Will They Do it?

Mark Steyn makes the case in City Journal for doing whatever is necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. His essay is a bit longish, but here are some excerpts:

If Belgium becomes a nuclear power, the Dutch have no reason to believe it would be a factor in, say, negotiations over a joint highway project. But Iran's nukes will be a factor in everything. If you think, for example, the European Union and others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what they'd be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of the Prophet. Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist.

Four years into the "war on terror," the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: "the long war." Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs-our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower-their strengths, and our great weakness. Even a loser can win when he's up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.

Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:

1. contempt for the most basic international conventions;

2. long-reach extraterritoriality;

3. effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;

4. a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);

5. an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.

Yet the Europeans remain in denial. Iran was supposedly the Middle Eastern state they could work with. And the chancellors and foreign ministers jetted in to court the mullahs so assiduously that they're reluctant to give up on the strategy just because a relatively peripheral figure like the, er, head of state is sounding off about Armageddon.

What's the difference between a hothead and a moderate? Well, the extremist Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," while the moderate Rafsanjani has declared that Israel is "the most hideous occurrence in history," which the Muslim world "will vomit out from its midst" in one blast, because "a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world." Evidently wiping Israel off the map seems to be one of those rare points of bipartisan consensus in Tehran, the Iranian equivalent of a prescription drug plan for seniors: we're just arguing over the details.

So the question is: Will they do it?

And the minute you have to ask, you know the answer. If, say, Norway or Ireland acquired nuclear weapons, we might regret the "proliferation," but we wouldn't have to contemplate mushroom clouds over neighboring states. In that sense, the civilized world has already lost: to enter into negotiations with a jurisdiction headed by a Holocaust-denying millenarian nut-job is, in itself, an act of profound weakness - the first concession, regardless of what weaselly settlement might eventually emerge.

Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland.

Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: Can't be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get 'em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran's head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that's part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.

Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no "surgical" strike in any meaningful sense: Iran's clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country's allegedly "pro-American" youth. This shouldn't be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment - and incarceration. It's up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime - but no occupation.

The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it's postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.

And time seems to be short and getting shorter. Read Steyn's entire essay at the above link. It's very good.

Conjectures and Refutations

It is often said that Intelligent Design (ID) isn't science because it does not lend itself to testing. There is, we are told, no way to falsify the claim that intelligence was involved in the development of living things and therefore the suggestion that it was is scientifically vacuous. This is the conventional wisdom, but it seems to me to be mistaken.

As Karl Popper instructed us, science proceeds by what he called conjectures and refutations. Scientists offer a conjecture that some phenomenon can be explained in a particular fashion and then other scientists set about trying to show that the conjecture is false. If there is no way that the conjecture can be tested then it's considered (by some but by no means all scientists) to be outside the domain of science.

As long as a testable conjecture withstands the scrutiny to which it is subjected, it remains scientifically viable. It remains a legitimate scientific hypothesis until evidence for its falsity, or its unliklihood, accumulates to the point where a consensus of scientists becomes persuaded that the conjecture is improbable. At that point it doesn't cease to be a scientific hypothesis, rather it falls into the category of "bad science." Even this is not a death sentence, however, since future investigators may resurrect it as new evidence becomes available and the old conjecture, perhaps modified, is seen as a compelling explanation for that new evidence.

Intelligent Design, or at least that argument for it based upon irreducible complexity (IC), lends itself nicely to the Popperian model.

Let some structure, system, or process (S) be adduced which exhibits at least prima facie design in the form of what appears to be irreducible complexity. The ID position is twofold: It asserts 1. that there are at least some (S) that are irreducibly complex, and that, 2. if these instances of (S) do in fact exhibit IC then whatever processes might be ultimately responsible for (S) must include as part of the mix intelligent guidance or agency (I). The latter claim is not especially controversial, but the first claim is.

Thus it is this claim that biologists must refute in order to discredit IC (and derivatively, ID), and this claim, that some (S) are irreducibly complex, is testable.

Once the claim that a particular (S) possesses IC is made then biologists set about trying to come up with a plausible pathway or set of mechanisms that could have produced (S) independently of (I). The solution must be plausible and not merely logically possible.

If they are successful in formulating a plausible naturalistic pathway for the construction of (S) then the ID option in this case will be effectively refuted. If they are repeatedly successful over a wide range of examples of (S) then ID, at least in its biological dimension, will, over time, be seen as falsified. Failing such a demonstration, however, the conjecture that (S) could not have arisen apart from (I) should be accepted as a valid scientific hypothesis.

Indeed, it is this very process of seeking to refute the conjectures of irreducible complexity that biologists are undertaking in labs all across the country. The most recent example is the work of Bridgham, et al. at the University of Oregon whose paper is being touted as a refutation of claims of IC in the endocrine system (ID theorists maintain that their work does no such thing).

Whether the Bridgham paper accomplishes what its promoters say it does or not, the important point here is that it argues that ID, at least in this one instance, is false. The critics of ID can't have it both ways, however. They can't say that ID isn't falsifiable while simultaneously crowing that it is false. There is irony in the fact that the very attempt to show that ID is false confirms that ID can be tested and is therefore a legitimate scientific hypothesis.

Judge John Jones might not think ID is science, the witnesses who appeared for the plaintiffs in Kitzmiller v. Dover may have argued that it's not science, but real scientists are certainly acting as if it is. They're trying very hard to falsify it, and this is exactly as it should be. It's what science is all about.

Emergentism

An interesting and helpful essay on the theories of strong and weak emergence that have taken on a certain cachet among philosophers and scientists in recent years can be found at Science and Theology News.

The more interesting of the two is strong emergentism which, briefly put, is the view that there are laws which produce increasing complexity in the world and that complex systems are not explicable simply in terms of their component parts:

Among those who think about emergence, said Australian philosopher David J. Chalmers, two main positions have developed: strong emergence and weak emergence. Supporters of weak emergence make the claim that the more fundamental theory can in principle explain the phenomena of the higher-level theory. And many also argue that emergent laws and properties, even if they do exist, don't cause anything on a lower level of reality to change in any way.

According to this view, mind, for example would be an epiphenomenon of the material brain and if we knew how the material substrate worked in all of its detail we'd understand exactly what mind is.

Those who favor strong emergence, meanwhile, search for examples of emergence where the emergent property, or alleged law, cannot be reduced in this way. To use a common emergentist phrase, the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts - and the whole really causes things to happen among lower-level parts. "In the broadest sense, as elements combine into complex structures, new properties emerge that are surprising and not present in earlier, simpler stages, that new things come about through the appearance of complex structures," said William Hasker, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Huntington University in Huntington, Ind. "As such, these new things are not added from the outside but through the complex structure itself."

In this view, mind is not reducible simply to chemical reactions in the brain. It is a higher order phenomenon that actually affects the lower order phenomena of the brain which in turn exerts control obver the even lower order phenomena of the physical body. In strong emergent thinking there is a hierarchy to nature and no level in the hierarchy is completely reducible to lower levels.

Supporters of weak emergence say that stronger forms leave the door open to an unwarranted intrusion of religion into science, even though many atheists also believe in strong emergence.

Indeed, it does leave the door open, and it looks as if the more we learn about the natural world the harder it will be to keep that door shut.

Update: See this interview for more on the emergent paradigm.

The Wrong Time to Quit

Given the following facts about the war it's hard to understand why the Last Helicopter folk are so strident in their calls for us to get out of the country:

First off, US soldiers killed in Iraq continues to fall. This is the 5th straight month.

Even IED deaths, after a brief surge in February are down to their lowest level since I started keeping track.

Each month, there are more Iraqi troops available.

Slightly more Iraqi police were killed in March then in February, but the trend has plateaued at about 200 fatalities a month.

Meanwhile, March was actually one of the more peaceful months in Iraq since the insurgency began, even for civilians.

This could all change over night, of course, but the trend lines are certainly pointing in the right direction. It seems awfully foolish to be calling on the United States to quit while it's ahead, yet that's exactly what Kerry, Murtha, Pelosi and other Democrats are doing. I don't think this is true of Murtha, but it certainly seems true of others that their biggest fear in Iraq is that the U.S. will win, and that winning will embolden us to use force again. At least some on the left want us to fail so that we will be too chastened and weakened to resort to military intervention again any time soon. The aversion to force is understandable, if wrongheaded, but the means some are willing to employ in order to produce it are reprehensible.

Bearing the Brunt

From time to time critics of the war will make the claim that the soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq are from the lower echelons of the social order and are people who had no good alternatives to military service. In other words, we are given to understand, they're not really volunteers. Often the implication is that the casualties are largely members of minority groups who disproportionately shoulder the burden for the white man's wars.

This study of American fatalities in Iraq strongly suggests that those assumptions are uninformed nonsense.

