Peggy Noonan

Here. Excerpt:

But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.

It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.

We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways--in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That's how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.

We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. "So I'm like 'no," and he's all 'yeah,' and I'm like, 'In your dreams.' " Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.

So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.

But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.

What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they're joining something special. That the streets are paved with more than gold--they're paved with the greatest thoughts man ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made, about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house-raisings, the stubbornness. The Puritans, the Indians, the City on a Hill.

The genius cluster--Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, all the rest--that came along at the exact same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used (i.e., a high IQ followed by high attainment) but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? (I once asked a great historian if he had thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was "providential.")

We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this? We went to Europe, fought, died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it. Again: What kind of nation does this?

Only a very great one. Maybe the greatest of all.

Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they're joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?

Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don't want to be impolite. We don't want to offend. We don't want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.

And yet what is true of people is probably true of nations: if you don't have a well-grounded respect for yourself, you won't long sustain a well-grounded respect for others.

Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they've joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It's a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.

Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without . . .

You can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud too, if you want to.

And it's not just the nitwits, wherever they are, in the schools, the academy, the media, though they're all harmful enough. It's also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical, to provide a new look at the old text. They're not noticing that the old text--the legend, the myth--isn't being taught anymore. Only the commentary is. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they've never heard the positive side of the argument?

Those who teach, and who think for a living about American history, need to be told: Keep the text, teach the text, and only then, if you must, deconstruct the text.

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it. That Medal of Honor winner, Leo Thorsness, who couldn't quite find the words--he only found it hard to put everything into words because he knew the story, the legend, and knew it so well. Only then do you become "emotional about it." Only then are you truly American.

Unlocking the secrets of Lost

This post seeks to uncover the Plan: the overall plot and the subsequent payoff of the television series Lost.

I suppose the best place to start would be an interview with the creators and actors, found here. The article opens with Sawyer reading "Watership Down":

On its surface, the novel is about several rabbits that escape the destruction of their warren and traverse the English countryside to seek a new home. But the tale quickly becomes one of heroism, survival and friendship, and ultimately, the challenge of building a free society versus yielding to a totalitarian one.

Another point made in the article is that the island "isn't normal" -- obvious to anybody who has watched a couple of episodes but a good premise to start our analysis with. Another clue from the article: John Locke is the "Enlightenment-era British philosopher who originated the term 'tabula rasa,' or 'blank slate,' to describe the unformed state of the mind at birth."

Here are the other clues (from Wikipedia):

1. Locke believed that the original state of nature was happy and characterized by reason and tolerance. In that state all people were equal and independent, and none had a right to harm another’s “life, health, liberty, or possessions.” The state was formed by social contract because in the state of nature each was his own judge, and there was no protection against those who lived outside the law of nature. The state should be guided by natural law.

2. Rousseau contended that man was good by nature, a "noble savage" when in the state of nature (the state of all the "other animals", and the condition humankind was in before the creation of civilization and society), but is corrupted by society. He viewed society as artificial and held that the development of society, especially the growth of social interdependence, has been inimical to the well-being of human beings.

Society's negative influence on otherwise virtuous men centers, in Rousseau's philosophy, on its transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride. Amour de soi represents the instinctive human desire for self preservation, combined with the human power of reason. In contrast, amour-propre is not natural but artificial and forces man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others.

Rousseau claimed that the state of nature eventually degenerates into a brutish condition without law or morality, at which point the human race must adopt institutions of law or perish. In the degenerate phase of the state of nature, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while at the same time becoming increasingly dependent on them.

And this from Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum":

"The Plan" slowly evolves and many of its details change as the story progresses, but basically the final version involves the Knights Templar discovering secret energy flows named telluric currents during the Crusades. The telluric currents affect the geophysical movement of plate tectonics. The currents' mother lode is the so-called umbilicus mundi, or "navel of the world". By placing a special valve in the umbillicus mundi, they would be able to control the currents. This would give them the power to disturb and interfere with life anywhere on Earth, with vast blackmailing possibilities against entire nations. However, they cannot utilize the currents due to insufficient technology.

There are other clues, but this gives us a pretty good starting point. The battle lines on the island are between barbarism and society, freedom and tyranny, tolerance and hatred. The battle will be over this power -- who controls it, who guards against it. My own opinion is that this tracks with the battle on earth between the forces of freedom and tolerance and the forces of tyranny and subjugation. The battle in the real world is who controls the power of technology, nuclear and everything else. One "tribe" wants to keep this power in its cage. The other wants unleash it on the world.

That, I think, is the outline of Lost.

Perspective on Iraq

Mark Steyn wrote a provocative column today about our Iraqi policy pre-war, which led to Wretchard at Belmont Club expounding on it. To keep the memetic momentum alive, here is an illustrative, but by no means exhaustive, compendium of news articles from the nineties:

The Nation, July 26, 1999:
NATO's nightly airstrikes against Yugoslavia have ceased, but the periodic Anglo-American bombing of Iraq continues. Between mid-April and July 4, American and British warplanes hit Iraq twelve times, almost always in the northern air-exclusion zone. ...

On the ground, despite tireless efforts by the State Department to bring about a lasting rapprochement between the feuding Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), success continues to elude the Clinton Administration.

The Nation, May 31, 1999:
The Gulf War was also popularly thought to be about "getting" an evil dictator, whose position was never seriously threatened by the war and who is still in control, despite sanctions that have destroyed Iraq's economy and caused the deaths of thousands upon thousands of ordinary people through disease and malnutrition-despite, indeed, ongoing US bombings, which now and then rate a short paragraph on a slow news day. What's humanitarian about any of that?

The Nation, May 17, 1999. Saddam the Phoenix:
Since the end of the Gulf War, Iraq has altered little politically. But its economy is in tatters, its middle class in terminal decline and its economic infrastructure has deteriorated to the point where it is becoming irreparable. The cost of returning Iraq to pre-1991 standards in infrastructure is put conservatively at $ 50 billion. And, as a direct result of the UN sanctions, an estimated 1 million Iraqis have died, more than half of them children.

At the first sign of central authority in Baghdad weakening, Iran will exploit the situation, as it did in the aftermath of the Gulf War...Were the Iraqi Kurds to declare an independent state of Kurdistan as the central power in Baghdad waned, the Turkish military would march into Kurdistan.

The Nation, February 16, 1998:
Indeed, America's sanctions policy has done more to strain U.S.-European and U.S.-Russian relations--to the benefit of Iraq and the detriment of international cooperation generally--than it has to alter the behavior of Cuba, Iran or Libya.

