Leaving the Left

Erstwhile British leftist Stephen Pollard issues his declaration of independence from his former associates. Here's what he calls his Maida Vale Manifesto:

We the undersigned have always thought of ourselves as being on the Left. We have held it as axiomatic that the Left believed in fighting tyranny, liberating the oppressed, and spreading wealth and power.

We have had a rude awakening. When terrorists murdered thousands of American citizens, many of our fellow leftists blamed not the terrorists so much as Americans themselves. They had it coming seemed to be the view of many, if not most, of the Left.

This attitude was typified by the Left's house magazine, the New Statesman, which wrote this in its editorial after 9/11:

"American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privilege of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the US often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader."

This piece of moral degeneracy was far from being a one-off. In the aftermath of 9/11, we were shocked by the frequent incidence of similar sentiments. The New Statesman again typified this after last July's tube murders, with a picture of a rucksack on its cover, accompanied by two words in large font: Blair's bombs.

There are many decent people on the Left, who understand the difference between good and evil, and who do not ally themselves with terrorists, murderers and oppressors. The Prime Minister himself is an outstanding example of this, risking his political support within his party to do the right thing at the right time.

But the very fact that supporting the liberation of Iraq from Saddam entailed such a political risk says almost all that needs to be said about the outlook of most Labour Party MPs and members.

Add to this the relish with which large, mainstream sections of the Left - typified by the Mayor of London - now choose to ally themselves with Islamists who seek to destroy the essence of Western civilisation, who would put to death homosexuals and Jews, and who would put women in metaphorical - and sometimes literal - chains, and the moral cancer that has taken hold of the Left becomes clear.

The evidence of reality is something with which we have had to wrestle. It is not easy to acknowledge what the Left has become, and the mindset of Leftists. But that evidence is so overwhelming that we can no longer conceive of describing ourselves as being on the Left in any recognisable form.

Theoretical arguments about what is or is not a proper Left-wing position are now meaningless. The mainstream Left has demonstrated clearly which side of the battle to preserve Western civilisation and freedom it is on. The Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy.

Pollard's description of the moral and intellectual inanition of the British secular left applies no less aptly to their American counterparts.

American Muslims

Stories like this one about the attitudes of American Muslims toward terrorism are heartening.

Young People and the Church

Commonweal, a Catholic magazine on religion, politics, and culture, has a piece by Dennis Doyle that probably captures the experience of many parents as well as many young people. It starts with this:

Two months after the wedding of my nephew, Joe, and his lovely bride, Laura, I went out to dinner with them. Their wedding had been well planned and beautiful, a ceremony containing so many thoughtful elements, I'd assumed they must be very religious. Later, though, I discovered it was Laura's mother who was behind many of those touches. Being a nosy Catholic theologian, I quizzed the two of them over dinner. It was true, they admitted: they had enjoyed picking the readings for the ceremony, but as for religion itself-well, they saw themselves not as religious, but as spiritual.

Hesitantly, I started to venture a response, then pulled back.

"You're going to use your twenty-four-hour rule!" said Laura with a laugh.

We had just been discussing the topic of e-mails sent in anger and how regrettable they can be, and I'd explained my personal rule: If a message you're about to send feels too heated, wait a day and give yourself a chance to send a more measured one.

"Correct," I laughingly agreed.

Yet all of about twenty-four minutes later, there I was, plunging into the subject, animatedly sharing with them how both spirituality and religion had become very important for me around their age. I was gently attempting to prod them, and Joe felt the implicit critique. "You had your epiphany, and that's great," he said. "We haven't had ours yet."

My nephew was quick to explain that he is a true fan of religion and of sincerely religious people-even envious, sometimes, of those who are able to live out their religion in an intelligent, committed manner. But he considered himself a spectator, not a participant, and moreover saw a basic distinction between spirituality-which he viewed as a felt connection to something deeper-and religion, a human construct rooted in tradition and ideology. He had other objections. In his view, while religion can sometimes provide a structure for spirituality, it can also be divisive and limiting. Further, most people inherit their religion, making it difficult for them to freely choose a faith later.

For her part, Laura emphasized the difficulty of making exclusive commitments in this complex, pluralistic world. Like Joe, she said she wouldn't mind believing in a religion, but it was difficult for her to imagine a particular religion being the "right" one. She saw "spirituality" as a vague concept, something akin to "finding yourself," but also a positive one, suggesting a habit of being in touch with your inner core. For Laura, belonging to a particular religion would involve a type of equivocation, since invariably she would have to accept things she didn't really believe. Should Jesus be thought of as God by Hindus and Muslims as well as by Christians? If she believed that, she mused, she'd have to hope that someday the entire world would be converted to Christianity. Yet she valued religious pluralism, and considered it both healthy and beneficial. She was comfortable with Hindus remaining Hindu and Muslims Muslim. Did this acceptance of other faiths neutralize the Catholic beliefs with which she grew up?

The conversation is familiar to me. The day before I started to write this, one of my sons, a college student, informed me that he was no longer going to Mass. He said he would probably attend later in life, but for the time being, it didn't really make any difference whether he went to church or not. I was fairly calm about it-even appreciative that he saw his disaffection as a stage he was going through. But a colleague I shared the news with barked in anger (no twenty-four-hour-rule there): "Doesn't your son realize that if he goes to church every Sunday over the next twenty-five years, it will make all the difference-and that there's no way for him to know unless he does it?"