This is the breakdown of fatalities by ethnicity:

American Indian or Alaska Native: 25

Asian: 37

Black or African American: 231

Hispanic or Latino: 248

Multiple races, pending or unknown: 29

Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander: 23

White: 1,654

This is a rough breakdown of where soldiers killed between March of 2003 and March of 2005 came from in the U.S.:

26.2% were from cities and large towns in the U.S.

40.5% were from suburbs in the U.S.

33.3% were from rural areas in the U.S.

The picture that emerges from this data shows that, contrary to the picture of the average KIA as a poor, non-white, urban male, the casualties of this war are overwhelmingly white suburbanites.

Neuhaus to be on Meet the Press

This notice comes from Richard Neuhaus, author of The Naked Public Square and editor of First Things:

Wednesday morning I'm involved in taping with Tim Russert a special edition of NBC's "Meet the Press" that will be shown Easter Sunday morning. I gather he's bringing together a motley crew of "religious leaders." I will do my best to see that Christianity-as in Christ crucified and risen-gets a hearing.

It sounds like sandwiching Meet the Press in between church services and other family activities on Easter morning might be spiritually profitable. Neuhaus is a first-rate intellect and a prolific commentator on matters resting at the intersection of religion and contemporary culture. It'll be worth hearing what he has to say.

The Knockout Punch

Jesus Wed to Mary Magdalene! Jesus Walks on Ice! New Gospel of Judas Discovered! Judas and Jesus in Cahoots! Prayer Doesn't Work! Now, after this rapid succession of blows to the staggering body of orthodox Christian faith comes this devastating upper cut. It may well be the punch that delivers the knockout to many a believer's faith. Here's the story from Catholic World News:

Newark, Apr. 8 (CWNews.com) - Archeological researchers in Ridgewood, New Jersey, have discovered an ancient Christian document that offers a radically new account of the founding of the Catholic Church.

The newly discovered document, which scholars have named "The Gospel of Skip and Muffy," was found in an abandoned row house in New Brunswick, New Jersey, which had formerly housed a Rutgers sorority.

Theologians and anthropologists agree that "The Gospel of Skip and Muffy" is likely to cause intense debate among Christians, forcing a complete re-examination of all Catholic teachings.

There is no possible debate, however, about the authenticity of the document. "It was typed on an IBM Selectric II," reported Dr. Ernest Litewaite, an associate professor of Contemporary Archeology at Kutztown State. "Using a Courier 72 10-pitch element." The document is believed to be a copy of an earlier statement, crafted by students at an East Coast private college sometime around 1970.

"The Gospel of Skip and Muffy" is an extended dialogue between two young theologians who take a startling new approach to the faith. The document suggests that young Christians of the 1970s generation did not accept Church teachings on some controversial moral issues.

B.F.D. Zeitgeist, a Professor of Serious Christianity at Dupont University, said that the Gospel of Skip and Muffy will force Christians to re-examine the nature of Church authority. He pointed to one key passage in the manuscript:

"The Church is-- I mean-- it's just a bunch of, like, rules and stuff," said Muffy.

"Yeah," Skip replied. "I mean, really. Hey, don't let that thing go out."

Ultraconservative Catholic officials may not accept the validity of the new Gospel. Spokespersons for the Newark archdiocese did not immediately return a reporter's phone call. But Msgr. Pius Gr�mbling, a pastor in Hoboken, replied to queries by saying: "OK, that's right. We do not accept the validity of this document."

But Professor Zeitgeist doubts that Church officials will be able to stop parishioners from raising questions about the new document. He cites "astonishing new insights" such as the one contained in this passage:

"Have you ever thought," said Skip, "that the solar system is just like an atom in this really gigantic alternate universe, and the planets are just, like, electrons spinning around, and the sun is, like, the nucleus?"

"Wow," said Muffy. "Heavy. And then we'd be, like, just tiny little, like, specks that you can't even see."

"Riiight," said Skip, exhaling slowly. "Far out, huh?"

"This document will force Christians to re-examine all of their basic moral principles," said Professor Zeitgeist, "starting with the outmoded and inhumane taboo that prevents teachers from having love affairs with their students."

"Or with reporters," the professor added, smiling. "Would you care for a daiquiri?"

Professor Litewaite said that he had found the manuscript of the Gospel of Skip and Muffy several months ago. "The significance of the discovery was immediately obvious," he said. "But my publicist suggested that I should wait until Holy Week to make it public."

This discovery has pushed us here at Viewpoint to the brink of a crisis of faith. Wait till Newsweek gets hold of the story. Or Dan Brown. Or Ingmar Bergman. Christianity may be finished for good.

European Quagmire

Jamie Glazov of Front Page Mag interviews Claire Berlinski about her new book titled The Menace in Europe. Berlinski has many interesting things to say in the interview about the cultural, social, and spiritual difficulties Europe finds itself in today. Inter alia, she says the following:

Berlinski: Europe does not seem to be able to offer its Muslim immigrants an attractive alternative, an attractive future. Muslims have done very poorly, socio-economically speaking, in Europe. This is an ongoing source of humiliation. When a viral ideology is at large, humiliation and poverty-poverty, at least, compared with the ambient society; even the poorest Muslims in Europe are still better off than Muslims in, say, Sudan-constitute a growth medium for its propagation. In the United States, Moslems have for the most part been successfully integrated into American political culture; they have been very economically successful, like most immigrants in the US. This is not so in Europe. Europe's Moslems remain for the most part uneducated and poor. Crime rates in Moslem neighborhoods are high. Unemployment in those neighborhoods vastly exceeds national averages-Moslems comprise 50 percent of France's unemployed, for example.

This marginalization extends to the political sphere. The percentage of Moslems in France exceeds that of African-Americans in the United States, but not one single Moslem sits in France's 577-seat Chamber of Deputies.

FP: So why has Europe been such a failure in coping with the threat of Islamic radicalism?

Berlinski: Well, for one thing, they generally refuse to acknowledge it. The problem is seen, but it isn't recognized, its gravity has not been suitably assessed. This passivity or indifference to the threat of Islamic radicalism has complex roots, and I discuss them at greater length in my book, but essentially I believe the answer is this: Europeans have in recent memory suffered two great losses, that of their religious faith and that of its replacements-ideologies involving the idea of human perfectibility absent supernatural guidance.

The failure of European experiments in Utopianism-which not only failed to provide the promised paradise but indeed gave rise to the most criminal regimes ever inflicted on the human race-has left Europeans paralyzed by shame and self-doubt. They have retreated into a kind of cocoon of technological and physical comfort; they bathe themselves in vapid clich�s about "tolerance." It would be almost unimaginable, for example, for a European politician to say of Islamic radicalism, "this is an unspeakably evil belief system and we must fight it to our last breath." Unfortunately, not much short of that kind of resolve is of much use when you're in a battle against what is, indeed, an unspeakably evil belief system....

Some Europeans are serious, rational and sober critics of American foreign policy, but a large number and even a majority, it seems to me, are responding to something that has nothing to do with America. We have to explain the completely disproportionate animus. Where, for example, was all this political energy when Europeans were confronted with the disintegration of Yugoslavia? Nowhere to be seen. Europe was indifferent. The members of the European Community squabbled. Genocide in Europe-once again-was halted only by American intervention. And a decade later, no one even talks about it.

Saddam Hussein's regime was rooted in the aftereffects of European fascism and anti-Semitism, but his annihilation of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs left Europeans indifferent. The American invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam, however, outraged them. Genocide in Sudan? No one in Europe cares. But the majority of Europeans earnestly believe that the United States is the second-greatest threat to world peace....

Right now economic initiative throughout Europe is crippled by excessive taxation, rigid labor laws, labyrinthine bureaucratic regulation. The European Union issues some 80,00 pages of regulations a year. It requires far more paperwork to start a small business in most European countries than it does to become inscribed on the welfare registers. Venture capitalists steer clear of Europe, preferring to invest in the United States.

Scientific initiative and scholarship is stifled in Europe too -between 1900 and 1920, France produced 20 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners and the United States produced three percent. Between 1980 and 2000, France produced only three percent of the prize winners; the United States, 58 percent. The world's great universities are no longer in Paris and Heidelberg and Bologna. They're in the United States. Europe's most talented scientists and researchers have moved en masse to the America, where funding is more generous, facilities are superior and the culture more meritocratic.

I have a friend in Paris who was working as a contractor for Total. They fired him after two years because French labor law prohibits employing contractors for more than two years; this to ensure that no corporation can evade paying a laborer his enormous due in social security. They declined to hire him as a permanent employee because it would then have been nearly impossible, under French labor law, ever to fire him. No one could be found with equivalent knowledge and competence to replace him at his salary, so they had to hire two inexperienced new contractors to do his job. So my friend is on the dole, where, by law, he is paid a percentage of the salary of both new contractors-130 percent of his former salary! Needless to say, he is not looking for a new job.