The Nation, December 8, 1997:
Six years after the Gulf War, the severe sanctions against Iraq punish only the Iraqi people, give no incentive to Saddam to change his behavior and in fact strengthen his support in some quarters. And the heavy hand of U.S. sanctions worldwide now colors international perceptions of Washington's objectives. The Helms-Burton Act punishing foreign investors in Cuba has more than a little to do with erosion of the international consensus on Iraq, as do similar attempts at imposing extraterritorial sanctions on nations doing business in Iran and Libya. Add to this the matter of U.N. dues -- those U.N. weapons inspectors delivered their reports of Iraqi anthrax production the very week Congress voted down payment of S] billion in back dues -- and you have a climate in which US. unilateralism has Poisoned relations with its closest allies.

The New York Times, September 24, 1999:
The question of Iraq preoccupied the Foreign Ministers of the five permanent members of the Security Council -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- who were unable to bridge their differences today on a resolution opening the way for United Nations weapons inspectors to return to Iraq.

The New York Times, September 21, 1999:
Secretary General Kofi Annan sounded a warning today to a frequently paralyzed Security Council, urging it to act faster and more effectively to meet the challenge of a world engulfed in civil wars that quickly descend into the slaughter of helpless civilians.

In an address to world leaders at the opening day of debate in the General Assembly, Mr. Annan also said that countries that have resisted international intervention will no longer be able to hide behind protestations of national sovereignty when they flagrantly violate the rights of citizens.

Mr. Annan did not single out the United States, the Security Council's most powerful member, or any other major nation, but his unusually strong criticism of the Council's initial failures to deal with genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and its inability to agree on responding to Serbian atrocities in Kosovo during the last year pointed obliquely at American policy decisions.

The New York Times, December 26, 1999:
Thus the continuing standoff with Mr. Hussein. No arms inspections are likely soon, and therefore there is no end in sight for sanctions, which Mr. Hussein sees as a gross insult to Iraq's sovereignty, as is American enforcement of no-flight zones in the north and south, where Iraq fires on American planes and the planes keep bombing Iraq's air defenses.

In recent months Mr. Annan has become very outspoken and self-critical about the mistakes the United Nations makes when it tries to treat abusers of their own populations with the nonjudgmental neutrality accorded other heads of government. Some people are just evil, a recent report on the 1995 fall of Srebrenica and the subsequent massacre of its Muslim population recently concluded. Mr. Annan has been stung in Bosnia, Serbia and Rwanda -- and said so with extraordinary contrition. He has criticized Russian action in Chechnya and supported NATO in Kosovo.

But Iraq? By the evidence of United Nations Human Rights Commission monitors and human rights organizations, President Hussein rules with ruthless terror and is not squeamish about gassing his own population or using the suffering of civilians as a propaganda tool. Mr. Annan's entourage does not dwell on this.

The New York Times, November 3, 1999:
Mr. Halliday, an Irishman, resigned last year to protest what he said was the damage inflicted on ordinary Iraqis by the sanctions, which he said were incompatible with the United Nations Charter. Mr. Halliday contended that 6,000 Iraqi children were dying every month because of sanctions imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

It is rare for the United States to criticize a United Nations official by name. But diplomats said the chief American delegate to the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, and the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Thomas R. Pickering, have expressed concern to Mr. Annan about Mr. Sponeck. They are reported to have questioned his objectivity, as well as his ability to deliver food and medicine to the intended Iraqi recipients.

The New York Times, November 14, 1998:
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, briefing reporters before departing for the Asia-Pacific economic conference in Malaysia, said the United States had pursued military and diplomatic options on Iraq.

"Unfortunately," she said, "one by one, the diplomatic options have been rebuffed."

She said Mr. Hussein had blamed the United Nations, the United States and others for the breakdown of the inspection program. That, she said, "is completely disingenuous and dishonest and despicable."

The Guardian, August 24, 1999:
A shepherd and his family of six had been bombed to death on one day, his sheep the next. Apart from a news-in-brief item in the Guardian, this was not news in Britain.

Such acts of murder are routine, carried out by US and British pilots over Iraq...Numerous other studies on the suffering of the civilian population of Iraq have been ignored or buried. A Unicef report in 1997, which left no doubt that the malnourishment of a million children was caused by 'the impact of sanctions", was confined largely to an article in the Economist. In 1995, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation concluded that 'the moral, financial and political standing of the international community intent on maintaining economic sanctions is challenged by the estimate that since August 1990, 567,000 children in Iraq have died as a consequence." That is four times the number of children who died at Hiroshima.

The Guardian, August 16, 1999:
But sanctions have given the Iraqi government a powerful propaganda weapon. It can blame child mortality, and the general infrastructure of the country, on sanctions. It says that more than 1.5m people, including children, have died as a result of sanctions...Will sanctions ever help to topple Saddam Hussein?

The west's policy towards Iraq appears bankrupt.

The Guardian, July 30, 1999:
Documents released under the US freedom of information act indicate that US forces fired a total of 944,000 rounds of DU-tipped weapons during the Gulf war, leaving 300 tonnes of DU in Iraq and Kuwait.

It is the first use of radiological weapons in the history of mankind . . . You don't find a family without cancer or malformations from Basra to Mosul. According to Dr Mona Kammas, these children are suffering from congenital abnormalities because their fathers were exposed to depleted uranium weapons used in the Gulf war.

The Guardian, July 19, 1999:
I suppose we knew that before the war started; if western governments were motivated by humanitarianism, they could lift sanctions against Iraq and, according to UN figures, save the lives of 4,000-5,000 children a week.

The L.A. Times, September 3, 1999:
Despite the damage to Iraqi society by economic sanctions, despite the destruction of more Scud missiles, chemical and biological warheads and secret weapons facilities than were destroyed in the Gulf War, Iraq apparently is still capable of producing unconventional weapons and Hussein's grip on power has not slackened. It's time to consider a new policy.

The no-fly zones patrolled by U.S. and British aircraft over northern and southern Iraq and the almost daily attacks since last December on Iraq's air defense sites have held Hussein's aggressive instincts in check. But in the face of increasing Iraqi obstruction, UNSCOM, the U.N. arms monitoring program, ceased functioning nine months ago. Meanwhile, economic sanctions have taken a fearful toll, not on Hussein and his cosseted military and police forces but on the Iraqi people. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, especially of children, have been blamed on a lack of imported food and medicine that has been only partly relieved by letting Iraq resume some oil sales. Hussein has been unmoved by this suffering but has sought with some success to manipulate the compassion of others. International support for Washington's determination to hold to a tough sanctions policy has steadily eroded. ...

For the United States, the painful fact to be faced is that sanctions haven't achieved what it sought. While Iraq for now is contained, the absence of U.N. arms inspectors raises concerns about its future military potential.

The L.A. Times, August 29, 1999:
The Clinton administration must decide over the next month whether to do battle with some of its own allies to keep alive a policy aimed at undoing the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein--or compromise in ways that might help a leader who was once compared to Adolf Hitler stay in power.

