This Zoo is characterized by, among other things, providing a public forum for an assemblage of the world’s thugs, dictators, bullies, autocrats, tyrants, satraps, and sycophants to play at democracy and government by deliberation while brazenly disregarding the great and unspeakably elaborate moral firmament which buttresses and makes possible democracy and self-government. Moreover, the Zoo is a kind of consummation or triumph of form and process over substance; a divorce between reality and perception so complete that the introduction of a bit of reality here and there has all the trappings and thrill of real scandal.

Mr. Buckley wrote a book about his experience called United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey. The hypocrisy at this place can take on gargantuan forms. For instance, he reports that back then everyone learned rather quickly that, “the convention is very simply to ignore Soviet infractions against the stated ideals of the organization.” One of the first addresses he heard in the General Assembly was a stern reprimand by the Soviet foreign minister directed toward Israel for its occupation of the West Bank. That speech, delivered by the representative of the most ruthless imperial power on earth, contained the following lines: “The only wish of the Arab States who fell victim to imperialist aggression is to retrieve what was seized from them by force.” And what about the Poles and the Czechs and the East Germans behind the Iron Curtain? Was a similar retrieval of liberty not their “only wish”? Irony has fled when words like that can be spoken by characters like that with a straight face.

But such is the nature of the UN, and of the credulity of the world in its approach to this lumbering, tragicomic institution.

David Warren, in another illuminating column, describes a typical item in the UN catalogue of fatuity:

It has also emerged that Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, has been active behind the scenes, helping the Iraqis frame and phrase both of the diplomatic stunts that have subverted the U.S. and British diplomatic effort. He helped the Iraqis write the letter on Sept. 16, deceitfully offering “inspections without conditions,” and has since kept them informed of diplomatic developments, helping them time their second intervention, in which they anticipated and rejected the proposed U.S. resolution draft. The U.S. State Department has the documentation on this . . .

Mr. Buckley’s book, supple, surprisingly lacking in bitterness, even mirthful, is worth a look for a little dose of reality –- along with a smile and a resigned sigh.

[Soccer player Sayed Tahir] first made a name for himself internationally a few months ago when he scored a stunning goal, broadcast around the world, against a team of international peacekeepers in Kabul.

“One of my best memories was when I scored a great goal playing against ISAF (International Security Assistance Force). I was greatly encouraged by international footballing bodies and by my own people,” he told Reuters during a recent training session.

At his humble, clay-brick home in Kabul Tahir showed off his soccer paraphernalia. With his infant son and daughter on each knee, he said his ultimate hero was Argentinean soccer genius Diego Maradona.

Afghanistan’s future is obviously precarious, but its people are free of the yoke of fascism; they were liberated, though you’ll hardly hear a word of acknowledgement from the anti-American Left and the Arab tyrants.

Columnist Michelle Malkin calmly details the career of New Jersey’s own apologist for terror and hatred, who has been coddled and funded by the state for around forty years. The indictment is illuminated, if no longer surprising.

(1) Broadly, the principal failure of the administration since September 11 in my view has been clarity of purpose. Things could be much worse on this count, and it is a bit difficult to point to many specifics here, but there have been genuine and debilitating missteps in articulating a comprehensive yet easily-apprehended statement of who we are fighting and why. To do such a thing immediately after the terror attacks, to be sure, would have been an almost Herculean task, and it may simply be too much to ask from modern political leadership in such a moment of crisis. Nonetheless, the failure is there, and it is with language, I think, that it most obviously manifests itself: The administration, for instance, chose to declare a “war on terrorism,” which, as many have noted, cannot, even sympathetically, be said to be wholly coherent. One does not declare war on a method of warfare, however repugnant that method may be; does it make sense to proclaim a “war on submarine warfare” or a “war on high altitude bombing”? Weapons of mass destruction are a deadly serious matter, but the emphasis on them these days can also tend to reflect a strained and careless way with words. In point of fact, it must be a human actor who employs the repugnant method, and it is he with whom we are at war. Various outgunned but fiercely committed actors in conflicts of almost every scale have employed terrorism as an appallingly effective method.

A related point: The administration should have requested from Congress, in the days after the attacks, a formal declaration of war, because such action is still, last I checked, required by the Constitution, and because it would have been an immensely unifying and clarifying decision. A few cranks would have howled about our lack of knowledge of our enemies, or the unconventional nature of the war, or whatever else; but they could have been defeated by the simple remark that a declaration of war means only that a state of war exists between the United States and those who attacked it. Constitutionally, politically, and morally our collective sense of purpose and resolve would have been consolidated by this formal declaration. And legally, innovations in criminal law for unconventional warriors operating in the United States —- terrorists whose sinister movements are assisted and concealed by the machinery of freedom —- could thereby have been more efficaciously promulgated and argued. I wrote about this several months ago.

(2) The administration has at times exhibited a distressing unwillingness to vigorously argue its views; instead, it seems to prefer the fait accompli approach, or, as the Democrats so elegantly put it, the “my way or the highway” approach. This unaccountable tendency is rather strange considering that when the President and his able and cogent advisers have set themselves to arguing a case, they have usually prevailed. A good example, unrelated directly to the war, is the case of the International Criminal Court. Now the ICC is undoubtedly a very bad idea. Its undemocratic, illiberal nature; its menacing and unspecified powers and disdain for nuance; its roots in European and Third World intellects whose commitment to individual rights and detached judgment is dubious; the obvious threat it poses to a hegemon like America which naturally arouses envy and hostility; all these characteristics provide ample reason for the United States to resist. But the administration hardly made a public case; rather, it just threatened the ham-handed retaliatory measure of defunding all UN peacekeeping mandates, which was surely effective in the immediate short-term but, without concomitant public arguments against the ICC, it seemed arrogant and inexplicable, and therefore alienated even those who might have been sympathetic to the arguments.

