articles 2/28

NY Times Magazine
The Freshman

Jihadi Turns Bulldog
The Taliban's Former Spokesman Is Now A Yale Student. Anyone See A Problem With That?

Democracy Angst
What's The Alternative To Promoting Freedom In The Middle East?

Are We Playing for Keeps?

By MICHAEL RUBIN
February 27, 2006; Page A14

On Feb. 22, terrorists bombed the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq. The attack shocked Iraqis and infuriated Shiites. The Iranian government sought to direct public anger toward Washington. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei blamed "intelligence agencies of the occupiers of Iraq and the Zionists." Iran's Arabic-language al-Alam television repeated the accusations on Feb. 23. Because al-Alam is broadcast terrestrially, it is particularly influential among poor Iraqis who cannot afford a satellite dish. Furthermore, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the powerful Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), a movement aligned to Tehran, blamed U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad for the attack. "Certainly he is partly responsible for what happened," Mr. al-Hakim said.

He is not, nor is Washington, despite the U.S. policymaking elite's tendency to self-flagellate. Blame for terrorism rests solely upon its perpetrators and their sponsors. Here, though, the White House has lost focus. While journalists concentrate on the daily blood, Iraqis describe a larger pattern which U.S. officials have failed to acknowledge let alone address: Step-by-step, Iranian authorities are replicating in Iraq the strategy which allowed Hezbollah to take over southern Lebanon in the 1980s. The playbook -- military, economic and information operation -- is almost identical.

Hezbollah's story begins in 1982. As the Israeli army evicted the PLO from Lebanon, Ayatollah Khomeini dispatched his elite Revolutionary Guards to the Bekaa Valley to arm and organize its Shiites. Hezbollah was born. Iranian authorities simultaneously built Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah's Sunni equivalent. (The idea that Shiites do not arm Sunnis is taken far more seriously in Langley than in Lebanon.) Tehran was so brazen in its support that, until the early '90s, it even carried a budgetary line-item. The investment paid off: Even after last year's Cedar Revolution, southern Lebanon remains under Hezbollah's control. Islamic Jihad remains a force.

Just as the Revolutionary Guards helped hone Hezbollah into a deadly force, so do they train the Badr Corps, Sciri's militia. The Badr Corps infiltrated Iraq even before U.S. forces reached Baghdad. This was reflected in the black market of Sadr City where the price of Iraqi documents rose while those of Iranian passports fell. The Iranian strategy was laid bare with its choice of representations. Its first chargé-d'affaires in post-Saddam Iraq was Hassan Kazemi Qomi, the Revolutionary Guard's former liaison to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Nor did Sciri hide its affiliation. In January 2004, a yellow Lebanese Hezbollah flag flew from Sciri's headquarters in the southern city of Basra.

Iraq's subsequent experience reflects the evolution of Hezbollah tactics. In Lebanon, Revolutionary Guard advisers imbued young Lebanese with a cult of martyrdom. Hezbollah suicide bombers moved with deadly accuracy, ultimately driving U.S. and multinational peacekeepers out of Lebanon. In 1984, Hezbollah added kidnapping to its repertoire. The Revolutionary Guards provided intelligence to the kidnappers and, in some cases, interrogated the victims. The group seized several dozen foreigners, including 17 Americans. Just as in Iraq, journalists received no immunity. In 1987, Hezbollah held ABC's chief Middle East correspondent hostage for two months. Just as in Iraq, the kidnappers sought both to win material concession and shake Western confidence.

Increasingly sophisticated bombs also accompanied Hezbollah's rise. The improvised explosive device has become the bane of coalition patrols. In October 2005, Tony Blair confirmed that bombs used to kill eight British soldiers in Iraq were of a type used by Iran's Revolutionary Guards and its Hezbollah proxies. When pressed in a November 2005 meeting in Sweileh, Jordan, an Iraqi Sunni insurgent leader acknowledged to me the "possibility" that some Iraqi Sunni insurgents took Iranian money, albeit unknowingly.

While Washington wrings its hands over the Samarra bombing, it should not play into Iranian hands and repeat the mistake of Najaf: Following the Aug. 29, 2003 bombing at the shrine of Imam Ali, coalition authorities acquiesced to demands to empower militias for security. Once implanted, militias take root. Iran is patient. While Washington rejoices in short-term calm, Tehran looks to long-term influence.

As in southern Lebanon, what cannot be won through bribery is imposed through intimidation. Neither Hezbollah nor Iraq's Shiite militias tolerate dissent. Constitutions mean little and law even less. In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is judge, jury and executioner. In Iraq, the Shiite militias do likewise. Militiamen have broken up coed picnics, executed barbers and liquor store owners, instituted their own courts, and posted religious guards in front of girls' schools to ensure Iranian-style dress.

Force, though, is not the only component of the Hezbollah playbook. In Lebanon, Hezbollah used Iranian money to create an extensive social service network. It funded schools, food banks and job centers. It's a tried and true strategy. When I lived in Dushanbe toward the end of Tajikistan's civil war, babushkas lined up under Khomeini's portrait to pick up food from the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee. Driving through Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, similar scenes unfold. While the U.S. Embassy boasts billions of dollars spent, it has little to show ordinary Iraqis for its efforts. Not so the Shiite militias. Mr. al-Hakim's son Amar has opened branches of his Shahid al-Mihrab Establishment for Promoting Islam throughout southern Iraq. They distribute food and gifts of money, so long as patrons pledge their allegiance. For impoverished Iraqis lacking electricity and livelihood, it's an easy decision.

U.S. officials have no strategy to counter this. At a recent American Enterprise Institute panel, James Jeffrey, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, said, "We don't believe in bags of money in the middle of the night like [the Iranians] do." In principle this is fine; in reality it is a recipe for defeat: While Tehran understands the importance of patronage networks, Washington does not. While U.S. funds go to Bechtel and Halliburton, Iran-backed groups address Iraqis' immediate needs. And not only is U.S. policy ineffective, but Foggy Bottom ineptitude has bolstered Tehran. Take Bayan Jabr, a Sciri functionary who, with U.S. acquiescence, became Iraq's Interior Minister: He has transformed the Iraqi police into a Badr Corps jobs program. According to one Iraqi minister, he has employed 1% of the Najaf workforce. These recruits do little, they receive a salary courtesy of the U.S. Congress, and the Badr Corps reaps the gratitude.

* * *

The final part of Hezbollah's strategy is information warfare. Since 1991, it has used al-Manar TV to spread its message. Iran founded Al-Alam for the same purpose and succeeded in beginning broadcasts three months before the U.S.-funded Iraqi Media Network commenced. Well-endowed, al-Alam provided cars and video cameras to students, making them correspondents and promising rewards to those providing footage embarrassing to the U.S. mission.

It is in the info-war that Washington has stumbled most severely. The U.S. operates in Iraq as if the country is a vacuum. Sheltered within the Green Zone, diplomats are oblivious to enemy propaganda. Resistance to occupation is Hezbollah's mantra. It is a theme both the Badr Corps and firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army adopted. Why then did Foggy Bottom acquiesce on May 22, 2003 to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 which formalized U.S. and Britain as "occupying powers." What U.S. diplomats meant as an olive branch to pro-U.N. European allies was, in reality, hemlock. With the stroke of a pen, liberation became occupation: Al-Manar and Al-Alam barraged ordinary Iraqis with montages glorifying "resistance." They then highlighted U.S. fallibility with images of withdrawal from Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.

Tehran has a formula for success in Iraq; Washington does not. Victory will require U.S. diplomats to recognize that any successful policy must include strategies not only to promote U.S. and Iraqi interests, but also to derail our adversaries' strategy. Iran's methods are clear. Less clear is U.S. resolve. The stakes in Iraq are high, and one side is playing for keeps. Are we?

