Take psychology professor Phyllis Chesler. She has been a tireless and eloquent champion of the rights of women for more than four decades. Unlike her tongue-tied colleagues in the academy, she does not hesitate to speak out against Muslim mistreatment of women. In a recent book, The Death of Feminism, she attributes the feminist establishment’s unwillingness to take on Islamic sexism to its support of “an isolationist and America-blaming position.” She faults it for “embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic, heartless, mindless and suicidal.” The sisterhood has rewarded her with excommunication. A 2006 profile in the Village Voice reports that, among academic feminists, “Chesler arouses the vitriol reserved for traitors.” ~Christina Hoff Sommers, The Weekly Standard

I have already remarked on why it would be bizarre for conservatives to care about this “controversy” over American feminism’s alleged lack of concern for Muslim women (which, for what it’s worth, happens to be untrue), but I thought I would go back over the Sommers article to see if I had been too flippant in trying to find something wrong with a Weekly Standard piece.  Certainly, The Weekly Standard could not be confused with a robust defender of tradition or traditional gender roles or anything that might mislead their readers into thinking that they were reading a culturally conservative magazine.  So it might not be quite as bizarre for the Standard to run this piece as, say, a magazine that was actually socially and culturally conservative, but it was still a bit odd.  Even so, perhaps I had missed the real point of the article in having judged it a bizarre piece of commentary for an ostensibly conservative audience.  It should have occured to me that a significant part of the real point, as with most everything the Standard does, is to back up their bad foreign policy views.  

At first, this section of the article puzzled me, but it became clear soon enough why it had been included.  It might well be that Prof. Chesler speaks against Muslim mistreatment of women, and it is probably true that there are academic feminists who are “anti-American” (though in the last ten years or so I have seen that word used so indiscriminately that I scarcely know what it is supposed to mean anymore), but I had to confess that I didn’t understand how there was any conceivable connection between the two.  Then I focused on that line about the “isolationist and America-blaming position” that these feminists are supposedly taking.  As we understand all too well in the wake of the Giuliani-Paul contretemps, the accusation of being “isolationist” and someone who “blames” America is intended as an insult, an accusation of disloyalty and a way to demean your interlocutor because he (or in this case, she) has taken a foreign policy position contrary to the globalist, hegemonist consensus.  The problem that Chesler and Sommers have with these feminists seems to be, actually, that they do not get on board for interventionist wars, because of their “isolationist and blame-America position.”  I cannot think of any other reason why someone would choose to use the word “isolationist” in the context of this discussion.  My guess would be that these people now shun her because they dislike the suggestion that they are somehow turning against their own country, and not necessarily because of anything related to the Islamic world at all.  Their shunning of her might therefore prove nothing at all about their own attitude towards “the subjection of Islamic women.”  

Yes, there are citations in the article of women saying stupid things about terrorism–but not really more or less stupid than Obama and Huckabee have said about violence and terrorism in the past few months.  I await the article, “Terrorism and the Fecklessness of Obama and Huckabee,” but I imagine I will be waiting for a while.  There are other citations in the article where women say exaggerated, Marcottesque things about similarities or equivalences between the treatment of women under Islamic fundamentalist control and treatment of women in the West (patriarchy is patriarchy is patriarchy, I guess), where their error is not so much failing to take seriously the oppression of women in Islamic countries as it is in equating or linking the plight of women in, say, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan with that of women living in America.  This may have the rhetorical effect of diminishing the significance of the plight of Muslim women in the eyes of people who are already not terribly inclined to listen to what feminist activists have to say in the first place, but it is rather different from saying generally that “American feminists” are feckless or are not working on behalf of Muslim women.  In any case, these equivalences and linkages typically do not involve showing hatred for America–they involve hatred for religious people.  It would be very difficult to say that Amanda Marcotte hates America, for instance, but she plainly does hate religious people, at least if they are in the least traditional or serious about their religion’s dictates with respect to sexual morality.  It is that hang-up that partly drives these feminists to say absurd things about universally identical patriarchy, since it is taken as a given that traditional religion is simply a weapon of patriarchy against women, and so on and so forth.

