Also in today's Political Diary, Brendan Miniter quotes California Senator Dianne Feinstein as saying, "We are capitulating our independence to other countries." Since when is "capitulate" a transitive verb?
In today's (subscriber-only) Political Diary at OpinionJournal, Stephen Moore writes (emphasis mine),
Economist Michael Darda of MKM Partners predicts a budget deficit this year of 2.5% of GDP. We like Mr. Darda's explanation of what's going on here. He writes that the deficit is falling because "lower tax rates on investment [are] boosting incentives for growth and liquefying the wheels of commerce."Well put.
Er, no, or at least I hope not. If the wheels of commerce are liquefied the train (car? what vehicle does commerce use?) will come to an abrupt and noisy halt. I think Darda meant "lubricating."
I wouldn't note this except that Moore, a very smart man, specifically praised the line. May all my errors be similarly misread.
So to the question, “Is there a crisis in Islam?” -- the answer might be a droll, “No, it is flourishing.” The crisis is developing in Former Christendom. President Bush and Prime Ministers Blair of Britain and Howard of Australia have made a brave start in leading Western response to what is becoming less deniably a “clash of civilizations”. They were right to take the battle to the enemy; they remain right in attempting to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan as “beacons”. They rightly grasp that the alternative is worse.What they have done is just a start, however, and I see no one in mainstream Western politics with the glimmering of an idea about what to do next. Plenty of evidence, on the other hand, that our “ruling classes” have been rotted away by moral relativism, and by the cowardice that is the rot below that. And, especially in Canada and western Europe, evidence that “the people” do not have the stomach for any challenge at all.
Andy McCarthy (replying to John Podhoretz):
These are the facts. I’m sorry it’s despairing. But I AM despairing. I believe in the “you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” approach. I thought that was what we all believed. As it happens, I was a believer, based on close observation, for several years before there was a Bush administration. Here’s what I’ve recently been treated to: The President’s spokesman calls Hamas members “business professionals” rather than terrorists. The SECDEF talks about how we’re now negotiating with the insurgency. The people invited to this negotiation included Ansar al-Sunna. They are the terrorists--the people the President said we were going to annihilate, not sit down with. To get to the table in the first place, they murdered 22 people who were committing the great crime of having dinner in a military base in Mosul. And Ansar's reaction to being invited to the bargaining table is now fairly clear: they’re killing our guys. So what’s the latest? SECDEF now says maybe Iran and Syria, our enemies, will find their way clear to be “helpful.” And you figure the problem is that I’m too despairing? What’s your view? How do you figure our approach to Iran and Syria stacks up with what the President said in his speech on September 20, 2001?
David Brooks had a nice column last Sunday on the value of serious, organized sports for kids:
Those of us involved in this sort of life can see why people object to the over-the-topness of it all: the $200 bats, the professional coaches, not to mention the sheer competitiveness of the games. There isn't a boy on this team who hasn't experienced, along with many moments of glory, crushing moments of defeat - the crucial strikeout, the game-altering error, giving up the season-ending grand slam - moments when tears come to even adolescent eyes and the parents on the sidelines sort of crumple inside at the sight of their child's pain.Yet this team, which ends one phase of its existence here in Sarasota at the A.A.U. Nationals before the boys go off to their different high school programs, has been one of the most fabulous experiences of our lives.
What the critics miss is the irrepressible boyness of the kids, the rhythms of disciplined learning and exuberant play. They compete practically as men in 14-year-old tournament baseball in the morning, and then they go off and organize their own stickball games on the beach until the sun goes down at night. They've played together as a unit for all these years - from when they were four feet tall until now, when some have passed six feet - and not a single boy has lost his love of baseball or his comrades.
They have a physical confidence about them now, which comes from knowing they have become good at something really hard. They have come into contact with coaches who commanded an authority that, frankly, surpasses that of many of their teachers; coaches who talk more directly about character, self-sacrifice and discipline than other people in their lives or in their culture. They have become members of the community of baseball, the oddballs, near-stars and legends from Little League to the Hall of Fame, who speak a similar language and share a common attitude.
