianity also: the idea that matter, and especially matter related to sex, is evil; that man, wearing a body made of matter, living in a material world, and delighting in the manifestations of sex, is tainted with evil and must cleanse himself before God; and that this atonement must take the form of suffering. He examined these ideas from a philosophical point of view and discussed how they looked in the new light cast on the world by the life of Christ, and he checked his conclusions by his own personal experience, which he used with a candour new in literature. The construction thus built stood up so well that the Western mind made it its home, and its finest achievements since then have consisted largely of modifying and extending the original structure. The teachings of Augustine are, of course, directly transmitted by the Roman Catholic Church to its members, and with various modifications by the Protestant churches to theirs; and they pervade Catholic and Protestant literature. Shakespeare was born about twelve hundred years later than Augustine, but if his work is examined for evidence of his general conceptions he proves to accept the same assumptions that Augustine makes when, in his Confessions, he deliberates on the religious and philosophical significance of the events of his life. But it is easier to prove his domination of the modern world negatively. Our recognition of Goethe as a unique figure can be accounted for by his freedom from Augustinian conceptions; and in our own day the influence of André Gide, not sufficiently explained by either his creative or critical works in themselves, is derived from his organisation of an anti-Augustinian revolt.

One of the thunderous frustrations for us moderns is the very possible, even likely, fact that many of the ancients knews us better than we know ourselves. We have forgotten much of what was learned when civilization was young, and we have deliberately unlearned even much of that which has been retained.

And just like the Romans, our peril is the old peril of barbarian invasion. If that world can fall to wild rabble on the periphery and exhaustion and decadence within, so can ours.

Mr. Valentine quotes me as declaring that the results of the study I discussed are “devastating,” then asks: “Devastating for whom?” Very simply: devastating for those who deny the presence of a stark imbalance in political perspective among the professoriat. He then faults the study itself, with some plausibility, for a problematic grouping of political parties into the rather crude categories of Left and Right.

If anything this survey should have three categories, Left, Right, and Center. We should count the Greens as Left, the Libertarians as Right and stick both the Democrats and Republicans in the Center.

Very well; any categorization will have its problematics, and we all, upon reflection, could likely conceive of methodological adjustments; whether they would be improvements, however, remains unclear.

The numbers Paul quotes are useless in their current form. The ideological line between Democrat and Republican is an extremely fine one. The terms liberal and conservative are also mostly useless in this context nowadays. Most of the folks on the hill, regardless of which side of the aisle they find themselves on, are politically moderate until there’s lobbyist or campaign contribution money involved.

Here one is inclined to remark, very quietly, that (1) assertion is not the same as argument; and (2) we are not discussing Capitol Hill, where the marvelous intransigence of the American electorate’s centrism is ineluctably at work, but rather enclaves of often detached, even insular, intellectual society. Mr. Valentine even admits later that, “the academic environment is one of the most politically delicate in existence.” Now why is that, because academia is full of a coterie of bland moderates whose views are barely distinguishable from the two major political parties, the ideological line between which “is an extremely fine one”? It seems a bit strange to assimilate data showing, however imprecisely, a large disparity in political affiliation by stating that the differences in said affiliation are essentially meaningless. If Republicans and Democrats constitute principally the same entity, then why do the latter outnumber the former in many academic departments by a factor of 6, 8, even 10 to 1? If the study is not gauging ideological preferences, what exactly is it gauging? Chance alone cannot explain the salient pattern in these results.

Mr. Valentine more or less answers these very questions, and thereby partially undermines his prior contentions, when he states,

Individual professors are free thinking, educated adults and will decide their political affiliations individually based on the party’s merit and their subjective opinions of them. I would argue that university professors, being far more exposed to the rigors of scientific research and peer review, would be on the whole far more likely to give their political affiliations a logical analysis than the general population would.

So the decisions made about political affiliation are the result of logic and rigorous analysis of merit, and yet they concern distinctions which are “useless in their current form.” Another strange argument. What he seems to be saying is that (1) the study is irretrievably flawed; but if it is not flawed then (2) it is not measuring anything substantial; but if it is measuring something real and substantial then (3) what it is measuring is to be cheered, not bemoaned. Three levels of sophistry to explain away uncomfortable numbers.

Academia, especially today, is only attractive to those who find value intrinsic in the environment itself. There is little monetary motivation for someone to join the academic world. Corporate America would scoff at the typical university salary.