For quite a while this same hauteur fluttered about the American approach to arguing its Iraq policy: the administration, for several months, scarcely even argued for it at all. Perhaps this was intentional, part of a contrivance structured around military and political timetables; and anyway, fortunately, it has changed rather dramatically in the last month or so, both here and abroad, with fairly dramatic results.

(3) But a similar ham-handedness has characterized much of the administration’s dealings with Europe in general. Europe is a huge place, and even talking about it as one entity is almost an affront to reality. Does anyone really think Britain has more in common with Germany or Italy than with America? Nor are European opinions accurately reflected by European elites. Most Europeans —- not just the British —- are quite sympathetic to American determination to smash Islamic terror; and most Europeans countries have been thoroughly helpful, with military assistance, intelligence, law enforcement, etc, etc. Moreover, I think the idea, popular with a lot of conservatives, of “to hell with the Europeans!”, however attractive in moments of exasperation, is misguided and reckless. There is simply no plausible coalition of allies at the moment that could even begin to compare favorably with our European allies.

To overcome European reluctance, which is real, requires some delicacy and equipoise, but it can be done. Chiefly, it consists of playing the European nations against one another in order to undermine the primary problem that looms in Europe: a consolidated European superstate which finds its only meaningful identity in rivalry with, or even hostility toward, the U.S. That is the ambition of many European Union bureaucrats and other elites; but it is not an ambition, by and large, shared by the bulk of the European populace. And it is an ambition which should be opposed —- quietly, perhaps, but resolutely. Because a Europe unified to some degree in opposition to the U.S., with its own security force replacing NATO, is no laughing matter. It is not hard to imagine this rival superpower some years on, its relations with America now strained, seeking an alliance with a rising China, or even with some assortment of resentful Arab states whose emigrants have moved north and west in such numbers to have established a solid constituency for pro-Arab policy in Europe (this is already happening, in fact). Then where would we be? In a far more precarious world, that’s where.

Yet administration policy is still one of basically unqualified support for European integration. Moreover, as John O’Sullivan, whose indispensable essays on this topic ground much of my argument, wrote recently:

It would be comforting to report that American conservatives had criticized and opposed this State Department drift [of favoring European integration]. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, they have accepted the false picture of a Europe already unified in opposition to the U.S., denounced it in apocalyptic terms, and gone on to advance strategic fantasies of replacing NATO with an anti-Islamic alliance built on Turkey (an Islamic country), Russia (which just signed a trade deal with Iraq), India (which is violently hostile to America’s client, President Musharraf of Pakistan), and Israel. It is, of course, an achievement of sorts to have produced a foreign policy even more unrealistic than that of the U.S. State Department.

A achievement indeed. Yet the ominous consolidation, centralization and homogenization plans roll on: Two years ago the European Union passed a law making it illegal for journalists to criticize its policies. In March The Wall Street Journal reported that EU anti-trust officers may conduct “dawn raids” of businesses, without a search warrant, to locate evidence of “price-fixing or abuse of market power”; any evidence seized may be used to assess huge fines (Volkswagon was assessed $78 million in 2000) without any judicial hearing and review. “The only approval needed,” the Journal reported, “is from the EU’s antitrust chief, Mario Monti, who usually bases his decision on whether the haul of evidence will likely be big enough to justify the time and expense.” Mr. Monti would like to expand his powers to include arbitrary searches of executives’ personal residences, and the authority to interrogate employees, again without judicial review. And there is a push to “harmonize” enforcement throughout the fifteen EU member states. Another proposal would make racism and “xenophobia,” very nebulously defined, crimes punishable by prison sentences; the primary consequence of this legislation would probably be a coerced silence on immigration policy —- an arena of public policy already so poisoned by rhetorical violence that it cost the life of one unorthodox Dutch politician. This is not the kind of integration we ought to be endorsing; vigilance of despotic trends in Europe, of all places, should not yield to complacency; there are quite enough American military cemeteries over there already.

That last remark may be exaggerative, but how short is our memory? Outside of Britain and France, no European nation right now has a military of global reach, but it wouldn’t take long, after the decommissioning of NATO, for that to change, especially with the bureaucratic consolidation continuing, as seems likely, unabated. There are already these inchoate, or not-so-inchoate, ideas floating around about a European “rapid reaction force.” As Steve Sailer observed acerbically, “Iraq is just a sideshow compared to maintaining peace in Northwest Europe.” Who will gainsay that statement?

We cannot wash our hands of Europe; the mere entertaining of such an idea does indeed border on the delusional. Nor should we want to. The anti-Americanism so often cursed is real, but it is not comprehensive. There are huge constituencies of European voters deeply suspicious of the EU consolidation, its disdain for tradition and community, and these, I’ll wager, are very frequently the same voters who are most sympathetic to U.S. robustness against Islamofascism. We do ourselves harm when we simultaneously paint them with the same reproachful brush as we do the leftist elite and turn a deaf ear on their concerns about the direction of Continental politics.

I want to stress here that my complaints about the administration, and the public figures of the American Right, are petty things in contrast to what might have developed under, say, a Gore administration. I shudder just thinking about the alternatives to the moral and strategic clarity that characterizes this president and his advisers, whatever their failure and miscalculations.

