Iraq policy has become the poster child for the pathology that afflicts American politics.  Specifically, Iraq policy is the exclusive domain of extremists.  On the right, attempts to recognize any specific failures in Iraq policy are condemned as “undermining the troops” while all efforts to change strategy or put pressure our Iraqi allies are disdained as “cut and run” tactics.  The right’s approach is pinup patriotism — all flash, no substance.  The left is no better, smearing everyone that disagrees with them on any detail (no matter how small) as “Bush sycophants” or “neocons”, all the while responding to any new information about incremental U.S. successes or diplomatic initiatives with behavior akin to a child sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming “la la la la la” in an effort to avoid hearing the intolerable.

Where are the moderates? ~Jason Steck

It is my view that there are no moderates in the Iraq debate because it is not really possible to take a little from column A and a little from column B and craft a synthesis of the “best” from both sides of the debate.  You will be classed with one side or the other in the debate on the war to the extent that you emphasise the insights of one side or the other.  For instance, when Mr. Steck writes:

Regardless of whether it is true or not that the war itself was originally a misguided diversion from the post-9/11 war on al-Qaeda, the political right has a legitimate point in stating that Iraq is now a central front in that war.  Abandonment of that front in the face of any other practical alternatives would constitute the granting of not only a major propaganda victory to al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but would also carry a serious risk of granting them a new base in Iraq far better technologically and financially than their earlier base in Afghanistan. 

Speaking as someone on the political right and who has opposed the war from day one, I don’t accept this at all.  They don’t have a legitimate point.  It isn’t a central front in the “war on al Qaeda.”  Even now, it has almost nothing to do with Al Qaeda.  Conjuring the picture of Iraq serving as a major Al Qaeda base–supposedly much more substantially than it does right now–is straight out of the most tired of pro-war talking points.  Imagine if communist guerrillas accounted for approximately 5-10% of all enemy forces encountered in Vietnam–would anyone seriously claim that fighting in Vietnam was in any way a part of an anticommunist containment strategy?  No, you would acknowledge that this group was trying to exploit the situation and recognise that the rest of the conflict is basically unrelated to that group.  If you want to split the difference between “unreasonable” extremisms, you might start by not choosing one of the most poisonously deceptive pieces of government propaganda as the positive contribution of war supporters to the debate.

After a war this badly managed, why is there not a single serious anti-war candidate in the GOP? ~Andrew Sullivan

Maybe because there is the constant insistence on the part of the great and the good (and even the relatively mediocre) that the one antiwar candidate in the Republican race is not a “serious” candidate?  It becomes a self-fulfilling complaint once you have decided that antiwar candidates are ipso facto unserious because you already know that antiwar candidates cannot be “serious” contenders for the nomination.  No one could be better-suited as an ideal candidate for Sullivan’s rhetorical pose as the Last of the Goldwaterites than Ron Paul, who is as genuinely libertarian and constitutionalist in reality as Sullivan pretends to be during one of his “fundamentalist”-induced panic attacks, yet you will not see someone like Sullivan (or anyone else in a similarly prominent position) lift a finger to advocate for Dr. Paul’s candidacy.  Why?  Because he is “not serious.”  Of course, candidates can never be really “serious” until large numbers of people support them, so instead of complaining about Ron Paul’s candidacy antiwar, realist, small-government and constitutionalist conservatives might actually stop whining about how the movement and candidates have failed them and back the one person who has had the integrity and willingness to defend these positions when most of them were hiding or on the other side.

Sullivan is right that Barnes’ picture of GOP diversity is quite exaggerated.  Note that the only diversity Barnes discusses in his article is diversity over abortion views, and it is on these issues that Barnes and the Standard are happy to entertain a wide variety of views.  Obviously, on foreign policy dissent is not only not welcome, it is very simply hated. 

Among the candidates, on the main issue that will probably end up destroying the modern Republican Party, the war in Iraq, only Ron Paul has been right from the beginning.  It is for that reason, if for no other, that all of the people in the movement and party who have been or continue to be wrong about Iraq refuse to grant that he is a worthy candidate.  He stands as a living rebuke to all those who have sold out or compromised their principles or embraced the opposite of what conservatives used to believe about foreign policy, and so all those who have lost their way will insist on not taking him seriously, because to take him seriously is to admit that they have been terribly wrong in one way or another.

In fact, grasping that they are Albanians and knowing that “ethnic Albanian” plus “Muslim from the former Yugoslavia” equals “Kosovo,” is the privilege of experts. It is but one of many Balkan equations that mainstream media editors are determined to keep hidden from their consumers. That there is nothing in the federal complaint about the “Yugoslav” suspects’ origins is almost certainly the result of political interference.