“Monetary,” strictly defined, is a very narrow way to assay economic incentives; but I suspect Mr. Valentine means this more broadly, and here he overlooks hugely important factors. A most prominent feature of a professor’s compensation lies in job security; we cannot even begin to approach the economics of the occupation without considering this. In Florida right now we have this conspicuous case of a professor linked to Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization, whom the university cannot dismiss without elaborate legal machinations on account of his tenure. Now that is job security; and if it is not included in the economic calculations of the academic career, then we might as well dispense with economic calculations altogether.

[Paul Cella] even appears to be harboring the idea that diversity is a self-justifying goal and that lack of diversity is a sign of some innate injustice or unfairness in the system in question.

I do not harbor such an idea; nor did I intend to imply such things as Mr. Valentine infers. The primary idea I do harbor with regard to this is that terms like “diversity” and “tolerance” function as a dialectical component in the multiculturalist ideology which pervades the modern university: they are deployed ruthlessly to bludgeon and intimidate opponents, but tend to vanish without a trace when the issue drives against allies. The relativism about value judgements is purely tactical. The tolerance for dissent is fraudulent. In this way the multiculturalist ideology surely reflects the enduring presence in the halls of Intellect of the old dialectical materialism that warmed the hearts of so many Marxists; the dark and terrible elegance of which allowed the Soviet Union, for example, to calmly endorse UN resolutions by the dozen promoting violent resistance to colonial powers among oppressed peoples in Africa and Asia, without fearing the implications of those endorsements for their own colonial subjects under brutal military occupation in Eastern Europe. The language of diversity and tolerance now, just like the language of self-determination and independence then, is nothing more than an instrument for leverage and manipulation. Its ideals are not held sincerely; but out of either calculation or idleness, or some combination of the two.

Let me decode a central fear of some critics: They do not think that George W. Bush and his divided administration are capable of implementing an orderly and successful military campaign in Iraq without inflicting major casualties and national damage on the United States.

They don't think this president and all his squabbling men are up to the job, despite America's experiences in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the successful use of air power in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the surprisingly swift breaking of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The first thing to be said about this line of argument is that it is legitimate, important and could even come to be correct in one circumstance that I will identify. For the American public to understand the stakes in a war that no one should want to wage, this misgiving and others should be plainly stated by our current crop of foreign-policy wise persons.

Instead, in typical Washington fashion, we get alot of innuendo and mystifying ambiguity.

(Thanks to The CounterRevolutionary for pointing this column out)

UPDATE: Two good replies to the Scowcroft essay are here and here.

Then there is the curious notion of Mr. Mathers as “one of the most relevant forces today promoting fidelity, safe sex and traditional family values.” All those others promoting these things, beginning, say, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he wrote with prescience in 1965 about the baleful effects of the welfare state on nuclear families, on through George Gilder when he wrote with prescience about the “unmanned” father —- they must concede to “irrelevance” and yield their place to moral leaders such as Eminem. The writer goes on,

We are lucky as a society to have someone of his talent and insight reaching such a mass audience with moral messages to fill a void that our so-called “real” leaders refuse to address in a meaningful way.

Here we have the modern mind in all its unintelligible splendor: the only way to deliver “meaningful” “moral messages” is to twist and mangle and garble them into something ugly and stale; and which point they become “relevant” to young people, whom we can expect to quite easily overlook the grotesque, shameless self-regard of the whole enterprise, and discern within it a moral message of traditional wisdom.

In fact this critic has managed to get very nearly everything wrong; more than that, he has managed to get some supremely important things hopelessly reversed. Eminem as a moral leader could scarcely be more irrelevant. He is championed in this essay as an emancipator, freeing men from their stifling taboos and traditions. But his aesthetic or artistic innovations are utterly exhausted, by decades if not by centuries. Épater le bourgeoisie forms and tropes were already growing stale when the Marquis De Sade took up sexual perversion an art-form at the turn of the nineteenth century; and at least De Sade possessed a certain deadpan narrative verve: “When calm had been restored, they buried the two bodies.” By the time Eminem appeared and hammered our senses in abject tonelessness, the thing was patently dead, lifeless and evacuated. Shocking the respectable classes by transgressing sacred things is only a functional method for artistic excitement so long as there are things held in near-unanimity as sacred. Eminem has very diligently dug up enemies to attack who are quite certainly not going to retaliate, as they are long dead. He assails with crude vituperation a kind of mythical 1950s traditionalism as if it were still active and vital and capable of an organized counterstrike; but indeed it is on the very issue of his insults toward homosexuality, which was of course viewed by this mythical traditionalism as the quintessence of sexual perversion, that Eminem felt the gravest threat to his fame. Thus it is only in his rare moments of unity with the traditionalism that he encounters sustained resistance: that is how dead the traditionalism is.