The core of the U.S. dilemma is that no end is in sight to its costly strategy, despite recent rumbles of unrest in southern Iraq. ...

Eight months of almost daily U.S. and British airstrikes in response to Iraqi provocations have failed to cow the Iraqi military. Pilots have flown about 70% as many sorties as NATO flew in its 78 days of saturation bombing of Yugoslavia, yet Iraq has managed to rebuild several facilities hit since four days of Operation Desert Fox in December led to an escalation over the northern and southern "no-fly" zones.

Hussein has defied every intelligence prediction of internal trouble or an imminent demise. ...

The Clinton administration has gone one step further than the Bush administration in calling for a regime change before sanctions are lifted. But a growing number of countries are prepared to lift sanctions as soon as the U.N. certifies that Iraq has destroyed its deadliest weapons, thus allowing a totalitarian leader to remain in power indefinitely.

The L.A. Times, May 6, 1999:
The real question is why we punish Saddam for his probably ineffectual efforts to develop such weapons by crippling the people of Iraq with sanctions. According to John and Karl Mueller, writing in the May issue of Foreign Affairs, economic sanctions are the weapon of mass destruction. "They may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction throughout history."

The post-Cold War West, rather than defeating terrorism, has become its chief sponsor.

Stephen Hadley on National Security Strategy

MR. HADLEY: Thank you very much, Robin. I'd also like to thank Ambassador Dick Solomon for being here and for inviting me to speak to you today. I am honored to be here with so many members of the diplomatic corps and other distinguished guests who have joined us today, and I appreciate the opportunity to visit with you and to discuss the President's National Security Strategy.

I want to begin by thanking the Institute for your hard work, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. Your support of those drafting the Afghan constitution has helped create a society rooted in the rule of law that respects the rights of all Afghans. Your work in Iraq is bringing different Iraqi groups together to discuss their common future. The Institute is making a difference, bringing the hope of peace and freedom to both countries. And we are very grateful for that work.

Today, we released the President's National Security Strategy, which explains the strategic underpinning of his foreign policy. As the President has said, America's policy -- and its purpose -- is to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

The National Security Strategy lays out the President's vision of how to achieve this goal -- and today I want to draw your attention to five important themes in the strategy. First, America must be strong and secure. We are at war, and defeating the terrorists is America's most immediate challenge. Second, our strategy is to defeat -- our strategy to defeat the terrorists must include a strategy to defeat their hateful ideology. We do this by promoting a positive vision -- the promise of freedom and democracy. Third, freedom and democracy are more than just a means to an end. Our nation has long promoted freedom as the birthright of every human being. We champion effective democracy as the best way for nations to secure the freedom of their citizens, as well as their prosperity and security. Fourth, security and effective democracy can enable the pursuit of a smart development strategy that can improve the lives of people everywhere. Fifth, a community of effective democracies can best address the regional and global challenges of our time.

The President's strategy begins with the recognition that America is at war. Protecting the American people remains the first duty of the President of the United States. The President's strategy renews his commitment to maintain an American military without peer that can dissuade, deter, and defeat a wide variety of potential threats.

The President continues to mobilize all elements of America's national power to defeat the terrorist threat. To do that, he believes we must stay on the offense: We must defeat the terrorists abroad so we do not need to face them here at home. The strategy reaffirms the doctrine the President has set forth so clearly, that America makes no distinction between the terrorists, and the countries that harbor them. And the President believes that we must remember the clearest lesson of September 11th -- that the United States of America must confront threats before they fully materialize.

The President's strategy affirms that the doctrine of preemption remains sound and must remain an integral part of our National Security Strategy. If necessary," the strategy states, "...under longstanding principles of self-defense, we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. Terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, Amman, Samarra, Bali, Riyadh and many other cities since September 11th are grim reminders of just how lethal and determined the terrorists remain.

At the same time, the United States, with its partners and allies, is making progress in the war on terror. From the terrorists' point of view, they have lost their home base in Afghanistan, many of their leaders are dead or in custody, countries that once allowed them free rein are now moving against them, their efforts to divide their opponents have largely failed and the terrorists' strategy of attacking innocent Muslims is beginning to backfire and expose them for what they are: enemies of all humanity with no respect for human life and dignity.

Two weeks ago I was with the President in Kabul, and we witnessed the enormous transformation that has taken place in Afghanistan. Before September 11th, 2001, Afghanistan was ruled by a cruel regime that oppressed its people, brutalized women, and gave safe haven to the terrorists who attacked America. Today, the terror camps have been shut down, women are free to work if they choose, boys and girls are back in school -- and 25 million people now enjoy freedom.

This week will mark the three-year anniversary of the liberation of Iraq. In that time, the Iraqi people have gone from suffering under a brutal tyrant to liberation, to sovereignty, to free elections, to a constitutional referendum, and, last December, to elections for a fully constitutional government. In those December elections, over 11 million Iraqis -- more than 75 percent of the Iraqi voting age population -- defied the terrorists to cast their ballots.

Yet in recent weeks our memories of purple-ink-stained fingers have been replaced by images of events much more violent -- a ruined house of worship, mass protests in response to provocation, reprisal attacks by armed militias, and sectarian violence that has taken the lives of hundreds of Iraqi citizens.

The sectarian tensions that are fueling this violence were exacerbated for many years by Saddam Hussein's tyranny. Saddam ruled through brutal suppression of dissent, through murder and genocide, and his Iraq became a nation of deeply repressed sectarian divides. It should surprise no one that freedom has allowed the expression of sectarian identity, and the surfacing of sectarian grievances. And it should surprise no one that terrorists like Zarqawi would seek to exploit these divisions.

But freedom and democracy have also empowered and legitimized leaders who exerted their influence over the last two weeks to dampen the violence and draw their nation back from the brink of sectarian warfare. As the President said, the Iraqi people "looked into the abyss and did not like what they saw." The vast majority of the Iraqi people clearly do not want civil war. They do not want sectarian violence to rob all Iraqis of the hope of a common future. And their elected leaders are doing the difficult work of binding the nation together and forming a national unity government.

That work goes on as we speak. Before coming here I spoke with Ambassador Khalilzad, as I do every couple days, for a status report. The leaders of all the various parties and factions are in Baghdad; they are meeting daily to form a unity government. They announced to the Iraqi people two days ago that they would seek to do that by the end of the month. They are working on a structure of government, the personnel to go in position, and a common program that can bind the government and the country together.

The process is going forward. The legislative assembly met today -- that meeting went well -- and the leaders group is resuming their discussions tomorrow. We are supporting that effort strongly. The government that emerges will be an Iraqi government. But we and the Iraqi leaders agreed that the next step for Iraq needs to be a unity government, and needs to be a unity government soon.

Violence remains a challenge in Iraq, and it remains a challenge in Afghanistan. But this challenge is being met by leaders, empowered by the ballot, who offer their people a new hope rooted in freedom and democracy.