If Sommers’ piece were an article called “Outlandishly Exaggerated Things That Some Radical Feminists Say About America,” I don’t suppose many feminists would like it, but at least the article would actually demonstrate what it claims to be showing.  The best part of the article comes about three-fourths of the way through:

Hard-line feminists such as Seager, Pollitt, Ensler, the university gender theorists, and the NOW activists represent the views of only a tiny fraction of American women. Even among women who identify themselves as feminists (about 25 percent), they are at the radical extreme.

In other words, they are so unrepresentative that anything that Sommers can demonstrate about this “radical extreme” has almost no bearing on the majority of American feminists.  All of which makes the title, “The Subjection of Islamic Women and the Fecklessness of American Feminism,” seem fairly overblown and misleading.

It would appear that my initial, immediately negative reaction to Tommy Thompson’s candidacy has now become conventional wisdom six months later.

The always tiresome Ryan Sager, fresh off of sticking knives into religious conservatives and encouraging the GOP to commit electoral suicide by alienating its key constituency, has decided to join the Smearbund against Ron Paul.  Gosh, a non-interventionist is accused of being a racist and anti-Semite.  This is about the only things that our opponents seem to be able to say (falsely) about us.  Don’t interventionists ever get tired of distorting and lying?   Apparently not. 

Ryan Sager is an odd sort of libertarian.  He doesn’t actually seem to support any real, live libertarians, and he doesn’t seem to support any actual reductions in the size or scope of government.  His latest here is an effort to join in the chorus trashing the only small-government libertarian candidate in the GOP field.  Why is he bothering?  Because said candidate enunciated a foreign policy of non-intervention and, by extension, non-aggression, which are the traditional libertarian positions.  I have suspected that his pro-“libertarian” arguments were really just cover for endorsing social liberalism and bashing Christians–which is all that most Republican libertarianism amounts to in practice anyway–since that is the cheap poseur libertarianism I have come to expect from pundits.  Thus he welcomes the candidacy of Giuliani, who has never been confused with a defender of civil liberties at any other time in his life, and Giuliani himself suddenly worries about keeping the government out of our private lives–but only when it comes to abortion.  How noble and idealistic.

There is no love for Hagel in this Jim Antle article praising Ron Paul at Taki’s Top Drawer.

Some key Republican supporters of President Bush’s Iraq war policy said this week that if the Iraqi parliament calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, their position could change dramatically.

“I suspect we would respect their wishes,” said Florida Rep. Adam Putnam, the third-ranking Republican in the House.

“I think that it would reflect a successful, healthy and well-running parliamentary organization [bold mine-DL] that was delivered to that nation by the sacrifices of our fighting men and women.” Putnam was responding to a bill a majority of Iraqi lawmakers signed on to earlier this month supporting a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces. ~Politico

Perhaps Rep. Putnam has not characterised the Iraq war as the “central front in the war on terror,” but I still found these remarks a bit surreal.  According to the administration and the usual suspects in the pundit class, Iraq is vitally important to the “war on terror,” it is the “central front” (never mind that counterinsurgency doesn’t have linear fronts) and “if we leave there, they will follow us here,” etc.  All of that is, of course, bogus, but it is the party line.  Meanwhile, the Putnam position, if we can call it that, seems to be: “We’re just there to help the Iraqis, and we’ll leave when they ask.”  So far, the first group of Republicans has been basically on the same page with this second, almost certainly smaller group, since the first group assumes that the Iraqi parliament would not request our withdrawal unless and until Maliki supported that move, which would mean that Iraq was sufficiently stable and the Iraqi government was capable of providing for security.  It appears that there are now pro-war Republicans who can envision the Iraqi parliament  calling for our withdrawal in the near future, whether or not the country has been stabilised.  That would seem to suggest that there are at least some otherwise stalwart supporters of the war in the House minority caucus who don’t really buy the heavy-handed national security arguments for staying in Iraq and who think that we really are just there on a nation-building mission.  I wonder how many Republican voters would continue to support the war so unflaggingly if that was what they thought the mission was.