Mr. Mathers wallows in his own life-giving boldness in hurling vague invective at institutions and taboos which passed into intellectual oblivion before he was born; and here he joins with the whole of the counterculture, as it was once dubbed, in attacking everything that is weak and emasculated, in seeking out the more defenseless and unpopular ideas and gleefully flaying them in public. It takes a very special sort of moral cowardice to so viciously attack dead things and call the act of doing so courageous.

But it really does say something about the persistent applicability of traditional sexual and moral standards of behavior that even in decadence they are regarded as such a opalescent threat to our multifarious moral reformers. That every ego with pretensions of grandeur supposes that he must attack the fading afterimages of Victorian morality to derive his fame and fortune is the mark of something more than a passing fashion. Of course, the traditions are only decadent today because modern man is himself decadent; they are only dead by the lights of Modern Man, not by those of the unspeakably boarder and deeper Mankind. The traditions themselves will endure, because they are rooted in the nature of Man; only the traditionalism will vanish, and with it its perfectly irrelevant parasitic defamers.

Conservatives and some independent-minded liberals (Senator Joseph Lieberman, for example) have protested the stultifying ideological monotony of academia for quite a while; well, now there are hard, immovable facts to back up the complaint —- facts that could hardly be more demonstrative of precisely what the complaint has centered on: an environment where words like “tolerance” and “diversity” have become the catchphrases of an argot which means very nearly their opposite.

Mr. Harris’ initial decisive point is that the fantasy ideology, and therefore the acts of monstrous terror its spawns, exists as a sort of psychological device to fill a void of resentment or despair or feebleness in the life of its host.

A fantasy ideology is one that seizes the opportunity offered by [the] lack of realism in a political group and makes the most of it. This it is able to do through symbols and rituals, all of which are designed to permit the members of the political group to indulge in a kind of fantasy role-playing. Classic examples of this are easy to find: the Jacobin fantasy of reviving the Roman Republic, Mussolini’s fantasy of reviving the Roman Empire, Hitler’s fantasy of reviving German paganism in the thousand-year Reich.

We are cautioned, though, not to dismiss the apparent authenticity of the fantasy, even for the leaders of a people stricken with it:

In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself.

After laying out a careful, methodical, but elegant and succinct intellectual examination of the fantasy ideology in history, Mr. Harris applies it to radical Islam in a deft staccato of able thought and perspicacity.

The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation —- in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor —- but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand?

As the purpose of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was to prove to the Italians themselves that they were conquerors, so the purpose of 9-11 was not to create terror in the minds of the American people but to prove to the Arabs that Islamic purity, as interpreted by radical Islam, could triumph. The terror, which to us seems the central fact, is in the eyes of al Qaeda a by-product. Likewise, what al Qaeda and its followers see as central to the holy pageant of 9-11 —- namely, the heroic martyrdom of the 19 hijackers —- is interpreted by us quite differently . . .

But in the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, suicide is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Seen through the distorting prism of radical Islam, the act of suicide is transformed into that of martyrdom —- martyrdom in all its transcendent glory and accompanied by the panoply of magical powers that religious tradition has always assigned to martyrdom.

Mr. Harris then turns to some practical recommendations, beginning with the ever-crucial though rashly, indefensibly neglected question of language. Oh, how we have bruised and dishonored our language!

But, Bush’s critics argued, the term “evildoers” dehumanizes our enemy. And again, the critics are both right and wrong. Yes, the term does dehumanize our enemy. But this is only because our enemy has already dehumanized himself. A characteristic of fantasy ideology is that those in the throes of it begin by dehumanizing their enemies by seeing in them only objects to act upon. It is impossible to treat others in this way without dehumanizing oneself in the process. The demands of the fantasy ideology are such that it transforms all parties into mere symbols. The victims of the fantasy ideology inevitably end by including both those who are enacting the fantasy and those upon whom the fantasy is enacted —- both those who perished in the World Trade Center and those who caused them to perish; and, afterwards, both those who wept for the dead and those who rejoiced over the martyrs.