I recognize a bit of a Yogi Berraism to this logic, if not a full-scale Catch-22: my son should know something there's no way for him to know unless he does it for twenty-five years. But, paradoxically, that is the truth of it; that is how religious knowledge is acquired. And that's what I really would like to tell Joe and Laura. You won't know whether to believe unless you let yourself try.

Doyle goes on to discuss some of the reasons young people often feel disaffected from the religious traditions of their parents, and much of what he says is worth reading whether your a parent or a grown child.

He doesn't mention this explicitly, but perhaps part of the reason young people attach little importance to religion is that they see their lives as lying all ahead of them and see little need or relevance for religion. It seems like something for old people. Young adults are excited about the prospects of home, career, family, and so on. Like pioneers, they stand on the frontier of a vast and beautiful life stretching out before them filling them with a sense of meaning and purpose. It's not until they approach their middle years that some of them begin to wonder if they haven't been fooling themselves about what really is meaningful in life or whether there even can be genuine meaning apart from intimacy with God.

Not everyone asks this question, of course, and not everyone who asks it asks it in the same way or is even aware that that's the question that's been gnawing at them. But for some, maybe even for many, the question raised by the old Peggy Lee song becomes the crucial existential question of their lives: Is that all there is? Is life just a matter of acquiring things? Is happiness solely a matter of having the right house in the right neighborhood with the right spouse and going each day to the right job and watching each night the right television shows? When people start wondering if there's not supposed to be something more then they begin to realize that, as Augustine put it, "Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee."

Neutralizing the Chinese Threat

Strategy Page brings us up to date on the latest developments in President Bush's missile defense program:

The latest test of the American missile defense system, which saw a defensive missile destroy an incoming ICBM warhead, is probably the biggest step yet in the quiet neutralization of the ballistic missile arsenals of China, North Korea, and Iran. In this test, a missile launched from a base in Alaska hit and destroyed a target coming from the Pacific Ocean.

One thing to keep in mind is that this test was intended for data collection, not to test if the system could actually kill an incoming missile. The successful takedown was a bonus. The next test, intended to determine how well the system can pick out real targets from decoys, is slated for December.

The system, as it now stands, will have 18 ground-based interceptors (GBIs) by the end of 2007, and is already sufficient to have neutralized China's force of 24 DF-5 ICBMs. How is this so, considering that China has 24 DF-5 ICBMs? Simple subtraction would seem to indicate that at least six ICBMs would get through to their targets in an attempted strike.

It is true, that if the GBIs work and kill their targets, six missiles would get through. But which six will they be? That is a question China would need a clairvoyant or a fortune teller to determine. With the increased level of uncertainty about the success of the attack, China would very well decide not to launch the attack in the first place.

We note that those who scoffed at, and fought against, Ronald Reagan's concept of missile defense have had little to say about the current program. It's true that Reagan's plan called for a space-based defense and the current program employs ground based missiles, but the emphasis on weapons in space was not what earned Reagan's proposal so much opprobrium. Reagan thought it was not only feasible but morally obligatory to defend ourselves against foreign ICBMs. His critics, however, thought, back in the days of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, that self-defense was "destabilizing" and likely to result in a pre-emptive attack by the Soviets before our defense shield was up and running. Nobody seems to worry much about that anymore in this post 9/11 world.

Rocket Ride

Our media, unfailingly skeptical about anything our administration, or that of our allies, has to say about the various struggles in the Middle East, have been astonishingly credulous of reports by Hezbollah that the Israelis deliberately targeted Red Cross ambulances for missile attacks.

The Jawa Report has some video that shows how absurd the reports were and how gullible the news outlets which reported these "atrocities" had to be. Watch the whole thing.

Thanks to Michelle for the tip.

Why We Can't Leave

Last week I posted an article titled Living in a Fantasy World in which I argued that the opponents of the president are reluctant to offer a genuine alternative to his Middle East policy, other than vague and meaningless adjurations to negotiate more effectively or set a time line for withdrawal from Iraq. Their reluctance to be more specific is due to the fact that what many of them really want him to do, although they don't want to explicitly say it, is pull out of Iraq as soon as such a pullout can be accomplished.

A withdrawal before Iraq is stable and self-sufficient, however, would be a disaster of historical proportions and anyone who has thought about it surely realizes this. Thus many of the president's critics keep their counsel about what he should do, and instead content themselves with bashing him for doing what he is doing.

Why would a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq be a calamity? Consider the likely aftermath of an American military pullout. Once we are gone the following are not just possible, they're highly likely:

1. Sunni and Shia would be quickly at each others' throats in a desperate civil war for political dominance. It would be a fight for survival because whoever wins would surely oppress, if not utterly eliminate, the loser.