Mr. Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of Middle East Quarterly.

Ports of Gall
February 25, 2006; Page A10

"I also believe that winning the war on terror will not happen by military strength alone. This is fundamentally about America's values and leadership. . . . The idea of winning hearts and minds has been derided by some. But I don't think that we can overlook its singular importance. . ."

-- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, February 25, 2004

In Mrs. Clinton's "hearts and minds" crusade, this will not go down as a good week. A United Arab Emirates government allied with America, that provides a Persian Gulf base for U.S. military operations, and that was the first Middle Eastern country to join the U.S. Container Security Initiative, has been rewarded with Congressional demagoguery that a company it owns can't be trusted to manage commercial operations in U.S. ports. With Mrs. Clinton herself leading the jeers.

And why? For no other reason than that it would be an Arab-owned company. If it is "foreign" ownership that's alarming, the same politicians would also be denouncing the Chinese, Singaporean and British companies that already manage some U.S. port operations. So the message that all Arabs need not apply comes through loud and clear.

By the way, to make this argument does not mean we are accusing critics of racism. We are accusing them of error, not to rule out stupidity. These columns have long supported profiling young Middle Eastern-looking men in airport screening, for example, as a way of reducing the odds of another 9/11. But Mrs. Clinton was absolutely correct to note back in 2004 that to win the war on terror we need Arab and Muslim allies. And trashing friends who are engaging in legitimate commercial transactions is not a good way to keep those allies.

It is also not a good way to convince the world that we mean what we say about free trade and investment. The port-management business is dominated by non-American companies in part because high labor costs drove U.S. firms out of the business. That's also in part the handiwork of the International Longshoremen's Association, an affiliate of the protectionist AFL-CIO.

And, lo, the New York Sun reported this week that "nearly every politician who has been at the forefront of the opposition to the Dubai deal is on the receiving end of some Longshoreman largesse" in the form of campaign contributions. They include New York Representatives Peter King (R), Jerry Nadler (D) and Vito Fossella (R) and Senators Clinton, Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.).

Another sign of the protectionism at work here is the call to give Congress a larger say in vetting such transactions. But the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), the interagency panel that reviewed the DP World contract, is an executive branch function precisely to avoid the parochial concerns that dominate Congress. If Congress ran CFIUS, every Member would have a chance to interfere with every private foreign investment.

In fact, under the CFIUS statute Congress is barred from being involved in the review process until it is over, and the political meddling we see with respect to the DP World deal is the reason. Such confidentiality is important because companies are often asked to disclose proprietary information to the government. This also explains why the Bush Administration didn't brief Congress up and down about the deal in advance.

To take seriously the political criticisms of the DP World deal, you must also take seriously the notion that President Bush has suddenly gone soft on security. So the same Administration that's criticized for being overly obsessed with terrorism suddenly can't be trusted to vet a routine deal involving terminal management at a handful of U.S. ports. We can understand why some Democrats would want to make this case; the shame is that so many conservatives and Republicans have taken their political bait.

The good news is that we elect Presidents to represent the national interest on these issues, even if it means taking political heat for doing so. That's what Mr. Bush has been doing this week, and in the process he's caused some of the original yahoos to educate themselves before they demagogue again. We've also learned something about the political character of certain would-be Presidents, such as the junior Senator from New York and Majority Leader Bill Frist, who also joined the early critics. Using "national security" as an excuse for protectionism is not the best way to win anyone's "hearts and minds."

Chinese Consumers Overwhelm Retailers With Team Tactics

Mr. Zhang Haggles With Gang Over Cost of Cabinets; 'Let's Talk About Price'

By JAMES T. AREDDY
February 28, 2006; Page A1

SUZHOU, China -- Seller beware: Some of China's 1.3 billion consumers are angling for group discounts.

Chinese shoppers have long been known as hard-nosed bargainers. Now, to the dismay of merchants, some have started shopping in teams to haggle for bigger markdowns.

The practice, called tuangou, or team purchase, begins in Internet chat rooms, where like-minded consumers hatch plans to buy appliances, furnishings, food, even cars, in bulk. Next, they show up en masse at stores like Suzhou Zhongyi Kitchen Co. to demand discounts.

On a recent Saturday, Zhang Qinyong, who owns the kitchen-cabinetry shop in this city near Shanghai, found himself cornered against his display cabinets by a team of more than a dozen shoppers.

"In Suzhou, no other products are better than ours, I bet," he told the crowd. He insisted that craftsmanship and German materials made his cabinets worth more.

"Forget quality. Let's talk about price," snapped one member of the buying group, 36-year-old Guo Yong, an electrical engineer. For the next hour, the shoppers turned aside Mr. Zhang's sales pitches with an unbending response: "Thirty-five percent off!"

Cai Kun with the Chevrolet Aveo he bought with a team-purchase discount in Shanghai.

Successful haggling is a point of pride in China, where even shoppers in department stores treat price tags as mere starting points. The practice is gaining popularity at a time of unprecedented change in China's retail sector.

Name-brand consumer goods now fill the nation's stores, giving Chinese consumers more choice than ever before. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, merchants are quietly bending to consumer demands.

Group purchasing is catching on in booming cities such as Shanghai. On the Web site 51tuangou.com -- in Chinese, the name sounds like "I want to team buy" -- consumer teams formulate plans to bargain for products ranging from Buick automobiles to Panasonic television sets and refrigerators. Dozens of other Chinese Web sites offer similar services. EBay Inc.'s Chinese site offers potential bulk sellers of goods an option to solicit team bids.

Zhang Guohua, the 34-year-old founder of 51tuangou.com, says he decided to launch his Web site after saving money two years ago on bathroom fixtures for his new apartment. He arranged those purchases, he says, by posting messages in general-interest Internet chat rooms, listing the brands he planned to buy. "Let's meet at the shop," he wrote. Many did. "I was really shocked by the power of ganging up," Mr. Zhang says.

Last year, he says, 380,000 consumers registered to use his Web site, free of charge, to organize group purchases. He says he gets his profit from ads and commissions from companies that offer discounts on the site.

In the U.S. and Europe, several Web-based businesses were set up in the late 1990s to arrange discounts on group purchases of consumer goods. But customers were turned off by the amount of time it took to complete transactions and other complications, and many of the Internet businesses failed.

China's version of team buying, however, leads to face-to-face negotiations. "That's a little scary, the mob mentality," says Tom Van Horn, former chief executive officer of Mercata Inc., whose now-defunct Web site attempted to negotiate bulk discounts for U.S. consumers.

In Shanghai, when Cai Kun decided in December to buy a new General Motors Corp. subcompact, the Chevrolet Aveo, he logged onto a Web site where others were chatting about staging a team purchase. On a Saturday morning, 28-year-old Mr. Cai and 17 others met for the first time at Anji Mingmen Car Services Co., a Chevy showroom in downtown Shanghai. As planned, they told the dealership's manager they would buy 18 Aveos in one pop -- but only if he would cut roughly 10% off sticker prices as high as $12,862.

Negotiations went on for six hours. Group members broke away occasionally for private meetings. The dealer tried unsuccessfully to negotiate separately with buyers who wanted the more expensive SX model and those who didn't. In the end, the group extracted a discount of nearly 9% on a fleet of 18 Aveo cars, along with gifts such as car-wash vouchers, says one buyer. Group members such as Mr. Cai who bought the fancier Aveo SX AT, for instance, agreed to pay $11,712, about 8.9% below the sticker price. Individual buyers can normally expect a discount of as much as 6%, Shanghai Chevrolet dealers say.