Update: Two of the real heavyweights, Mark Steyn and V. D. Hanson, have stepped into the ring on the question of American-European realtions. I appear to be at least thinking about a crucial question, though I quail at the notion that neither man places as much importance on our European alliance as I. Another important essay on this topic is Robert Kagan's from some months ago.

About the possibility of freedom for Cubans, this bit of candor: “Ultimately it’s up to Cuba, it’s not up to us. It’s their country, and if there are going to be changes in Cuba it will be the Cubans who make those changes.” Thanks, Jesse. When you spend your days hunted by secret police, your family threatened, your willpower draining in the face of debasement and the brutal jackboot of the totalitarian state, what’s a little leisurely contempt from an American celebrity?

Candidly also, Mr. Ventura rebuked the Cuban human rights activists for not coming to him! “They know where my hotel is.” They also know where Florida is, in a general sense, and quite a few have chosen rather… unorthodox means of arriving there. Many others, of course, have perished in the attempt, because one does not willingly choose unorthodox means to traverse 90 miles of saltwater.

Apparently these two men of candor discussed the Kennedy assassination. It so happens that the very same man whose film contrived (rather successfully) to traduce the history of that historical event in the minds of modern movie-goers, Oliver Stone, is now at work on a project about one Fidel Castro. Imagine that: having feverishly mined that vast quarry of conspiracy-theory material, America’s “military-industrial complex,” Mr. Stone will now favor us with a hagiography of the world’s elder tyrant. A certain symmetry there.

Like so many other moral cripples of our age, Mr. Ventura pronounced Castro a very bright and articulate man, or some such thing (Norman Mailer once compared him glowingly to an erect penis). This kind of thunderous foolishness, grounded in a kind of blatant intellectual negligence, overflows the borders of mere stupidity into the category of cruelty. As Myles Kantor concludes in a short, sharp piece,

Minnesota’s governor prides himself on bluntness, so I’ll be blunt: You’re despicable, Governor Ventura, but not because you went to Cuba. You’re despicable because you chummed with a slave master, snubbed his victims, and acted as if Cubans’ future belongs to them.

The problem with abandoning deterrence is that you give up deterring the enemy from doing his worst. Our 1999 attack on Yugoslavia seems to have disappeared down the memory hole, but it offers a perfect example. NATO was successfully deterring Milosevic from ethnically cleansing the rebellious Muslims from Kosovo, by keeping British inspectors on the ground in Kosovo and threatening air strikes. But, then, Madeleine Albright had her private little psychodrama and demanded in writing that Milosevic let NATO invade Serbia proper. He of course said no, so NATO gave up on deterrence and started dropping bombs on his capital. With nothing left to lose, hours later the Serbs started expelling the Muslims.

That’s a danger in invading Iraq —- we’ve successfully, and quite easily, deterred Saddam from making trouble for his neighbors for a decade, but once we start trying to conquer him, then deterrence stops working and he’s likely to lash out with a See You In Hell! attack.

Ramsey Clark, who served president Lyndon Johnson as attorney-general and then moved drastically to the left, set out in 1994 to find a lawyer for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian who was charged with conspiring to bomb the UN and several New York bridges and tunnels. The story of Clark’s search bears in a perverse way on what I wrote last Saturday about the left’s affection for dictators and demagogues.

To defend Rahman, Clark recruited Lynne Stewart, a New York “movement lawyer” who often represents radicals. She knew little about Rahman’s followers, Egyptian terrorists who prey on Coptic Christians and others. She was logically Rahman’s enemy, since he’s a religious fascist and she’s a feminist and an atheist. But Clark told her (George Packer reported in a superb article in last Sunday's New York Times magazine) “that if she refused, the Arab world would feel betrayed by their friends on the American left.” An amazing thought, with alarming implications.

She took Rahman’s case, lost it, helped him appeal, then (the government charges) illegally transmitted his political instructions to his murderous followers. For that she’ll be tried next spring, and perhaps imprisoned for life. But what astonished me was Ramsey Clark’s argument. Who knew that eight years ago Arab terrorists already depended on the American left? Not me. Who knew that terrorists would feel betrayed if such help did not materialize? How did American leftists, such as Clark, connect with Islamists? The fever swamps of American left-wing politics turn out to be darker and more tangled than most of us guessed.

Not long after September 11, I wrote on an email discussion list that, “It is a truly remarkable thing to witness elements of the radical Left, many of whom insist on calling themselves ‘liberals,’ driven by their constitutive hatred of America into the arms of one of the more illiberal historical impulses in human history, namely, Islamic fanaticism.” I did not then adequately appreciate the depth and brazenness of this truth; nor the almost unaccountable and languid pervasiveness of it. This weekend two Democratic congressmen were in Baghdad, cavorting around with Saddam’s poltroons and prevaricators, broken men whose loyalty is insured through a mélange of fearsome intimidation, blackmail, agony, and moral debasement of the most appalling sort. And these two patriots stood there among this cavalcade of human depravity and wretchedness and one of them declared on American television that Americans can trust Mr. Saddam Hussein but they cannot trust their president, Mr. George W. Bush.

The mind reels.

Enough with the compliments.

It would be difficult to imagine a more irresponsible speech than what Mr. Gore delivered on Monday. It was bitter, disingenuous, misleading, and incoherent; it added nothing to the debate over Iraq policy expect rancor and diversion; and it emboldened other Democrats to further displays of irresponsibility, namely Tom Daschle, who fulminated two days later against the “politicization” of the war by, he said, the President. This was classic displacement, of a vaguely Freudian variety —- for though the President may have been sloppy with some campaign rhetoric, it was in fact Al Gore who degraded the war debate with shameless political calculation; which calculation, of course, was focused on 2004, not 2002, and mainly threatens potential Democratic primary contenders, including one Tom Daschle.