2. Iran would move into Iraq on behalf of the Shia and to settle old scores with the Iraqi Sunnis dating back to the Iraq/Iran war in the 1980s. They would doubtless annex the oil fields in the south. Meanwhile pressure would mount on Sunni nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to come to the aid of their beleaguered brethren. Turkey would take advantage of the chaos to settle their chronic Kurdish problem by invading northern Iraq. Syria would be sorely tempted to grab some oil fields wherever they could. Iraq would get carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey among its neighbors and would be almost completely helpless to prevent it.

3. Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations would exploit Iraq's weakness to establish training areas and safe havens in the country from which to launch terrorist attacks around the world.

4. Anyone who collaborated or cooperated with the coalition would be marked for torture and death by the insurgent forces. This would come to perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis.

5. The chaos of war and the rape of the country's resources would result in severe shortages of food, water, medical care, sanitation, and electricity. Perhaps millions of Iraqis would starve or perish from disease if these conditions persisted more than a few months.

6. The United States would be thoroughly discredited and blamed for the misery and strife in Iraq because of our retreat. No nation would ever trust us again to honor a commitment. Pressure from their people would cause governments in Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar to insist we abandon our bases there. Other Muslim nations, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Indonesia, seeing that we are undependable partners in the war on terror, would ratchet back their cooperation. As the last American helicopter flies out of Baghdad, every Arab nation that has the money will begin looking for nuclear weapons to protect themselves from the blackmail and threats of the Iranians.

7. Our lack of credibility in the region would embolden Israel's neighbors to settle the "Zionist problem" once and for all. Once we start pulling out of the Middle East it would be psychologically almost impossible to reverse course and go back in, and the Arab enemies of Israel know this. Thus they would see our withdrawal as presenting them with a golden opportunity to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and Israel may have to resort to nuclear weapons to keep that from happening.

It may be, of course, that none of these things would occur. It may be that in the vacuum created by our absence the Shia and Sunni would turn their swords into plowshares and live amicably with each other.

It may be that other nations would not be at all tempted to grab what they can of Iraq's oil wealth.

It may be that al Qaeda feels safe enough in the hills of Pakistan that they wouldn't move in force into Iraq.

It may be that the insurgents would forgive and forget the collaboration of their fellow Iraqis with the coalition.

It may be that Israel's neighbors would feel sorry for Israel in their weakened and vulnerable state and offer to make peace instead of war.

It may be that tomorrow will be the day of the Second Coming, but all of our experience tells us that it probably won't be, and it is our experience which should inform our judgments and policies.

To withdraw from Iraq before Iraq can fend for itself would be the most immoral course of action we could follow as a nation. It would consign tens of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis to almost certain death and would earn us the contempt of history for such a reprehensible betrayal. This prospect doesn't seem to bother some, but it should confer a deep sense of obligation, it seems to me, upon anyone who strives to fulfill the Biblical mandates to do justice and love our neighbor.

The Advantage of Playing Away

Strategy Page makes the interesting point that:

Since the United States took the offensive in the war on terror, nearly all the Islamic terror attacks have been in Moslem countries [The attack in Madrid being a notable exception. ]. The American move in to Iraq and Afghanistan is an ancient tactic, and is also called "forward defense," or "taking the war to the enemy." In addition to Iraq, where Sunni Arab nationalists have joined forces with Islamic radicals to try and gain control of the country, there is also lots of Islamic terrorism in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. There's some, but much less, activity in places like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia.

They go on to explain why they think al Qaeda will eventually lose the global war which they've initiated.

RLC

The Mystery of Consciousness

Robert Wright interviews evolutionary icon John Maynard Smith on the mystery of consciousness and seems driven toward the conclusion that perhaps there is a God after all. Smith demurs. Their exchange can be viewed here.

Consciousness poses a challenge to materialism in that it's very difficult to conceive of an explanation for how matter could produce sentience, self-awareness, and abstract thought purely by chance and the laws of nature. The materialist believes that consciousness is just a product of the chemical and electric phenomena occuring in the brain, and it may be, though I doubt that it's that simple, but the salient question is not just what consciousness is and what generates it, but how did it ever emerge.

It is as if, the materialist would have us believe, an ocean of computer parts was somehow, through the action of blind physical forces, able to gradually construct a machine that was aware of itself and of its environment. This, if it happened, would be a feat every bit as miraculous, if not moreso, than turning water to wine or parting the Red Sea, events at which materialists are generally given to scoff.

The origin of consciousness, along with the origin of life itself, may well be the two greatest mysteries confronting human understanding today and are certainly two of the greatest difficulties with a materialist worldview.

Barely Juvenile

This article prompts us to ask what message, exactly, is walking around in one's altogether supposed to send? Does a naked body make some sort of political statement? If so, what could it possibly be? "Hey, look at me I'm a liberal!"

Does the individual who strips him or herself down to the bare essentials simply crave attention? Are they psychological cousins to "flashers" who, like monkeys in the zoo, find amusement in flaunting their most personal accoutrements in front of others? Are they deluded exhibitionists who think that their naked anatomy is a turn on for bystanders? Are they nothing more than rude, and perhaps deranged, souls who simply enjoy embarrassing others?

If exposing oneself is merely a symbol of rebellion it seems pretty childish: "Okay, George Bush, if you're going to go to war in Iraq I'm going to show the world my willy!" What deeply suppressed obsessions and neuroses do these people feel the need to liberate?

