It’s a great day today. I’ve watched the news with anxiety over the last few days, because as I looked at the war, I saw two possible futures arising from it; one dark and bloody, couched in the resentful glare of the Iraqis who silently watched their conquerer’s tanks roll by; and another, hopeful, future – couched in the joyful kiss of a dark-eyed child on the cheek of a helmeted Marine.

Today I saw the joy and the hope – and the kiss – on the streets of Iraq, and a weight on my heart lifted.

Hope is the vital ingredient.

John Balzar, a columnist in the L.A. Times who I find intermittently fascinating and frustrating has a great one today. He is looking at the current mood in the country, and contrasting the determined hopefulness that the conservative, pro-war group has with the equally determined despair of the liberals and those who oppose the war.

Back to politics. Here at home, conservatives are mining this vein of American optimism and prospering as a consequence.

[Update: Check out Dan Hartung’s eloquent take on this.]

Mark Kann, chairman of the political science department of USC, says this is a traditional partisan advantage at moments of international engagement: “Conservatives always have been optimistic about the status and furtherance of America compared to the rest of the world. There is a whole body of literature on what is called ‘American exceptionalism.’ The idea of a shining city on the hill.”

Romantic? Perhaps. But I believe that cynics — and I’ll include myself here — owe it to our ideas, and our hopes, to pay fresh respect to that part of the American character. Not that optimism is always the avenue to political success. But sometimes it is; and at those moments, it’s hard to convince Americans of anything except their exceptionalism.

When citizens came to doubt their future in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan appealed to the nation’s sense of optimistic renewal. It was “morning in America,” and nothing else mattered nearly so much. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton gave optimism to a citizenry knocked off balance by global economic competition and technological change. Out of uncertainty, he promised that Americans could find opportunity. George W. Bush, who has neither Reagan’s sunny disposition nor Clinton’s empathy, seems to have fashioned his own kind of hardheaded, can-do optimism out of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Today, the language of Bush and his conservatives is spoken in high notes of expectation: liberation, freedom, security, possibility. Opponents find themselves bogged in something of a rhetorical quagmire, stuck with words like mistake, immoral, imperialist, failure, fraudulent, cynical, doom.

An optimist, as the old wheeze goes, sees opportunity in calamity, while a pessimist finds calamity in opportunity. Thus far, Bush’s opponents have failed to match his optimism with much more than the gloomy promise of worse to come.

And boy, is that combination of self-loathing, negativity, and hopelessness a winning political combination for the left.

ly, I refuse to yield all the optimism to conservatives. I believe there are a number of liberals like me – who define their liberalism not by antipathy for the modern West, or more specifically for the U.S., but by a desire for more justice, more liberty, more equality, and a belief that we can have it all. I think that someone will find a way to channel our patriotism, our hope, and our energy into a political movement that can stand toe-to-toe with the conservative wave that is going to rise for the next few years in this country. Somone is going to outline a future for us, and challenge us to make it happen.

We may never get there…I certainly won’t live to see it…but we can set out on the road. And, more important, we can start down the road hoping that what we want will be at the end of it. I wrote about a Balzar column before:

He wrote:

Yet I sense a yearning among Californians. I’m not the only one who wants to believe in destiny. I don’t know a single person who is content to allow a future Kevin Starr to describe this as the era when we gave up on our dreams.

I was bicycling through Death Valley one winter, and came across a series of grave markers next to the road. Children and adults who died while attempting to cross to California and their dream of a future.

It had a huge impact on me to realize how badly people wanted a better future for themselves and their children…badly enough to walk and ride ox-drawn wagons across the country and end up out of water, of food, and still to press on and cross Death Valley.

For me it was paved roads, a 25-pound bicycle and a support van driven by my girlfriend with water, food, and the promise of an air-conditioned hotel at the end of the day.

Why is it so much harder for us to hope than it was for them?

Why is so hard for the Left to look forward with hope, rather than around with disdain? It isn’t for me, and it isn’t for many others that I know.

And I’m happy to admit that it isn’t for me because I am perfectly willing to stand with conservatives in believing in American exceptionalism.

I just think we got there for different reasons, and that we’ll build the shining future using different tools.

When I started this series, I said:

…it turns out that Tenacious G and the boys haven’t seen the Branagh ‘Henry V‘, so we jump it to the head of the Netflix queue, and it shows up in the mail. We watched it the other night, and it was still wonderful (Yes, Bacchus, I’m still supporting Branagh’s erotic reward). My boys loved it as well; Littlest Guy, who is six, wanted to watch it again the next day, and spent the time after bath and before bed wandering the house in his blue PJ’s-with-rocket-ships-and-feet and a stern look, declaiming “No King of England if not King of France.” I love my sons and they are wonderful, but they are a bit … odd, sometimes. Somehow that line over all the others had caught him, and he and I had a long discussion in which I explained that Henry wanted to be King of France, and that he was willing to risk losing England to get it.