Then there is this item at the end, which makes the earlier surreal parts of the article seem grounded and normal:

New Jersey Rep. Scott Garrett, a Republican supporter of the war, said that such a move by the Iraqi parliament would be a reason for U.S. troops to leave. “That’s what the White House has been saying it wants. They stand up, we stand down,” he said.

Does Rep. Garrett even know what these talking points mean?  The “stand up, stand down, fight! fight! fight!” mantra doesn’t just refer to Iraqis casting votes on things or making public gestures that attempt to enforce their claims to sovereignty–it refers to Iraqi military units being trained and prepared to fight effectively, which seems to proceed at fairly excruciatingly slow pace.  What is being discussed here is an Iraqi parliament bill that calls for American withdrawal regardless of whether very many Iraqis have “stood up” or not.  Yet Rep. Garrett treats it as if it were all part of the official plan.

Incidentally, if war supporters think the Democrats are stabbing the troops in the back when they set a timetable for withdrawal, what would they think of Iraqi legislators setting a timetable or even calling for U.S. withdrawal outright?  If American legislators say, “Bring the troops home,” they are being disloyal and treacherous (in the pro-war view), but when Iraqi legislators say, “Take your troops away,” it is supposed to be perfectly fine and proof that Iraq can stand on its own?

Each of those Arab countries has flaws and big ones, at that. But they are not Iran or Syria, or an Iraq conquered by either the Sunni Ba’ath or the Sunni Al Qaeda or an unstable combination of both [bold mine-DL]. ~Marty Peretz

I know there are all sorts of doom-laden scenarios for what might happen after a withdrawl from Iraq.  These are usually serious scenarios of increased sectarian warfare, or an Iranian invasion, or Kurdish separatism provoking a Turkish attack and so on.  In none of these scenarios is anyone so out of it as to suggest that the Ba’ath is going to “conquer” Iraq or that Al Qaeda will“conquer” it, either.  Absolutely nobody (except Marty Peretz) is suggesting that the two of them will be the winners of whatever bloodletting follows an American departure.  Where does stuff like this even come from?

First about the latter. George Bush was so pathologically partisan when he arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that he hardly had a moment for a Democrat or an independent liberal. Or a job. ~Marty Peretz

This is a statement about the President who appointed Norm Mineta–Norm Mineta!–Secretary of Transportation and invited Ted Kennedy to the White House to see Thirteen Days.  That was in the first month of his first term.  Back then, he still wanted to pretend that he was a “uniter.”  This might not matter, except that this is supposed to set up the stark contrast between Bush the newly-elected American President and Sarkozy the newly-elected French President, when there is actually no strong contrast with respect to appointing members of the other party as heads of government departments.

Nor are the Hugh Hewitts going after Paul because they’re “afraid” of him, as Andrew would have it; they’re going after him because he’s a poor spokesman for opposition to the Iraq War – sure, it’s intellectually consistent to oppose the 2003 invasion and the first Gulf War and the creation of NATO, but it’s not a plausible position for the contemporary GOP to take – and because they can use his tendency to stray into deep right field as a way to discredit any criticism of the Bush Administration.