And to think that in the last election we were told more than once that we should be more like the Europeans and more sensitive to their opinions of us. We have to wonder why.

What They Want

Is there any question about what the goals of at least some of the "immigration" protestors are and who they think is most likely to help them reach those goals?

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the photo. There's also a lot more on the protests at her site.

All Aboard the Last Helicopter

In the spirit of having voted for it before he voted against it, the flipper has laid claim to a seat on the Last Helicopter. On Meet the Press yesterday Senator John Kerry, who has more flip-flops to his credit than a freshly beached trout, said this:

What I do know is unless you get that conference, unless you combine that with the threat of withdrawal and unless you set a date to move forward, it's not going to happen.

MR. RUSSERT: But by setting a specific date for withdrawal-and you say immediate withdrawal-it is a, a change in your thinking. Now, if you go back to March of '04...

SEN. KERRY: Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: ...'04, this is what you said. "Kerry says, he is committed to finishing the mission. 'My exit strategy is success,' he says, 'a viable, stable Iraq that can contribute to the stability and peace in the Middle East.'" And then a month later, you offered this.

(Videotape, April 14, 2004):

SEN. KERRY: I think the vast majority of the American people understand that it is important not just to cut and run. And I don't believe in, in a cut-and-run philosophy. I think that would be very damaging to the war on terror, it would be very damaging to the Middle East, it would be very damaging to the longer term interests of the United States.(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: And last January of, of last year, I asked you specifically about...what you are now proposing. Let's watch.

(Videotape, January 30, 2005):

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe there should be a specific timetable of a withdrawal of American troops?

SEN. KERRY: No.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: No. Now you're saying yes.

SEN. KERRY: There's no change. Yes, I am saying yes.

First he says that this is "absolutely" a change in his thinking then he says it's no change. His exit strategy, he tells us in 2004, requires a viable, stable Iraq, but if it looks like that will be tough to achieve then his strategy morphs into a policy of get out now. All of this, he wishes us to understand, is perfectly consistent. Senator Nuance defends his no-change change with these words:

[W]hat I said back then was based on the fact that the presumption of everybody, Tim, was that we were fighting al-Qaeda principally and that we were looking at the, at the, at the war on terror.

What difference does it make whether the people we are fighting are al-Qaeda or Saddam loyalists who will surely destabilize the country as soon as we leave and who will certainly be a threat to the U.S. if they regain control? These people don't wear uniforms. Whether they belong to al-Qaeda or not they're all scum from the same pond, and as long as they are able they will prevent Iraq from becoming the stable state that Kerry said in 2004 was his precondition for withdrawal. The distinction Kerry is trying to draw between al-Qaeda and the Baathist insurgents is one that makes no practical difference.

He then went on to a tout John Murtha's over-the-horizon strategy:

Secondly, the fact is that I have recommended, as Jack Murtha has, and others, that you have an over-the-horizon capacity. You don't withdraw completely from the region, you don't leave it exposed to the Iranians and others. And all of this has to happen with this date and accordslike summit taking place at the same time.

If we withdraw conditions will almost certainly deteriorate, as Russert points out elsewhere in the interview. What, then, is the point of withdrawing in the first place? If we have to go back in it will be infinitely more difficult to pull off both logistically and politically. Kerry knows this. We are no more likely to re-enter Iraq once we leave than we were to re-enter Vietnam once the last helicopter left Saigon. Kerry and the summer soldiers and sunshine warriors of the Democrat party know that to leave will be a defeat for the United States and for Bush. The latter, in their minds, amply justifies the former.

Bush Didn't Lie? So What.

Ever since the spring of 2003 the administration's critics have proclaimed that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and that there's no evidence that he had anything to do with terrorism directed against the United States.

Documents taken from Iraq, which are just now finally being translated, have consistently refuted these claims, however. One of the latest developments concerns a document that clearly is an order to recruit Iraqi suicide terrorists from the Fedayeen Saddam willing to strike at "American interests."

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters has done some important leg work on this one, but the most thorough summary of the contents of the documents that we've come across is in Investor's Business Daily:

The latest in a stream of eye-opening Iraqi documents shows Saddam Hussein's regime was planning suicide attacks on U.S. interests six months before 9-11. Why won't Washington get the word out? Last month the Pentagon began releasing records captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Among the documents is a letter dated March 11, 2001, written by Abdel Magid Hammod Ali, one of Saddam's air force generals.

According to an unofficial translation, Page 6 of the letter asks for "the names of those who desire to volunteer for suicide mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American interests." Assuming the document's accuracy, this shows that Saddam's regime was not only providing aid and support for terrorist organizations of other countries. It was also planning its own bombings directed at U.S. facilities and personnel.

As counterterrorism consultant Dan Darling wrote last week on the Weekly Standard's Web site, that would mean Russian intelligence services under Vladimir Putin were better informed about Iraq's terrorist abilities than the U.S. spy community. Though little noticed by the press, during a July 2004 visit to Kazakhstan the Russian president said that between 9-11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received . . . information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the U.S. and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations."

This new document, said Darling, "would seem to refute a long-standing contention among members of the U.S. intelligence community that Iraq ceased its involvement in international terrorism after its failed 1993 plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush." Darling cites former National Security Council official Richard Clarke's book "Against all Enemies," which contends that the NSC, the CIA and the FBI all agreed Iraq posed no terrorist threat to the U.S.

Excerpts from a long, recently declassified report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Iraqi Perspectives Project will be published in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Looking at the "Blessed July" document, Foreign Affairs notes this "regime-directed wave of 'martyrdom' operations against targets in the West (was) well under way at the time of the coalition invasion."

Equally embarrassing to our spies is another newly released document from 1999 detailing plans for a "Blessed July" operation. According to the English translation on the Foreign Military Studies Office's Joint Reserve Intelligence Center Web site, Saddam's older son Uday ordered 50 members of the fanatical "Fedayeen Saddam" group to stage bombings and assassinations in Iraq and Europe - including London, where 10 people were assigned.

The Pentagon has obviously been sitting on a treasure trove of paper incriminations against Saddam's regime. So far, just a minuscule amount of the more than 3,000 hours of tape recordings of Saddam and 48,000 boxes of intelligence documents has been translated and deciphered. What has come out so far has confirmed Americans' worst fears about Saddam's evil regime. To review:

Saddam is heard on a 1997 tape predicting terrorism would soon be coming to the U.S., while his son-in-law - who was in charge of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction - gloats about lying to U.N. weapons inspectors to hide the extent of Iraq's WMD program.

Saddam, in a tape made in 2000, talks with Iraqi scientists about his plans to build a nuclear device. He discusses Iraq's plasma separation program - an advanced uranium-enrichment technique completely missed by U.N. inspectors.

An Iraqi intelligence document, released just two weeks ago, describes a February 1995 meeting between Saddam's spies and Osama bin Laden. During that meeting, bin Laden offered to conduct "joint operations" with Iraq. Saddam subsequently ordered his aides to "develop the relationship" with the al-Qaida leader.

A fax, sent on June 6, 2001, shows conclusively that Saddam's government provided financial aid to Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf is an al-Qaida offshoot co-founded by bin Laden's brother-in-law.

These are just a few of the revelations about Saddam and terrorism to be found in a handful of documents and tapes. When all are fully translated, we're betting the terror links will be clear, damning and irrefutable.

At present, we're relying too much on translations by bloggers and other amateurs. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., says the White House has been dragging its feet for fear of embarrassing supposed allies (such as Russia) whose links with Saddam would come under scrutiny.

These documents make it even plainer who our enemies are and why we're at war. The administration should move to get out accurate translations so Americans can better understand why we fight.

The shame of it is that those who've been shouting the loudest about Bush having lied to us will be unmoved by evidence such as this. These people don't care about evidence except insofar as the lack of it can be used as a club with which to kneecap the administration. If it turns out, as it certainly appears, that Saddam gave the world ample reason to believe he was hiding WMD and that he was involved in terrorist activity against the U.S., the critics will just shrug and cast about for whatever other cudgel they can wield to continue their on-going mugging of the president.

From the left's point of view their fight is not really about the war, it's not even about Bush, it's about using whatever means are necessary to put the country back on a trajectory leading to a secularized, egalitarian, socialist, demilitarized indentured servant of the United Nations. The "Bush-lied-about-Iraq" meme was useful to this end, but if it no longer works something just as serviceable will soon be found to employ in its stead.

If I May...

On the issue of "Living like Jesus" I would humbly suggest an alternative way to look at the subject.

All of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There is no way we can "live like Jesus".