The President's strategy recognizes that the global war on terror is both a battle of arms and a battle of ideas. In the battle of ideas, freedom and democracy directly counter the ideology of the terrorists. The terrorists exploit feelings of alienation, while freedom and democracy offer a stake in society, and a chance to shape one's own future. The terrorists exploit historical grievances, while freedom and democracy offer institutions that promote peaceful resolution of disputes. The terrorists exploit misinformation, prejudices, and propaganda, while freedom and democracy offer independent media and the marketplace of ideas. And while the terrorists exploit a religion to justify murder, freedom and democracy offer respect for human dignity and rejection of the deliberate destruction of innocent lives.

For the vast majority of Afghans and Iraqis, the choice between these two visions is clear, and they have chosen democracy. Yet freedom and democracy are not merely means to an end in the war on terror; they are noble purposes our nation promotes because of our history and our founding principles.

The President expressed this calling most clearly in his second inaugural address. He said, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this Earth has rights and dignity and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of heaven and Earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time."

Human freedom and human rights are released by the defeat of tyranny, but they are secured by the creation of effective democracies. Effective democracies play a central role in American foreign policy, because they are our natural allies and the anchors of stability in the international system. We seek to help newly free nations build effective democracies, and to partner with effective democracies to address global challenges.

Effective democracies uphold basic human rights, including freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press. Effective democracies submit to the will of the people, especially when the people vote to change their government. Effective democracies exercise sovereignty, maintain order, and establish the rule of law within their own borders -- and fight corruption. Effective democracies protect institutions of civil society such as the family, religious communities, voluntary associations, private property and independent businesses. And effective democracies foster a vibrant civic culture that limits the power of the state through an independent media, opposition political parties, and a system of institutional checks and balances.

The President's strategy recognizes that the journey to effective democracy is long, and it highlights practical ways America supports countries as they make this journey. While free elections are the most visible sign of a free society, they are only the start of the process. Time and patience are required to build the institutions and practices of effective democracy. But free elections can be catalysts for change, by building popular demand for the other democratic institutions necessary to sustain freedom. Some have argued that holding elections before these institutions are in place is premature. But we know that tyrannies are generally poor incubators of free institutions. Generally, it is elected leaders who have the legitimacy to lead a nation -- with the sustained support of other effective democracies -- along the path of democratic success.

As nations find their way in building the institutions of effective democracy, they create opportunities for their people to prosper and build better lives. Creating global prosperity is another vital element of the President's National Security Strategy. The President recognizes that economic freedom and political freedom cannot be long separated. As people experience the freedom to buy, to sell, and to produce, it is only a matter of time until they will demand the freedom to assemble, to speak, and to worship.

For developing nations, the President has promoted economic freedom through an innovative global development strategy, the Millennium Challenge Account program. The President believes that each nation bears the responsibility for its own development, and that success will go to those nations that govern justly, fight corruption, invest in the health and education of their people, and are open to the power of free markets and free trade to lift people out of poverty. Nations that make these choices deserve the active support of the developed world.

The Millennium Challenge Account program is only part of the President's development strategy. He continues to support reducing debt burdens that cripple many nations in the developing world, and opening access to private capital markets. He recognizes the importance of the international private sector in development, as well as a nation's own entrepreneurs. He believes in the dignity of every human life and, therefore, has led unprecedented efforts to address deadly diseases such as AIDS and malaria. Together, these initiatives are creating an alternative to the failed model of corruption and permanent dependency that has been so prevalent in the past.

The President's strategy promotes economic freedom on a global scale, through a free trade agenda to foster prosperity among both developing and developed nations. The President supports open markets, a stable financial system, and the integration of the global economy -- because each of these helps create better lives for all people and a more secure world. The President's free trade agenda includes ambitious proposals put forward in the Doha Development Agenda negotiations of the World Trade Organization. Lowering trade barriers worldwide in agriculture, manufacturing, and services is the best opportunity in a generation to lift millions of people out of poverty and enhance economic opportunity for all people.

Effective democracies provide stability, accountability, and opportunity for their people. Mobilizing effective democracies is also the best hope for addressing the serious challenges we face in our world.

And the challenges we face are enormous. We face public health challenges such as AIDS and avian flu. We face environmental challenges, some of which have been created by human beings, some of which have destroyed human beings through horrific natural disasters. We face energy challenges caused by dependence on old fuels and old technologies. We face the challenges of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We face the challenges of the global drug trade, organized crime, and the detestable trade of human beings for sex and for slavery.

We face the challenge of oppression and violations of basic human rights. The President is personally offended by the profound oppression and suffering in Darfur, Sudan, as well as in Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Iran, Belarus, and other countries. Oppression occurs often on a massive scale, often as a tool of government control. The perpetrators of these horrors brazenly proclaim their indifference to human rights standards

-- so we in the international community must be equally bold in condemning their outrageous conduct.

Effective democracies can improve human rights, address other global challenges, and create a better world -- if we all work together. The President's strategy highlights ways in which effective democracies can cooperate for the greater good. But we must think differently and organize ourselves more creatively if we are to be effective.

The President believes that new international partnerships and arrangements among willing nations offer the possibility of quick and measurable results. The Proliferation Security Initiative, for example, has no governing council, no executive secretariat -- but it has created a community of nations voluntarily committed to acting together to keep dangerous weapons from rogue states and terrorist groups. The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Development and Climate is a group of states working to enhance energy security, reduce poverty, and lower pollution levels through accelerated development of clean technologies. The ad hoc Core Group led multinational efforts to respond to the devastating tsunami of 2004, and filled a critical gap until more traditional relief organizations could begin operations.

The President values these partnerships and arrangements, and his strategy anticipates replicating these and other innovative models to address future challenges. Measurable outcomes, not endless process, should define our international partnerships going forward.

I've only mentioned some of the principal elements of the President's National Security Strategy. But all of the President's foreign policy initiatives are united by his conviction that we are living in a moment of choosing, for our nation and for the world. America can choose a path of fear, leading to isolationism and protectionism, or a path of confidence, leading to international engagement and the expansion of freedom and democracy.

The President's National Security Strategy charts the way forward along the path of confidence. It is a strategy of leadership. It is a strategy of partnership. It is a strategy that protects America's vital interests, reflects America's history, and promotes America's highest ideals.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

Kierkegaard

Resource here.

Islamic Human Rights

And yes, it seems that is an oxymoron. From the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights:

Life is a God-given gift and the right to life is guaranteed to every human being. It is the duty of individuals, societies and states to protect this right from any violation, and it is prohibited to take away life except for a Shari'ah-prescribed reason.

Safety from bodily harm is a guaranteed right. It is the duty of the state to safeguard it, and it is prohibited to breach it without a Shari'ah-prescribed reason.