The vacuum that Paul currently occupies is supposed to be filled by an internationally-minded realism. Indeed, it’s precisely the coexistence of realism and idealism in Republican foreign policy, the fruitful tension between the two strains of thought, that has long made the GOP the party to be trusted in international relations – because the idealists elevate the realists, and the realists keep the idealists grounded. When the pendulum swings too far in one direction or another, this tension has usually produced a correction, of the kind that, say, the original neocons and then Reagan provided to the cynical machtpolitik of Kissinger. But there’s no sign of a realist corrective in the current GOP field: There were ten  [sic] candidates on that stage besides Ron Paul yesterday night, and not one of them was willing to call the Iraq War a mistake, which seems to me like the place that a serious realist critique of his Presidency’s foreign policy needs to begin. ~Ross Douthat

As much as I don’t want to admit it in this particular case, Ross makes some good points here.  (However, I obviously think “hard isolation” is the serious and genuinely realist alternative, or else I wouldn’t advocate for some form of it.)  It isn’t plausible for the GOP to declare retroactive opposition to the founding of NATO.  I propose a compromise solution (one of the few times you will see me doing this): if the GOP adopts as part of its platform a call for the dissolution of NATO today, I think we non-interventionists can all see our way to agreeing (for the sake of progress) that creating NATO was a good, temporary answer to the problems of the time.  What do you say?

Okay, on a slightly more serious note, Ross really does make some good points.  Ross is right that Hewitt isn’t afraid of Ron Paul when he attacks him–Hewitt continues to pursue his mad plan to turn the GOP into a fifteen (or less)-state party as soon as possible by weeding out all of the traitors who think for themselves and question bad policies.  Ross is definitely right that Chuck Hagel appears to be a “self-promoting buffoon.”  Ross is also right that there should be foreign policy realists out there somewhere willing to make the case for opposition to the Iraq war or at least to make a sharper critique of the assumptions behind the invasion (rather than the usual nitpicking about implementation).  Unfortunately, most Republican realists who are already not running for President cannot manage to make this argument, so how much less likely is it that someone trying to satisfy a party base of die-hard war supporters in a primary election would offer a robust critique, even if he were in the race?

If the space filled by Paul should be filled by an internationally-minded realism, then why isn’t it being filled?  Because it is not at all clear that most of the internationally-minded realists in the GOP actually believe, for example, that the Iraq war was a mistake.  If they do believe this, there is little evidence that most realists think the answer is to withdraw from Iraq in some fashion sooner rather than later.  If acknowledging that the Iraq war was a mistake is the starting point for a realist turn away from Bushist foreign policy, realists who actually say this seem to be thin on the ground.  Perhaps I am missing some of them.  They do exist, but they are not very numerous nor are they usually very prominent, and those who tend to be prominent are prominent because they are reliable CFR types who never say anything too wildly interesting or creative.

If 40% of the public doesn’t think it was a mistake, and you can bet almost all of these are Republican voters, what are the odds that many Republican realists think that the war was a mistake?  Many will kvetch about execution, lack of planning, lack of international support and the like, but when it comes to the assumptions of what U.S. foreign policy is supposed to be and what the government is suppossed to do overseas it is hard to find self-described realists (with notable exceptions, such as Bandow and Bacevich) who will argue that the war was a mistake both in principle and in execution.  This is because “internationally-minded realists” tend to think that deposing Hussein was a net good, even if it has brought about the ruin of Iraq, a refugee crisis and considerably more regional instability, and since they are so “internationally-minded” they are even less likely to propose concrete alternative policies in favour of withdrawal because they fear the effects this will have on the region as a whole.  Put another way, the foreign policy establishment gave it their best shot with Hamilton-Baker and discovered that Mr. Bush doesn’t care what they have to say, which has basically caused them to stop doing much talking. 

Come to think of it, the Democrats have the same “problem” of a lack of distinct realist voices, but they have the national political advantage that all of their candidates actually want to end the war in fairly quick fashion.  They have the hard-core progressive non-interventionist in Kucinich, a progressive antiwar candidate in Edwards, a progressive interventionist (who is nonetheless against the war in Iraq) in Obama, and the centrist hawk act of Richardson, Clinton, Biden and Dodd (all of whom are also against the war).  Bizarrely, all of the Democrats know that their voters will let them be whatever else they want to be on foreign policy, so long as they still oppose Iraq, while all but one of the GOP candidates have hitched themselves to Iraq and seem to allow Iraq to dictate their entire foreign policy stance.  The lack of foreign policy realists in the GOP is closely tied to the stunning lack of political realists in their ranks, since the party seems to be operating on the assumption–which makes great propaganda and lousy campaign strategy–that the American people are not against the war, but are just discouraged and simply want “victory.”  That might even be true, if you could actually define this end-state and knew how to get there, but without these two crucial elements it is a false assumption.  Yet on this assumption all GOP candidates but one are pinning their electoral hopes in any general election contest. 