The attitude comes from the reality of the game, which is that the difference between a home run and a pop-up is minuscule. A pitcher dominates one day and is shelled the next. So the players, even our boys, develop this emotional resilience, this fatalistic ability to accept the good and the bad, which will serve them well in life.
Via my dad, a fascinating look at group identity and its martial consequences:
An insight comes from Jane Goodall’s seminal study of the battles of the Kasakela chimpanzees of the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. During her study the Kasakela chimpanzees, growing too large in number, split in two — a smaller Kasakela group and a new Kahama group emerged. To start with, the groups shared the rain forest peaceably, and when their members met they were pleasant. They were old friends.But after about a year, once the new collective loyalties had firmed up, the two groups grew mutually hostile, and they fell into war. Bands of males from one would descend on bands of the other, killing the males and abducting the females (perhaps chimps, too, dream of 72 virgins). Eventually, after appalling scenes of multiple mutilation and murder, the Kasakelas drove the Kahamas to extinction.
The suspicion we primates have of other groups is so strong that academics can experiment with it. In one study on human beings, the psychologist Muzafer Sherif, of the University of Oklahoma, collected 22 local boys aged 11. The boys didn’t know each other, but they were of similar backgrounds.
Sherif divided the boys arbitrarily into two groups of 11, which he separated on different camp sites in the Robbers Cave State Park. What would the two groups do over the next few weeks? Would they intermingle? Or would they separate even farther apart in the near-endless spaces of the park? Or would they name themselves the Rattlers and the Eagles, declare war, and meet for the sole purpose of beating the hell out of each other? Yup, you guessed it.
The conclusion from these and related studies is that, when different group identities exist, war is the default position.
I'm skeptical, however, of the author's final point:
[S]ubjects who had dated members of the other race were swifter to lose their racial fear than those who had not. It probably shows that the more intimately we know members of different groups, the more likely we are to accept them as “us”. Biology confirms that the breaking down of cultural barriers promotes peace.
That may be wishful thinking. Steve Sailer, for one, would likely disagree.
This article on moderate Muslims, which I found via LGF, has affected my view of the prospects for free Muslim societies. (By "affected" I mean "made more pessimistic.") The author interviewed friends and relatives of the victims of the Sharm el-Sheik bombing:
You understand many things about terrorism when you speak to them; and you understand also, unfortunately, why we will never be able to count on what we call "the moderate Muslims" for the war against terrorism. . . ."Do they hate terrorists?" The answer is "Yes, very much so," and they really do. . . . But then, if it's so, why can the great moderate Muslim world not really fight their own enemy? They themselves give me the answers: "Bin Laden? The Muslim Brotherhood? Certainly the terrorist attacks are not their work, no! This is a lie. A Muslim could never do this. [. . .]"
And then, we ask again, who is behind the attacks? Well, you know the answer, they smile with a smart expression. . . . They know the answer, yes: the television said that only the Israelis and the Americans have a real interest in seeing Egypt on its knees; General Fuad Allam said that the perpetrators of the Taba attack of October 2004 were apparently linked to the Israeli security forces, and so, supposedly, it is today. Also Al-Jazeera and even Al-Arabia interviewed "experts" to confirm this point of view. . . .
So, we cannot count on "moderate" Arabs, not even on the group of youngsters that I meet later, the girls dressed just like ours: They repeat to me, still with a smart little face, "It cannot be a Muslim, it's certainly the Israelis and the Americans."
This post by Rich Lowry makes sense to me:
When the history of this latest phase of the Iraq war is written (or, at least, when an overly long article in NR is written about it), I suspect the key causes of the loss of momentum we've seen since the January election will include: the slowness of the Iraqis to form a government after the election; the weakness of Jaafari as prime minister; the absurd, months-long lack of a US ambassador; our continued inability to get a handle on the electricity situation; perhaps an over-estimation of the transformative effect of the election (if a majority of the country votes, that's great, but if the minority that didn't is the sea in which the insurgency swims, it might not matter so much, or at least as much as we thought/hoped); and most of all, the resiliency, viciousness, shrewdness, and evil of the collection of terrorists and death squads who are opposing us.