The four gospels present our Lord in four different perspectives. In the book of Mathew as Jehovah's KING. In the book of Mark as Jehovah's SERVANT. In the book of Luke as Jehovah's MAN. And in the book of John as Jehovah HIMSELF...GOD.

In each of these perspectives, Jesus demonstrated perfection in each of these roles.

To live "like" Jesus would require that we be as GOD and as we are fallen man we have no ability in and of ourselves to attain to such a goal. It simply isn't possible and any attempt to do so will fail utterly. But there is a way for the world to see Jesus in us and the way is for Jesus to live through us.

While space doesn't permit a full treatment of my position here, I'd suggest to our readers that are interested to check out Robert Mulholland's The Deeper Journey. In his book, Mr. Mulholland speaks to our "false self", a self-referenced self. It is this "self" that most of us are and it's only through the dying of this "self" that Christ can live in and through us. Consider the following references of Christ's indwelling us:

• Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you...(Rom 8:9-10)
• He is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful in you. (2 Cor. 13:3)
• Do you not realize that Christ is in you? (2 Cor. 13:5)
• My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you (Gal 4:19)
• Christ in you, the hope and glory. (Col 1:27)

It is only as we crucify our "false self" that Christ is able to live in us and then and only then the rest of the world may perceive us as living "like Jesus".

Bottom line...it's not something we do. It's something Jesus does through us.

Taking the Collar

The Washington Post's Richard Cohen invariably fails to be persuasive in his columns, and his latest effort keeps his record unblemished. He argues that Zacarias Moussaoui should not receive the death penalty for his role in the 9/11 attacks. It's not that he doesn't deserve it, mind you. Rather it's that the death penalty is what he wants and we shouldn't help him get what he wants. Even by Mr. Cohen's lax standards, this is nonsense.

He writes:

[The world] might marvel at how much effort had gone into the killing of a single man. They will note his trial and the lengthy part of it devoted to determining if he is worthy of the death penalty and then whether or not he will get it. The process is almost a parody of justice -- a laborious procedure to carry out what most of us recognize is nothing more than revenge.

Or, contrarily and at least as plausibly, the world will note how careful we are to make sure that the man has every opportunity to establish his innocence and to demonstrate compelling reasons why he should not die.

Call it justice if you will, we all know what it really is.

In other words, it's only pretend justice to bend over backwards to ensure this man his legal rights. It's not really justice if the whole process culminates in Moussaoui's execution. And why would that be? The only answer is that the death penalty is inherently unjust. Cohen's assumption that anything we do to protect Moussaoui's rights means nothing if the end result is his execution makes everything else he's about to offer as reasons for not killing the terrorist a hypocritical smoke screen.

Moreover, we wonder why Cohen assumes that if the execution is for revenge that it is therefore not just. What reason does he give for assuming that revenge and justice are mutually exclusive? Unfortunately, he simply assumes that we'll agree with him and lets the matter drop with no explanation.

He seems determined to become a martyr. He might have slipped the noose after the government bollixed up its own case when a lawyer coached some witnesses. Had he simply not taken the stand and let his lawyers talk for him, he might have averted the death penalty. Not only did he insist on testifying, he was insulting and unfeeling and downright hateful. Here was a man crying out for execution. With the government's help, he will attain what he always wanted -- martyrdom.

If I had my way, I would deny Moussaoui his opportunity. I would do so not just because it is pretty clear the man is crazy and, on account of that, he played a marginal role at best in the 9/11 plot, but because I would not complete the plot for him. I would not grant him what he wanted from the day he stepped foot in America -- his own death. If, in his case, the punishment is to fit the crime, then he would suffer most by spending the rest of his life behind bars. When he dies of old age, he will have been forgotten. In no place will people gather to mark his death. That will not happen if he is executed.

No, execution is not what he wants. He wants to die in the act of killing as many Americans as he can. If he is executed by the state that won't happen. His death will be shrouded in ignominious failure. As long as he is alive, though, he will harbor a hope that somehow, someway, he will one day find himself in a position where he can carry out his dream. Why not argue that he should be denied that hope and that opportunity? Why not argue that he should die knowing full well that his life was wasted?

The answer, of course, is that these are not Cohen's real reasons for being reluctant to execute him. Cohen is simply being disingenuous. In the end he comes right out and admits it:

Of course, I would not seek his death in any case. I am opposed to capital punishment -- not for Moussaoui's sake or for another guy's, but for our own. The taking of life is something we should not permit government to do. In the first place, life is inviolate.

The death penalty is wrong, Cohen claims, because human life is inviolate, but where does that come from? What makes it inviolate? Why is it wrong for a government to put a man to death? Cohen gives us no answer. He just assumes the reader will nod in agreement with this amiable sentiment and move on without giving it any further thought.

Second, governments have abused this power in the past and will do so in the future. It is no accident that Europe bans the death penalty. Under Hitler, Stalin and others, Europeans learned what government can do.

Governments should not use the death penalty, Mr. Cohen is here averring, because it has been abused in the past. Well, now. What else should governments not do because it has been abused in the past? Incarcerate criminals? Tax citizens? Pass laws? Confiscate property? The fact that something has been abused is not in itself a reason for not doing it, it is only a reason to insure that it is done carefully and with respect for the rights of the accused. But doing it carefully in Moussaoui's case is exactly what Cohen scoffs at in the beginning of his essay.

Anyway, like spectators rooting for the kid at the bottom of the lineup who can never manage to get a hit, we keep expecting that Richard will one of these days, perhaps with a wild swing of the bat, make contact with the ball, even if only by pure luck.

Although Mr. Cohen appears to have it as his personal goal, nobody takes the collar forever.

Living Like Jesus

My friend Byron Borger, who has been an occasional guest on these pages, has a blog called Hearts and Minds Booknotes devoted to reviewing books that he sells in his shop.

In the course of discussing a set of books by a couple of authors affiliated with an organization called the Rutba Group, Byron remarks that he was "a bit surprised that nobody commented on these extraordinary books which make such expansive claims that we should all live like Jesus."

The last clause in Byron's remark got me to wondering exactly what it means to live like Jesus.

I jotted down some thoughts off the top of my head and sent them along to him. On this Palm Sunday it might be appropriate to share them with you, with only some minor emendations, along with his reply:

I thought about your comment, By, or at least the last six words of it, and I've asked myself about it a couple of questions to which, as is often the case, I have no good answers.

To what extent would the authors you write about say we should pattern our lives after that of Jesus? Don't misunderstand. I agree that Christ is our model, but I just don't know how far we are to take the idea of modelling our life upon that of Jesus.

If we are to take it as far as possible, of course, then we should all remain single and devote our lives fully to itinerantly preaching God's word. I suppose the Rutba group would agree that that radical sense of Christ-likeness is not incumbent upon us all, but I wonder why not.

I think the question is important because once we agree that marriage, family, and vocation are all valid callings then we find that everything changes. A single man with no job or family has relatively little stake in society. He can afford to be a John the Baptist, a prophet. All of his decisions affect mostly just him. But a husband, father, and employee has other responsibilities. He has, to take one example, an obligation to be a protector of his wife and children. As a wage-earner, provider, and citizen he also has a political obligation to society that the prophet, who sees himself, really, as none of these, can transcend.

Our status as husband, father, employee, and citizen affects our views on war and the use of force, material possessions like homes, cars, etc., and political ideology and governance. The prophet can rise above these and not soil himself in the nitty-gritty of life as it is lived by those who don't pattern their lives after that of Jesus to the extent the prophet does, but not having to live in the midst of life's nitty-gritty is not a "luxury" many of us have or feel called to.

It's one thing to live like Jesus by remaining single and living in a commune, rising above the cares of those whose commitments are less radical, but as soon as we begin to deviate from the pattern of Jesus' life in even the smallest particular we find that the consequences ramify.

So, I guess what I'm wondering is where, exactly, would the Rutba writers draw the line in terms of following Christ's example as a model for our own lives, and why would they draw it there and not somewhere else? What does it mean, in other words, to live like Jesus in 2006?

I don't expect you to respond to these questions because I'm sure you don't feel that you can speak for those guys. Even so, the line in your blog that I quoted above caused some thoughts to crystallize which had been bouncing around in the back of my mind for some time, and I wanted to share them with you.

Dick

Byron's reply is here:

Thanks Dick, good conversation. I don't want to minimize the cost of discipleship or the radical call to live fully for Christ (or to minimize his direct teachings.) But your questions are good ones. I don't think "what would Jesus do" is exactly the right question (I was chided last week for this reason by a friend who is convinced it is the wrong question, and I wasn't hard enough on an article that went in that direction and which I applauded.)

