Tearing Up The Last Half-Millennium

The events of 9/11, according to Michelle Malkin, awoke her from a slumber.

The mass murder nearly 3,000 innocent people on American soil forced open my eyes to the Islamic holy war against the West, freedom and modernity. The battle has raged not for years or decades, but for centuries -- well before the Crusades.

If you want to know how the holy war works, writes Malkin, just go down the list: Jihad, Infidels, Sharia, Caliphate, Taqiyya (deception), and Dhimmitude (inferiority of non-Muslims under Islam).

The striking thing about the Muslim agenda is how it hasn’t changed over the years. But the striking thing about the West is how much it has changed.

After the religious wars of the seventeenth century, a generation of thinkers tried to think up a society in which these poisonous conflicts over divine truth could be avoided. They came up with the separation of church and state and the idea of tolerance for people you didn’t agree with.

In the first demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences, something extraordinary happened that nobody had thought about. The market economy grew like topsy in the space afforded by the new, if imperfect, tolerance (which was good because it spread prosperity).

But this sudden explosion of markets and trading had a frightening effect. It seemed that it would utterly destroy the old and the familiar, the organic institutions that people had lived under for centuries. What should be done?

“What is to be done” is the watchword of the last two hundred years. Should the market be encouraged? Should it be eliminated? Should we build new institutions to bind people into a sense of belonging? Or should we let everyone just hang out and figure things out for themselves?

But this vast dialogue has not occurred in the Islamic world. There was no reformation, no Enlightenment, no centuries-long dialogue about what we do now. Yet now we see Islamic hot-heads saying that the West has got it all wrong and they are going to clear it all away with jihad, with sharia law, a new caliphate, and dhimmitude.

Sorry fellahs. An agenda like this just doesn’t sound like it will end happily.

It sounds more like a bunch of ignorant teenagers on the lookout for mischief. It sounds like the sort of project that adults put a stop to right now before it gets out of hand and people get hurt.

However flawed and corrupt the West, it must be agreed that real knowledge was gained in the last half-millennium about how to construct a global society.

Tearing it all up isn’t going to solve anything.

But hey, maybe all this mess would never have happened without President Bush and his war on terror.

Oh, I forgot. The war on terror came after 9/11.

Two Kinds of Chess

There are two kinds of chess in the world. There is the western game of chess, in which the pieces move about the board. And there is Chinese chess, in which you put your pieces, or stones, on the board never to move them again.

I say this in connection with the continuing political argument over 9/11 and the war on terror. Democrats are all over the board, yelling at one moment that Bush is to blame, at another that Clinton is not to blame, that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, that the whole thing is “Bush’s War.”

You’ll note that the Republicans have not been rushing around saying this one day and that the other. Instead President Bush is playing it the Chinese way, putting markers on the board and never moving them.

The flap over ABC’s “The Path to 9/11” shows all this with disturbing clarity. The Democrats run a week-long spin extravaganza, with the Clintons soberly asking for the truth, aged historians talking about “disingenuous” disregard for the truth, and Democratic officeholders issuing naked threats about broadcast licenses.

In the end, everyone watched the Sunday Night Football game instead of “The Path to 9/11.”

Media critic L. Brent Bozell III reports on all the Clinton shenanigans. He closes with a quote from a Kosite:

As one blogger at the Daily Kos pleaded about the ABC film: "So who is the greater threat to democracy? Terrorists or media consolidation?" Nothing, but nothing will bring this crowd to reality.

This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Because we have to ask ourselves: Where did this dunderhead learn this crazy conspiracy stuff? And the answer probably is: in college.

Meanwhile President Bush continues fighting “his” war on terror, in behalf of all of us whether we get it or not.

Why the West Won't Win Against Islam

We all know that we will win the war against Islamic fascism. Or will we? Author David Selbourne sets out ten reasons why, as things stand, Islam will not be defeated. Selbourne is author of the book The Losing Battle with Islam.

1. Disagreement in the non-Muslim world about what is really going on.
   
2. The nature of Islam is misunderstood. It is not a religion. “It is a transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems.”
   
3. “[T]he low level of Western leadership, in particular in the United States.
   
4. “[T]he egotistical competitiveness... of “experts” and commentators on Islam, from “Islamophobes” to “academic apologists.”
   
5. “[T]he confusion of ‘progressives’ about the Islamic advance,” viewing Muslims through the lens of colonialism and multiculturalism.
   
6. “[T]he vicarious satisfaction felt by many non-Muslims at America’s reverses.”
   
7. “[T]he moral poverty of the West’s, and especially America’s, own value system.” Obedience to Allah will beat freedom and liberty.
   
8. The skill and effectiveness of Muslim media and propaganda.
   
9. The dependency of the West on the Middle East’s oil resources.
   
10. The notion that “technology-driven modernity and market-driven progress are innately superior to the ideals of ‘backward’ Islam.”
    

The clarity and the forcefulness of these ideas are helpful in thinking about what the West must do to counter the Muslim threat.

But the biggest thing to think about is the lesson of the Enlightenment.

The great Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century were trying to find a path out of the brutal religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their solution was to back off from the search for the good, the true, and the beautiful. They proposed instead a society in which these absolutes were removed from the public square into the private realm. In politics we would be content with the fairly good, the true enough, and the merely pretty.

The result, of course, was the staggering prosperity revolution of global capitalism. It was when the West abandoned the Islamic notion of a “transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems” that it began its breathtaking climb to world domination.

The Blank Page of History

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the new Hitler? And Osama bin Laden the new Lenin? Is Iraq the new Vietnam?

The problem with our national analysis of the war on terror is that most of us don’t know much history, according to Jonah Goldberg. So we go cherry-picking where we already know there are cherries.