I’m somehow amazed that only a few people have made the G.W. Bush > Prince Hal comparison.

And in this case, I think the comparison is apt; Hal became Henry, who staked his crown on defeating and conquering France.

We know that he won, and that at Agincourt, his technology (the longbow), strategy (setting up across a muddy and plowed field), and luck made him King of France and kept him King of England.

And I believe that Bush staked his presidency on the War with Iraq (and the consequent wars we will have with interests – I am hoping that we don’t have to fight any more nations – in the Middle East.

I believe that the 2004 election is being settled this month in Baghdad, and that Bush is about to win it.

Does that mean that all will play out as Bush & Co. intend in the Middle East? We’ll have to watch and see.

Remember that Henry won France, but ultimately his children lost his crown.
But Bush is coming out a winner, in no small part I’ll suggest, because as he is seen as being willing to take risks and that in an era of carefully machined, consensus-driven, ‘find a way to say things that won’t pin you into a corner’ politics he is, like Reagan, willing to take a stand.

If one were to look for the common strain in modern American (and to a lesser extent, European) politics, it’s the desire to avoid, at all costs, risk. One can’t take risks in what you say, one can’t take risks in the programs to propose. You don’t take risks, because in an era of ‘gotcha’ politics,

So we wind up with these featureless Pillsbury-Dough-Boy (and Girl) Politicians, who desperately try to take positions without taking any positions that could come back to haunt them later. That’s a problem. It’s a problem first, because it deprives us of a politics of issues. It is virtually impossible to have a debate on issues when neither party will take a clearly distinguishable stand on them. Next, it’s a problem because it builds into our politics a bias toward inactivity.

Now inactivity on the part of the government is often a good thing; one reason we are probably so tolerant of the long reach of the government is that it often doesn’t do much. Imagine what it would be like if they really enforced 100% compliance with speed limits or the tax codes.

But, over time, government inactivity begins to take a toll, as institutions and infrastructure begin to fall in to disrepair, and as we fail to even look at the difficult issues we need to solve in order to function as a society.

Right now, the California Legislature is in its … I think … fifth month of trying not to deal with the budget crisis the state is facing.

Given an annual deficit of $30+ billion, that means that we’ve spent TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS or so while waiting for the powers-that-be to get the budget under control.

Why haven’t we? because the costs of acting – of taking steps to cut programs and raise taxes – are viewed as being fatal to one’s political career, while the costs of not acting, of going along and letting the ‘process’ sort it out over time – is a burden you can share with the rest of the incumbents.

Not only does inaction directly create costs, it creates a set of risks itself; it is important to judge actions not in terms of their absolute risk (which is typically unknowable), but in terms of the risk relative to other choices, including taking no action.

And, we seldom retire incumbent politicians for failing to act when history shows they should have. That’s a mistake, because it deprives us of a dynamic market in the political sphere – we lose the ‘creative destruction’ Schumpeter talks about, and which is so vital to the strength and durability of a society.

And a part of the loss is to our political culture, as we begin to perceive politicians as failing to lead, failing to take stands, and, ultimately, failing to solve the problems we expect the government to face. This loss of legitimacy is, to me one of the great threats to modern political life.

But one positive thing GWB has done, I believe, is to show the benefits of taking political risks. Not only (I fervently hope) in terms of outcomes, but in terms of the direct political benefit to the risk-taker.

Now we just need to find some risk-takers on the Democratic side of the table so we can have a real marketplace of ideas…

This is Part I
This is Part II
This is Part III
Parts V > VI aren’t written yet.

Irony always makes me happy. In today’s LA Times, a story that conclusively proves that Peter Arnett either has a completely tin ear, is a fool, or most likely, simply belives in saying whatever his audience wants to hear.

Arnett Fuming at Loss of NBC Job

By Elizabeth Jensen, Times Staff Writer

NEW YORK — Peter Arnett said Tuesday he was upset with how NBC severed ties with him the day before, and sounded more defiant than apologetic over his decision to grant an interview to state-run Iraqi TV.

In an interview from Baghdad, where he hopes to stay if he can find enough work, Arnett called the controversy a “storm in a bloody teacup.” He said he was irritated that he had spent 19 days helping NBC, whose own reporters left citing safety concerns, and “then I’m being trashed.” Arnett’s official Baghdad employer was National Geographic Explorer, which agreed to let him report for NBC. National Geographic fired Arnett on Monday.