Anyway, I don't know if you were able to read through my full review of Irresistible but I did spend the last half of it mildly rebuking them for not being committed to ordinary careers and middle class cares and for being basically against institutions. I like their revolutionary spirit (and am a little suspicious of you saying that once you're married those kinds of concerns may not be as pressing....why are we willing to tolerate young men leaving their wives and children to fight in a war, but might find it excessive if they, say, pick up a hitchhiker or give away the family budget??) But, I still find the personalistic tradition, being like Francis, being like Jesus, not quite the way to go. So I hear you and appreciate your concern. Thanks.

One thing, though, that comes to mind: Jesus himself may not be the model--obviously, we need not wear his outfit, eat the same food, and be unmarried, since those things were contextualized to his calling and culture. But his teachings--ah, that is another matter. He spoke as one with authority, representing the perfect will of God. If he said to give to whomever asks, live simply, love all, not take oaths, eat with the sinners and invite the poor to your parties, well...that isn't a peculiar mimicking of his contextualized habits--like riding a donkey--but get to the heart of his message, his definition of the Kingdom, His holy commands, his ethical lifestyle. It seems fairly easy, doesn't it, to sort out the former from the later, to take seriously his ethical commands and ethos, and ignore his dietary and fashion tastes...

The question of having no wealth, being itinerate, even, are a bit in the middle ground; he didn't forbid those things, exactly, at least not having a home, but they do seem to nearly come with the territory of his teachings of being free from worldly care...

Byron

Denying the Existence of Truth

David Yeagley at FrontPage Mag.com sums up a recent debate between former Marxist radical turned conservative David Horowitz and the notorious University of Colorado professor, Ward Churchill. The debate was on the role of the instructor in the university classroom, and this passage in the summary caught our eye:

Horowitz believes that a professor should teach subjects in which he has been trained, and in which he has expertise. A professor should teach the truth, and teach "about" the subject, objectively, rather than advocate personal opinions or conclusions. The classroom is not a place for the professor's political advocacy or recruitment of followers. The classroom is not for indoctrination, nor for the preaching of ideological prejudice.

Ward Churchill believes it is impossible for the professor not to advocate his own opinions. Unavoidably, he must "profess." Moreover, Churchill denounces the idea that there is such a thing as truth, about any subject. Truth is merely the opinion of those in power, and such opinion has never been kept out of the classrooms of America. The classroom is a place of advocacy.

If Churchill really believes that there is no truth about any subject, what does he think is the point of advocacy? In the absence of truth, advocacy of one's political opinions is like advocacy of one's preferences in ice cream. According to his own assumptions nothing Churchill says is really true, so all he's doing with his advocacy is telling his students something about his own mental states. Why does he think that anyone should care about that? Indeed, if there is no truth about anything then Churchill's claim that there is no truth is self-refuting.

And this is the quality of thinking that the taxpayers of Colorado pay the guy $100,000 a year to dispense to their sons and daughters.

The Krauthammer/Viewpoint Solution

Charles Krauthammer has evidently been reading Viewpoint. Okay, maybe not, but his solution to the illegal alien problem sounds pretty much like what we advocate, for instance, here.

Forget employer sanctions. Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won't do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put cameras. Put sensors. Put out lots of patrols.

Can't be done? Israel's border fence has been extraordinarily successful in keeping out potential infiltrators who are far more determined than mere immigrants. Nor have very many North Koreans crossed into South Korea in the last 50 years.

Of course it will be ugly. So are the concrete barriers to keep truck bombs from driving into the White House. But sometimes necessity trumps aesthetics. And don't tell me that this is our Berlin Wall. When you build a wall to keep people in, that's a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that's an expression of sovereignty. The fence around your house is a perfectly legitimate expression of your desire to control who comes into your house to eat, sleep and use the facilities. It imprisons no one.

Of course, no barrier will be foolproof. But it doesn't have to be. It simply has to reduce the river of illegals to a manageable trickle. Once we can do that, everything becomes possible -- most especially, humanizing the situation of our 11 million existing illegals.

If the government can demonstrate that it can control future immigration, there will be infinitely less resistance to dealing generously with the residual population of past immigration. And, as Mickey Kaus and others have suggested, that may require that the two provisions be sequenced. First, radical border control by physical means. Then shortly thereafter, radical legalization of those already here. To achieve national consensus on legalization, we will need a short lag time between the two provisions, perhaps a year or two, to demonstrate to the skeptics that the current wave of illegals is indeed the last.

This is no time for mushy compromise. A solution requires two acts of national will: the ugly act of putting up a fence and the supremely generous act of absorbing as ultimately full citizens those who broke our laws to come to America.

It boggles the mind that the senate attempt to craft a compromise bill on how to handle illegals leaves completely untouched the problem of stopping the influx in the first place. When people are pouring into your house uninvited the first step in dealing with them is to lock the door so that the ones which are already in can be limited to a more manageable number and the ones still outside remain outside. The august senators in their infinite wisdom think the best way to stem the flow of hungry visitors into our home is to throw open the refrigerator door and stand out of the way.

Absolutes For Me But Not For Thee

Andrew Sullivan opposes fundamentalisms of all kinds, including Christian fundamentalism, presumably because fundamentalists tend to be absolutists. This is a mindset Andrew finds repugnant:

There is an absolutist, fundamentalist, authoritarian tendency in all monotheisms. Right now, that tendency is ascendant in all the major faiths - but it has become particularly dangerous in Islam. The problem is not religion as such, or faith as such. The problem is fundamentalism, and its certitude. There is another kind of religious faith - more rooted in doubt, more subject to humility in front of the ineffability of an ultimately unknowable God, less abstract, more sacramental. That kind of religion, which sees the different faith of others as an invitation rather than a threat, is compatible with liberal democracy. And it's that faith we have to recover and reinvigorate if we are to combat the excesses of both Islamic and Christian fundamentalists, and their political ambitions.

Very well, certitude is bad, humility is good. No one should ever believe that they are right absolutely and that anything or anyone is always wrong absolutely. But then how's this for absolutism?

In this inevitably emotional debate, perhaps the greatest failing of those of us who have been arguing against all torture and "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" of detainees is that we have assumed the reasons why torture is always a moral evil, rather than explicating them. But, when you fully ponder them, I think it becomes clearer why ... torture, in any form and under any circumstances, is both antithetical to the most basic principles for which the United States stands and a profound impediment to winning a wider war that we cannot afford to lose.

A little side trip to the link reveals that these words were written by ... Andrew Sullivan. Torture is absolutely wrong, Andrew avers. Evidently, whether absolutism is an evil depends upon whose absolutes are under scrutiny. Absolutism is bad when it's a phenomenon displayed by Christian conservatives, but it's entirely appropriate, and indeed morally exalted, when the absolutes are such as sophisticates like Andrew embrace.

South Park

Michelle Malkin might become a South Park fan. Here's why. Heck, after reading this we might tune in, too.

Numbers

Belmont Club links us to this site where we read the following:

81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25

What are these numbers? This week's Powerball winners? A safe deposit combo? New numbers to torment those poor b*stards stranded on the island in Lost?

No, they're the number of troops that have died in hostile actions in Iraq for each of the past six months. That last number represents the lowest level of troop deaths in a year, and second-lowest in two years.

But it must be that the insurgency is turning their assault on Iraqi military and police, who are increasingly taking up the slack, right?

215, 176, 193, 189, 158, 193 (and the three months before that were 304, 282, 233)

Okay, okay, so insurgents aren't engaging us; they're turning increasingly to car bombs then, right?

70, 70, 70, 68, 30, 30

Civilians then. They're just garroting poor civilians.

527, 826, 532, 732, 950, 446 (upper bound, two months before that were 2489 and 1129).

My point here is not that everything is peachy in Iraq. It isn't. My point isn't that the insurgency is in its last throes. It isn't. My point here isn't even to argue that we're winning. I'm at best cautiously-pessimistic-to-neutral about how things are going there.

My only point is that, at the very least, people who complain that good news coming out of Iraq gets shuttered by the press aren't crazy. I'm a regular denizen of the right-leaning blogosphere (though I spend about half my daily routine with left-leaning sites), and I was unequivically shocked when I saw this. Completely the opposite of what I'd expected. My non-scientific sample of three friends, all of whom are considerably more bullish about the prospects in Iraq than I am, revealed three people similarly surprised by these numbers. I'm guessing if I polled people on this site regarding the direction those numbers were going, and people didn't answer strategically (eg figure I was up to something from the question words), no one would predict any of those numbers were on a downward trend, or were even flat.

Again, my point isn't that we're winning. My only point is that if the data you've received left you completely surprised by these numbers, what does that really say about the completeness of the data you've received?

Incidentally, these statistics are compiled by the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank.