When was it, precisely, when the Democratic Party developed such disdain for democracy? We ought to thank Providence that this war debate comes during an election season, allowing we the people to have a real voice in this critical political decision. President Bush says to Congress and the nation (if I may be so bold as to paraphrase): “Are we serious? Are we serious about what it takes to defend this country? I take as my principal duty the protection of the people of this country; and I regard as the gravest threat we face the possession of weapons of mass slaughter in the hands of anti-American madmen, the first of which is Saddam Hussein. This man has violated every agreement he has ever signed, and has flaunted pledges he undertook to save himself from the wrath of the U.S. Army, which could have rolled right up to his front door ten years ago. I know there are other terrorists, other madmen, other organized threats arrayed against us, but this one is the most serious, and we must deal with it. Can we not walk and chew gum at the same time? Are we serious about this war?” And the Democrats replied, very simply: “Of course we’re not serious. And how dare you expect us to be serious in an election season?”

Fortunately, the Democratic Party does not consist of politicians exclusively. It consists also of thinkers and writers and serious people, who have taken up the debate with vigor and, well, seriousness (a few examples are here). “The battle is joined,” Peggy Noonan wrote Friday.

It will be waged over the next six weeks. It is going to be hot. It is going to dominate public discourse. This is good. We need and deserve a debate that is worthy of the moment, and worthy of the people —- the millions of them —- who could be affected by America's decision one way or another.

And by the way, it is not bad for a critical world to see how a great democracy, the world’s oldest, goes about resolving questions of the utmost gravity. This is a good time to remind them who, and what, we are.

I was pleasantly surprised by Mr. Tam’s missive. In the past year, I’ve been called a hatemonger thousands of times by various correspondents, but this is one of only a handful to accuse me of factual error. Most sail past anything so prosaic as facts and simply say that the column in question is “hateful.” (“No free speech for hate speech!” as they say at Concordia, in between beating up Holocaust survivors.)

That last remark refers to several horrifying events at Concordia University in Montreal involving a riot among Palestinian protestors, some mob violence against Jews –- you know the storyline (See here and here).

This is in line, incidentally, with the general emotionalism of the anti-war crowd. This week, The Guardian in London accused Mr. Bush for the umpteenth time of “arrogance.” So what if he is? Jacques Chirac’s arrogant, so’s John Ralston Saul, and Pierre Trudeau, and Bob Hope. “Humility? I pass.” That was Bob, but it could just as easily have been Pierre or John or Jacques. Ol’ man Yasser struck me as pretty arrogant when he was squawking away to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (“You have to be accurate when you are speaking with General Yasser Arafat! Be quiet!”) and then hung up on her. But, even if he were charmingly modest and endearingly sheepish, it wouldn’t change my view of him: His manner is not the issue.

Mr. Steyn goes on to reassert, with conclusive additional evidence, the fact called into question by his correspondent; which fact, namely, is the percentage of rapes committed in Denmark by criminals of “foreign origin” –- in plain language, by Muslims. His reassertion, as I say, is conclusive.

Then, a point so rudimentary it verily boggles the mind that the thing requires such elaborate rhetorical and logical calisthenics to establish:

What should the West do about this problem? Well, we could start by acknowledging it. Fact: Almost all Denmark’s rape victims are ethnic Danish girls or women. Fact: An ethnic Danish girl is far more likely to be raped by a Muslim than an ethnic Dane. Fact: Immigration means that more Danish women get raped. You can argue about the way to change these stubborn facts —- curtail immigration vs. increase outreach, cut welfare vs. educate immigrant parents —- as the People’s Party and the Muslim Youth League are doing. These are tenable positions in the debate. But, when you insist someone’s a “hatemonger” even for mentioning these awkward demographic trends, you’re just trying to shut down the debate . . .

Of course, plain unassailable logic will hardly convince anyone among Mr. Steyn’s voluble and fierce interlocutors. Yet more grounds for resigning ourselves to a fact I wrote about before: reason does not hold sway over the minds of most people.

Professor Esposito has an academic partnership with one Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian residing in London. They have co-edited a book. Tamimi has published another book in a series edited by Esposito (in the preface, Tamimi calls Esposito “my ustadh,” my teacher). Tamimi also runs something called the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London. Esposito sits on its board of advisors—the only American to do so. In short, this seems to be a close liaison. The problem is, Azzam Tamimi is Hamas.

Mr. Tamimi also gave an interview to a Spanish newspaper last November in which he declared his admiration for the Taliban and pronounced that “everyone” in the Arab world celebrated the fall of the Trade Towers. His anti-Semitism, it goes without saying, also is palpable and lethal.

Whatever value of Mr. Esposito’s scholarship, and that has been called into question (see here and here), his judgment is, to say the least, untrustworthy.

Last year, the Trinidad-born British writer V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though virtually no one doubts the power, suppleness, and aesthetic facility of his works of fiction, he was nonetheless a highly controversial Prize-winner, chiefly because of his blunt renunciation of the insidious ideology of political correctness that pervades much of the literary establishment. This repudiation is most salient, perhaps, in his works of nonfiction; and therefore the controversy is most potent surrounding these as against his novels. In particular it surrounds his Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, an admirable piece of cultural journalism drawing on Mr. Naipaul’s travels through the non-Arab Islamic world, from Iran to Indonesia.