…

Indeed, many media observers have criticized Arnett more for where he made his comments than what he said.

NBC, he said, “was just grateful for anything I could give them” and used him up to 20 hours per day. “But in the end, I was thrown out on the street, and very casually, my reputation in shreds — for what? For helping them out.”

An NBC News spokeswoman said Tuesday: “Yesterday, on the ‘Today’ show, Peter Arnett said that he had made ‘a stupid misjudgment.’ And he apologized to us and the American people. We’ll leave it at that.”

Asked about that sober apology, Arnett said: “What choice did I have? I followed a young woman who was crying over the loss of her husband in a suicide attack.” He called the situation “bizarre,” noting, “I was fired on the ‘Today’ show, the most popular morning program.”

He said he still believes, as he said on “Today,” that it was a misjudgment to do the interview, “in view of the reaction to it.” But he added, “I don’t think anything I said to them was so terribly criminal.”

Many observers took issue with Arnett’s statement praising Iraq’s treatment of foreign journalists, noting that some reporters are missing and others have been expelled. Arnett, who is on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit group based in New York that promotes global press freedom, said one reason he did the interview and made that comment was “to remind the Iraqi police and authorities that we are reasonable people, here to tell their story.

“I wanted to give a human face to the journalists ….This is a dangerous environment.”

…

The irony part comes in the adjacent story on the same page:

4 Journalists Freed From Iraqi Prison

By Josh Getlin, Times Staff Writer

NEW YORK — Two Newsday journalists and two freelance photographers who had been missing in Iraq reached Jordan safely Tuesday after spending a week inside Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, an editor at the newspaper said.

…

Yup, the foreign press are treated well in Iraq.

Like most people, I read the news in a kind of emotional spin cycle of pride, grief, anxiety, determination and wonder. And then every so often I manage to change my perspective, and grasp at something that amuses me. Usually it’s dark amusement these days, but it’s amusement nonetheless.

Recently, it’s been the litany from those who opposed the war in the first place who now trip over themselves to tell us how badly it’s going. They seize on the casualties and delays to explain that if we’re not actually losing the war, we’re certainly approaching a stalemate.

And, thinking about the misperception of risk in this, I manage a dry chuckle.

See, it’s like this.

The population of South-Central Los Angeles is about 300,000, last time I checked. Goes up and down as you define neighborhoods in and out.

Last year there were over 250 murders there.

Two hundred and fifty people died. Moms, dads, kids, grandparents, teenagers. Going to the grocery store. Selling groceries. Leaving church. (Yeah, some were selling drugs.)

That’s about twenty deaths a month, a little over two every three days.

In one neighborhood.

In all of California, we had about 2,066 murders (including non negligent manslaughter) in 2000. The total population of California in 2000 was about 38 million (as compared to an estimated population of Iraq of 29 million). That’s about five and a half deaths a day.

In one state.

Based on the list of deaths in Fox News, we suffered 43 deaths…including hostile action and accidents from March 20 to March 29. Ten days, 43 deaths. Each one a tragedy, as are the deaths here in California. Four and some tragedies per day.

So what does this tell us?

That in a country about the size of California, in a FREAKING WAR ZONE, the daily number of deaths among our soldiers is comparable to the daily number of murders in California as a whole. If I were to pull out the accidents from the war deaths…14 of them…there are fewer war deaths than murders. (Note: I know that some Iraqis are dying as well, and that the rates per population are higher…)

Let’s use a real population as a comparison. Figure that the population of South-Central LA is roughly the population of the US forces (it’s probably close); it is roughly five times more dangerous to be a soldier in Iraq than to simply go out and buy groceries in South Central.

Does this detract from the courage of the troops in Iraq? Of course not. Does it mean there are too many murders here in California? Of course it does.

But before we panic at the ‘slaughter’ of our troops caught in a ‘quagmire’, let’s remember than in any group of a third of a million people, a certain number will die every day. Add heavy equipment and guns, and even with no hostile action, we will see a significant number of deaths.

And our troops have a whole army facing them, and in spite of it, they are being killed at a rate comparable to that of the average resident of neighborhoods in California.

Now, I’m not a military historian or a tactician. And there are some alternative ways to look at the data. But I will suggest that this suggests that the opposition our troops are facing … relative to their individual abilities, training, determination, technology, and tactics … isn’t doing a very good job of fighting them.

Look, these numbers aren’t exact. I’m pulling them from quick Google searches and public databases, and if I was going to hold them up, I’d need to do a lot of refinement and adjustments (correcting time bases, getting exact populations, etc. etc.).