Wretchard at Belmont Club quotes an Armed Forces Journal article entitled "It will be better when you leave" which says that it has become so comparatively quiet in former Iraqi hotspots that the troops are wondering what to make of it:

There are more than 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, 23,000 of whom are Marines. But even in the most insurgent-infested places in Iraq, the troops aren't doing much. The Fallujahs and Mosuls and Tall Afars are history. The insurgents seem to be lying low. They're not coming out in great numbers to confront U.S. troops. They're not mounting as many effective IED attacks.

Sometimes it seems the American forces are searching for things to do - going on patrol for the sake of going on patrol. At some point that patrol is going to hit an IED - it's a numbers game. But it's unlikely that a patrol was specifically targeted. It's just bad luck.

Could the insurgents be executing a similar strategy to the Taliban in Afghanistan? As Sean D. Naylor reported in the February issue of AFJ, Special Forces officers who work closely with tribal militias in Afghanistan's most remote provinces warn that the former regime that protected al-Qaida is lying in wait, marshalling resources for the day America leaves.

If this is so then the "Last Helicopter" party, the Murthas, Pelosis, and Deans, really are "useful idiots." They're unwitting terrorism enablers whose policy prescription for withdrawal would facilitate and accomodate the Taliban/al-Qaeda strategy of waiting us out. If the Defeatocrats have their way, the enemies of peace and freedom won't have to wait long before the road is open once again to Kabul and Baghdad.

Limbaugh's Laws

Rush hits a home run with his Limbaugh's Laws on immigration:

I want to call this proposal the Limbaugh Laws. Here they are. First, if you immigrate to the United States of America, you must speak the native language. You have to be a professional or an investor. We are not going to take unskilled workers. You will not be allowed.

There will be no special bilingual programs in the schools, no special ballots for elections, no government business will be conducted in your native language. Foreigners will not have the right to vote, I don't care how long they are here, nor will they ever be allowed to hold political office.

According to the Limbaugh Laws, if you're in our country, you cannot be a burden to taxpayers. You are not entitled, ever, to welfare, to food stamps, or other government goodies. You can come if you invest here, but it must be an amount equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage. If you don't now have that amount of money, you can't come and invest. You have to stay home. If you do come and you want to buy land, okay, but we're going to restrict your options. You will not be allowed to buy waterfront property in the United States. That will be reserved for citizens naturally born in this country.

In fact, as a foreigner, you must relinquish individual rights to property. These are the Limbaugh Laws. Another thing. You don't have the right to protest when you come here. You're allowed no demonstrations, you cannot wave a foreign flag, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies, or you get sent home. You're a foreigner. You shut your mouth or you get out, and if you come here illegally, you go straight to jail and we're going to hunt you down 'til we find you.

I can imagine many of you think that the Limbaugh Laws are pretty harsh. I imagine today some of you probably are going, "Yeah! Yeah!" Well, let me tell you this, folks. Every one of the laws I just mentioned are the actual laws of Mexico, today. I just read you Mexican immigration law. That's how the Mexican government handles immigrants to their country. Yet Mexicans and others come here illegally, they protest in our streets, they get on our welfare program, and we have members of the United States Senate, both parties, doing handstands and back flips, going through every contortion possible to allow it to continue so that it doesn't make these people mad, resulting in votes against these linguini-spined populations [he meant to say politicians].

This is more than a double standard. It is an indication of just how gutless people in charge in this country are to protect the identity of this country. They don't care about border security, I know the ports deal notwithstanding, they're not doing a thing to shore up the border, because that might make somebody mad. It's a good thing there are [not] a whole lot of Arab voters in this country or the port deal would have gone through, too.

Mercifully, it looks as if the senate bill, which essentially cedes the American southwest to Mexico, is going to stall. Evidently, there are still enough Republican senators who think that America has a right to control its borders that the bi-partisan amnesty bill isn't going to make it to the floor for a vote. This will be seen as a defeat for the president and we say it is one defeat we are glad to see.

Any bill which does nothing to stem the flow of illegals across the border will only make the problem worse. What we do with the illegals who are here now is important. What we do to stop more from pouring in is absolutely crucial. The senate bill does nothing at all to dam the flood.

Taxonomy of the Religious Left

Steve Waldman constructs a taxonomy of the religious left over at Slate. He makes the demographical distinctions seem a lot more confusing than perhaps he has to - he divides the religious left into six different groups when in fact there are probably only two or three with a lot of overlap - but it's an interesting, and sympathetic, analysis nonetheless.

Waldman's six groups are: Bible-thumping liberals, Pious peaceniks, Ethnic churchgoers, Conflicted Catholics, and Religious feminists.

If you read the piece note how many times the implication of what he says about the secular left is that they're little more than unprincipled political opportunists.

Bridging the Generation Gap

In a time when much of what we read in the news about university professors makes us cringe, it is reassuring and inspiring to read an essay like this one (free subscription required) in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. The writer, Stephen Martin, is a personal friend and former student who crafts a wonderful encomium to a literature professor, Wallace Fowlie, under whom he studied in his undergrad days at Duke and the influence this man, now deceased, had on his life. It's a portrait of what a university professor should be.

I was especially struck by a powerful passage Steve quotes from one of Fowlie's many books:

"The reading and teaching of Dante always restored for me the Catholic sense of history: everything a man does in his life moves him toward his true end in God, or moves him away from it. Everything is ultimately redeemed or lost. Hell and paradise are eternal places and eternal concepts."

Steve's essay is a must read, especially for students and teachers, and, indeed, for anyone who would like to inspire young people.

RLC

A New Transitional Fossil?

The Guardian has a fascinating story on a very important fossil find, but manages, unfortunately, to draw at least one silly conclusion from it:

Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375 million years ago.

Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action - like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.

As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power.

Well, no. It's not a blow to proponents of Intelligent Design. If it turns out that the fossil really is all that paleontologists presently think it to be, it presents a difficulty only for those who believe that major biological taxa were specially created. Whether there is now direct evidence that fish evolved into tetrapods or not has no bearing on the fundamental claims of Intelligent Design theorists who argue that the universe in general, and life in particular, display remarkable evidence of having been intentionally engineered. Nothing about this discovery conflicts with that claim or any other basic principle of ID.

Someday, perhaps, journalists will be sufficiently roused from their dogmatic slumbers to actually get themselves educated on this issue. Until then, we'll simply have to be vigilant in pointing out their manifold misunderstandings and errors.

There's a lot more on Tiktaalik at the link.

Clarifying the "Immigration" Debate

The American Thinker has an outstanding piece by Herbert Meyer on the "immigration" debate that brings some much-needed clarity to the issue. Here's the first half of it:

Simply put, the debate in Washington isn't about "immigration" at all - and that's the problem.

To ordinary Americans, the definition of "immigration" is very specific: You come here with absolutely nothing except a burning desire to be an American. You start off at some miserable, low-paying job that at least puts a roof over your family's head and food on the table. You put your kids in school, tell them how lucky they are to be here - and make darn sure they do well even if that means hiring a tutor and taking a second, or third, job to pay for it. You learn English, even if you've got to take classes at night when you're dead tired. You play by the rules-which means you pay your taxes, get a driver's license and insure your car so that if yours hits mine, I can recover the cost of the damages. And you file for citizenship the first day you're eligible.

Do all this and you become an American like all the rest of us. Your kids will lose their accents, move into the mainstream, and retain little of their heritage except a few words of your language and - if you're lucky-an irresistible urge to visit you now and then for some of mom's old-country cooking.

This is how the Italians made it, the Germans made it, the Dutch made it, the Poles made it, the Jews made it, and more recently how the Cubans and the Vietnamese made it. The process isn't easy - but it works and that's the way ordinary Americans want to keep it.

But the millions of Hispanics who have come to our country in the last several decades - and it's the Hispanics we're talking about in this debate, not those from other cultures-are, in fact, two distinct groups. The first group is comprised of "immigrants" just like all the others, who have put the old country behind them and want only to be Americans. They aren't the problem. Indeed, most Americans welcome them among us, as we have welcomed so many other cultures.

The problem is the second group of Hispanics. They aren't immigrants - which is what neither the Democratic or Republican leadership seems to understand, or wants to acknowledge. They have come here solely for jobs, which isn't the same thing at all. (And many of them have come here illegally.) Whether they remain in the U.S. for one year, or ten years - or for the rest of their lives - they don't conduct themselves like immigrants.

Yes, they work hard to put roofs above their heads and food on their tables - and for this we respect them. But they have little interest in learning English themselves, and instead demand that we make it possible for them to function here in Spanish. They put their children in our schools, but don't always demand as much from them as previous groups demanded of their kids. They don't always pay their taxes - or insure their cars.