Every man shall have the right, within the framework of Shari'ah, to free movement and to select his place of residence whether inside or outside his country and, if persecuted, is entitled to seek asylum in another country. . . .

Everyone shall have the right to enjoy the fruits of his scientific, literary, artistic or technical production and the right to protect the moral and material interests stemming therefrom, provided that such production is not contrary to the principles of Shari'ah.

There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Shari'ah.

Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari'ah.

Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Shari'ah.

Everyone shall have the right to participate, directly or indirectly in the administration of his country's public affairs. He shall also have the right to assume public office in accordance with the provisions of Shari'ah.

All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari'ah.

The Islamic Shari'ah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification to any of the articles of this Declaration.

Pathetic.

Separating Truth and Belief

By Andre Glucksman, writing in the new issue of Democratiya. Excerpt:

For centuries, Jupiter and Christ, Jehovah and Allah have had to put up with many a joke. The Jews are past masters at criticising Yaweh – they've even made it a bit of a speciality. That does not prevent the true believers of any confession from believing, or from respecting those of a different faith. That is the price of religious peace. But joking about gas chambers, raped women and disembowelled babies, sanctifying televised beheadings and human bombs all point to an unbearable future.

It is high time that the democrats regained their spirit, and that the constitutional states remembered their principles. With solemnity and solidarity they must recall that one, two or three religions, four or five ideologies may in no way decide what citizens can do or think. What is at stake here is not only the freedom of the press, but also the permission to call a spade a spade and a gas chamber an abomination, regardless of our beliefs.

Leonard 6 v. Osama bin Laden

Insects to join the fight against Al'Qaeda:

Geek entomologists stand by your beds: the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking for research proposals in the area of Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, aka HI-MEMS - remote-controlled cyberinsects capable of being "delivered" to within five metres of Osama bin Laden from a control distance of one hundred metres.

Nearer my God to thee...

Courtesy of Instapundit:

Nanotechnology has restored the sight of blind rodents, a new study shows.

Scientists mimicked the effect of a traumatic brain injury by severing the optical nerve tract in hamsters, causing the animals to lose vision.

After injecting the hamsters with a solution containing nanoparticles, the nerves re-grew and sight returned.

The researchers injected the blind hamsters at the site of their injury with a solution containing synthetically made peptides - miniscule molecules measuring just five nanometres long.

Once inside the hamster's brain, the peptides spontaneously arranged into a scaffold-like criss-cross of nanofibres, which bridged the gap between the severed nerves.

The scientists discovered that brain tissue in the hamsters knitted together across the molecular scaffold, while also preventing scar tissue from forming.

Importantly, the newly formed brain tissue enabled the brain nerves to re-grow, restoring vision in the injured hamsters.

Side Walk Artist

Amazing pictures, here.

Origin of the Anglo-Americans

Democracy in America, Chapter II excerpts:

Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness, but unless those fortunes are territorial there is no aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor.

All the British colonies had then a great degree of similarity at the epoch of their settlement. All of them, from their first beginning, seemed destined to witness the growth, not of the aristocratic liberty of their mother-country, but of that freedom of the middle and lower orders of which the history of the world had as yet furnished no complete example.

Slavery, as we shall afterwards show, dishonors labor; it introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind, and benumbs the activity of man. The influence of slavery, united to the English character, explains the manners and the social condition of the Southern States.

The principles of New England spread at first to the neighboring states; they then passed successively to the more distant ones; and at length they imbued the whole Confederation. They now extend their influence beyond its limits over the whole American world. The civilization of New England has been like a beacon lit upon a hill, which, after it has diffused its warmth around, tinges the distant horizon with its glow.

The settlers who established themselves on the shores of New England all belonged to the more independent classes of their native country. Their union on the soil of America at once presented the singular phenomenon of a society containing neither lords nor common people, neither rich nor poor. These men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any European nation of our own time. All, without a single exception, had received a good education, and many of them were known in Europe for their talents and their acquirements. The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of New England brought with them the best elements of order and morality—they landed in the desert accompanied by their wives and children. But what most especially distinguished them was the aim of their undertaking. They had not been obliged by necessity to leave their country; the social position they abandoned was one to be regretted, and their means of subsistence were certain. Nor did they cross the Atlantic to improve their situation or to increase their wealth; the call which summoned them from the comforts of their homes was purely intellectual; and in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile their object was the triumph of an idea.

Author's Introduction and Chapter One

Alexis de Toqueville:

Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are not in their poper relationships, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confused with a taste for oppression, and the holy cult of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?

I cannot believe that the Creator made man to leave him in an endless struggle with the intellectual wretchedness that surrounds us. God destinies a calmer and a more certain future...

I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.

To Hell with Them

Rich Lowry, writing in NR Digital (subscription required):

The way Bush has wed conservative opinion in the wake of 9/11 to a soaringly aspirational foreign policy has been extraordinary. It was predictable in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that conservatives would support a vigorous military response. It was not predictable that they would rally around a president who firmly maintained that “Islam is a religion of peace,” who undertook a quest for democracy in the Middle East, and who supported nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq of the sort most of the Right had rejected in the Clinton years. These positions weren’t inevitable for the Right; they were almost entirely the product of Bush’s priorities.

As Bush has weakened, so has the support for these priorities. Sotto voce, conservatives have often said among themselves of Islam, after some horrific terror attack, “This is a religion of peace?” And a small group of vocal right-wing experts have knocked Bush for his “Islam is peace” rhetoric from the beginning. The “cartoon riots” seemed to tip more conservatives into, or close to, this camp.

The Palestinian elections have undermined Bush’s contention that all people everywhere desire freedom in their hearts. If this statement is interpreted in such a way as to make it true, it becomes non-falsifiable — to wit, all people really do desire freedom although it might not be evinced in any practical way, e.g., election results. If Bush’s belief is interpreted thus, it’s not terribly comforting since it means the universal desire for freedom is limited by circumstances and buried under cultural and institutional obstacles. In other words, this supposed universal desire won’t do us much good when people hold all sorts of other competing desires, including a hunger for order, power, religious purity, ethnic solidarity, national prestige, and revenge. All of which have been on display in Iraq.

It is Iraq, of course, that is discrediting the project of nation-building. It has reminded us of the enduring importance of culture. Iraq suffers from a lack of a democratic culture, and its longstanding ethnic and tribal divisions have worked against us. Iraq has also been a lesson in the delicacy of institutions and the extreme difficulty of creating them anew. Iraq’s army, police, and governmental ministries collapsed after our invasion, and we obviously haven’t been able to reconstitute them, at least not satisfactorily.