Maybe a psychiatrist could tell us why the folks who do this sort of thing think it is anything other than a sign of a deeply troubled id and/or arrested development and why communities think that it's somehow "progressive" to permit it.

Alienating Religious Moderates

Slate's Amy Sullivan laments the rapid drop-off in the polls of those who believe that the Democratic party is "friendly" toward religion:

[I]t is startling that in the two years since this Democratic revival began, the party's faith-friendly image has dimmed rather than improved. The Pew Research Center's annual poll on religion and politics, released last week, shows that while 85 percent of voters say religion is important to them, only 26 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is "friendly" to religion. That's down from 40 percent in the summer of 2004 and 42 percent the year before that-in other words, a 16-point plunge over three years. The decline is especially troubling because it cuts across the political and religious spectra, encompassing liberals and conservatives, white and black evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

Ms Sullivan, however, mistakenly attributes this decline to Republican mischief:

In the past year, stunts by the right have taken a toll on the Democrats. There are the repeated Justice Sunday events, in which Republican congressional leaders bravely defend America from the onslaught of liberal activist judges, and the War on Christmas hysteria, in which Bill O'Reilly defends baby Jesus from secular tyrants at Target. If you say anything enough times on Fox (see: Saddam Hussein, role in 9/11 attacks), you can get some people to believe it. It's not a surprise that all of this affects conservatives' views of the Democratic Party's faith-friendliness. Of more concern to Democrats is the effect such tactics have on moderate voters. The percentage of self-identified political moderates and independents who believe Democrats are friendly to religion each dropped by 18 points over the past two years, according to Pew. These respondents may not exactly believe the rhetoric of Justice Sunday, but it seems to have planted a seed of doubt in their minds.

As long as Democrats continue to believe that their problems with Christian voters stem from Republican propaganda they'll never recover the confidence of those religious moderates whose estrangement Ms Sullivan bemoans. The reason for the disaffection among religious voters is simple and can be discerned by pondering the following six questions:

• Which party most strongly supports abortion on demand?
• Which party most strongly supports gay marriage?
• Which party most strongly supports the secularization of our culture?
• Which party's policies are most congenial to our cultural "slide into the sewer"?
• Which party is most strongly opposed to school choice?
• To which party do most militant atheists and agnostics belong?

In the answers to those questions lies the root of the Democrats' problem with religious voters.

By the way, Sullivan has a funny line in her essay where she drily observes that "random-seeming insertions of Bible verses into floor speeches came off as Tourette's syndrome for Democrats." Good one.

Speaking PoMo

College students who wish to impress their post-modern professors with their ability to master the art of speaking PoMo might try this site where links at the bottom of the article will take you to a PG (Postmodernism Generator) to help you construct (and maybe deconstruct) essays like the one at the page. The essays are total nonsense, of course, but that seems to be the point.

Thanks for the tip to Uncommon Descent.

Parody

The satirical ScrappleFace has some "comments" from Nancy Pelosi on the anniversary of Katrina and a few remarks by President Bush in response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's insistence that Iran's nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes:

One Year Later, Some Katrina Victims Still Slow to Respond

One year after hurricane Katrina, despite an outpouring of billions of dollars from government, church and private charity, and countless teams of volunteers who have come to their aid, many residents of New Orleans have still failed to restore their homes and neighborhoods, or even to clean up the storm-tossed debris, according to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA.

"Katrina was a tragedy in itself," Rep. Pelosi said at a news conference in a neighborhood where moldy furniture still lay in front yards, "but it exposed a tragedy of greater proportions. Some people in this region have lost the spirit of our forefathers - the work ethic, the persistence, the determination to overcome adversity."

The California lawmaker said that when she becomes the next Speaker of the House she plans to use her new prominence to tell Americans to "stop expecting the federal government to protect you from natural disasters, and to bail you out afterward."

When reporters asked what might be learned in the aftermath of Katrina, Rep. Pelosi said there were at least three lessons.

"One: don't buy a house between a lake and the sea that's built below sea level," she said. "Lesson two: if there's a hurricane coming, get out of town. And lesson three: if your home gets wrecked, clean up the mess and start rebuilding - like many people on the Gulf Coast have already done - or at least rip it down, cart off the debris and start over on higher ground."

Rep. Pelosi reserved her harshest comments for people who have "made a lifestyle out of blaming President Bush for everything."

"Were you expecting President Bush to show up at your door and whisk you to safety in his armored SUV?" she asked rhetorically. "After the storm, did you think he was going to skydive out of Air Force One and start shoveling the junk out of your living room? Wake up and smell the personal responsibility. What have you been doing for the last 360 days? Get off your keister, organize your neighbors and get this mess straightened up."

Asked if she was concerned that her remarks might be perceived as "less than compassionate," the lawmaker said, "Compassion does not mean fostering a culture of dependency that leaves people vulnerable and helpless when the inevitable trials come."

"Sometimes the greater part of compassion," she added, "is challenging people to use their God-given abilities in a way that preserves their human dignity and strengthens them for the next crisis."