Personally, I think of the balance between “idealists” and “realists” a little differently.  Lukacs observes that the opposite of idealism in foreign policy, as in all things, is not realism but materialism.  Those who believe that history is made by what people think and believe are equal parts “idealist” and “realist,” because they understanding the central role of ideas in history and they are apprehending the world as it really is, while the materialists believe that the material order creates the immaterial.  Meanwhile, the ideologues, the adherents of abstractions, are actually as opposed to the mix of idealism and realism as the materialists, but in a way that often leads people to confuse them with idealists.

There is evidence that our involvement in the Middle East has made some people living in the region angry enough to want to kill Americans. That fact doesn’t automatically dictate what our foreign policy should be, nor does it follow that if we were to leave the region tomorrow that Islamist terrorism would cease to be a problem. But it shouldn’t be beyond the pale to bring up. ~Jim Antle

Jim’s post makes many important points.  I have to agree that Ron Paul failed as a matter of debating tactics when he did not try to finesse the answer to play to the emotions of the crowd, but then Ron Paul never finesses his answers to play to the emotions of the crowd.  This is why he is frequently right and doesn’t get swept up in mass hysteria.  When his colleagues were foolishly plunging ahead on Iraq–which most of Paul’s current critics still believe to have been the right thing to do, which ought to obliterate their credibility at once–he was virtually alone on his side of the aisle in opposing the war.  The mindless Republican near-unanimity that took us into Iraq persists and causes most Republicans to fail to think critically about the nature and purpose of our foreign policy.  If Giuliani appears to have “won” the debate yesterday, he and the other candidates have made it clear in their Paul-bashing that the GOP is a party that favours myth and visceral emotionalism over serious thought.  Such is the deplorable nature of mass democracy that this sort of party might still do well in an electoral contest, but I think most of the country has grown sick of this stuff after all these years and the majority has been trying to purge its system of this toxic irrationalism.  Little noted in all of the post-debate commentary were Paul’s remarks that 2006 was lost because of the war and the majority of the country is against the standard GOP view: political realism, to say nothing of sane policy, dictates that the candidates offer some evidence of adjustment and reflection that actually amounts to more than mentioning “Islamic fascism” or “extremism” every three sentences.

As much as I and others who support Paul are thrilled that he is out there challenging these other candidates, it does make you ask the question: what would make anyone believe that a party that is 70% or more behind the Iraq war is going to be receptive to a lesson in how fundamentally they have departed from their own foreign policy traditions?  If the calamity of Iraq has not sobered them up, what good will history lessons do?  Even if they will acknowledge that this departure from tradition is true, they won’t want to hear that they have fallen into the ditch of hegemonism.  Denial in action is an awesome thing to behold.  Besides, many of these are people so far gone that they think that criticising policy as flawed and dangerous and “blaming America first” are the same thing.  (Incidentally, accusing someone of “blaming America first” is simply the code that these people use when their adversary engages in cultural or political criticism that they cannot answer with argument and feel compelled to resort to flag-waving and sloganeering–it is an ideological reflex totally divorced from thinking.)  Many can’t even manage the most elementary distinction between government and country, regime and people, and so cannot begin to grasp that opposition to ongoing policy implemened by the state is almost always motivated by devotion to the country’s welfare. 