It is clear early-on to the reader of Among the Believers why it generates so much indignation: Mr. Naipaul combines subtle and eloquent prose with considerable powers of observation and discernment to produce a work of immense, analytical, candid insight about a failed civilization. Moreover, the author’s unmistakable sympathy, even tenderness, for the people he encounters makes his judgments all the more resounding in their bleakness. Islamic civilization, he says, is desolation.

This is not a conclusion likely to be absorbed serenely by those of a more politically correct disposition. The very notion that a civilization can fail; that, by implication, some are superior to others, is anathema to all that political correctness asseverates. So Mr. Naipaul’s tragic judgments, irrespective of their accuracy, are positively unpalatable to many of his peers among the literati.

Among the Believers was published in 1981; it’s follow-up, Beyond Belief, in 1998. We tend, these days, toward greater impatience with ideological-inspired spinelessness that limits hardheaded judgment, particularly when that judgment concerns those who plot our destruction, and who target us for death for our association with a single idea: America. Perhaps it was impatience with political correctness, too, that animated the Swedish Academy last fall. Or perhaps it was mere coincidence that scarcely two months after Islamic fanatics reduced the World Trade Center to a crematorium the world’s most prestigious literary award was presented to one of the world’s greatest interpreters of the crisis of Islam.

Whatever the reasons —- there are many available —- for the honor bestowed upon him, Mr. Naipaul’s perceptive inquiries and his incandescent musings should be allowed to speak for themselves. Here I offer them in short, pertinent excerpts:

A central theme of Among the Believers is that within Muslim societies Islam cannot be contained; there is no civil society, no secular buffer to the fiery passion of fundamentalist Islam. The situation is profoundly unhealthy: Faith spills forth into the other areas of life —- political, economic, aesthetic, individual —- effacing all that was there. It leaves the society barren of everything but Islam. Mr. Naipaul quotes Sir Mohammed Iqbal, a poet whose ideas about a separate Indian Muslim state were crucial to the establishment of Pakistan in 1947: “The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.” Muslims must have an Islamic state; church and state must be united for Islam to thrive. Mr. Naipaul then speaks of the “simple, terrible flaw” of this ideal:

Muslim passions were strongest among those Muslims who felt most threatened, and they were in that part of the subcontinent which was to remain Indian. Not all of those Muslims, not a half, not a quarter, could migrate to Pakistan. The most experienced Muslim political organizations were rooted in Indian India rather than Pakistan. Indian Muslim politicians, campaigners for Pakistan, who went to Pakistan became men who overnight had lost their constituencies. They became men of dwindling appeal and reputation, men without a cause, and they were not willing to risk elections in what had turned out to be a strange country. Political life didn’t develop in the new state; institutions and administration remained as they were in the British days.

Into that void rushed the military, the only organized political entity; and then came, almost inevitably, military despotism. A populist dictator followed, with no relief from the secret police. He goes on,

The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith. The state had been founded as a homeland for Muslims. If the state failed, it wasn’t because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for. And in that quest for the Islamic absolute —- the society of believers, where every action was instinct with worship —- men lost sight of the political origins of their state.

Mr. Naipaul then asks the hard, incisive questions:

Wouldn’t it have been better if the creation of Pakistan had been seen as a political achievement, something to build on, rather than as a victory of the faith, something complete in itself? . . . Wouldn’t it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn’t that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?

Mr. Naipaul’s sympathy for the Muslims of the subcontinent is evident, but it does not yield to his unflinching analysis —- and what an analysis it is!

Another overarching theme is the incapacity of Muslim societies to reconcile themselves to the matrix of creativity and freedom that powers the Western world —- the engine of technological and material prosperity. They look upon Western energy and see only decadence and spiritual sterility, things that are unquestionably there —- I have written of them frequently. But to mistake the waste products of freedom for freedom itself is a miscalculation of shattering proportions. It is precisely that miscalculation which lies at the heart of Muslim folly, and Muslim frustration, and rage.

After hearing a speech full of rage and fulmination and malevolence from Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, Mr. Naipaul writes,

It was his call to the faithful . . . He required only faith. But he also knew the value of Iran’s oil to countries that lived by machines, and he could send Phantoms and tanks against the Kurds. Interpreter of God’s will, leader of the faithful, he expressed all the confusion of his people and made it appear like glory, like the familiar faith: the confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of a great new encircling civilization. That civilization couldn’t be mastered. It was to be rejected; at the same time it was to be depended on.

Again, he writes of the phenomenon of rejection: “That expectation —- of others continuing to create, of the alien, necessary civilization going on —- is implicit in the act of renunciation, and is its great flaw.”

And again, this time of Malaysian Islamic extremists: “Their rage —- the rage of a pastoral people with limited skills, limited money, and a limited grasp of the world —- is comprehensive. Now they have a weapon: Islam. It is their way of getting even with the world.” This hardened theology and the psychic refuge it provides “is passion without a constructive programme. The materialist world must be pulled down first; the Islamic state will come later —- as in Iran, as in Pakistan.”