In light of these developments, the “to hell with them” hawks want to write off reforming Islam, since they consider it inherently unreformable. They are in favor of varying levels of frankness about this evaluation, wanting either to pass over it in silence or to be open about what they see as a clash of civilizations, with Islam itself the enemy. They don’t see any relation between spreading democracy and fighting terrorism, so want to give democracy-promotion a much lower prominence in U.S. foreign policy. They see the Iraq War as essentially lost, and want to pull up stakes either immediately or as soon as is plausible without creating further disaster. They agree on the imperative of never launching such a project again.

This is a most dangerous attitude to have, precisely because it is self-fulfilling. If Americans start believing we are at war with Islam, we will soon be at war with Islam.

Rich goes on:

Whether we say “never again” is important for another reason. A key question in the political debate post-9/11 is, What kind of conflict are we in? Is it primarily a law-enforcement action, or is it a war? “To hell with them” hawks think it is a war. But there is another important question: What kind of war?

The answer is that it is most like a counterinsurgency. This doesn’t mean that the War on Terror has to be the Iraq War over and over again. It is, after all, a feature of counterinsurgencies that they aren’t exclusively military in nature. They require persuading people through a range of inducements — military, but also political, economic, and ideological — to put down their arms, or not to take them up in the first place. On a global scale, that is our task in the War on Terror.

This means we need the two qualities that we either haven’t had or are rapidly losing in Iraq: an intimate knowledge of the culture we are dealing with, and patience. We will need more engagement with the Muslim world rather than less, and more perspective rather than less. To allow a month or two of sporadic rioting over the Danish cartoons — much of it fomented and paid for by fanatics — to make us turn our backs on the Muslim world for the long term is childish. It highlights the way our enemies and the “to hell with them” hawks exist in a somewhat symbiotic relationship. They want us to quit the Middle East, and the “to hell with them” hawks wouldn’t mind quitting; our enemies say democracy is incompatible with Islam, and the “to hell with them” hawks believe them.

Graves, I think you will appreciate this part:

First, the contention that Islam is a religion of peace. Even if this seems a polite fiction, it is an important one. Influential Muslims believe it to be true, and it is crucial that they prevail in the Muslim struggle for self-definition. Rather than scorning them, we should be doing what we can to support the likes of King Abdullah of Jordan, who has launched an anti-terror initiative, and Iraq’s Ayatollah Sistani, who has been consistent in condemning terrorism. Whatever the theological niceties of Islam, religious cultures take on different colorations across time. Some people wondered whether Christianity was a religion of peace 300 years ago when rival Christian princes were warring over questions of faith.

Like Christianity, Islam has within it resources that can be used both to promote liberty and peace and to repress these things. The relative strength of these dueling resources depends in part on the political and economic conditions in which they exist. We should want to do all we reasonably can to create the conditions in which the positive elements within Islam flower.

Rich goes on:

There is no more powerful political force than legitimacy. With it, a great empire can sprawl around the world; without it, it collapses the next day. Philip Bobbitt argues in his brilliant book The Shield of Achilles that what he calls “epochal wars” always revolve around legitimacy, around the questions of what the state is and how it is to be governed. He calls the period from the First World War to the end of the Cold War the “Long War,” a running conflict over whether the legitimate government of the nation-state was fascism, communism, or parliamentary democracy.

In the Middle East today, there is a similar struggle over legitimacy. How should Arab and surrounding states be governed — secular fascism, religious dictatorship, or a semi-democratic parliamentarianism? This struggle is mixed up with complicated ethnic and sectarian divisions, making it particularly nettlesome, but to pretend we have no stake in it is folly. How Muslim states and populations are governed makes a difference in the expression of Islam. Witness the relative moderation of Islamic populations in Turkey, Indonesia, and India.

“To hell with them” hawks suffer from an awful case of presentism. Because for the last 30 years there has been a rising tide of Islamic radicalism, they conclude it is inevitable. But radical Islam is an ideology, and ideologies don’t rise out of nothing. They exist in relation to political and state power, and to economic success, and their prestige rises or falls with these factors. In the 1960s, “to hell with them” hawks might have said, “All Arabs must be nationalists.” Arab nationalism delivered political and economic stagnation, and duly declined, with Islamism taking its place.

The key moment in the advance of radical Islam was Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran in 1979. The mullahs became the biggest boosters of suicide bombing. The burst of Iranian ideological energy scared the Saudis. Worried about losing leadership of the Islamic world, they began an international campaign of evangelism on behalf of Wahhabism. These two developments changed the iteration of global Islam. It wasn’t inevitable that this change take place, and it needn’t inevitably endure. Further, the geopolitical context of the Middle East mattered in making this change happen, and it will matter to reversing it.

The contemporary Middle East has featured a competition of radicalisms — who can be religiously purer, and more hostile to the West? The project in Iraq is an attempt to shift the terms of the competition to who can better deliver peace, prosperity, and representation. If this shift occurs, it will be a grave blow to the legitimacy of radical Islam. The radicals realize this, which is why they hope to defeat us in Iraq and in so doing trash the legitimacy of semi-democratic parliamentarianism.

“To hell with them” hawks would say, “Fine, but since Iraq isn’t capable of any sort of democracy, you are on a fool’s errand.” But the outcome of the conflict in Iraq is still in doubt. Confident predictions about which cultures are or are not capable of democracy have the aspect of unassailable truth — right up to the point that they don’t. Representative Arab government will be impossible until it happens.

Skeptics about the relation between political systems and terrorism in the Middle East point to the existence of homegrown terrorists in Britain to show violent extremism can exist in liberal democracies. Of course it can. But such extremism in many cases reflects the tentacles of Saudi money and propaganda. During the Cold War, there were also homegrown Communists in Western societies, but when the center of Communism, the Soviet Union, collapsed, these Communists disappeared. Similarly, if the Middle East, the heart of the Muslim world, didn’t have so many players sanctioning extremism and violence, there would be fewer homegrown fanatics.

“To hell with them” hawks implicitly promise that if we deny extremists sophisticated technology, and secure ourselves at home, we can be safe. But it is the fire in the minds of men that matters most. As long as there are countless young men who want to do us harm, and are willing to die in the process, it is going to be hard to deny them the materials or the access to the U.S. necessary to do it. The key is to try to see that the fire itself begins to die out. There is no chance of that happening without changes in the Middle East that will require calling on all aspects of our power — economic, diplomatic, ideological, as well as military — in a drawn-out, unconventional kind of political warfare.

For believers in a clash in civilizations, the “to hell with them” hawks have an odd attitude toward their own. They want to put our civilization in a permanent posture of strategic defense. In Cold War terms, they believe in Containment rather than Rollback. Containment was a successful strategy, but especially so when Ronald Reagan invested it with aspects of Rollback, launching insurgencies against Communist states and engaging in unapologetic evangelism for the Western cause.