I also like something I heard Ralph Peters say on John Batchelor's radio show (Larry Kudlow guest-hosting) tonight. My paraphrase: that if Iraq fails as a nation, whether by devolving into civil war or becoming a fundamentalist Islamic state, it'll be an Iraqi failure, not an American one. Our task was to give the Iraqis a chance at freedom, and by the time we leave we'll have accomplished it. I'd add that we haven't done all we should in that regard. We must improve at keeping other Middle-Eastern countries, especially Iran and Syria, from sending terrorists and arms there. That caveat aside, I share Peters's view.
Mark Goldblatt examines what might've convinced Bush to invade Iraq:
Suppose . . . it’s late 2002, and you’re the president of the United States.Three thousand civilians have been murdered in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania by Islamic terrorists, and you’ve responded by toppling the government in Afghanistan which hosted the terrorists’ sponsor, Osama bin Laden. But along the way, you’ve inadvertently, though unavoidably, sent a perilous message to the rest of the world. Since the end of World War II, America’s national security has largely rested on the belief that an outright attack on the United States would be answered by unspeakable retaliation. That belief, you’ve now demonstrated, was false. Osama called our collective bluff. He hit us in a horrific way, and you didn’t lash out. You investigated, determined who was behind the attack . . . and even once you knew it was Osama, and that he was operating out of Afghanistan, you didn’t incinerate Kabul. Rather, you only demanded that the Taliban hand him over "dead or alive." In doing so, you provided our international enemies with an easy-to-follow formula for waging war against the United States: Just work your mayhem through non-state surrogates and, after the next 9/11, if America again connects the dots, hand over a few corpses to satisfy Washington’s demand for justice.
All right, you’re the president. The Taliban is gone, but so too is the great measure of America’s deterrence. Meanwhile, Islamic terrorism remains a very real threat. As you survey the festering political landscape of the Muslim world, you must now ask yourself which dictatorial thug is most likely to capitalize on that formula for waging war against the United States?
Journalist/blogger Steven Vincent has been murdered in Iraq. Here's a brief tribute by Kathryn Jean Lopez.
As a graduate student traveling alone in early-1980s Europe, I sometimes matched terrorist profiles and got stopped. (In those days, European terrorist groups were bigger problems than Islamic terrorism.) Today, I look like a bearded, troublemaking professor, and I still get stopped occasionally, in airports.But the fact remains that profiling is logical in loads of circumstances, from deciding who should get flu shots to choosing whom to chat with when you don't know anyone at a party. Profiling means making smart choices when you have nothing but externals to go by.
Good citizenship -- remember that phrase? -- requires that we cooperate with the authorities as they work to head off the next terror attack. John F. Kennedy, a Democrat and the nation's first neoconservative president, put it well: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
How to deal with profiling? Take it like a New Yorker, with a shrug.
Tony Blair talks a good talk, explaining the rationale for war far better than President Bush. But he now needs not just to talk but to act. In France, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has just expelled another dozen Islamists. By contrast, Mr Blair seems paralysed. In the weeks after 9/11, Mr Bush rethought 40 years of US policy in the Middle East. The Prime Minister has a more difficult task: he has to rethink 40 years of British policy in Leicester and Bradford and Leeds and Birmingham.He has to regain control of Britain's borders from the EU and of Britain's education system from the teachers' unions and of Britain's welfare programmes from wily Somalis and others. In 20 years' time, no one will remember whether Tony Blair abolished the House of Lords or foxhunting: that's poseur stuff. They'll judge him on whether or not he funked the central challenge of the times. If "the images of ruin and destruction" come to pass, it will not be because of the bombers but because of a state that lacked the cultural confidence to challenge them.