Those are poignant, deeply uncomfortable words, written as they were twenty years ago. It seems it is Mr. Naipaul’s vocation to be uncomfortable, unsparing —- as is often the vocation of the great writer. Now they have a weapon: Islam. It is undeniable that in matters of material excellence and creative energies, the West surpasses the Muslim world by leaps and bounds. But in matters of the spirit, it seems also true that Islam exceeds the West, though the spirit has been tortured, as I wrote before, by infusions of Western radicalism. Who among us feels such fervency of faith that he comes to disdain life itself? There is in the West virtually no concept of martyrdom outside of the ancient tradition of the Catholic Church, and that a martyrdom of capitulation, not violence, like St. Francis who longed for a martyr’s fate but did not seek it actively. To us moderns the very idea: martyr seems uniquely disturbing, alien in what it says about the faith of our enemies.

Mr. Naipaul has seen, first hand, and with true acuity, the rumbling tumult in the collision of these twin discrepancies. We would do well to consider even the discordant, contrarian voices, like Mr. Naipaul’s, that are among us —- for in those voices there can be great insight, and now is not the time to recoil from insight because we do not like what it tells us.

I have not seen Barbershop, but it appears to be a magnificent breath of fresh air, a truly liberating piece of art amid the welter of mendacious malice and rarefied bigotry that passes for art in Hollywood.

Mr. Dreher concludes,

Here’s the best news: Before Eddie [one of the characters in the film] begins his iconoclastic monologue about Rosa Parks, et al., he prefaces it by admitting that he wouldn’t say this in front of white people. Of course, the filmmakers knew white people would be watching this movie, which makes this line both a confession and a sly declaration of independence, an acknowledgement that the sense of racial solidarity that kept these things from being discussed openly is outdated, and no longer serves the interests of black Americans. Barbershop is an example of black self-confidence, and an affirmation of traditional values against the culture of grievance, shiftlessness, and dependency that has kept so much of inner-city black America down. And its makers defiantly say they don’t need anybody’s permission to say these things.

Three cheers for them.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

It will always be a bit exasperating to hear from people that our grandfathers may know us better than we know ourselves; that the Greeks, say, understood democracy better than we; that, to wit, progress of the intellect is a myth. Mr. Patrick Ruffini senses the approach of this ever-unpopular asseveration and communicates a mild and understandable irritation with it. Instead, he offers a sort of dialectical dynamic, where competing ideas face off and ultimately the superior ones emerge victorious, albeit in an amalgamated form. The welter of forces impinging on the culture will, after some trial and error, and the operation of reason, perhaps some rational self-interest, produce something satisfactory or better.

I must admit that I am deeply suspicious of this kind of optimism, because I am less than sanguine about Man’s sensitivity to reason. No amount of evidence will drive most people to abandon long-held beliefs, much less a complete ideology; the socialist enterprise, despite catastrophic failure after catastrophic failure, yet endures in the minds of an astounding number of people, and would indeed be re-implemented, history, experience, evidence be damned, if these people, who are never very far from power, were to dramatically reclaim it. Mr. Ruffini speaks of the failed social policies of the 1960s, which plunged many American cities into ugliness and decrepitude and squalor, and remarks that had we known in 1955 what these policies would do, things would have been quite different. But as Mr. Judd points out, we did know. In fact, “we” knew long before the policies were even formulated: Tocqueville wrote a book of stunning penetration, which is not exactly obscure, about the beguiling tendency of democracy to reduce men to bondage.

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

That sparkling sentence was written some one hundred and sixty-five years ago, and I’ll be damned if a more consummate and prescient arraignment of the welfare state has been written since. Well, John Derbyshire came close when he wrote of the English underclass, similarly produced by idiotic social policy:

Americans may find it surprising that most of the people wallowing in this slough of ignorance, illiteracy, promiscuity, bastardy, intoxication, vice, folly, lawlessness, and hopelessness are white English people. Much of what is described here is the sort of thing Americans instinctively associate with this country’s own black underclass. There is some satisfaction, I suppose, though of a very melancholy kind, to be drawn from the revelation that sufficiently wrong-headed social policies, persisted in with sufficiently dogged refusal to face simple truths, will visit moral catastrophe on people of any race.

Now it bears a moment’s attention to note that Britain’s experience came predominantly after America’s own; that, in other words, even the stark exhibit of failure across the Atlantic did not disabuse the British socialists of their social policy dogmas. And of course the Brits are not alone in this despondent, incorrigible “refusal to face simple truths”: opposition here to welfare reform, perhaps the single most successful domestic policy in a generation, is still truculent and inspired, and its potential to roll back what was achieved continually threatens.

Reason alone is simply not a solid enough foundation upon which to build a civilization; it does not hold final sway over the minds of human beings; stronger elements must be employed: habit, prejudice, prescription. That was Burke’s teaching, and I do not think it has been refuted, neither by argument nor by experience. Burke does not disdain reform. But it must be done with care for the organic thing that is human society, for the traditions into which men of genius and of modesty alike have infused their hard earned wisdom and lessons for posterity. Tradition should be venerated; that the past is full viciousness and injustice only strengthens the necessity for taking it seriously.

I want to emphasize that I have no reason to believe that Mr. Ruffini has any dispute with all this. His piece was just a mild demurral from something previously remarked, which provoked the above inscribed thoughts.

The Resistance faces off with one of the most barbaric regimes on earth in Sudan —- a regime which aims at Taliban-style theocracy and maintains the most extensive trade in human chattel slavery in the world. Records Mr. Novak,

The Sudanese may have suffered more than any other people in the world during the last two decades from torture, enslavement, the carrying away both of women and young men for sex slavery, the enforced starvation of scores of thousands at a time, imprisonments, beatings, amputations, lashes, the forced migration of millions, indiscriminate shelling and mining of civilians from armies in the field, and high-altitude bombing of field hospitals and food centers and refugee camps, in an effort to prevent peoples from settling in one place. Yet they remain, if their resistance leaders are any example, capable of an extraordinary warmth, comradeship, and mutual acceptance of differences, showing a delicacy of feeling and courtesy that are, as the world goes, striking.