Bush: B-2 Flights Over Tehran for 'Peaceful Purposes'

Just hours after Iran opened a new plant capable of making plutonium "for peaceful purposes", U.S. President George Bush assured his Iranian counterpart that any B-2 bombers that appear over Tehran in the near future would also serve peaceful purposes.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cut the ribbon on the new heavy-water nuclear plant Saturday as part of a month-long Iranian tribute to the effectiveness of the United Nations.

Mr. Bush hailed Iran's "transparent diplomacy" and said, "I called President Ahmadinejad today to congratulate him, and I told him that if he happens to notice one of them Stealth bombers going over his town at about 600 miles per hour, he can be assured that the pilot has only the best intentions in his heart for world peace."

"There's nothing like the B-2 when it comes to giving peace a chance," Mr. Bush added.

There's more at the link.

The Long March

Christianity Today has an interesting interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff in which Kristoff, no friend of orthodox Christianity, shares his thoughts on how the evangelical wing of Christianity has evolved over the last couple of decades. Surprisingly, perhaps, he's very sympathetic, probably because he sees evangelicals as allies in some of the causes to which he is committed.

At one point, however, he makes this rather patronizing statement, which is as gratuitous as it is misleading:

Christianity has certainly been growing since the early 1980s. But in the past there's been a certain stigma attached to it among some intellectual quarters, because often the Christians have been peasants. It struck me that in the last few years there have been more intellectuals in the cities converting to Christianity.

If Kristoff thinks that the phenomenon of urban intellectuals converting to Christianity is something that's just been happening over the last few years he simply hasn't been paying attention. Christians, unwittingly following the advice of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (d. 1937), have been making their long march through the institutions of our culture at least since the sixties. Perhaps what Kristof means is that having begun this process decades ago Christian intellectuals have only recently begun to arrive at the pinnacles of their professions and begun to be noticed by observers such as himself.

Even so, there's much left to do and it seems that there's little time in which to do it. As the culture unravels in its lemming-like pursuit of hedonistic gratification, consumerism and materialism can enough people with a clear vision of what a culture should be move into positions of influence soon enough to forestall what George Will has called our "slide into the sewer"? One hopes ... and prays. If not, given our current trajectory, what will our children's and grandchildren's world be like?

We need to keep marching, and maybe even pick up the pace a little.

Big Loser

Amir Taheri writes that Hezbollah has been severely shaken by the recent unpleasantness with Israel and that the ramifications of this will play out for years into the future:

Why did Nasrallah decide to change his unqualified claim of victory into an indirect admission of defeat? Two reasons.

The first consists of facts on the ground: Hezbollah lost some 500 of its fighters, almost a quarter of its elite fighting force. Their families are now hounding Nasrallah to provide an explanation for "miscalculations" that led to their death.

What angers the families of the "martyrs" is that Hezbollah fighters had not been told that the sheik was starting a war to please his masters in Tehran, and that they should prepare for it.

The fighters found out there was a war only after the Israelis started raining fire on southern Lebanon. In fact, no one - apart from the sheik's Iranian contacts and a handful of Hezbollah security officials linked to Tehran and Damascus - knew that Nasrallah was provoking a war. Even the two Hezbollah ministers in the Lebanese government weren't consulted, nor the 12 Hezbollah members of the Lebanese National Assembly.

The "new Saladin" has also lost most of his medium-range missiles without inflicting any serious damage on Israel. Almost all of Hezbollah's missile launching pads (often placed in mosques, schools and residential buildings) south of the Litani River have been dismantled.

Worse still, the Israelis captured an unknown number of Hezbollah fighters and political officers, including several local leaders in the Bekaa Valley, Khyam and Tyre.

The second reason why Nasrallah has had to backtrack on his victory claims is the failure of his propaganda machine to hoodwink the Lebanese. He is coming under growing criticism from every part of the political spectrum, including the Hezbollah itself.

Last week he hurriedly cancelled a series of victory marches planned for Beirut's Shiite suburbs after leading Shiite figures attacked the move as "unmerited and indecent." Instead, every village and every town is holding typical Shiite mourning ceremonies, known as tarhym (seeking mercy), for the dead.

As the scale of the destruction in the Shiite south becomes more clear, the pro-Hezbollah euphoria (much of it created by Western media and beamed back to Lebanon through satellite TV) is evaporating. Reality is beginning to reassert its rights.

And that could be good news for Lebanon as a nation. It is unlikely that Hezbollah will ever regain the position it has lost. The Lebanese from all sides of the political spectrum are united in their determination not to allow any armed group to continue acting as a state within the state.

Read the rest of Taheri's analysis at the link.

Inside a Cell

Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts tells us that:

One of the best scientific animations ever can be found here.

It illustrates the process of leukocyte extravasation, but focuses largely on a protein's-eye view of the various events that take place inside the cell. You'll see both the assembly and disassembly of actins and microtubules, the shuttling of the cargo vesicles by the motor protein kinesin, the export of RNA through the nuclear pore complexes, the assembly of ribosomes on the RNA along with translation, the shuttling of ribosomes to the surface of the endoplasmic reticulum, the transport of vesicles to the golgi complex, and the exocytosis and activation of new receptors. Many details are missing and this is only a three minute excerpt from an eight minute animation.