Yang Feng, sales manager of the dealership that provided the discount, declines to talk about individual deals. "Team purchases aren't common," he says. "But if more than 10 buyers come together, we can give them a cheaper price than we do individuals."

Some manufacturers don't like the practice. Some Chinese dealers of sinks and toilets made by Kohler Co., for example, have offered group discounts via Mr. Zhang's Web site. The company, based in Kohler, Wis., said in a statement: "Kohler does not support team purchases via the Internet as it purely supports competition based on price."

Chinese dealers of BMW AG's luxury cars typically provide 2% discounts for four-car orders, says Jiao Jian, fleet sales manager at Shanghai Bowdex Motor Co., a BMW importer. But such discounts are intended primarily for companies ordering more than one car, not strangers who meet on the Web. In an internal memo this year, the dealership urged employees not to capitulate to buying groups set up for the sole purpose of getting a discount, Mr. Jiao says.

Cosmetics group Estee Lauder Inc. and Cartier, the jeweler owned by France's Compagnie Financire Richemont SA, say they stop team-buying at the door with fixed-price policies.

The team buyers who targeted Mr. Zhang's cabinet shop, most of them new homeowners in their 20s and 30s, met on an Internet bulletin board, where earlier postings revealed that another team last year had squeezed a 35% discount from Mr. Zhang. For two weeks, they plotted strategy, and team members visited his shop individually to view the cabinets. "If we have more people, we can of course get more discount," said one of their Internet postings.

Nearby cabinet shops were nearly vacant when more than a dozen team members filed into Mr. Zhang's store one Saturday afternoon this month and began haggling for a 35% discount. More than an hour later, Mr. Zhang appeared to be wearing down. He directed an assistant to type up and distribute an offer: 30% off cabinets, 15% off hinges and free gifts to the team.

Three hours after the group arrived, some team members continued to press for a bigger discount. Ten had put down deposits on the package offer, including Mr. Guo and his wife, who agreed to pay $875 for new cabinets. They chose Mr. Zhang's shop, they say, only because they saw the team forming on the Internet. "Last year I bought wooden flooring this way," Mr. Guo says. "I don't have too much money."

The fapiao experience

The Fapiao -- When you pay you get a receipt (pronounced my-dan) and a fapiao. A fapiao is basically a type of monetary receipt that you receive in different denominations (5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, 100s, 1000s) for certain purchases. For expats, the fapiao is the key to your tax deduction/reimbursement. It is VERY important. Most expats have a living allowance and you get reimbursed for that living allowance by the gov't with your fapiao. It's a way for the gov't to get you to spend more in China, which is good for their economy.

Depending on your contract, you can turn in your fapiao for different and limited expenses and be reimbursed. There is also a cap (different for each expat) for how much you can turn in each month. For example, at a consulate you can only turn them in for your grocery purchases. Others receive them for different expenses such as meals, transportation, education, laundry or rent. It all depends.

As you can imagine, the expats have gotten rather creative and "help" each other by trading them. If I don't get to turn in my fapiao for groceries, I find a friend that does and they give me their fapiao for meals at restaurants to that we can all turn hit the cap each month. If you use less than your cap, you pay more in taxes. Taxes in China are roughly 35% of income. By hitting your cap, you are basically decreasing the amount of your taxable income, similar to putting money in a 401k and health savings account before your salary is taxed in the U.S.

Another way, you can get fapiao is when friends come to visit on business or for pleasure. If they're here on business they only need a receipt to get reimbursed at work but they can also request a fapiao and give it to you. Same goes for family and friends.

The other thing the fapiao phenomenon leads to is heavy spending at the end of the month as you try to hit your cap. It's is not uncommon for people to go our for very expensive meals, buy lots of ground coffee at SBUX, etc. to reach their limit.

Music While You Shop -- When you go shopping in Shanghai, you never know what might be playing on the radio in the store...or outside it. The selections can be very diverse. The Carpenters appear to be a big deal here because I regularly hear their AM hits on the radio or in stores. Rap is also a regular selection in upscale stores that cater to the young and wealthy and also in the streets. It's actually funny to hear rather raunchy rap playing. To hear the expletives and other American slang is funny, not offensive, because even as an American you can barely make out the words, so you wonder how they do.

Chinese New Year continued -- Tonight, Feb. 12, is the first full moon of the CNY. And, you guessed it, the sky is alight with fireworks and firecrackers...AGAIN. This is the third night that they've been really active (CNY Eve, official end of CNY three days later and tonight). There are fewer tonight but it's still impressive. We're already bracing for the new moon and more fireworks.

Cold Foods -- The Chinese supposedly aren't big fans of cold foods. I've been told by a couple that American favorites (deli foods, cereal, sandwiches, etc.) just aren't popular here. Given what the folks in my office eat each day for lunch, this would appear to be true. Almost everything I've seen them eat for meals has been warm/hot.

Troubled Continent: A crisis of demography — and of the spirit

Troubled Continent
A crisis of demography — and of the spirit

MICHAEL NOVAK

The images we recently saw on the TV news suggest that Europe has, once again, lost its way. It looks as though Europe is set to repeat in the 21st century the disasters of the 20th.

Europe — especially France and Germany — seems to have a love affair with collectivism. Europeans refuse to learn the lessons of collectivisms past; they certainly fear liberty, especially in economics. Worse still, European elites have done their withering best to empty Europe of its Christian spirit. They have swept Europe clean just in time for the rapid rise of a rival faith prolific with children, vitality, passion, and confidence in long-term victory. What Muslims of the 16th century could not accomplish at Malta (1565) or Lepanto (1571), nor Muslims of the 17th century at Vienna (1683), they are beginning to accomplish in contemporary Europe. Europe is becoming Eurabia.

One could see this in “France ablaze” during the nights of October 27–November 12, 2005. On some of those nights, across some 300 French cities, more than 1,000 automobiles were being set afire. The young men involved did not look impoverished, and they did not look “angry.” Their clothing was modish and expensive, in the style of American “gangsta rappers.” Their faces radiated exultation. These young men are in the pay of the state, through unemployment insurance — paid for not working. But honor they do not receive: In French employment markets, Hamid and Abdul see that they are not held equal to Pierre and André. They are housed, fed, and clothed, and left to graze upon the land. In the eyes of others they can see that they are regarded as less than cultivated human beings. Few see in them any vision, enterprise, or energy to contribute to the glory of France.

When the French government had earlier said, with reference to Iraq, that Islam is not compatible with democracy, it said to these youths that their lives too are incompatible with democracy, at least in France. The young men could see that the government of France held them in fear, and as young men they enjoyed that. They will remember this lesson.

In all these sad events, we see that Europe has forgotten what made it great in nobility of soul and spirited accomplishment, and for many centuries great also in courage and victory in battle.

SOURCES OF GREATNESS
The distinguished sociologist Rodney Stark has just published a book, The Victory of Reason, about why Europe surged beyond all other civilizations in the past millennium. Europe’s greatness, he writes, arose chiefly from a vision of human possibility descended from the Creator of all things: a vision of reason, freedom, and progress — and also a drama of free will, refusal, and sin. Even some atheists, in honest clarity, admit how Jewish/Christian faith lifted up Europe among the continents, and inspired a vision of universal amity and mutual assistance — especially to the most vulnerable among us — that haunts persons of compassion still. One does not have to believe in God to see the power of that faith in lifting the horizons of human accomplishment. If you wish to see its monuments in Europe, look around you.