The leaders of the Resistance were intensely interested in what Mr. Novak had to say on the thorny problems of the interaction between church and state. The Muslims among them abhor Islamofascism, but love Islam; the Christians search for a path between a dangerous radicalism of their own and the dreary, deracinated secularism of the West. And they echo Mr. Novak in making a penetrating point that has been much overlooked in the many discussions of radical Islam and its clash with the West. The term “fundamentalist,” deployed censoriously to at once describe and condemn religious militancy, is intolerable: it obliterates important distinctions and thus damns the innocent with the guilty.

The press and pundits of all sorts should stop speaking of politicizers and abusers of Islam as “fundamentalists.” Why approve of their own false propagandistic claims? They are “extremists,” not fundamentalists. They contradict the fundamentals of Islam. What they are proposing is a flagrant abuse of Islam.

One of the ideological architects of political Islam in Sudan is a man named Turabi, who quite frankly admitted that his teaching was modeled on a careful study of Stalin and the Fascists of the early 20th century. Any and every means possible should be used, he learned, in the effort to organize cadres to build up a utopian, perfect, totalistic regime.

In other words, so-called “radical Islam” or “Islamic fundamentalism” of the new political type is in fact a bastard modernization of authentic Islam, corrupting Islam by the worst of all modern impulses. As one of our professor-guerrillas put it, If they were going to modernize Islam, why didn't they choose the best features of modernity to bring into Islam, like the Universal Declaration, and democracy, and human rights? Why the worst features —- Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler? He expressed the last sentence with exquisite disdain, to vigorous agreement from others.

This, I think, is a crucial point. Whenever I hear references to the “fundamentalist” or “medievalist” nature of our enemies, presumably drawing on the disdainful popular half-memory of, say, the Spanish Inquisition, I cringe, and reflect on two historical facts: 1) Whatever the horrors perpetrated by the medieval Inquisitors, they pale in comparison to what modern man has produced. Over half as many people died on September 11 alone as did in the entire three-century history of the Spanish Inquisition, and these latter were at least favored with a trial of some deliberation, indicating an individual rather than collective idea of guilt. Those whose bones were ground to dust under molten steel in Lower Manhattan were not given so much consideration. 2) The Inquisition is not called the Catholic or Christian Inquisition for good reason: it required the mobilization of the Spanish state to operate; and recall that the state is an innovation of modernity.

Now this is not some romantic cri de coeur for a return to the Middle Ages. But it is a cry for humility to a people generally ignorant of history. I myself know very little about the Middle Ages; but I know enough not to tar them with broad, implacable comparisons to a violent politico-religious death cult which counts its salvation by the numbers of massacred innocents. Moreover, I firmly suspect that when historians have achieved a sufficient detachment, they will begin to look on the Modern Age, with its mountains of corpses sacrificed by wild-eyed utopians at the altar of the State, with a bit less triumphalism than we do. Indeed I am tempted to agree with the great Evelyn Waugh, whose lapidary delivery was without peer, when he wrote of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”

Islamofascism is as much a creature of Lenin as it is of any Islamic figure. The modern West’s wretched revolutionary philosophies; its menacing arguments for social reconstitution from the ruins of an eradicated old order; its Benthamite notions of society as a scientific construct, remediable by abstract calculations; its tendentious twaddle assigning blame for the ills of the Third World exclusively to a caricature of European imperialism; all these elements have been fused to a puritanical interpretation of the Muslim faith to yield a great multifaceted monster. Just as we provide the technology to facilitate the instruments of terror, so our decadent intellects have sown the seeds of ideological Islam.

Mr. Novak’s enthusiastic essay (in contrast to this rather bleak essay of mine) suggests that one of the great callings of this war is for the sagacious, morally-confident among us to reach out to those Muslims who reject the fever of Fascism that has seized their faith; to arm and support them where they fight; to encourage and nourish them where they think and write; and to declare firmly that their struggle is our struggle. To do this thing will be so delicate and perilous a challenge that my mind swoons, and I cannot say I am confident about our chances for success. An insidious rot drives to the heart of the Western intellect, enfeebling our powers of discernment and enervating our spirit. This rot attacks the authority of Truth in the order of men and society, and it leaves the very flesh of intellect blackened with gangrene. The hull lurches on, but its limbs increasingly fail to respond to their summons, as they are little more than carrion clinging to a once vital body. The revolt of the intellectuals against authority, the trahison des clercs, cloaked though it always is in the parlance of sublime liberation, is a core element of the Modern Age. In the late nineteenth century Orestes Brownson, an ample New England Catholic, proclaimed defiantly, “We have heard enough of liberty and the rights of man; it is high time to hear something of the duties of men and the rights of authority.” Few heeded his call; and I am struck by how deeply contrarian, even reactionary, his words still sound, even now, with eighty-five years behind us of blood flowing like rivers in the name of liberation. Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, one hundred and twenty-five years earlier, when it consumed even him and set the world afire, should have told us enough: were Man a creature susceptible to the tender prodding of reason and pity. But he is not.

I digress from the issue at hand: that of the Western roots of Islamic terror, which we have hardly even begun to face; because we have hardly even begun to face the restless, intransigent spirit of liberation which reduced the science of politics to homicide, and the guilt of individual men to the guilt of whole classes, peoples, and races. And we have exported this cancerous, inchoate doctrine; not even a doctrine —- a prejudice, a mental impulse. We have exported it: not with shame or foreboding, but with ceremony and self-satisfaction. Dear God, forgive us.