The video is pretty neat although there's no explanation of what you're seeing. Even so, it's a remarkable piece of animation, especially if you appreciate biological beauty and are impressed by the amazing complexity of living cells. It just astonishes me to think that blind, purposeless processes and forces could produce such a marvel of engineering, but it must be so, after all, because people like Richard Dawkins assure me that it is.

For a little background on the clip go here.

What's Really Going On?

The bottom line for much that is going on in the Middle East today may be found at the link below. You may want to read this excerpt serveral times so it really sinks in...

"Moreover, any asset, regardless of location, that is denominated in dollars is a US asset in essence. When oil is denominated in dollars through US state action and the dollar is a fiat currency, the US essentially owns the world's oil for free. And the more the US prints greenbacks, the higher the price of US assets will rise. Thus a strong-dollar policy gives the US a double win."

Read the entire article here.

Fighting Terrorism With Non-Violence

Sojourners magazine ran a column recently by David Cortright which lays out a case for adopting a non-violent strategy against terrorism. As much as I'd like to be assured that there is a non-violent approach that would work against Islamic terrorism, I just don't think he makes a very good case. In fact, I think his argument is exceptionally naive.

He writes:

In the months after 9/11, Jim Wallis challenged peace advocates to address the threat of terrorism. "If nonviolence is to have any credibility," he wrote, "it must answer the questions violence purports to answer, but in a better way." Gandhian principles of nonviolence provide a solid foundation for crafting an effective strategy against terrorism.

Nonviolence is fundamentally a means of achieving justice and combating oppression. Gandhi demonstrated its effectiveness in resisting racial injustice in South Africa and winning independence for India. People-power movements have since spread throughout the world, helping to bring down communism in Eastern Europe and advancing democracy in Serbia, Ukraine, and beyond. The same principles - fighting injustice while avoiding harm - can be applied in the struggle against violent extremism.

At the outset he has caused me some doubt. In every case he cites where pacifist approaches were successful they were employed by oppressed and relatively powerless citizens against their own government. We find ourselves in a very much different situation vis a vis the Islamists. We are not yet governed by the Islamists nor do we have any non-violent tools at our disposal such as passive non-compliance, etc. which would be relevant to our circumstance. Moreover, in the cases Cortright mentions the goals of the oppressors were political whereas the goals of the Islamists are primarily religious. It was not in the interest of the oppressors in Cortright's examples to kill off their citizens, but it is very much in the Islamists interests, as they see it, to kill off all the infidels.

Bush administration officials and many political leaders in Washington view terrorism primarily through the prism of war. Kill enough militants, they believe, and the threat will go away.

I share Cortright's skepticism that we'll ever be able to "kill enough militants" to make the threat disappear entirely. But just because killing terrorists is not a sufficient condition to ending terrorism it doesn't follow that it's not a necessary condition. It may be that without killing at least some terrorists no diplomatic solution will work.

The opposite approach is more effective and less costly in lives. Some limited use of force to apprehend militants and destroy training camps is legitimate, but unilateral war is not.

What does he mean by "unilateral war"? In what sense is the war on terrorism unilateral? He doesn't say, but surely he doesn't mean that we're fighting against an enemy who is not himself fighting us. He must mean that we're alone in fighting the enemy, but if this is his meaning then not only is the statement false but it's absurd. There are many nations which have joined us in this struggle in one way or another and depending on where the conflict is being fought other nations will join us as well. We can't permit ourselves to think that just because the French aren't willing to help that therefore we're all alone. Moreover, even if we were fighting the battle by ourselves his statement is patently absurd. If one is fighting for one's life one doesn't give up the fight just because no one else will help.

In the three years since the invasion of Iraq, the number of major terrorist incidents in the world has increased sharply. War itself is a form of terrorism.

Here Mr. Cortright is succumbing to the temptation to indulge in rhetorical excess. Terrorism, ab defino, is the deliberate use of violence against innocent civilians in order to effect a change in their government's conduct. The United States is not, as a matter of policy, engaging in deliberate violence against the citizens of Iraq or any other country. War is only a form of terrorism if terrorism is defined as an activity in which people are deliberately killed. This definition, however, would have the unhappy consequence of making regular police work terrorism.

Using military force to counter terrorism is like pouring gasoline on a fire. It ignites hatred and vengeance and creates a cycle of violence that can spin out of control. A better strategy is to take away the fuel that sustains the fire. Only nonviolent methods can do that, by attempting to resolve the underlying political and social factors that give rise to armed violence.

It could be as easily argued, though, that the refusal to fight back against terrorism only emboldens those who would not otherwise join with the terrorists to do so and thereby increases the number of terrorists with which one must contend. Cortright's reasoning is the same that every bully hopes his victim will adopt: No matter what the bully does, no matter how savagely he beats his prey, the victim should not strike back in self-defense because that will only make the bully angrier.

The most urgent priority for countering terrorism, experts agree, is multilateral law enforcement to apprehend perpetrators and prevent future attacks. Cooperative law enforcement and intelligence sharing among governments have proven effective in reducing the operational capacity of terrorist networks. Governments are also cooperating to block financing for terrorist networks and deny safe haven, travel, and arms for terrorist militants. These efforts are fully compatible with the principles of nonviolence.