But they aren’t off by an order of magnitude (factor of 10).

So the next time you read someone who tells you that we’re being fought to a stalemate, that the war is lasting too long and there are too many casualties…ask yourself how it can be true when one can look at these numbers and have them be even roughly comparable.

I can only think of one answer, and it is that the war is going pretty darn well from our side.

Let’s hope it keeps doing so.

And let us keep in mind that those deaths that statistics can dismiss are real, and that to the loved ones they leave behind, it is no consolation that only a few died if it is their daughter, son, wife, husband, mother or father who comes home under a flag.

It’s never good to be made an example of, except a) when you deserve it, and b) when you learn something from it.

I got a small dollop of email tonight pointing me to “Weblog Central” on MSNBC where I’m used as a cautionary example of those who sometimes live on the Isle of Conclusion (because they jumped there):

Take, for example, the March 23 report out of Iraq that U.S.-led coalition troops had seized a chemical plant. Early reports on FoxNews.com indicated that the plant was a “huge chemical weapons factory.” Other news organizations jumped on the story, citing Fox as the source. When it eventually became clear that there were no actual chemical weapons at the plant and the actual nature of the chemical factory could not be determined for some time, news outlets backpedaled, and reports of a “chemical weapons factory” were tempered with terms like “suspected.”

In most cases, this correction might have gone mostly unnoticed. But in a war that is being covered simultaneously by news organizations and independent Webloggers, information and disinformation is being recorded, analysed, spun, counterspun and set straight again in countless iterations, countless languages and countless countries.

So, when Armed Liberal saw the original chemical weapons plant report at 1:41 a.m., he promptly posted the story on the Winds of Change blog, with a link to the Fox News story and a quote:

“A senior Pentagon official has confirmed to Fox News on Sunday that coalition forces have discovered a ‘huge’ chemical weapons factory near the Iraqi city of An Najaf, which is situated some 225 miles south of Baghdad.”

And while the writer is too gracious to directly take me to task for not correcting my post when the underlying news story was updated, he should have because I should have.

I’m taking away the fact that “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” I’ll try much harder to step up when what I say is misleading or sometimes, heaven forbid, just plain wrong.

Below is a snippet of an email conversation I had with a friend, a woman with whom I’ve had some disagreements about the war. Now while we disagree, I think that she’s genuine and thoughtful (although wrong) about her stance, and I appreciate that she struggles with it (as I do with mine).

I think her issues are shared by a lot of people, and so worthy of consideration. So here goes (the opening quote is from my email to her):

&gt And I’ll suggest a simple test. If you think George
&gt Bush and Saddam Hussein
&gt are morally equivalent, or that Bill Clinton and
&gt Milosevich are equivalent,
&gt then your argument holds water.

…
This is not to say that we are all morally equivalent. In my morality, Saddam and Hitler will be bunkmates in hell. I am, of course, being somewhat facetious here and in the next sentence as, truly, I do not know who will be or won’t be in hell, if hell exists, and I fully anticipate I will find out via my own experience of it, if it exits. However, in my morality, Clinton and Bush will bunkmates there as well–on a different level perhaps with day passes. But, on this level of reflection, I think–hell is hell and does it ultimately matter what level we end up on in there–will there be a popularity contest, benefits to be garnered, an advantage to be gained if one is on a higher or lower level? I don’t know. It is enough, simple as my theology has devolved to–that one has not lived in such a way to avoid hell and that’s all that matters. This goes to my belief that one is just as guilty if they steal a million dollars buck by buck as if they took it all at once…

Furthermore, I am all too aware of my own sins and foibles. … Sigh. Thus, I find myself singularly unable to pass judgment–intellectually–on others. There but for the grace of God? Pot calling the kettle? Regardless–there you have it. I am a sinner and am unable to tell whether I myself am a sheep or goat let alone anyone else.
So, no, they aren’t equivalent, but I cannot say, morality-wise, that they are significantly different as I do not know ultimately and in the light of eternity what good or ill each will have wrought…

And I, as student and as sufferer and as perpetrator, know painfully well the pavement on the road to hell. More evil, imho, has been done in the name of good than has ever been perpetuated by the truly evil. And, yet, I cannot find it in my heart to categorically blame them (intellectually) for the results of their good intentions. Blame in one way, but not in another–if that makes sense.

Thus, I do not know and thus, I hesitate to pass judgment as to what is truly evil.

Now, emotionally, oh, that’s another story. I rage, I cry, I stomp about and I send all kinds of people to hell for much less than even poor Dubba or Bill has done. Emotionally, I am quite willing to draw a distinction between a million at once and a million a buck at a time. Emotionally, though, I also see (and intellectually) that people are wounded and influenced by things that others may not even notice–that we are flawed but worthy of love–so I am in a real conundrum here.