In the 20th century, sadly, Europe decisively chose against this faith, in favor of the lesser vision of the Enlightenment — and bathed the dream of Universal Reason in universal bloodshed. Neither Communism nor Fascism, once the passionate enthusiasm of hundreds of millions, left much behind of which to be proud, or even beautiful to contemplate. Instead Europe still suffers from nightmares, from spasms of guilt and unworthiness. Europeans today wear signs on their backs that read: Kick me again! Whence come these self-loathings? When one feels guilt, and there is no longer any God, there is no one to confess to.

Europe now carries a very heavy burden. Its two great passions are peace and security — but you cannot have peace unless you are willing to prepare for war; and you cannot have security unless you are willing to take risks. Few signs indicate that Europe is willing to do these simple things. In the past, that has always proved costly for America.

This lack of vigor shows itself in demographics. Very soon there will be far too few European workers to pay for the benefits of a much larger cohort of retirees, who will live longer and more expensively than any other retired generation in history. In an era of barely one child per married couple (with many couples not even marrying), we now have an Italy in which virtually no child has a brother or a sister. For the state, such families will mean fiscal bankruptcy; for rival ethnic groups, religions, and civilizations abroad, such numbers will telegraph fateful weakness.

There are still pockets of will and vitality. But having turned away from Jewish and Christian faith, a Europe based solely upon the Enlightenment cannot long survive. The Europe that is declining in population is a Europe more rational than Europe has ever been, more scientific, less religious, less pious, more mundane, wealthier, more consumerist, more universally close to living etsi Deus non daretur (as if God does not exist). A very large part of the “European crisis” is the crisis of the Enlightenment. On that ground, a civilization cannot be built, a civilization can only burn down to the last waxed threads of its wick.

For the beginning of culture is cult. Apart from the worship of God, human beings cannot in practice (whatever may be said in theory) transcend themselves — not, at least, in the large numbers needed to sustain a civilization. Unless human beings have a vision of something larger than their own natures, and beyond the bounds of their own natures, they cannot be pulled out of themselves; they cannot be inspired; and they will not aspire, in the way that Gothic steeples aspire. To be sure, there are secular ways to interpret the word “transcendence”: as some potential already within human beings to break their own records, to go beyond what has already been achieved in order to achieve new marks, and the like. But that is not the sort of transcendence on which civilizations are built. Real transcendence is from outside, a new form of life, a new human nature, an uplifting into participation in the divine. This transcendence is known to all religions, and is sensed by many artists. It is a new dimension of the human spirit, which does not spring from human potential, but is given from outside. It is experienced as an uplifting, a newness, a vision and a vitality not within one’s own powers to achieve or to deserve. It comes as a gift.

Only the type of transcendence that points to the divine inspires a civilization or a culture, properly so called. Ancient Chinese culture, worldly in its practical Confucian wisdom, aspired to harmony with the stars and the will of Heaven. As yeast lifts dough, so the great religions of the world have informed and inspired cultures. A merely secular culture instead reduces human beings to creatures of chance, deprives them of any end for which they were purposely created, and renders universal moral principles into pragmatic bargains or subjective personal preferences. While it often promotes highly moral living, a secular culture can give few reasons for such living except personal preference, and in ethical practice it frequently borrows a sensibility and even concepts formed by an earlier religious heritage. The social morals of a secular culture these days tend also to depend upon moral credits stored up in the past. Even such supposedly secular values as compassion, liberty, fraternity, and equality sprang first from Jewish and Christian moral commitments, as even Richard Rorty notices — not from Greece or Rome or any purely philosophical source.

It might seem, then, that secular cultures are solely parasitic upon earlier religious cultures. But they sometimes play a creative role in putting questions to religious concepts that result in the deepening, revision, or withdrawal of earlier versions. For instance, the struggle for religious toleration in Virginia (1776–1791) led to a deeper comprehension of the grounds, in large part religious, of liberty of conscience. (If a rational creature owes a self-evident duty of worship to his Creator, no state, civil society, or individual may alienate him from that duty; and the Jewish-Christian God, to whom that inalienable duty is owed, wishes to be worshiped in spirit and truth, by a free conscience.) Thus, in America, even natural right had a historical religious content. The thinking of Judaism and Christianity has benefited greatly from this and other challenges by secular thinkers, just as the latter have borrowed much from the former. The contestation between believer and unbeliever has been very fruitful for Western civilization as a whole.

When, in 1948, Europe wished to preserve itself from absorption into the Communist bloc, it turned to the Christian political parties. Later, it turned to the religious leadership of nonviolent labor unions such as Solidarity, and to church human-rights activists, in order to find a bloodless, democratic path. Apart from the extraordinary skills and the saintly charisma of John Paul the Great, it is not easy to explain how so much happened — so fast, and so peacefully — during the years 1978–1991. The Pope began his pontificate in the late autumn of 1978 by saying that the “twin branches” of Christian Europe would be reunited soon. Impossibly utopian, I remember thinking at the time.

One must conclude that Judaism and Christianity are still great powers slumbering in the soul of Europe. But secular Europe unaccountably does not want to draw upon them. We live in the age of the Grand Refusal: the age of Denial.

OLD FAITHS AND NEW THREATS
Islamic thought up until this time does not separate religion from politics, either analytically or in practice, exactly as Westerners do. Today, for example, we who are American, Italian, French, German, and so on do not think of ourselves as “Crusaders,” although a fair number of Muslims call us by that name. They know as well as we do how secular France is, for example, and their best writers often write of that, a few in admiration, others in disgust. That fact does not prevent them from lumping the French into the “Crusaders.”

In the view of some Muslims, the religion of Islam is not really distinguishable from the one, united, universal Islamic caliphate and its military vanguard. This singular Islam has been at war with “infidels,” they think, since its founding. This unitary Islam — politics, military, and religion all grasped as one single entity — has been at war with “Crusaders” ever since the latter found the nerve and the gall to resist, after about four centuries of fairly supine retreat, and then the effrontery to take back the Christian heartland, from Constantinople to Jerusalem to Alexandria.

Toulouse, France, November 2005Bordas/Sipa
Then, quite shocked, beginning about 1150, the Muslims, in return, began gathering their forces for another protracted assault to subdue Christian Europe once and for all. City by city, they took back the whole once-Christian Middle East. Probing westward, they failed at Malta in 1565, in one of history’s greatest sieges, and failed again at Lepanto in 1571 (Miguel Cervantes, a warrior in that naval battle, called it the greatest occasion of all history). Their overland advance through Hungary then made great strides until, just outside Vienna, they were prevented from cutting Northern Europe from Southern by the cavalry of Jan Sobieski, bearing at its forefront the painting of Our Lady of Czestochowa. The year was 1683, the date was September 11–September 12, a date of high symbolic value to Muslims, a date in September Americans too will long remember.

Europeans and Americans today do not think often of those battles of the Crusades, which seem so long ago and so irrelevant. Yet today the Muslim population of Europe is growing very rapidly, not only by immigration, but also by multiple births per family. Demographically, Muslim morale is very high. They are as it were investing with their bodies in the future, in a way Europeans are not. Already in various European states, there are important political districts in which Islamic constituencies predominate. In some cities, the number of new mosques is rising steadily, while the number of Christian churches actually in use continues to fall (partly from widespread lapses in religious practice). Some of the most ardent terrorists and political extremists among young Muslim radicals today are being raised in European cities, of second- or third-generation immigrants. Some Muslims in the past integrated themselves into European societies, mores, and political values. Many today, it appears, are making no effort to do so. On the contrary, they are resisting what some call the “moral decadence” of Western values, and some also resist the highest political principles of Western peoples.