Like the “to hell with them” hawks, the Crusaders of old believed in a clash of civilizations. But they wanted to spread the one, true faith; the “to hell with them” hawks want to enhance port security. Perhaps it is President Bush who is most serious about engaging in a war of civilizations, seeking to translate key aspects of our civilization to theirs (while at the same time shrewdly denying that there is any clash of civilizations, to help make the medicine go down). What Islamists are attempting to do in Europe, Bush is attempting in the Middle East.

As I've said before, we must stay engaged. If we don't, it's only going to get worse.

Bolton at the U.N.

Jay Nordlinger writes in NR Digital (subscription required):

On February 23, the U.N. brass, in the person of Jan Eliasson, president of the General Assembly, responded with a proposal that said: 47 members, rather than 53; voted in by an absolute majority; and even those under sanctions are eligible. Bolton said no way — the United States would not accept that proposal, in fact would vote against it, if it came to that. He told the press that it wasn’t enough that the Eliasson proposal, on the whole, wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He also said, “We want a butterfly. We’re not going to put lipstick on a caterpillar and declare it a success.”

(I later ask whether that is an expression from his growing up, or from somewhere else in American culture. Bolton says no, he made it up, and will have to accept paternity, for better or worse.)

Bolton made clear that he — i.e., the United States — was willing to negotiate with other member states, but not with Mr. Eliasson, acting as a “facilitator.” International agreements ought to be between nations, he argued. You sit down across a table, with red pencils, and jaw it out. Annan supports the Eliasson proposal, and so do many nations — most nations. The United States, incidentally, has no veto in the matter: It would be one of the 191 members of the General Assembly, voting on the proposal. Many conservatives believe that, if the proposal goes through, the United States should refuse to participate — should leave the human-rights panel as it did UNESCO, under Reagan, back in ’84.

For their stance, Bolton and the administration received support from an unexpected quarter: the New York Times. That Bush-despising, Bolton-despising newspaper editorialized, “When it comes to reforming the disgraceful United Nations Human Rights Commission, America’s ambassador, John Bolton, is right; Secretary General Kofi Annan is wrong; and leading international human rights groups have unwisely put their preference for multilateral consensus ahead of their duty to fight for the strongest possible human rights protection. A once-promising reform proposal has been so watered down that it has become an ugly sham, offering cover to an unacceptable status quo. It should be renegotiated or rejected.”

Bolton later sought to reassure National Review that, despite the Times’s approval, he and his people had not “gone soft in the head.”

But the Times, as it concluded the editorial, took care to offend: “Mr. Bolton, representing an administration whose record is stained by Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, is awkwardly placed to defend basic human rights principles.”

Stubbornly soft in the head were usual suspects such as Archbishop Tutu, Jimmy Carter, and the leaders of the EU, all of whom urged acceptance of the Eliasson proposal. Carter practically pleaded with U.N. members to defy the United States. This recalled his actions in 1990, when the first President Bush was trying to rally the Security Council for what would be the Gulf War, Desert Storm. Carter wrote members of the Council, urging them to thwart the United States. The government in Washington found out about it when the Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, called the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, and said (essentially), “What gives?”

As of this writing, it is unclear what will become of the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

David Warren and Honesty

Mr. Warren has some dark thoughts, here. Excerpt:

In this view -- which I hold to be Mr Bush’s -- we are dealing with what amounts to a planetary civil war, between those who accept the state-system descended from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and an emergent Islamist ideology that certainly does not. To Mr Bush’s mind, only legitimately-elected governments, presiding over properly-administered secular bureaucracies, can be trusted to deal locally with the kind of mischief an Osama bin Laden can perform, with his hands on contemporary weapons of mass destruction.

But Mr Bush was staking his bet on the assumption that the Islamists were not speaking for Islam; that the world’s Muslims long for modernity; that they are themselves repelled by the violence of the terrorists; that, most significantly, Islam is in its nature a religion that can be “internalized”, like the world’s other great religions, and that the traditional Islamic aspiration to conjoin worldly political with otherworldly spiritual authority had somehow gone away. It didn’t help that Mr Bush took for his advisers on the nature of Islam, the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, or the profoundly learned but terminally vain Bernard Lewis. Each, in a different way, assured him that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.

The question, “But what if they are not?” was never seriously raised, because it could not be raised behind the mud curtain of political correctness that has descended over the Western academy and intelligentsia. The idea that others see the world in a way that is not only incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see it, is the thorn ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism. “Ideas have consequences”, and the idea that Islam imagines itself in a fundamental, physical conflict with everything outside of itself, is an idea with which people in the contemporary West are morally and intellectually incapable of coming to terms. Hence our continuing surprise at everything from bar-bombings in Bali, to riots in France, to the Danish cartoon apoplexy.

My own views on the issue have been aloof. More precisely, they have been infected with cowardice. I am so “post-modern” myself that I, too, find it almost impossible to think through the corollaries from our world’s hardest fact. And that fact is: the post-Christian West is out of its depth with Islam.

The Economist is Wrong

And they are wrong because of basic economic theory, which is ironic. American Future pointed me to this article which argues against the Indian nuclear agreement because "rule-bending for India is bound to encourage some other countries to rethink their nuclear options too... Giving India a freer ride is also likely to embolden Iran and North Korea in their defiance, with potential repercussions for the security of all their neighbours, from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan."

That is ridiculous.

To understand why one must remember that the international arena is not one of law, where rules apply to everybody and are enforceable unilaterally and monopolistically by a state. Instead, it is a more complex system of interaction where the various players seek to maximize their own self-interest. In otherwords, it is an economic, incentive-based market, where the currencies are power and resource.

In such an un-administrated system, there are no laws -- there are ethics. Ethics in the international arena are enforceable only insofar as power-blocks of individual players buy into them; any decision to purchase will be informed by a conscious and sub-conscious measurement of incentive.

If a country with nuclear ambition was to take a snapshot of the last week--comparing Iran's referral to the Security Council with Bush's validation of India's nukes--a very clear picture would form: If one is a friend of the Americans, effort is made and rules are bent to see you get what you want. If, however, one is an enemy of the US, one will find oneself operating under the magnifying glass of an aroused superpower and its allies -- a "community" with real powers that can be used to impose tangible costs on one's country.

In the absence of law--which needs an element of inevitable cost to be effective, something not to be found in the current non-proliferation regime--an incentive-based approach is the only available supplement in the geo-political world of quiet diplomacy. To not understand this and complain about sophomoric concepts like "fairness" and "hypocrisy"--in a world of evil agents no less--is to do a great disservice to responsible discourse.

To be English

Every society has its forbidden fruit. In the British garden, it is here where you may not go.

Species: America

From Wretchard:

[M]an is at the center of warfare...The jihadis want our souls; the rule in warfare is that we will want theirs.

In total war, the deprogramming of the individual is less important, from the standpoint of effect, than the long-term deprogramming of the losing culture.