No doubt these methods must be employed, but if Mr. Cortright seriously believes that police work alone will stop Osama bin Laden and other terrorists then he's deluding himself. Consider Iraq. The police in Iraq would be overwhelmed by the insurgents were they not backed by military force. What police force on earth would be able to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan or disarm Hezbollah or apprehend Osama bin Laden or Abu al Zarqawi?

Terrorism is fundamentally a political phenomenon, concluded the U.N. Working Group on Terrorism in 2002. To overcome the scourge, "it is necessary to understand its political nature as well as its basic criminality and psychology." This means addressing legitimate political grievances that terrorist groups exploit - such as the Israel-Palestine dispute, repressive policies by Arab governments, and the continuing U.S. military occupation in Iraq.

These deeply-held grievances generate widespread political frustration and bitterness in many Arab and Muslim countries, including among people who condemn terrorism and al Qaeda's brutal methods. As these conditions fester and worsen, support rises for the groups that resist them. Finding solutions to these dilemmas can help to undercut support for jihadism. The strategy against terrorism requires undermining the social base of extremism by driving a wedge between militants and their potential sympathizers. The goal should be to separate militants from their support base by resolving the political injustices that terrorists exploit.

Reading this causes me to wonder if Mr. Cortright really understands the nature of the threat we're facing today. By far the predominant form of contemporary terrorism is perpetrated by Muslims, and it is not motivated primarily by politics, it's motivated by religion. The radical Islamists wish to spread their religion throughout the globe and to purge the world of all non-Muslim influences. To the extent that they have a political grievance it is that Israel exists and must be eradicated. Everything else Mr. Cortright mentions is, in their minds, trivial by comparison. The solution to these "dilemmas" is not hard to discern, of course. We can all simply convert to Islam and abandon Israel. That is the only non-violent solution that will appease the Islamo-fascists which plague the world today.

A nonviolent approach should not be confused with appeasement or a defeatist justification of terrorist crimes.

William James once observed that "a difference, in order to be a difference, has to make a difference". I see no practical difference between appeasement and what Mr. Cortright is advocating in his article. By refusing to fight them where they are we would be giving them exactly what they want. The situation would be similar to that of a football game where one team plays by the rules but only plays defense whereas the other team plays by whatever rules it wishes and plays only offense. The prospects of the defense being successful aren't encouraging.

The point is not to excuse criminal acts but to learn why they occur and use this knowledge to prevent future attacks.

But we know why they occur. The terrorists resent our very existence. They loathe it and believe they're doing God's will by killing us. The sooner Mr. Cortright himself realizes this the sooner he'll realize how hopeless are his suggestions for how to address the threat.

A nonviolent strategy seeks to reduce the appeal of militants' extremist methods by addressing legitimate grievances and providing channels of political engagement for those who sympathize with the declared political aims. A two-step response is essential: determined law enforcement pressure against terrorist criminals, and active engagement with affected communities to resolve underlying injustices.

And if that doesn't work, what then? Mr. Cortright proposes we throw the terrorists all in jail. How are we going to do that without moving militarily into the countries which harbor them? I don't think warrants for the arrest of terrorists in Saddam's Iraq, or Mohammad Omar's Afghanistan, or Kim Jong Il's North Korea or Ahmadinejad's Iran would put very many killers behind bars. What police force on earth is capable of acting beyond the borders of its own nation? And what's the difference anyway between a police force acting beyond its nation's borders and a military force?

Ethicist Michael Walzer wrote, counterterrorism "must be aimed systematically at the terrorists themselves, never at the people for whom the terrorists claim to be acting." Military attacks against potential sympathizers are counterproductive and tend to drive third parties toward militancy. Lawful police action is by its nature more discriminating and is more effective politically because it minimizes predictable backlash effects.

Lawful police action? What's lawful when we're talking about the dysfunctional states mentioned above? Would Mr. Cortright have urged that the British send their police to arrest Adolf Hitler in 1940?

Mr. Cortright might recall what happened the last time we did what he recommends. After 9/11 we demanded that the Taliban turn over Osama bin Laden. They refused to do so. So, what does he suggest we should have done next? Should we simply have given up the attempt to capture him?

I'm certain Mr. Cortright means well and that he sincerely believes the things he writes, but his argument fairly drips with naivete. I wish it weren't so because I agree with him that violence can often be counterproductive. Unfortunately, in the present conflict it's the only realistic alternative, for both the West and for Israel, to total abject surrender to the Islamist jihad being waged against us. We're in a war for the survival of our nation and our culture. Our enemy is implacable, and a war like that can't be won solely with police officers and arrest warrants.

Just One Truth Among Many

Karen Armstrong of the Guardian writes a column in which she makes a plea for better understanding of the different religious worldviews that are floating about in the global marketplace of ideas. After subjecting us to a dose of postmodern hocus-pocus which she employs, as best as I can tell, to make the point that truth is often a complicated thing, she closes with this:

We must, therefore, make a concerted attempt to listen critically to all the stories out there in order to gain a more panoptic vision. This includes our own cultural narrative. Our modernity has liberated many of us, but it has disenfranchised others. Counter-narratives that question the myth of western freedom must also be heard, because they represent a crucial element in the conflicted, tragic whole.