Until recently, one of the expectations of Western democracies was that all immigrants would shortly embrace the core values, at least the political values, of their host countries. It is not yet clear what will happen to the functioning of democracies if sizable groups of immigrants do not wish to do so. A vulgar form of Euro-modern multiculturalism assumes that all cultures are equal in their moral and political preferences, as if underneath the skin, deep in their hearts, all peoples were universalist liberals. In a variety of circumstances, that is turning out not to be true: The long-term dangers of radical, alienated European Muslims feeding the leadership of worldwide terrorism are already being felt.

Europe needs to have a realistic understanding of the degree of benevolent competition, and long-term hostile threat, that it must expect from Muslim peoples, given the widespread lack of economic opportunity, and the fairly closed political outlets, of Middle Eastern societies during the past 50 years. One would think it in the high and urgent interest of Europe to set a new and different dynamic to work in that part of the world, which is so close to them. It is also necessary for Europeans to come to a clearer understanding of the intense hatred for and violent opposition to democracy of a small but intense faction of extremists who claim to be Islamists, for whom an adequate and accurate name seems to be Islamofascists. These are the factions led by the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden and the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

LOSING THE FUTURE?
The resurgence of religious conviction in the Muslim world (often not at all fused with political radicalism, but imbued rather with a longing to live under a regime of rights and individual dignity) does bring into sharp relief the most acute weakness of European culture today: the desert it has made of religious conviction, once its richest source of vision, courage, and practical good sense. And this depletion of spiritual resources is not unconnected to the recent European habit of demonizing capitalism. European elites reserve a special hostility for Anglo-Saxon economic thought, especially the liberating ideas emanating from Austria by way of Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, with their emphasis on incentives, enterprise, risk, flexibility, and liberty. These ideas cut very sharply against Communist, statist, and social-democratic emphases on stasis, security, and privileges won, and against their intemperate denunciations of business, enterprise, corporations, and wealth-creation. Without going so far as to hold that losing money is chaste, the European Left even holds that making money, creating wealth, and reaping profits are all obscene. The economies of the Left rarely do make money, create wealth, or show profits. Their economic chastity is their own punishment.

Given the demographic crisis mentioned earlier, it will be essential for Europe in the near future to create much more new wealth than its economies have ever been required to create before, simply to pay benefits due to the large proportion of retirees (compared with workers) in their economies. Social-welfare economies were constructed on the basis of a proportion of about nine, or at least seven, workers to every retiree. In Europe, the actual proportion will all too soon approach three workers per retiree. To make matters worse, most retirees were originally expected to die not long after their 65th birthday, but now very large numbers of them are living past 85. They will require their pensions to be paid for many more years than the planners of the welfare state ever imagined. In addition, medical care for them has become far more sophisticated and vastly more expensive than anyone dreamed 50 years ago. In Europe, it really is time to stop the show of disdain for economies that work better than Europe’s, at least in creating new jobs for an ever-expanding workforce, and in steadily raising living standards for all.

Europe will find during the next 30 years that it desperately needs alliance with the United States, for many reasons. It is utterly clear to Americans that in the immense challenges looming ahead in the 21st century — from China and India, as well as the Middle East — we will desperately need an alliance with a strong and united Europe. That is why the prospect of a Europe beset with sickness of soul, and with illusions about its own spiritual health, worry us deeply. We very much need Europe to be successful — and soon.

Mr. Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he is director of social and political studies. This article is adapted from remarks he delivered in Venice, Italy, on November 18, 2005.

articles 2/5

Facts vs. Fiction: A Report from the Front
By Karl Zinsmeister

TAE's editor in chief answers the most common queries about how the war is faring after his fourth extended tour in the last two and a half years.

How Divided Are We?
by James Q. Wilson
The polarization in our politics is real; so are its damaging consequences.

Israel's Media Problem
by Hillel Halkin
Reporters in the region do not acquire their biases accidentally.

Will Israel Blast the Iranian Bomb?
By Michael Karpin
Iran continues on the path to atomic weaponry. Will Israel put an end to the problem?

Sick of Sausage
Today's Voters Crave Ideology

An Intolerable Threat
What A World With An Iranian Nuclear Weapon Would Look Like

Europe's New Dissidents.
Middle-Eastern Repression Comes To The Continent

An Energy Revolution
By Robert Zubrin
A breakthrough that could preclude future wars by defunding our enemies.

Howard Dean's Egregious Comments on Terrorist Surveillance
by Sen. Pat Roberts, Chairman, Senate Select Intell

The Rage
by David Warren

NY Times
Oil Graft Fuels The Insurgency, Iraq & U.S. Say

W. Post Magazine
Eden & Evolution
Evolution & Intelligent Design: What the War Between The Two Is Really About

WSJ Editorial
President's Bush's Startling Left Turn On Energy Policy

Business Week
Why The Economy Is A Lot Stronger Than You Might Think

The Silence of the Good News
An explosive jobs report and Bush says nothing? What’s up?
by Larry Kudlow

Iraq Blogger: Notes From Trenches
A former Green Beret heads for Iraq to see what's happening in the war zone. His pro-military blog portrays the horrors of war differently than the Army public relations department does.

Looking For The Lie
Scientists are using brain imaging and other tools as new kinds of lie detectors. But trickier even than finding the source of deception might be navigating a world without it.

I Spy

Amateur satellite spotters can track everything that government spymasters blast into orbit. Except the stealth bird codenamed Misty.

The Beatles Now
by Terry Teachout
No one has matched their success, but is their music worth listening to?

Bono & The National Prayer Breakfast

Video
Transcript
Photos
Coverage
MSNBC poll - Should the U.S. Take Bono's Advice?

AP - "Bono’s speech riveted the ballroom audience that included the president and first lady and leaders from Congress, the Cabinet, the military, the clergy and countries from around the world."


Bono remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast

Remarks — as prepared for delivery and courtesy of DATA
Feb. 2, 2006.

BONO: Thank you.

Mr. President, First Lady, King Abdullah, Other heads of State, Members of Congress, distinguished guests …

Please join me in praying that I don't say something we'll all regret.

That was for the FCC.

If you're wondering what I'm doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I'm certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather. It's certainly not because I'm a rock star. Which leaves one possible explanation: I'm here because I've got a messianic complex.

Yes, it's true. And for anyone who knows me, it's hardly a revelation.

Well, I'm the first to admit that there's something unnatural… something unseemly… about rock stars mounting the pulpit and preaching at presidents, and then disappearing to their villas in the South of France. Talk about a fish out of water. It was weird enough when Jesse Helms showed up at a U2 concert… but this is really weird, isn't it?

You know, one of the things I love about this country is its separation of church and state. Although I have to say: in inviting me here, both church and state have been separated from something else completely: their mind. .

Mr. President, are you sure about this?

It's very humbling and I will try to keep my homily brief. But be warned—I'm Irish.

I'd like to talk about the laws of man, here in this city where those laws are written. And I'd like to talk about higher laws. It would be great to assume that the one serves the other; that the laws of man serve these higher laws… but of course, they don't always. And I presume that, in a sense, is why you're here.

I presume the reason for this gathering is that all of us here—Muslims, Jews, Christians—all are searching our souls for how to better serve our family, our community, our nation, our God.

I know I am. Searching, I mean. And that, I suppose, is what led me here, too.

Yes, it's odd, having a rock star here—but maybe it's odder for me than for you. You see, I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line. Where the line between church and state was… well, a little blurry, and hard to see.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.

For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land… and in this country, seeing God's second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash… in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment…

I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV.

Even though I was a believer.

Perhaps because I was a believer.

I was cynical… not about God, but about God's politics. (There you are, Jim.)