This starts, of course, with individuals. Dead men tell no tales: their beliefs and perspectives die with them. With criminals, this is usually where the story stops; their criminality is no longer transferrable once they are dead. With movements and cultures, however, the story is more complex.

Movements and cultures carry with them an institutionalized memory--made of narrative theories and beliefs--that are much less dependent on particular individuals for their survival and transmission. Some are more dependent than others on leaders--their recall and articulation, for instance--but the most successful ones can survive with minimal carriers in a decentralized environment. Christianity in its infancy was such a movement. America, for all its early dependence on Washington, was another.

In total war, one is fighting a common mentality--a common narrative theory about the world that is shared (if not by every lowly soldier) by every agent of consequence in that society. This narrative theory does not have to be complex: it can be as simple as "them or us." It may be based on truth, and it may be based on falsity. Many times it is broad and vague--a general agreement that to continue to be us we must stop them from being them. Sometimes it is narrow and precise--they are infidels, and must be slaughtered.

I said yesterday that human motives are pretty much consistent across all spectrums and societies, and this is true. We all start with certain genetic baggage--some of this baggage is species-wide, some of this baggage is more localized. Our binocular vision, or our language center, or our ability to recognize agents--these were selected for way back, and will be consistent in all humans except in the case of mutation. Localized genetic baggage--genes that developed geographically--play a much bigger role in behavior and personality, but they are heavily diversified and tend to manifest on distribution curve that is similar, though not the same, in all societies.

Okay, you are probably wondering (if you've made it this far), where does that take us?

It takes us, in a literal sense, to birth, to the grand introduction of this genetic package to the world in which it must navigate and participate. Thereinafter, all information this person takes in from the world will be processed in the context of his genetic predisposition, and, when enough of this data is stored, in the context of the processed product itself.

The short hand for this is "qualia"--which is a philosophical (not a technical) term that signifies subjectivity itself. Red to me is not red to you, as the classic example goes. You will never be able to experience my red, and I'll never be able to experience yours. There must be some subjective experience, then, that cannot be quantified or reduced. And so on.

While this is practicably true, it is not true in principle, not true in the sense that it cannot be accounted for. If we were to start with a genetic replica of you, and if we were able to recreate each discrete sensation and event you ever experienced, in the order in which you experienced them, there is still a doubt about whether the person at the end of the line would be you exactly. Oh, it would be close enough to predict all but the tiniest of behaviors, but it still may not be fully and completely you. An element of randomness may have gone unaccounted for, for instance, a quantum variable or some such that cannot be mathematically predicted. But it would be very close.

This tells us a lot -- a lot -- about avenues we should explore if we hope to avoid total war. Barring some horror like gene-doping (which, unfortunately, we will see in our life-times), the substances we have to work with--and on--all exist at the sensory input level. We should recognize it, and act on it.

An Arabic kid who was never exposed to Islam would not be Muslim. He may still be wicked, insincere, narcissistic, etc., but the mental universe in which he acted out these traits would not be based on Suras and Sermons. His behavioral options--based on theories about cause and effect--would be broadened in some ways, but also narrowed in others: it would never occur to him, for instance, to kill himself and others for 72 virgins in heaven.

Nothing is easy, and messing with belief systems is no different. Motivations do not exist one at a time, but in a matrix of relativity that can change value on a dime if the environment in which it interacts shifts even slightly. Two beliefs can be held simultaneously even though they are, fundamentally, contradictory--and one can be acted on in one kind of situation while another will be effectual in another kind of situation. There are more possible neural pathways than there are particles in the universe. Our brain is incredibly complex.

But we really don't need to know every little thing about the mind before we come up with a plan to cultivate it. Edison didn't need to understand 'why carbon filament' before he internalized the lessons of its success. Farmers don't need to know chemistry to understand the necessity of a field lying fallow. And a park manager doesn't need to know thermodynamics to understand the benefit of a controlled burn. We don't need to know everything, either, because we have examples of success all around us.

A stable society must have stable institutions that organize the information that flows into developing and developed minds, and it must also have institutions that then account for the individual and group activity that is a consequence of this information input. We know that works, we know that is a recipe for success. There are also other things that spell success: informational competition, activity competition, kinds and quality of information, kinds and quality of acceptable activity, etc.

What you see on closer inspection is that America is--as far as it is possible--the ideal mind cultivator and aggregator. Just as the human brain developed to cultivate theories (explanatory postures about the world) and aggregate information (memory), America has developed as a superior mechanism for nurturing and organizing minds. It has done this by accounting for the propensities and diversities of behavior (human nature) in order to minimize institutional and societal instability. And it has done this by freeing minds to associate with other minds--much like neurons associate with other neurons--thereby allowing 'America' to process information at the society level in an incredibly efficient, responsive, and fault-tolerant way.

This is the recipe for societal success. This is what the rest of the world must become.

The reason why is painfully obvious: other cultures now interact in a world where America exists. A new species has developed--strong, agile, intelligent, determined--and the fact of its existence changes everything for every other species.

I'm sure the Neanderthal thought himself successful before the ascendancy of homo sapien. The story of America's ascendancy will play out in the same way, until another species develops to take her place.

This is not much comfort for individual cultures and societies, I'm afraid, but--and I think I'm on solid ground here--their minds will love it.

Deindustrialization

Its causes, and its implications. Here (.pdf).

More Philosophy of Mind

The Interpretation of Texts, People and Other Artifacts, here.

Evolution, Teleology, Intentionality. Here.

Evolution, Error and Intentionality. Here.

The Origins of Selves, here. Excerpt:

The original distinction between self and other is a deep biological principle; one might say it is the deepest principle, for biology begins in self-preservation--in the emergence of entities (the simplest replicators) who resisted destruction and decay, who combatted, at least for a short time, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and passed on their capacity to do this to their descendants [...]

Our human environment contains not just food and shelter, enemies to fight or flee and conspecifics with whom to mate, but words, words, words. These words are potent elements of our environment that we readily incorporate, ingesting and extruding them, weaving them like spiderwebs into self-protective strings of narrative. Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not building dams or spinning webs, but telling stories--and more particularly concociting and controlling the story we tell others--and ourselves--about who we are.

Now we are ready for the strangest idea in my talk, but also, I think, the most important: there is a further similarity between the spiders, the beavers, and us. Spiders don't have to think, consciously and deliberately, about how to spin their webs; that is just something that spider brains are designed to get spiders to do. And even beavers, unlike professional human engineers, do not consciously and deliberately plan the structures they build. And finally, we, (unlike professional human storytellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them; like spider webs, our tales are spun by us; our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.

Learning & Labeling. Here.

Evolution as Algorithm - the Ultimate Insult? Here.

Did HAL Commit Murder? Here.

Quantum Incoherence. Here.

Wired for Sound. Here.