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Having been assured ad nauseam over the years by successive U.S. administrations that Kosovo’s Albanians are not really serious about their Islam, that even when they desecrate Christian churches and joyously rip crosses from their cupolas they do it for nationalist rather than jihadist reasons, the powers-that-be are doing their utmost to ensure that the public remains anesthetized. Asking when and how Albanian “secularists” became Islamic radicals is a no-no. Being so audacious as to wonder what this transformation bodes for a new, independent Muslim state in the heart of Europe is simply not on. Asking questions about major KLA figures’ documented links to jihad terrorism (including to Osama bin Laden personally) is polizeilich verboten. In the meantime, cadres, cash and ordnance linked to jihadist outrages all over Europe have been traced back to Kosovo, including the bombings in Madrid (March 2004) and London (July 2005), and a rocket attack on the U.S. embassy in Athens last year.

In New Jersey in May 2007, Kosovo blowback has finally reached America. ~Srdja Trifkovic

My colleagues continue to do fine work at What’s Wrong With The World, and I am pleased that my initial effort over there seems to have been generally well-received.  Thanks to that post, Mark Shea and Ross have proposed a showdown between me and Christopher Hitchens.  Actually, I think Douglas Wilson is doing just fine without any help from me, and makes the crucial point (the one that atheists will contend against until their last breath because they know a large part of argument hinges on it) that if the atheists are right about God then there is no transcendent moral order, no imperatives of justice or requirements of conscience that are any less subjective or arbitrary or more authoritative than the “man-made religions” Hitchens ridicules.  Morality is then not only purely conventional and contractual, but inevitably exists only as a function of social control by the few over the many for the benefit of the former.  Hitchens has in no way remedied the control of thought and act that he finds so obnoxious in religious societies, but has simply denied the religious legitimisation of this control.   

Hitchens’ exquisite moralistic outrage at the crimes of the religious or at least the nominally religious is all very interesting, until you consider the problem that there is nothing authoritative or meaningful or ultimately important about the morality he claims to defend (not that this devotion to this morality stops him from backing wars of aggression and lionising communist murderers, but, hey, nobody’s perfect).  Men who do not fear God, because they think He does not exist, will usually have no compunctions against committing the most horrific atrocities, along with a whole range of crimes, if they believe they have sufficient self-interest to do so.  If atheists were right, and there is very often no justice here below, the morality that condemns the genocidaire and praises the almsgiver is as ephemeral and ultimately meaningless as the religious rites they regard as absurd.  In such a world, one man’s genocidaire becomes another man’s national hero and, if the atheist is right, there is nothing to which men can appeal as an ultimate authority against such depredations (except to the entirely arbitrary conscience of other people, who would feel no sense of moral obligation to help anyway). 

Human dignity quickly evaporates when man becomes concerned with survival and naked interest, as men usually will when they have no vision of the eternal before their eyes, whether it is a Dean Barnett talking about “getting our hands dirty” or a Stalin talking about making omelettes.  Monistic materialism, which is the inevitable destination of an atheist, cannot invest man with any special dignity; theoretically, he would be no more morally significant than the bacteria we kill off with disinfectant.  The paths to a thousand genocides are opened, because men are already prone to such deeds and without some confidence that these things are not only absolutely wrong but the cause of damnation the temptations of power will very often win out over what native goodwill may reside in fallen, unilluminated men.  To this the atheist, if he is honest, will happily agree and say, “That’s just the way it is.  Get used to it.”  But not only does no sane person want to live in such a world, our very natural horror in the face of such things tells us that a world entirely without meaning cannot be the reality. 

It is not precisely the purpose of revelation to bring ethics to the world (though the life of virtue is tied together with participation in divine Life), and it was certainly not the main feature of Christ’s life and work to be an ethics instructor, but to bring life to the world, yet without God ordering the cosmos and giving men the just fruits of their works in eternity there is no particular reason to regard one ethos as more desirable than another, except by some arbitrary and equally man-made standard that can be challenged, deconstructed and subverted by means of the reason that built it up.  Paradox and mystery stand beyond the ken of reason, and so offer man the hope of meaning that cannot be emptied of content.

My father’s family is from New Jersey, and my great-grandfather was at Fort Dix after being mobilised for WWI (he subsequently caught influenza, but fortunately survived), so I feel as if I have some more immediate connection to the story of the planned assault on Fort Dix by the six foreign Muslims (four Albanians, one Turk, one Jordanian). As Dr. Fleming points out, this was not exactly a band of cunning masterminds, and no wonder that it wasn’t. I will probably have more to say about this later, but it is worth remembering episodes like these after our government went out of its way to support the cause of Albanian Muslims.