Then, in 1997, a couple of eccentric, septuagenarian British Christians went and ruined my shtick—my reproachfulness. They did it by describing the Millennium, the year 2000, as a Jubilee year, as an opportunity to cancel the chronic debts of the world's poorest people. They had the audacity to renew the Lord's call—and were joined by Pope John Paul II, who, from an Irish half-Catholic's point of view, may have had a more direct line to the Almighty.

'Jubilee'—why 'Jubilee'?

What was this year of Jubilee, this year of our Lords favor?

I'd always read the Scriptures, even the obscure stuff. There it was in Leviticus (25:35)…

'If your brother becomes poor,' the Scriptures say, 'and cannot maintain himself… you shall maintain him… You shall not lend him your money at interest, not give him your food for profit.'

It is such an important idea, Jubilee, that Jesus begins his ministry with this. Jesus is a young man, he's met with the rabbis, impressed everyone, people are talking. The elders say, he's a clever guy, this Jesus, but he hasn't done much… yet. He hasn't spoken in public before…

When he does, is first words are from Isaiah: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,' he says, 'because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.' And Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord's favour, the year of Jubilee. (Luke 4:18)

What he was really talking about was an era of grace—and we're still in it.

So fast-forward 2,000 years. That same thought, grace, was made incarnate—in a movement of all kinds of people. It wasn't a bless-me club… it wasn't a holy huddle. These religious guys were willing to get out in the streets, get their boots dirty, wave the placards, follow their convictions with actions… making it really hard for people like me to keep their distance. It was amazing. I almost started to like these church people.

But then my cynicism got another helping hand.

It was what Colin Powell, a five-star general, called the greatest W.M.D. of them all: a tiny little virus called A.I.D.S. And the religious community, in large part, missed it. The one's that didn't miss it could only see it as divine retribution for bad behaviour. Even on children… Even fastest growing group of HIV infections were married, faithful women.

Aha, there they go again! I thought to myself Judgmentalism is back!

But in truth, I was wrong again. The church was slow but the church got busy on this the leprosy of our age.

Love was on the move.

Mercy was on the move.

God was on the move.

Moving people of all kinds to work with others they had never met, never would have cared to meet… Conservative church groups hanging out with spokesmen for the gay community, all singing off the same hymn sheet on AIDS… Soccer moms and quarterbacks… hip-hop stars and country stars… This is what happens when God gets on the move: crazy stuff happens!

Popes were seen wearing sunglasses!

Jesse Helms was seen with a ghetto blaster!

Crazy stuff. Evidence of the spirit.

It was breathtaking. Literally. It stopped the world in its tracks.

When churches started demonstrating on debt, governments listened—and acted. When churches starting organising, petitioning, and even—that most unholy of acts today, God forbid, lobbying… on AIDS and global health, governments listened—and acted.

I'm here today in all humility to say: you changed minds; you changed policy; you changed the world.

Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.

Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. "If you remove the yolk from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places"

It's not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. [You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.] 'As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.' (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor.

Here's some good news for the President. After 9-11 we were told America would have no time for the World's poor. America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it's true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.

In fact, you have double aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support for the Global Fund—you and Congress—have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria.

Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.

But here's the bad news. From charity to justice, the good news is yet to come. There's is much more to do. There's a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.

And finally, it's not about charity after all, is it? It's about justice.

Let me repeat that: It's not about charity, it's about justice.

And that's too bad.

Because you're good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can't afford it.

But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drugstore. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality.

Because there's no way we can look at what's happening in Africa and, if we're honest, conclude that deep down, we really accept that Africans are equal to us. Anywhere else in the world, we wouldn't accept it. Look at what happened in South East Asia with the Tsunami. 150, 000 lives lost to that misnomer of all misnomers, "mother nature". In Africa, 150,000 lives are lost every month. A tsunami every month. And it's a completely avoidable catastrophe.

It's annoying but justice and equality are mates. Aren't they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

You know, think of those Jewish sheep-herders going to meet the Pharaoh, mud on their shoes, and the Pharaoh says, "Equal?" A preposterous idea: rich and poor are equal? And they say, "Yeah, 'equal,' that's what it says here in this book. We're all made in the image of God."

And eventually the Pharaoh says, "OK, I can accept that. I can accept the Jews—but not the blacks."

"Not the women. Not the gays. Not the Irish. No way, man."

So on we go with our journey of equality.

On we go in the pursuit of justice.

We hear that call in the ONE Campaign, a growing movement of more than two million Americans… left and right together… united in the belief that where you live should no longer determine whether you live.

We hear that call even more powerfully today, as we mourn the loss of Coretta Scott King—mother of a movement for equality, one that changed the world but is only just getting started. These issues are as alive as they ever were; they just change shape and cross the seas.

Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market… that's a justice issue. Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents… That's a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents… that's a justice issue.

And while the law is what we say it is, God is not silent on the subject.

That's why I say there's the law of the land… and then there is a higher standard. There's the law of the land, and we can hire experts to write them so they benefit us, so the laws say it's OK to protect our agriculture but it's not OK for African farmers to do the same, to earn a living?

As the laws of man are written, that's what they say.

God will not accept that.

Mine won't, at least. Will yours?

[pause]

I close this morning on … very… thin… ice.

This is a dangerous idea I've put on the table: my God vs. your God, their God vs. our God… vs. no God. It is very easy, in these times, to see religion as a force for division rather than unity.

And this is a town—Washington—that knows something of division.

But the reason I am here, and the reason I keep coming back to Washington, is because this is a town that is proving it can come together on behalf of what the Scriptures call the least of these.

This is not a Republican idea. It is not a Democratic idea. It is not even, with all due respect, an American idea. Nor it is unique to any one faith.

Do to others as you would have them do to you.' (Luke 6:30) Jesus says that.

'Righteousness is this: that one should… give away wealth out of love for Him to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and the beggars and for the emancipation of the captives.' The Koran says that. (2.177)

Thus sayeth the Lord: 'Bring the homeless poor into the house, when you see the naked, cover him, then your light will break out like the dawn and your recovery will speedily spring fourth, then your Lord will be your rear guard.' The jewish scripture says that. Isaiah 58 again.

That is a powerful incentive: 'The Lord will watch your back.' Sounds like a good deal to me, right now.

A number of years ago, I met a wise man who changed my life. In countless ways, large and small, I was always seeking the Lord's blessing. I was saying, you know, I have a new song, look after it… I have a family, please look after them… I have this crazy idea…

And this wise man said: stop.

He said, stop asking God to bless what you're doing.

Get involved in what God is doing—because it's already blessed.

Well, God, as I said, is with the poor. That, I believe, is what God is doing.

And that is what He's calling us to do.

I was amazed when I first got to this country and I learned how much some churchgoers tithe. Up to ten percent of the family budget. Well, how does that compare the federal budget, the budget for the entire American family? How much of that goes to the poorest people in the world? Less than one percent.

Mr. President, Congress, people of faith, people of America:

I want to suggest to you today that you see the flow of effective foreign assistance as tithing…. Which, to be truly meaningful, will mean an additional one percent of the federal budget tithed to the poor.

What is one percent?

One percent is not merely a number on a balance sheet.

One percent is the girl in Africa who gets to go to school, thanks to you. One percent is the AIDS patient who gets her medicine, thanks to you. One percent is the African entrepreneur who can start a small family business thanks to you. One percent is not redecorating presidential palaces or money flowing down a rat hole. This one percent is digging waterholes to provide clean water.

One percent is a new partnership with Africa, not paternalism towards Africa, where increased assistance flows toward improved governance and initiatives with proven track records and away from boondoggles and white elephants of every description.

America gives less than one percent now. Were asking for an extra one percent to change the world. to transform millions of lives—but not just that and I say this to the military men now – to transform the way that they see us.