I have a couple of questions: Why is it that we're always the ones who have to try to understand other people's "stories"? Shouldn't Ms Armstrong's plea for understanding be directed at the Islamists who are undertaking to purge the globe of Western civilization? Shouldn't they be expected to show greater appreciation for our "myth"?

Second, when the "other" starts flying hijacked airplanes into our skyscrapers isn't the time for acquiring "a more panoptic vision" and appreciating their "context" pretty much at an end? Or are we supposed to keep "affirming" their "narrative" right up to the moment when they've sliced our head from our shoulders?

Living in a Fantasy World

Take any critic of the administration's Middle East policy, and, after he has gone through the entire list of what the Bushies have done wrong over the past five years, ask them, well, what should the president have done before, and what should he do now? Invariably, the answer will be that he should rely more upon diplomacy and negotiations. The administration should have sat down and talked to Saddam, to Ahmedinejad, to Hezbollah, to the Palestinians, to the North Koreans. They should sit down now and talk with the Europeans and get them to put more economic pressure on the bad guys in the Middle East. The Bush administration, we will be told, is absolutely inept when it comes to the art of diplomacy. And how does the critic know this? Because our diplomatic efforts have obviously not worked.

When talks fail to bring about the desired result, as they inevitably will when dealing with Islamo-fascists, the critics' assumption is that it's our fault. It's also our fault that the French and Germans didn't go along with the invasion of Iraq because we couldn't persuade them that that would be better than raking in billions in oil for food money. It's also our fault if Ahmadinejad, convinced that he's riding the crest of history's wave, insists on provoking Armageddon. It must be our fault because all these people are reasonable and want peace. Only Bush wants war.

If the matter weren't so serious the response would be amusing. It assumes that the administration hasn't been talking, and it assumes that the other side is comprised of reasonable people who are willing to accept compromise. It assumes that the other side will make concessions, even if there's no threat of force hovering over their heads, if only we can convince them that we mean well. That none of this has come to pass can only mean, in their minds, that we've failed to persuade them of our good intentions and that our team must be negligent or incompetent negotiators.

Should we ask the critic what we should do if, for whatever reason, talks fail to convince the peace-loving Iranians and North Koreans to abandon their nuclear programs, or fail to persuade Hezbollah and Hamas to live in peace with Israel, the response will be more irrelevant, rambling, recapituations of Bush's failings as a negotiator. In other words, the critic really has no answer to this question.

Some of them might hint that what Bush needs to do, in Iraq at least, is send in more troops, but although this might indeed be an appropriate measure, few critics, especially on the left, really want him to follow through with it. They'll use inadequate troop strength as a club with which to beat him up politically until he decides to follow their advice, and then they'll accuse him of pouring more resources into a failed cause, or of diverting attention from the real war on terror, and why haven't we caught Osama yet, etc.

The conversation follows this or a similar path because critics know they can't say what they're really thinking which is that they actually want the president to do nothing at all. They want the United States to give up its power, both military and economic, and become Sweden or Switzerland. They know that saying this would be political suicide for their party, and so they stick to their criticisms and mumble through their vague and unhelpful recommendations if they must.

This is why the left cannot be entrusted with the reins of power. They have no solutions to the most pressing issue of the day and don't really want to have to wrestle with it. The seeming indefiniteness of the war on terror is a great tool to use to diminish Republicans in the eyes of the voters, but the critics on the left have no idea what they would do differently, aside from surrender, appeasement, and trying to convince the Osama bin Ladens of the world that we really mean them no harm, that we want to give peace a chance, and why can't we just all get along.

Chris Muir, in his Day by Day political cartoon strip, illustrates the point:

Like many Europeans in 1938, not a few of the president's most vocal critics are living in a fantasy world, a world as they'd like it to be, but, unfortunately, not the world as it is.

Bummed Out Bushaphobes

I haven't written much on the Valerie Plame business because I thought it was very much ado about nothing much at all. The Bushaphobes have been frothing at the mouth for three years now hoping and praying (well...maybe not praying) that somebody, preferably the detestable Karl Rove, would take a hard fall for what always seemed to me to be a very trivial peccadillo.

Now, after a fortune in tax dollars has been squandered on a feckless investigation into a non-crime, it's all over and the Bush-despisers are crestfallen and stultified yet again. The major malefactor appears to be Ms Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who seems to be an almost pathological prevaricator, and the source of the infamous leak about her identity is a State Department official, Richard Armitage, who vigorously opposed the Iraq war and is thus one of the left's angels of light.

Since no administrative heads will be rolling - except the relatively minor noggin of Scooter Libby, who I predict President Bush will now pardon - and since the villains are all Bushaphobes in good standing, the breathless media hyperventilations have suddenly flatlined, and the story is sinking as quietly as a stone in the ocean.

The Washington Post offers perhaps the best eulogy:

[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Indeed. Well, now MSNBC's Keith Olberman can go back to bashing Bill O'Reilly, and meanwhile we'll await Hardball's Chris Matthews' apology to Karl Rove for having so gleefully anticipated his indictment.