There is one decisive advantage to the “evildoer” metaphor, and it is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers’ point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic —- you try to wipe it out.

My terse excerpts here do not do this essay justice; it is a thing of radiance. Years from now we will look back and see it as a milestone on the road to understanding of the new world into which we were hurled almost a year ago.

A Cuban-American friend of mine told me something I’ll remember forever: that, merely to be “a decent human being” in Cuba, you have to have a “martyr-level courage”: not to steal, not to lie, not to spy, not to debase oneself, or exploit the self-debasement of others.

This I have said before, though not here: The unwillingness of American liberals for nearly fifty years to speak the truth about Fidel Castro's miserably little tyranny comprises one of the great moral failures of our age.

A sentence was recently handed down in Australia concerning a ghastly string of gang-rapes. The leader of this gang, all of which were Lebanese Muslims, got 55 years in prison. Mr. Steyn quotes a letter in The Sydney Morning Herald:

As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. We need answers. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practiced with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions.

Racism. Its presence, real or imagined, is enough to excuse any crime, against any person, no matter how vile, and no matter how individual in nature. Rape is above all else an assault on the self, a violation of personhood. And yet this writer, delirious with ideology, retreats immediately, and with the usual oily self-righteousness, to collective guilt, which is the essence of authentic racism. Mr. Steyn comments acerbically:

Lebanese male immigrants, fleeing a war-torn wasteland and finding refuge in a land of peace, freedom and opportunity, are inevitably transformed into gang rapists by Australian racism.

A professor at the University of Oslo, contemplating the fact that 65% of Norway’s rapes are perpetrated by “non-Western” immigrants —- a euphemism for Muslims —- admonishes that, “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” and, “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.” Best not wear a short skirt around Muslims, or Western elites will stipulate that you bear responsibility for the act of sexual violence which, well, you probably had coming, failing as you did to consider the cultural traditions of certain immigrant communities.

What words are there to approach this moral bankruptcy? What response have we to men who by uttering such things so unmistakably reveal the deflation of spirit that has seized the West?

Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India -- curry, pyjamas, sitars, software engineers -- but suttee was not one of them. What a pity we’re no longer capable of being “judgmental” and “discriminating.” We’re told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can’t expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it.

As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I’m not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture —- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. —- is preferable to Arab culture: that’s why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu widow, we’re slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of our lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they’re scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations.

I do not see how the delirium of the multiculturalist ideology can be overcome. Will the fever ever break? Or will it well and truly consume us?

Those who argue that President Bush either should or shouldn't invade Iraq are anyway missing part of the plot. It is not only going to happen, it has already started.

There are many indications that U.S. special forces have been crawling around Iraq, from bases mostly in the northern Kurdish, but also in the southern Shia region, both of which are already under U.S. and British air protection within the old U.N. “no fly” zones. And I believe that the necessary conventional air, sea and ground forces for a sudden and effective “regime-changer” are now fully deployed in Iraq’s vicinity, at bases dispersed through the region, and in three aircraft carrier groups. Mr. Bush is, after months of unpublicized preparations, in a position to spring. He could give an order now, and there would be U.S. commandos dropping into Baghdad before breakfast tomorrow.

Mark Erikson, of Asia Times:

The lines of battle and the timelines to overt battle and full-scale combat have become fluid. Consider this: At the beginning of this year, when US President George W Bush started talking ever more in earnest about taking out Saddam Hussein and signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake a comprehensive, covert program to topple the Iraqi president, including authority to use lethal force to capture him, the US and putative ally Britain had approximately 50,000 troops deployed in the region around Iraq.

By now, this number has grown to over 100,000, not counting soldiers of and on naval units in the vicinity. It's been a build-up without much fanfare, accelerating since March and accelerating further since June. And these troops are not just sitting on their hands or twiddling their thumbs while waiting for orders to act out some type of D-Day drama. Several thousand are already in Iraq. They are gradually closing in and rattling Saddam's cage. In effect, the war has begun.

Both of these eye-opening articles were found through the hugely informative blog Winds of Change. Keep an eye on it if you want to know what the rest of the media isn't reporting.

The writer’s purpose, in summary, is to abet the case for public opposition to the prospective American military action against Saddam Hussein —- in particular, to abet the case among the British; and more particularly, to abet the same case for Tony Blair’s opposition, Mr. Blair being the British Prime Minister, for whom the writer admits admiration and affection. To do this relatively simple but somewhat precarious, considering the political dynamics of the Atlantic alliance, thing, he makes numerous reasonable concessions of logic and history —- Saddam is an international menace, his acquisition of nuclear weapons could be disastrous, war against him in 1991 was justified, etc, etc. This is the scaffold of reason.