In short, they aren't playing by the rules that our families played by when they immigrated to this country. And to ordinary Americans this behavior is deeply - very deeply - offensive. We see it unfolding every day in our communities, and we don't like it. This is what none of our politicians either understands, or dares to say aloud. Instead, they blather on - and on - about "amnesty" and "border security" without ever coming to grips with what is so visible, and so offensive, to so many of us - namely, all these foreigners among us who aren't behaving like immigrants.

What this second group of "immigrants" wants is to exploit American largesse to the fullest extent possible and ultimately to transform our culture to a simulacrum of the one it left behind. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Americans resisting such a change, and those politicians of either party who react with disdain and contempt for the concerns of Americans over what they see happening to their communities and their resources are inviting electoral retribution.

al-Zarqawi Demoted

The Sheik of Slaughters has evidently suffered a humiliating demotion in rank. The Christian Science Monitor has a lengthy story on this development which begins with this:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and one of the region's most prominent insurgents, has been demoted within Al Qaeda's ranks, according to recent reports.

The Times of London writes that Huthayfah Azzam, son of Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of both Osama bin Laden and Mr. Zarqawi, said Zarqawi was stripped of his political duties two weeks ago due to concerns that his actions were hurting the Iraqi insurgency's support in the Arab world.

"The Iraqi resistance high command asked al-Zarqawi to give up his political role and replaced him with an Iraqi because of several mistakes," said Mr Azzam in an interview with al-Arabiya, the Arabic news channel. "Al-Zarqawi's role has been limited to military action," he said.

The fugitive al-Qaeda leader, who has a $25 million American bounty on his head, is credited with masterminding some of the bloodiest episodes in the Iraqi war, including suicide bombings against the United Nations, Shia Muslims and US forces and the videotaped execution of Western and other hostages.

But his tactics have alienated many Iraqis, even those sympathetic to the insurgency. Mr Azzam, whose father is known as the "prince of the Mujahidin", said that he was accused of "creating an independent group" in Iraq, "making political mistakes" and hijacking the Iraqi insurgency for his own cause.

Al Jazeera reports that, among his "political mistakes," Zarqawi appeared to have taken it upon himself to speak for the Iraqi people. Zarqawi is Jordanian, however, and thus not perceived as an appropriate spokesman for the insurgency.

"Zarqawi also took the liberty of speaking in the name of the Iraqi people and resistance, a role which belongs only to the Iraqis," Azzam said.

As a result "the resistance command inside and outside Iraq, including imams, criticised him and after long discussions demanded that he be confined to military action".

"Zarqawi pledged not to carry out any more attacks against Iraq's neighbours after having been criticised for these operations which are considered a violation of sharia [Islamic law]," Azzam said.

You can get the rest of the story at the link.

American Atrocities

Perhaps you wonder what ever happened with the investigations of those recent reports coming out of Iraq of horrible massacres perpetrated by American troops. It turns out that they were lame, if fervent, attempts by the jihadis to propagate a little misinformation and to drag the world media into another round of lamentation over America's loss of the "moral high ground," etc.

The American Thinker has the details here, but you probably knew all along that the stories were a crock. Indeed, the best indicator that they were phony was that TruthOut.org touted them as if they were a modern My Lai. When TruthOut gets excited about something that reflects poorly on the United States, which they do with remarkable frequency, you can bet your home equity that there's nothing to it.

The American Thinker article describes the first horrifying episode this way:

Over the past few weeks, two serious accusations of mass murder by Coalition units have surfaced, both involving current operations - one against the Jihadis, the other against illegal militia. Both were given a wide airing in the international media.

At Ishaqi, a village near Samarra, at some time between 1:30 and 2:30 (reported times are inconsistent, as are other details of the story) on the night of March 16, a firefight took place between U.S. troops involved in Operation Swarmer and at least one member of Al-Queda in Iraq hiding out in an isolated house.

According to the locals, the troops fought their way into the house, owned by aschoolteacher, Faiz Mratt, and tied up, beat, and then shot Mratt, his wife, their three children, his sister, her three children, his father, and a woman who was visiting. Afterward they blew up the house, set fire to three cars, and, to top things off, killed all the livestock as well.

As it turns out the story is largely false. Read the article at The American Thinker to learn what really happened.

Paris As Mother Teresa

An Indian movie director said he hopes to persuade Paris Hilton to play the role of Nobel laureate and prospective Catholic Saint, Mother Teresa, in an upcoming film.

"Her features resemble Mother Teresa," director T. Rajeevnath told AFP from the southwestern coastal state of Kerala.

The filmmaker said Hilton is on his shortlist after a computer-generated image showed a close facial match between the hotel heiress and the Albanian-born nun.

Yes, the resemblance between the two is uncanny. And who better to play the role of Mother Teresa than a rich, dumb, narcissistic socialite whose previous movie experience included a home-made sex video made by a former boyfriend that appeared on the Internet, and parts in several Hollywood B-films.

She's the perfect choice.

This Year's Pollys

Diversity run amok, suppression of free speech, discrimination against Christians, conservatives, and patriots and other rancid fruits of contemporary liberalism continue to be the norm in American higher education. The Collegiate Network (CN) has once again chronicled the worst of those abuses in its 9th Annual Campus Outrage Awards called The Pollys.

Tongue-Tied has a summary of this year's winners:

The Collegiate Network's annual nod to the PC ninnies of American academia, the Pollys, are out today. Yale University takes the top award for admitting a former Taliban bigwig with a fourth-grade education -- in the name of diversity, of course.

DePaul University also gets a nod for, as the judges put it, declaring war on free speech.

"First, the university suspended -- without a hearing -- a veteran adjunct professor for daring to debate students handing out pro-Palestinian literature on campus. Next, the administration branded as 'propaganda' a College Republican protest of a Ward Churchill speech on campus. Finally, college officials shut down an affirmative action bake-sale sponsored by the campus conservative club and charged the club member who organized the event with harassment," the network says.

The third place award is shared by officials from Stanford University and at the College of the Holy Cross, both of which tried to silence conservative alternative newspapers on their campuses after The Stanford Review and Holy Cross' The Fenwick Review mocked or criticized sacred PC cows on campus.

For the full story on why these worthies were selected to receive the highly coveted Polly go here.

The Clock is Ticking in Tehran

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly reports that Washington insiders are forecasting a late summer air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. The good news is that there is still time for the mullahs in Tehran to give up their dreams of a nuclear bomb with which to attack Israel and to blackmail, and possibly attack the U.S., through terrorist intermediaries.

If they don't, however, it looks as if war will be inevitable.

Pianka's Predicament

University of Texas biologist Eric Pianka denies that he endorses bio-terrorism, and maybe he doesn't, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that he does. Bill Dembski writes the following:

The scientific establishment is closing ranks and now portraying Pianka as a benefactor of humanity despite his recommendation that 90% of humans be eliminated by airborne Ebola (see previous entries about Pianka on this blog). For an example of the spin, look here. Interestingly, a video interview with Pianka that is available at that site has now been doctored. At the close of the interview (before it was doctored, and which was available earlier today), Pianka is heard saying: "We need to plan our collapse rather than just let it happen to us." One could almost think this is an invitation to bioterrorism.

Before you buy the upcoming media spin on Pianka ("he's just a kindly, saintly old biologist deeply concerned about overpopulation who is being misrepresented by right-wing extremists"), ask yourself if it doesn't strike you as odd that prior to making his speech before the Texas Academy of Sciences (the speech that led to all the uproar), Pianka requested cameras and tape recorders be switched off because folks aren't ready to hear what he has to say. And now, when word of what he said gets out, he wants to play the part of the injured, misunderstood party.

Let's be clear: Pianka has not recanted anything. But he is now overtly denying what he said. Not to worry. The local newspaper and Texas Monthly have tapes of a second speech in which he made essentially the same points about ridding the earth of humans. Transcripts of the second speech are being made and will be available shortly.

Professor Pianka, according to the local paper linked to at the beiginning of this post, seems to have cleaned from his web-site a lot of information that could reasonably be interpreted as inculpating. We'll be interested to see what the afore-mentioned transcripts have to say.

Berlinski, Part 3

David Berlinski continues his tongue-in-cheek interview with himself in part 3 at Intelligent Design the Future. Along the way he discusses how odd it is that there has been such a vigorous allergic reaction in the evolutionary community to Intelligent Design.

A Public Disgrace

Michelle Malkin has a photo of Cynthia McKinney's Get Out of Jail Free card:

The radio news reported last night that McKinney is going to file charges against the police officer who tried to stop her from entering the Capitol Building without going through the metal detector. This poor guy probably barely makes enough money to provide a comfortable living for his family, yet he nevertheless is prepared to defend our politicians with his life. He performs his duties as he is required by stopping this arrogant, pompous, self-important knucklehead, and she smacks him for his impertinence and calls him a racist. Then she threatens to press charges against him. These are the tactics of a low class bully.