One of the main reasons we leap to analogies about World War II and the Cold War is that it’s the only history most of us know.

...

If Iraq is Vietnam, we allegedly have no choice but to accept the futility of our presence there and depart. If the war on terror is like the Nazi menace, it’s time to wax Churchillian.

It’s true that the analogy of Ahmadinejad to Hitler is pretty strained.

Iran is an economic and military weakling... [whereas] Der Fuehrer [had] a strong economy and an enormous military to accomplish his objectives.

The difference, of course, is nuclear weapons. A military weakling like Iran looks a lot different with the destructive power of nuclear weapons.

Or does it? It is, after all, telling that the US and the Soviet Union never used nuclear weapons during the cold war. How seriously should the world take Iran and North Korea—with or without nuclear weapons?

The problem is: We don’t know. “[H]istory may be offering us a blank page.” And that is why everyone disagrees about what kind of a war we are in. If we are in a war.

If Democrats Win in November

What if Democrats win in November? What will they do? Richard E. Cohen runs down their agenda.

[Democratic House Leader Nancy] Pelosi has also promised that within 100 hours after taking control of the House on January 3, Democrats will pass legislation to increase the minimum wage, mandate the negotiation of Medicare prescription drug prices, fully implement the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, and repeal tax benefits for big oil companies.

OK. Those are all policy initiatives that will help Democratic voters in the short term. What else?

Barbara Boxer wants to legislate reductions in greenhouse gases; Ted Kennedy wants to reduce student loan interest rates. Charles Rangel “wants a more bipartisan policy on international trade, including better protections for U.S. workers.”

Then there is this:

For many key Democrats, the emerging strategy -- should they win some congressional control this November -- appears to be to try to score legislative victories where possible, thwart GOP initiatives, and wage an aggressive oversight campaign to expose what they see as Bush administration shortcomings and neglected national problems.

Er, isn’t that what they have been doing for the last six years? Democrats have always been good at oversight, that is when it involves public hearings with eevil corporate executives brought to the bar of browbeating. You can bet that Rep. Henry Waxman will be a “barracuda”
in this department, according to Republican Rep. Tom Davis.

It is interesting, though, that there is nary a word in Cohen’s article about Iraq and the war on terror.

I wonder why?

The Path to Censorship

Imagine the following news item in your friendly local newspaper.

A furious former President Bush is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to Kuwait" grossly misrepresents his actions in the first Iraq war - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.

Imagine the screams. Imagine the outrage. Censorship! Abuse of power!

Actually it would never have happpened. Republicans know better than to even whisper a suggestion that a broadcast TV network should edit, or, God forbid, withdraw a drama on network TV.

But when ABC puts up a mini-series “The Path to 9/11” that dramatizes the ineffective policies and actions of the Clinton administration in the happy-go-lucky Nineties, the old Clinton War Room swings into action. As reported in The New York Post:

A furious Bill Clinton is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to 9/11" grossly misrepresents his pursuit of Osama bin Laden - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.

But wait. I thought the Democrats believed that the war on terror was a Bush Lie, a put-up job to scare the American people. I thought that President Clinton believes that Global Warming is the number one problem in the world.

Why should the Clintonoids and the former president care about 9/11? It’s just a law-enforcement problem, isn’t it? Really not that important when compared to global warming, institutional racism, gay marriage, and embryonic stem cell research.

So maybe the Democrats are misleading us on the war on terror as well. They know it is important, and they know that the American people think it is important.

The problem is that they can’t appear to take the war too seriously. Their base won’t let them.

The Election Campaign Begins

With Labor Day behind us we can expect to see, in the next couple of weeks, how the Bush administration intends to fight the mid-term elections.

Many people have noted how the Bushies seem to manage to pull themselves out of the ditch every election cycle—just after “everyone” has consigned them to electoral disaster.

The reason for this is not remarkable. In normal times the informal alliance of Democrats and liberal media means that the liberal world view occupies most of the public square. Only in the conservative subculture does an alternative view exist.

Come the campaign season the Bushies can engage the American people and advance their ideas and policies against the Democrats using the president’s bully pulpit and the paid media of campaign commercials.

With two speeches under his belt it is clear that President Bush and his staff have prepared a full-scale campaign to win the hearts and minds of the American people. They intend to confound those who have already conceded the election to the Democrats.

In his speech Tuesday, the president called for Congress to pass new legislation to clarify uncertainties in the legal status of unlawful combatants. Specifically, he declared:

I'm sending Congress legislation to specifically authorize the creation of military commissions to try terrorists for war crimes.

In addition, and perhaps for patriotic Americans this is the most important, the president said:

I'm asking Congress to pass legislation that will clarify the rules for our personnel fighting the war on terror. First, I'm asking Congress to list the specific, recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes under the War Crimes Act -- so our personnel can know clearly what is prohibited in the handling of terrorist enemies. Second, I'm asking that Congress make explicit that by following the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act our personnel are fulfilling America's obligations under Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. Third, I'm asking that Congress make it clear that captured terrorists cannot use the Geneva Conventions as a basis to sue our personnel in courts -- in U.S. courts. The men and women who protect us should not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists because they're doing their jobs.

These are important issues that have needed attention for some time. Some have complained that the Bush administration has not addressed them earlier. Obviously it is best to send them up to Congress in the weeks before an election. It helps concentrate the mind—of Congress and the American people. That is what the Bush administration is doing.

You can complain about the timing as a naked attempt to politicize the war on terror. But timing is everything. The president has a responsibility to advance his agenda at the best moment. Otherwise, why bother?

The Democrats have had a fine old time for the last year traducing the president and our war on terror, specifically against the Islamist movement that would like to overturn the Pax Americana. It has been very difficult to counter their careless and vindictive talk.

The time to engage with them in a battle is at election time, and that is what the president is doing.