One percent is national security, enlightened economic self interest, and a better safer world rolled into one. Sounds to me that in this town of deals and compromises, one percent is the best bargain around.

These goals—clean water for all; school for every child; medicine for the afflicted, an end to extreme and senseless poverty—these are not just any goals; they are the Millennium Development goals, which this country supports. And they are more than that. They are the Beatitudes for a Globalised World.

Now, I'm very lucky. I don't have to sit on any budget committees. And I certainly don't have to sit where you do, Mr. President. I don't have to make the tough choices.

But I can tell you this:

To give one percent more is right. It's smart. And it's blessed.

There is a continent—Africa—being consumed by flames.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did—or did not to—to put the fire out in Africa.

History, like God, is watching what we do.

Thank you. Thank you, America, and God bless you all.

Articles 2/1

We Must Decide

Cindy & Christiane

Googling "human rights" in China. Visit Despotipedia--the People's free encyclopedia!

Scandalology
A beginner's guide to the political scandal.
by Dan McLaughlin

Some U.S. Troops Question Woodruff Coverage
"The point that is currently being made (is that) that press folks are more important than mere military folks," a senior military officer told UPI Tuesday.

Why Abby Won't Talk


déjà vu

2003:

Tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country — your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.

2006:

Iran [is] a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people. ... Tonight, let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.

2003:

The United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. ... If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.

2006:

The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions, and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons. (Applause.) America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats.

How Come You Morons Can't Crack Al Qaeda's Communications?
This is from the WPost's report this morning about yesterday's release of a tape Qaeda No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, "taunting" President Bush over our recent failure to vaporize him:

M.J. Gohel, a terrorism analyst and chief executive of the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London, said it appeared that Zawahiri and bin Laden had coordinated their recent messages. He said it was noteworthy that al Qaeda's leaders had fashioned an effective system of communication that Western intelligence agencies have been unable to penetrate.

Meanwhile, here in Oz, the U.S. Senate has decided to conduct a hearing Monday to grill high government officials about whether they have violated the law by trying to penetrate al Qaeda's communications. During wartime. While al Qaeda is trying to blow up American cities and kill American civilians.

How hard must Zawahiri be laughing?

Bad News Bearers
The media won't defeat America by fighting the last war.
BY JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, February 1, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

In October the U.S. government released a letter found in Iraq and purportedly written by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2 man, and addressed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terror group's leader in Iraq. "More than half of the battle is taking place on the battlefield of the media," Zawahiri wrote. "We are in a media race for . . . hearts and minds." He added, "The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam--and how they ran and left their agents--is noteworthy."

They say that generals always fight the last war, and the same seems to be true of terrorists--and journalists. But the media today do not have the power they had during the Vietnam era--the power to lose a war.

Here's an example that illustrates both the media's antiwar attitude and their powerlessness: In October the Baltimore Sun ran a story under the headline, "Little Outcry Raised on Iraq." The subhead read: "Md. deaths push toll near 2,000, but public is distracted, experts say."

Consider what this headline tells you about the assumptions that prevail in the newsroom. "Little Outcry Raised on Iraq." Why is the absence of an outcry a story? News consists of the unexpected--man bites dog, not dog bites man. "Little Outcry Raised on Iraq" means that, in the view of the Baltimore Sun, an outcry is to be expected when the country is at war. If there isn't much of one, it means something is wrong: "Public is distracted, experts say." The so-called mainstream media are following the Vietnam script, according to which a war is supposed to become a quagmire, which provokes opposition and leads to American withdrawal.

If there is in fact "little outcry," as the Baltimore Sun acknowledges, the media will do their part to help generate such an outcry. So, last summer, we met Cindy Sheehan, whose protest outside President Bush's ranch made her a cause célèbre. Her son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, had died in the liberation of Iraq. She opposed the war and believed he had died in vain. The media portrayed her as a grieving everymom; Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."

Ms. Dowd didn't really believe this, of course. The parents of fallen servicemen are a diverse group, but it seems safe to surmise that on average they are more pro-war than the public as a whole. In fact, if the Sheehan protest was news, it was because of the man-bites-dog aspect of it: Her position was at variance with what you would expect from someone who had lost a son in the war.

The problem, though, is that her views were at variance with those of any sane person. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Cindy Sheehan is an anti-American crackpot--and "anti-American crackpot opposes Iraq war" is a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one.

In April, Mrs. Sheehan had appeared at a San Francisco State University rally in support of Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer who is awaiting sentencing after conviction on charges of giving material aid to terrorists. There Mrs. Sheehan opined that "we might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden," referred to America as a "morally repugnant system," and said: "This country is not worth dying for."

During her August protest, she gave a speech to an outfit called Veterans for Peace. According to a transcript on the group's Web site, she said that if the President agreed to meet with her:

I'm gonna say, "And you tell me, what the noble cause is that my son died for." And if he even starts to say freedom and democracy I'm gonna say, bullshit. You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East. You tell me that, you don't tell me my son died for freedom and democracy.

Cuz, we're not freer. You're taking away our freedoms. The Iraqi people aren't freer, they're much worse off than before you meddled in their country.

You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine.

In September, after Hurricane Katrina had brought her 15 minutes of fame to an end, Sheehan wrote on the Huffington Post website: "George Bush needs to . . . pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq."

All these comments were easily available on the Internet, yet they were seldom mentioned in the news coverage of Mrs. Sheehan's protest. They didn't fit the script--a script in which Mrs. Sheehan was playing the role of an ordinary American whose personal tragedy had turned her against the war.

Where did this script come from? Howard Fineman of Newsweek got at it in a provocative essay he wrote in January 2005, after CBS News released the findings of its independent investigation of the phony "60 Minutes" story about President Bush's National Guard service. Mr. Fineman argued that the journalistic establishment had, in effect, transformed itself into a political party; he called it the American Mainstream Media Party, or AMMP. "The notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press," Mr. Fineman wrote, was "pretty much dead":

The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded . . . (ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS's star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon's fate as the first president to resign.

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born.

This is not just a matter of "liberal bias." When it comes to matters of war and scandal, journalists see themselves playing a role that is not impartial but adversarial vis-à-vis the government. But the media's adversarial culture asserts itself far more strongly when a Republican is in the White House.

Yet the ability of the partisan media to shape events is self-limiting. In the 1960s and '70s, journalists had a reputation, built up over decades, for objectivity and fairness--a reputation they have, to a significant degree, squandered. When Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War, it had an impact because he was known as "the most trusted man in America." Is there any journalist today who comes anywhere close to wearing that mantle?

Beyond the media's credibility and public esteem, however, this partisanship today threatens the ability of journalists to do their job. To understand why, consider the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.

To the Democratic left, and to some journalists, this was a combination of Vietnam and Watergate: a scandal that discredited a war and, they imagined, threatened to bring down an administration. The basic story is by now familiar: In 2002 Joe Wilson, a former diplomat, was sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had sought to buy yellowcake uranium there. Mr. Wilson wrote a July 2003 op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he claimed that his findings discredited the administration's case for war. Later that month columnist Robert Novak reported--accurately--that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the trip by his wife, Valerie Plame, who worked for the CIA.

Mr. Wilson denied that Ms. Plame had recommended him, a denial that turned out to be false. He also alleged that the administration officials who identified her to Mr. Novak had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a 1982 law designed to protect covert CIA operatives. This charge also was false. To be protected by the act, an operative has to have been stationed overseas within the preceding five years. In his 2004 book, "The Politics of Truth," Mr. Wilson wrote that Ms. Plame's last overseas assignment was in 1997--six years before Mr. Novak's column appeared.