Laboring under the delusion that she's nobility rather than a public servant, this woman evidently thinks that being elected to public office makes her somehow superior to those whose job it is to protect American citizens. She doesn't have to follow the rules that apply to the rest of us commoners. Her attitude toward this policeman, and others with whom she's had similar unseemly altercations, is a fitting metaphor for the left's attitude toward national security.

She claims that her only crime was being in Congress while black when, in fact, her crime is being in Congress while simultaneously being an imbecile.

Ms McKinney doesn't belong in the position she's in. Not only does she lack the intellectual heft required for the job, she also lacks the moral qualifications necessary for the role of a Congressperson. That someone as d�class� as she would be elected to a position of such high responsibility is a national disgrace and embarrassment.

The Right Brothers on Video

The Right Brothers rock on for Bush. Good stuff, as far as it goes. Sounds a lot like Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire.

Now, if only Bush were as right on immigration and spending as he has been on the matters the Brothers praise him for we'd be singing right along.

9 in 10 Need to Die

You're going to die an awful, painful and premature death, and what's more, you should.

One of the arguments we hear from those scientists who oppose teaching Intelligent Design in public schools is that ID will turn students off to science. Students won't want to engage in research, we're assured, if they think that biological phenomena do not have a completely physical explanation. This is nonsense, of course, but we wonder what those who are so worried about what young minds are exposed to in science class rooms think of Professor Eric Pianka down at the University of Texas.

Professor Pianka instructs his students that we have far too many people in the world right now, and that the solution is to kill off 90% of us through some natural means such as the Ebola virus. The mind reels. Do UT officials blanche at this endorsement, by one of their esteemed faculty members, of genocide on a massive scale? Yes, indeedy. They'll have none of it, sort of.

For instance, Neal Armstrong, vice provost for faculty affairs, lays down the law:

Profesor Pianka is free to say whatever he wants in his classes, Mr. Armstrong allows, but when he's advocating the deaths of 90% of the world's people in public lectures, why, then he better make it clear to his audience that he's not speaking for the University. Or else ... or else, we'll get really, really miffed.

And don't you dare think that UT doesn't have a social conscience. Mr. Armstrong goes on to leave no doubt where the University stands on the matter of encouraging genocide:

"Students should be able to discern on their own the validity of views like Pianka's, but if allegations of Pianka actively advocating human death were to be confirmed, there might be some discussion about the appropriateness of that subject. I would hope that's not what's intended. I don't think that's appropriate for the classroom, but that's my personal statement."

There might be some discussion? Not appropriate? Armstrong doesn't think it's appropriate, but, hey, that's just his opinion, and we all know that nobody's opinion is any better than anyone else's, so what does it matter? Translated, all that this mealy-mouthed administrator-speak means is that UT won't touch this issue with a ten foot pole.

Those critics, however, who, unlike administrators, are given to plain-speaking and clear thinking raise disquieting questions:

Does Pianka believe, for example, that nature will bring about this promised devastation all by herself? Or is humanity's own dissemination of a deadly virus the only answer? And more importantly, is this the motive behind his talks?

As if responding to these impertinent queries, Pianka says forthrightly: "Good terrorists would be taking [stealing] Ebola ... so that they had microbes they could let loose on the Earth that would kill 90 percent of the people."

Good terrorists?!

There seems to be some disagreement as to whether Pianka is encouraging students to facilitate the spread of an epidemic, or encouraging them to accept mass death when it comes, or whether he's simply pointing out the consequences of over-population. If it's the first, how's what he's doing any different than a terrorist urging the masses to rise up and kill the larger population?

He may be right that a worldwide pandemic is likely to happen relatively soon, but he steps beyond his field of competence, and beyond any fundamental principles of humanity, if and when he suggests that such a horror should happen.

If this is, indeed, what he believes and what he's teaching, he'd certainly have made a good and useful German in Hitler's Third Reich.

Blacks Need a War

Errol Louis calls upon his fellow blacks to go to war, but he wants them to battle against what has come to be known as black "culture." Some excerpts:

What we need is a culture war. Specifically, we need aggressive, concerted action by members and institutions of the respectable black middle class to do open combat against the rise of an ancient enemy: a bold, seductive street culture that exalts lawlessness, addiction and anti-family behavior like pimping, sexual promiscuity, ignorance and personal selfishness.

[Tavis] Smiley and civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson tend to gloss over a split that has run through black culture for more than a century: the need to choose between the narcissistic pursuit of short-term pleasure and the plodding but rewarding business of building strong families and communities, where learning is sacred and the needs of the next generation trump the cravings of the moment.

In other words, black Americans need to talk more about culture. We need to fight over it.

My former professor, Orlando Patterson of Harvard, recently weighed in on the topic in The New York Times, scolding black leaders for "the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural attributes - its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members - and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing."

"What sociologists call the 'cool-pose culture' of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up," Patterson wrote. "For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture."

That mirage of street life tempts countless kids to discard the virtues of education, hard work and personal decency.

More teachers, preachers, politicians, journalists and other black Americans with a pulpit need to enlist in the battle against the self-defeating lure of street culture.

All we are saying is give war a chance.

It has become the convention in our society that only blacks are permitted to say such things about other blacks. If a white man were to have written this column Cynthia McKinney and her hangers-on would be screaming about "racism" and "blaming the victim" and all the other threadbare slogans which have served only to rationalize black failure and which have done nothing to instill in blacks a sense that they are in charge of their own lives.

We can all, black and white, be thankful, however, that more blacks are recognizing how poorly served they have been by the culture of victimhood that the left has sold them and the reluctance of most whites to criticize a mode of life that everyone knows is deeply dysfunctional but few dare say so out loud. Whites have been so intimidated by the "who are you to judge?" menatlity that it's easier to just not say anything than to waste hours of one's time seeking to absolve oneself of the inevitable charges of racism.

Journalistic Liberalism

Is the media liberal? Do birds fly?

A recent poll by the people at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 94% of print journalists and 82% of broadcast journalists agreed that homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by society.

Additionally, 55% of all journalists think the coverage of the Bush presidency is not critical enough. About 35% think it is fair.

Those two sets of data would certainly seem to indicate that journalists as a whole reside on the liberal side of town, but they themselves apparently don't see it.

For example, 59% of the journalists responding couldn't think of any daily national news organization that is especially liberal in its coverage of the news - not the New York Times, not the Washington Post, not CBS, ABC, NBC or CNN - but 82% had no trouble at all thinking of at least one that is conservative.

Not only are journalists political southpaws, but this last item suggests that they are evidently oblivious to the fact. They believe that their convictions are reasonable and therefore they must be moderate. Those media outlets which share the same convictions as they must therefore also be moderate, and those which oppose their views must perforce be irrational right-wingers. What could be more clear?

Cynthia

Quick Quiz: Which of the following best explains the expression on Cynthia McKinney's face?

a. She just stuck her finger into a hot light socket.

b. She's being goosed by Hillary Clinton.

c. She's just been told that Dick Cheney is running for president in '08.

d. She's just been told that being a black woman does not entitle her to slug police officers.

America the Beautiful

Peggy Noonan has an absolutely lovely column in Opinion Journal that should be read by every American. America, she insists, has no shortage of heroes, and it's the greatest country in the history of the planet, yet we're placing it all at risk because we have come to doubt the inherent goodness of our principles and of our people. We no longer teach love of country, and we've allowed ourselves to lose our sense of being a mutually interdependent community. We are, she says, like a big box store. Everyone wants to go there, but there's no spirit, no real loyalty to the place, no sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves.

She crafts a wonderful piece of writing which you can read here.

Up From Atheism

How's this for irony? One of the most influential atheists of the last half of the twentieth century is being presented an award by a conservative Christian university named in honor of one of the seminal figures in the Intelligent Design movement:

La Mirada, Calif. - British philosopher Antony Flew, once considered the most prominent defender of atheism in the English-speaking world, will accept the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth on May 11 from Biola University, a Christian university in Southern California. Flew, 83, argued in books such as God and Philosophy (1966) and The Presumption of Atheism (1984) that one should presuppose atheism until evidence for God proves otherwise. Then, in 2004, the Oxford-educated philosopher stunned the intellectual world by relinquishing his long-held atheism, claiming that the natural sciences supplied evidence for the existence of a designing intelligence. Flew said that he simply "had to go where the evidence leads."

The Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth was given to Flew for his lifelong commitment to free and open inquiry and to standing fast against intolerant assaults on freedom of thought and expression. Flew drew scorn from skeptics following his shift in views. When informed that he was this year's award winner, he remarked, "In light of my work and publications in this area and the criticism I've received for changing my position, I appreciate receiving this award."

There's more on both Flew and the award at the link.