Of course, it’s possible that departing from the Near and Middle East entirely would not bring an end to jihadi attacks on American targets.  Not likely, but possible.  Lessons from past insurgencies suggest that the attacks cease when the policies or actions that have been met with violent responses have been stopped.  It seems to me that you could make an argument that, say, having friendly ports in the Gulf is significant enough for our national interests that our government would be irresponsible as a matter of national interest to yield to demands that we never use those ports or base anyone in those countries.  I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that argument, but that is the kind of argument that someone would need to make to even begin to sound credible in defending an interventionism that provokes terrorist responses.  The benefits of intervention would have to clearly outweigh the costs that it brings with it.  The point normally made by non-interventionists is, of course, that the costs are almost always much higher and there are almost never any meaningful benefits for America.  In response interventionists say, “The sacrifice is worth it.”  They don’t elaborate, because I imagine they’re not even sure what they mean when they say this.  Anyway, there would need to be an argument that could credibly say that remaining in Iraq for the foreseeable future is so vital to the American interest that it is worth the risk of Iraqis (or some other jihadi motivated by anger over our presence there) one day possibly launching terrorist strikes on American soil.  Obviously, it’s nowhere near that important to America.  Continuing the Iraq war creates additional unacceptable and unnecessary risks for American security that can be eliminated by ending the war. 

This is the real question of any policy debate: every approach entails risk of one kind or another, and the wise and prudent man tries to find the policy that involves the least risk while securing essential national goods.  Part of the debate then involves determining what those national goods are.  Some people think voting Arabs belong in this category, while most do not.  Some think that propping up an openly sectarian government friendly to Iran is worth the lives of American soldiers, while opponents of the war do not.  Some believe that ruining our military in the sands of Iraq is essential to winning the “war on terror,” while others disagree.  Who seems to be more in the right? 

The Vice President was a great one for talking about risk before the invasion–the risk of inaction was too great!  Well, as it turns out, the risk of inaction was substantially less than he claimed and much more in line with what opponents of the invasion said it was.  It doesn’t require someone to be a dedicated America Firster to know that the current policy advocated and defended by the majority of the Republican candidates, most Republican voters and this administration is failing to secure American interests and is exposing this country to increased, unnecessary risks.  Our presence in Saudi Arabia, which did directly contribute to the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers, has now been replaced by a presence in Iraq that seems to have no logical or obvious conclusion and which also seems to be serving no obvious American interest.  Ron Paul proposes trying to shield America from these unnecessary risks, and for this he is routinely denounced and belittled by this supposed “big tent” party that is brimming with ideological diversity.

It is amusing to watch the gaggle of these other Republican candidates hold forth about the threat of Islam (Giuliani now claims to be some sort of expert), when they seem to have absolutely no historical perspective on any of this.  Tancredo expressed this view most absolutely when he cut to the heart of the issue: “…whether Israel existed or didn’t, whether or not we were in the Iraq war or not, they would be trying to kill us because it’s a dictate of their religion, at least a part of it, and we have to defend ourselves.”  Tancredo is sort of right, and yet also so horribly wrong that I cringed when I heard this. 

Is jihad an integral part of Islam?  Yes.  Will there always be those who pursue jihad and try to subject non-Muslims to Islamic rule?  Yes.  Of course, where and under what circumstances jihadis will be doing this are all determined by any number of other factors.  There are jihadis in Kashmir, but not terribly many in Gujarat–perhaps that has something to do with the political disputes over Kashmir?  There are or have been jihadis in the Caucasus, Kosovo and Bosnia, but not terribly many in Indonesia, which may have something to do with violent contestation for power in the former.  It seems plain that jihad comes to the fore when Muslims are caught up in conflict with non-Muslims, but otherwise the “dictate of their religion” remains more or less dormant.  So, I put it to the majority of Republicans, why would you pursue policies that seem intent on provoking more conflicts with Muslims if you are interested in quelling jihadism and undermining its appeal?  Either you have no idea what you are doing, in which case the rest of us should not heed your advice, or you are going about seeking the right goal in entirely the wrong way.   