I do not mean imply, despite how it may seem, that opposition to military operations against Iraq is in essence a posture of unreason. In fact, such a posture might be thoroughly reasonable, if in the end wrong. No, the “structure of unreason” I spoke of above is the prejudice, innuendo, and sheer assertion which constitutes the central argument in defense of his political conviction. And here is where, as I say, his remarks are both amusing and instructive.

The writer actually writes these words:

Bush, himself the most intellectually backward American president of my political lifetime, is surrounded by advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their political, military and diplomatic illiteracy. Pity the man who relies on Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice for counsel. The only man in the US administration who knows the score is Colin Powell. . .

Now I confess that when I read this, even aware as I was of the writer’s purpose in composing this article, aware, that is, of his intellectual prejudice against the Bush administration, I still for a moment took these statements for a joke. I may have even laughed out loud. The insouciance of its delivery; the almost complete lack supporting evidence; the startling bluntness and disrespectfulness: how could a plainly thoughtful and serious man write such things with a straight face? There are facts here —- facts that are disregarded with such breathtaking facility that it lends one to think the statement was proffered with deliberate unseriousness, that is, made in jest. Facts like, in Afghanistan, the crushing defeat of an experienced occupying military force, half way around the world, with precious few land bases, from a condition of almost total unpreparedness, with minimal casualties, in a matter of a few weeks. Facts like the securing of quiet acquiescence from a crucial and historically short-tempered regional power (Russia) on military operations in its traditional sphere of influence; and also quiet assistance from that same power in emasculating the most important economic asset of the enemy (oil). There are other less resounding but still bracing facts as well —- Mr. Rumsfeld’s masterly taming of an often hostile press corps during the Afghan campaign; the cunning and adept good cop/bad cop stratagem employed between Mr. Powell and “the hawks” —- whose silence in this article is, if you’ll excuse the cliché, deafening. What the writer is saying, at base, is that while there are many good reasons for opposing a military move against Iraq, the best one is that the political leadership in America consists of a clique of fools, narrow-minded militarists, and addle-brained hotheads. This is not an argument; it is a prejudice unsupported by facts, at least by any assembled to accompany its assertion. My view is that it is a prejudice of great and abiding error, and I have arrayed some readily-available facts among a large mass of them to buttress my view; the writer in question has arrayed almost exactly none to buttress his own more brazen one.

I say that this whole lively enterprise is instructive because it so obviously comes from a voice of moderation and candid reflection in America’s most reliable European ally. It does not come from those infallibly hidebound anti-American reactionaries whose pessimism and passivity and moral pusillanimity dominates elite European opinion, and whose animosity toward American power and influence is almost pathological in nature. That such a voice can speak of an American foreign policy leadership which has demonstrated at least a competence, if not a command, of the complexity of fighting this multifarious war in such a way bespeaks of the level of hostility we face among our allies across the Atlantic. I aver again, sincerely, that there is a solid, reasonable and hard-headed case to be made against military action in Iraq; but if we take the instance of our Spectator contributor, then what we face among our European allies is not an opposition borne of reason but of unreason; which is a much harder opposition to confront.

If a racist white dictator were creating conditions that starved millions of black Africans, the Congressional Black Caucus would have demanded severe sanctions, and a long line of African-American celebrities would be lining up to picket the nation's embassy, taking turns getting arrested and handcuffed for the TV cameras. But Mugabe's thuggery has barely roused America's black elite.

Like I said, refreshing.

I know, finally, that if democracy in America were given the opportunity for consummation, it would rise up in wrath such that our enemies would tremble and our friends gape; and that this consummation is restrained only by the anti-democratic principle of the intellectual and media elite, whose loss of nerve is nearly complete. It is not healthy for a society to be so poorly represented in the halls of Intellect and Opinion; or for such an intransigent adversary culture, to borrow a phrase from Irving Kristol, to develop at a historical moment of grave peril. It hinders debate, constricts the mind, enervates clarity of thought, and cripples decision-making. More fundamentally, it makes real communication almost impossible, cultivates deep resentment and distrust, sabotages moderate, pragmatic action, and provokes society-wide paralysis; which is essentially what we are seeing right now.