But the Angry Left, led by several bloggers and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, seized upon Mr. Wilson's charge. Meanwhile, the CIA made a routine request to the Justice Department to investigate the "leaking" of classified information. In September 2003, when that request was leaked to news organizations, a drumbeat began for a special prosecutor. A New York Times editorial in October called the revelation of Ms. Plame's identity "an egregious abuse of power" tantamount to "the disclosure of troop movements in wartime." On New Year's Eve 2003, another Times editorial cheered the Justice Department's decision to appoint Patrick Fitzgerald as special prosecutor: "The Right Thing, at Last," read the headline.

Here we had journalists applauding the investigation of government officials whose supposed crime consisted of providing accurate information to reporters. This seems a self-defeating position for the press--which depends on officials to leak information for stories--to take. In a February 2004 Times op-ed piece, Geneva Overholser, a journalism professor and former Times editorialist, gave away the game, explaining her colleagues' sudden hostility to "the public's right to know":

As a piece of journalism, the Novak column raises disturbing ethical questions. He apparently turned a time-honored use of confidentiality--protecting a whistleblower from government retribution--on its head, delivering government retribution to the whistleblower instead.

To Ms. Overholser, then, journalistic ethics apply differently depending on which side the journalist is on. Reporters are entitled to protect their sources, but only if they are against the government. At any rate, Joe Wilson is hardly a friend of freedom of the press. At an event outside the 2004 Democratic Convention, Mr. Wilson suggested that his critics in the press--he singled out Times columnist William Safire and The Wall Street Journal's editorial page--were part of a criminal conspiracy against him.

We live in a nation of laws, and legal principles must be neutral. Either journalists are privileged to protect their sources or they are not. Unleashing a special prosecutor to investigate a "leak" amounts to an endorsement of the idea that they are not, and it's hardly surprising that Mr. Fitzgerald sought to compel testimony from several reporters, including the Times' own Judith Miller.

With Mr. Fitzgerald threatening to throw Ms. Miller in jail, the Times did an astonishing turnabout. In February 2005 it published an editorial noting the "real possibility that the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity . . . may not have violated any law." The paper had finally realized that the Fitzgerald investigation posed a threat to the practice of journalism. But it was too late. In July, Judy Miller went to jail.

From a journalistic standpoint, the result was about as damaging an outcome as was possible. The Times portrayed itself and Ms. Miller as making a brave stand for principle. It repeatedly editorialized that there was no point in keeping her behind bars, for she would never crack. Then, after almost three months, she cracked. As the influential blogger Mickey Kaus noted:

The message sent to every prosecutor in the country is "Don't believe journalists who say they will never testify. A bit of hard time and they just might find a reason to change their minds. Judy Miller did."

In the Plame kerfuffle, then, the mainstream media, and especially the Times, got so carried away with crusading against the Bush administration that they lost sight even of the institutional imperative to protect the ability of reporters to gather the news. The Justice Department has announced that it is investigating who leaked information to the Washington Post about alleged secret detention facilities in Eastern Europe and to the New York Times about telephone surveillance of Americans linked to al Qaeda leaders--matters that, unlike the Plame disclosure, do have serious national-security implications. Will prosecutors follow the Plame precedent and demand testimony from reporters on penalty of incarceration? If so, adversarial journalists will turn out to have been their own worst enemy.

It's easy to list examples of media bias against the war effort. Just from last autumn: The battle of Tal Afar got far less coverage than the artificial "milestone" of 2,000 Americans dead (which includes suicides and accidents as well as combat fatalities). In November, Rep. John Murtha, a longtime war critic, received endless attention for his proposal of immediate withdrawal; Sen. Joe Lieberman's declaration that he believed America was winning was largely ignored.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, NBC's Tim Russert hosted a "Meet the Press" roundtable with four Washington journalists: the Washington Post's David Broder and Eugene Robinson, NBC's David Gregory, and Judy Woodruff, formerly of CNN. Mr. Robinson captured the tenor of the discussion when he said "there's general agreement" in Washington "that there will be a mess in Iraq when U.S. troops finally withdraw." Mr. Russert suggested that the President should be "backing off his stated goal of democracy in Iraq," and none of the panelists disagreed. None of them acknowledged that elections in Iraq were 2 1/2 weeks away. It was as if that news had not penetrated the Beltway media bubble.

It would be fatuous to deny that this dour drumbeat of defeatism has some effect on public opinion, which after all is driven by the most fickle members of the public. By last fall, polls consistently showed that a majority of Americans thought it had been a mistake to liberate Iraq, though some 70% had favored the war when the shooting began in March 2003. But a majority continue to oppose a precipitous withdrawal. Most Americans, it seems, do not want another Vietnam, which they understand to mean a self-inflicted American defeat.

The media's one-sided coverage may actually undermine the antiwar cause. It does a disservice to antiwar politicians by giving them the impression that the public is fully behind them--an echo-chamber effect similar to that which helped John Kerry lose the election of 2004 (see "Kerry's Quagmire," July 20, 2005). Thus in December, when Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean responded to the media panic by declaring that "the idea that we're going to win this war is an idea that, unfortunately, it's just plain wrong," fellow Democrats scrambled to distance themselves from him.

And the media's adversarial approach has proved costly in public trust. In a Pew Center survey conducted in early November, just after the indictment of Scooter Libby, only half of those polled said the press was fair to the Bush administration. The president's approval rating in the same poll was just 36%, so this was far from a pro-Bush poll.

Little wonder traditional media are losing audience share to such opinionated "new media" as talk radio, Fox News Channel and blogs. New forms of media would pose a challenge to old ones anyway, but the mainstream media are now getting competition on content as well. As a Wall Street Journal editorial put it in 2004:

For decades liberal media elites were able to define current debates by all kicking in the same direction, like the Rockettes. . . . But the last month [this was during the imbroglio over CBS's faked National Guard memos] has widened cracks in that media monopoly that have been developing for some time.

With the mainstream media facing a skeptical public and competition from those with other viewpoints, it seems unlikely that Iraq will turn out to be another Vietnam--a war lost in large part because of the media's opposition. Certainly President Bush is determined to stay the course. And it's quite possible that if U.S. troops are still in Iraq in large numbers by 2008, the presidential nominees for both major parties will promise to bring them home--and the winner, once in office, will find he cannot do so.

There's one wild card in all this: the possibility of another large-scale terrorist attack on America. It's natural to assume that the public would respond to such an attack the way it responded to 9/11: by rallying around the President with a renewed sense of militancy.

But would it? The difference between today and Sept. 10, 2001, is that back then terrorism was not uppermost in most Americans' minds. We have now been having a debate for more than four years about how best to combat terrorism. President Bush's opponents have argued that his offensive strategy--fighting terrorists overseas, both directly and by attempting to reform the political culture of the Middle East--has actually encouraged terrorism. They would likely respond to another attack by claiming it had proved the failure of that strategy. This argument would be wrongheaded, but another terrorist attack would make it seem plausible.

Yet there is no going back to the status quo ante September 11. Another terrorist attack would create an irresistible public demand for a new strategy, especially if the Bush strategy is rejected wholesale. An offensive strategy having been found wanting, the likely response would be a defensive strategy--a retreat into isolationism and an emphasis on homeland security. Its elements could include genuine curtailments of civil liberties, an end to the taboo against ethnic and religious profiling, restrictions on immigration, and heightened security that introduces enormous inconveniences into everyday life while constraining the flow of people and goods into America.

This would be a nightmare for liberals, and for all of us who care about freedom, prosperity and American engagement in the world. Those who are troubled by the Bush administration's aggressive approach to terrorism and tyranny in the Middle East should be careful what they wish for.

Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com. This article appears in the February issue of The American Spectator and is adapted from a speech he delivered to the Hudson Institute in November.