Jihad has existed in its fully formalised and elaborated form for approximately one thousand years, and yet jihadis (very broadly defined) took an interest in attacking Americans only in 1979.  For some reason, Maghrebi Muslims were not gathering themselves into boats to raid the Jamestown settlement in a trans-Atlantic razzia.  For some reason, the ruler of Morocco was among the first to recognise the independence of the United States; one of our earliest treaties was with the Moroccan monarchy.  There was a war against Tripoli to secure our shipping in the Mediterranean, which was a war against piracy.  From 1805 until 1979, it is exceedingly difficult to think of many episodes when the “dictate of their religion” so motivated zealous Muslims to attack Americans.  As ties with Israel have deepened and our military profile in the region has increased, jihadi attacks have also increased.  Now, as the old saying goes, correlation is not causation, but it is awfully curious that Muslims studiously overlooked a “dictate of their religion” for most of our national history in our dealings with them and only happened to rediscover them at the moment that we embarked on policies that were not all together friendly to at least certain Muslim groups and states.  Of course, we have enjoyed geographical distance from the Islamic world, and as inhabitants of this continent we have a certain luxury of distance that our cousins in Europe do not have, which is why it is so perplexing why anyone would actively promote a narrowing of this distance to bring us into ever-greater contact with people who are, in Mr. Tancredo’s estimation, out to kill us.  The point is, surely, even if Tancredo were right (and he largely is not right), we would be far better advised to limit our points of contact with the Islamic world in every imaginable way than to expand them through ever-wider rounds of intervention, democratisation efforts and the like.  Even by the standards of the wild Republican vision of the conflict with jihadis, the Republicans have been going about things in almost entirely the wrong way. 

The history of Islam from the beginning has been one involving much strife, bloodshed and the invasions of non-Muslim lands, and anyone talking about this should harbour no illusions on this score (I certainly don’t), but as a result of political fragmentation of the Ottoman territories after WWI there has been no Islamic polity capable of projecting power or significantly threatening Europe or any of the countries bordering the Islamic world.  The pathetic political and economic weakness and general geopolitical irrelevance of the Islamic world (Luttawak is right on this) has contributed to the eruption of mujahideen on the borders of that world where there are relatively small-scale conflicts.  Terrorism and even the pursuit of an “Islamic bomb” are the responses of a world desperately outclassed and outmatched in almost every measurable way by its neighbouring civilisations.  Those who have been on the losing end of global cultural and economic transformations almost always grasp for the sword and try to redeem their losses through power–the American conservative movement can understand this response a little too well, I think–and thereby confirm their own lack of deeper reserves of strength.

Of another excessively hyped and misunderstood, albeit real, threat, George Kennan said 54 years ago:

They [anti-communists] distort and exaggerate the dimensions of the problem with which they profess to deal.  They confuse internal and external aspects of the communist threat.  They insist on portraying as contemporary things that had their actuality years ago.  They insist on ascribing to the workings of domestic communism evils and frustrations which, in so far as they were not part of the normal and unavoidable burden of complexity in our life, were the product of our behaviour generally as a nation, and should today be the subject of humble and contrite soul-searching on the part of all of us, in a spirit of brotherhood and community, rather than of frantic and bitter recrimination.  And having thus incorrectly stated the problem, it is no wonder that these people consistently find the wrong answers.  (from George Kennan: A Study of Character by John Lukacs, p. 193-194)

Though not entirely applicable to the present situation, this quote points to many of the flaws in what passes for a lot of anti-Islamist or anti-jihadi thought today.  If Kennan was the anticommunist anti-anticommunist (where he was opposed to communism, but also strongly critical of populist, ideological anti-communism), perhaps the time has come for an anti-jihadi anti-anti-jihadist.

Sadly, some people have no sense of loyalty.  Lend Ron Paul support for his bid for the nomination here or support his re-election to the House here.