In France, for instance, I’m told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms [bold mine-DL] where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past. ~Mitt Romney

Frequently?  Who told him?  The tooth fairy?  This is a howler even for Romney.  Manyhavenoticed this glaring, incredible error.  It not’s in quite the same league as Ted Stevens’ “series of tubes” gaffe, but it’s pretty bad.  If this is part of Romney’s vaunted Francophobia campaign outlined in his master plan, he might want to stick to blathering about caliphates and other things fewer people will recognise as false.

Is Europe moving right? Is the democratic left in trouble?  The decisive victory of Nicolas Sarkozy over Socialist Segolene Royal in France’s presidential elections on Sunday was the most recent example of the battering that moderate left parties are taking from the forces of globalization and discontent over immigration. ~E.J. Dionne

The battering of moderate left parties?  Was Dionne paying attention to this or any other election?  This was the best showing the French Socialists have had in ten years; the extreme left in France was the loser this year, not the “moderate” left (of course, once we have started describing Sego as a moderate, the entire conversation has become surreal).  Italy just ditched Berlusconi and friends, Spain dropped the PP like a bad habit and Angela Merkel has to govern in a “grand coalition” because she almost managed to lose to Gerhard Schroeder.  There are blips of center-right success, such as Sweden, but all across Latin America (except Mexico, barely) and Asia (see India) it is the “moderate” left that has been winning the day.  The revolt against Labour was a revolt against the incumbent, incompetent party, where England moved to the right and Scotland simply kicked the bums out.  As anyone following the Cameroons knows, a win for the Tories in the next general election will only be a slight nudge to the right for Britain.  In Canada, Liberal incumbency had worn out its welcome.  Then there is, of course, the United States.  What Dionne describes are those elections where the “moderate” left has either held power for quite a while and is finally getting replaced after having enjoyed tremendous political, if not policy, success, or where, as in France, they haven’t held power in quite a while because they have not made themselves more competitive politically.  Beginning in 1997, the recent past has been largely high times for the center-left in many parts of the world.  It is amazing that anyone could think that there is a general crisis for it brewing out there.

They have Tom DeLay–yes, that Tom DeLay–writing a column on why the GOP lost in 2006.  It is remarkable how he refers to his former district, Texas’ 22nd, as if it were just any other House district.  No mention is made of why the seat was open or why there had to be a write-in candidate on the GOP side.  There is no mention of a fellow named Jack and a little thing called corruption.  According to DeLay, the greatest Democratic advantage in 2006 was unity.  Therefore, if Republicans are more united, they will win.  Uh-huh.  The Democrats had nothing else going for them that was more important than that.  Nope, Republicans just need some of the old-time religion (i.e., conservatism) and some unity, and all their problems will be solved.  And this was the tactical and political brains of the GOP operation in the House?  No wonder they were in such bad shape by the time he left.

In a speech that hit hard at the failings of Detroit automakers, Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Japanese companies had done far better than their Detroit counterparts to develop energy efficient vehicles.

Mr. Obama, speaking to a sold-out meeting of the Economic Club of Detroit, proposed stricter fuel economy standards, wading into a debate under way in Washington on increasing the corporate average fuel economy, now at 27.5 miles a gallon for cars and 24 miles a gallon for light trucks. ~The New York Times

Romney is going to be upset that someone is horning in on his modern, fuel-efficient car and technological transformation shtick, and in Michigan no less!  Meanwhile, Obama continues to follow the inevitable trajectory of any Stay-Puft politician who attempts to become a serious quantity on the national stage: to overcompensate for the glowing media frenzy that initially surrounded him and gave him a reputation for being charming but superficial, he must gradually become obsessed with details of policy that will either drive people up the wall or send people to sleep.  Having the media image of the best of JFK and RFK together, he is doomed to become a statistic-spewing Gore clone.  Just as he was anxious and uncomfortable in the first debate, he will continue to flail around and give dreadful policy address after dreadful policy address.  In the end, he was going to have to say something, and whatever he said was going to weaken his candidacy significantly. 

At least he didn’t talk about the “quiet violence” of poor fuel efficiency standards.

Take a look at the newly redesigned Chronicles website, including Dr. Trifkovic on the recent French presidential election, Dr. Wilson’s latest, Dr. Fleming on the war, and the table of contents for the May issue.