Millet’s book is so bad —- it is to eroticism what a minutely detailed account of bulimic binging and self-induced vomiting would be to gastronomy —- that it is best treated not as a literary, but as a psychological and sociological artifact. Why would anyone have written it? And why would anyone read it (except for review purposes)?

Mr. Daniels observes that it is impossible not to question her veracity in many instances, which observation leads to a concise psychological broadside:

Of course, if much of what is related in the book is not true, she is either a fantasist on an industrial scale, unable to distinguish reality from her imaginings, or a cynically calculating opportunist. If she is a fantasist, her imagination is a deeply impoverished one, an impoverishment that gives to the book its repetitiveness. In a sense, it is quite an achievement to have made so short a book about sex so utterly tedious and unreadable.

He then turns to the perplexing questions of 1) why the miserable thing has sold so briskly (400,000 copies in France) and 2) why its critical reception has been so preponderantly positive. To the former to remarks, “The book’s main appeal is to prurience, a prurience that has been given the nil obstat by literary intellectuals who affect to find virtues in a work that contains innumerable atrocious sentences” and prose abominations; in other words, it is highbrow pornography. To the latter question Mr. Daniels devotes more space, and here his scornful intelligence flashes like a swordsman’s blade.

The fear that this book has exercised over many reviewers is that of appearing prudish or unfamiliar with human degradation and the seamy side of life, and thus of being naïve and unworthy of attention. To express distaste for the exhibitionism of the life it describes, or fantasizes about, or cynically exploits for commercial purposes, is to hold fast to certain (rather minimal) beliefs about how life should be lived and humans should conduct themselves. This in turn requires a belief that truth is more important than one’s status in the eyes of the other members of one’s particular guild. And those who refuse ever to nail their colors to the mast are destined always to discover a few years later that, to their chagrin, the whole ship has sunk.

I am reminded of Chesterton’s more mirthful, but similarly flashing wit: “Defending any of the cardinal virtues now has all the exhilaration of a vice.”

For Whittaker Chambers, of course, was among the greatest of the ex-Communists; and his is an almost unspeakable story of redemption. Out of despair, he had become a militant for the cause of godlessness; out of love, he had come to the Cross, and become a Church Militant. Many felt the momentary exhilaration of tasting the inebriant of Revolution, then recoiled on account of some instinctual prudence; few fell so deeply under its spell as Chambers; and almost no one returned from that depth, repudiated its blackness, and then stood for light. He was a witness against the approaching Dark Age augured by the terrible marching discipline of those to proclaimed Man as the measure of all things. “And discipline,” he wrote, “is not only, to this great secular faith, what discipline is to an army. It is also what piety is to a church. To a Communist, a deliberate breach of discipline is an act of blasphemy.” He was also a witness against the ruinous complacency of liberalism; against its sloppiness and groupthink; against its anathematizing malevolence which continues to this day; finally, against its feral, crushing deathwish. “For while Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization."

But he was also, as he affirms, a witness for something. That something was a created order in the universe; and creatures made in the image of the Creator. Image-bearers, possessed of their own limited but ineffaceable reflected creativity; which means a freedom that cannot be taken from them; a freedom emanating from that which infuses a darkened and misused world with hope: in the heart of darkness, the crucified God. Michael Novak has remarked pregnantly that the twentieth century was a century of prison literature; for freedom too much threatens those who would deny it, and all the might of the state, all the violence and torture of Man as God, still could not overturn what Christ won for us.

I am with Mr. Judd in naming Chambers’ magnum opus Witness as one of the greatest literary testaments of the 20th century. “Hero” is one of those words that through carelessness and abuse we have for all intents and purposes destroyed as a meaningful appellation; nevertheless, Chambers was a hero. Like Solzhenitsyn and Armando Valladares and the countless others.

I have here an essay Chambers wrote about St. Benedict around the time of publication of Witness. It speaks of the “three great alienations of the spirit” which abetted mightily the fall of Rome, and which, he suggests, are abetting the fall of our civilization. “They are: the alienation of the spirit of man from traditional authority; his alienation from the idea of traditional order; and a crippling alienation that he feels at the point where civilization has deprived him of the joy of simple productive labor.” Here we have an intimation of the grandeur of Chambers’ haunted historical vision.

These alienations St. Benedict fused into a new surge of the human spirit by directing the frustrations that informed them into the disciplined service of God. At the touch of his mild inspiration, the bones of a new order stirred and clothed themselves with life, drawing to itself much of what was best and most vigorous among the ruins of man and his work in the Dark Ages, and conserving and shaping its energy for that unparalleled outburst of mind and spirit in the Middle Ages. For about the Benedictine monasteries what we, having casually lost the Christian East, now casually call the West, once before regrouped and saved itself.

So bald a summary can do little more than indicate the dimensions of the Benedictine achievement and plead for its constant re-examination. Seldom has the need been greater. For we sense, in the year 1952, that we may stand closer to the year 410 than at any other time in the centuries since. If that statement seems as extreme as any of Salvian’s, three hundred million Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, East Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and all the Christian Balkans, would tell you that it is not —- would tell you if they could lift their voices through the night of the new Dark Ages that have fallen on them. For them the year 410 has already come.

This is the mind of a prophet: let us thank God that is vision was premature, and let us pray that it was not premature by merely a few decades.

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.”