And she’s not alone in that conundrum.

As I talk to people about the war…particularly people who oppose it…I am constantly struck by what they would call even-handedness.

It’s a weird thing.

I’m pretty unhappy with Ashcroft’s loose interpretation of the restraints on the U.S. government’s ability to infringe on my rights. But I sure as hell don’t stay up nights worrying about being summarily executed or tortured, or being restrained while my children are tortured in front of me. And I’m skipping the more lurid tales of brutality that can be told about monstrous dictators like Milosovich or Saddam Hussein.

Somehow the fact that I’m opposed to one (the bureaucratic infringement of my liberties) doesn’t come close to making me feel that it’s the equivalent of the other (the knock on the door, the executioner’s bullet), and I don’t understand how other people can.

In part, I think it’s the same kind of misperception I talk about when I discuss our misjudgments of risk. The kind of thing where we see one incident tragedy in the news…a man shot by the police when he reaches for his wallet…and map it to other stories which have the same emotional impact, even though they represent far greater tragedies. Rwandan genocide appears alongside a battered child in the newspaper; each is unspeakably tragic in and of itself, but…

…are they morally equivalent?

Is there some greater moral weight that we can give to evil (or good, for that matter) when doing it, rather than fighting it, is a matter of social policy?

People like my friend think not. They see themselves an entrapped in a world of evil, where every action carries with it, not the possibility of hope and the risk of tragedy, but the certainty of failure.

And if we are ever going to be conquered, this is what will do it.

Folks on this site (and others) are doing a great job of concentrating the war news and keeping information addicts such as myself out of withdrawal.

I’ve got a small queue of things stacked up, including a piece on “Political Risk” from the POV of Bush.

But ly, I just can’t bring myself to write about risk from the safety of my desk while men and women (some my son’s age) put themselves at true risk for me.

I’ve been having a number of interesting conversations about the war in my non-pseudo-nominal life, however, and I wanted to bring a few of the points up here.

What I really want to talk about is dissent.

About dissent in wartime, and what it means and what it might mean, and about what I see in dissent, both in the news we all read, and in some of my private conversations.

I don’t think that dissent should be stifled in wartime. But I think that it moves onto a very delicate surface, and one that places great responsibility both on the dissenters and on those who respond to them. This is for one simple reason; wars are ultimately not won with weapons, not with technology or expenditure; they are won with will. They are won with the ‘tested in the fiery heat of the moment’ will of those who soldier on the front lines, and with the ‘restless late at night sleepless’ will of those of us who are at home.

And in my mind, there are two types of dissent. Both aim to change the hearts and minds of the polity, and of their representatives. One speaks to our hopes and plans, and argues with a firm voice and head held high, over the nature of our goals and over the means to attain them. One aims instead to win by whispering in our ears and appealing to fear and doubt, and offers the dissenter the bonus of a self-sustaining feeling of superiority. Not only are they taking a better position, but they are standing up to The Man, and as an extra value, they can cleanse their conscience of all the messy ambiguity and responsibility that one takes on as a member of our society.
I believe in dissent, and think that it is not only something that should be permitted in wartime, but encouraged. We get to the truth through argument and experiment, and that’s the strength of our system.

Den Beste has a piece today on “why the protesters are so lame”. I think his idea is interesting (paranoid, but interesting), and I know for a fact (from discussions with friends who are figures in the Left) that groups like ANSWER and Commonground are looking to the swell of activism to swell their ranks (and, don’t forget, fill their coffers).

But I think the real reason goes to the underlying process, and the desire of the self-selecting protesters not to join in and possibly win a national dialog, but to meet some needs for moral cleanliness and managing one’s identity by confronting authority.

Like a lot of other things, I’ve talked about this at Armed Liberal:

But when I read much of what comes from the left, I’m left with the feeling that they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.

We enjoy this life because a number of things happened in the world’s (our) history. Many of them involved one group dominating (or brutalizing or exterminating) another, or specific actions (Dresden, Hiroshima) whose moral foundation is sketchy at best.

“Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood,” Hoederer says in Sartre’s ‘Dirty Hands’.

Part of political adulthood is the maturity to realize that we are none of us innocents. The clothes we wear, money we have, jobs we go to are a result of a long, bloody and messy history.

I see my job as a liberal as making the future less bloody than the past.

Let me give an example from my own history.

Way back in time, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and American soldiers fought in Vietnam, I opposed the war (There’s another piece in the queue – why I opposed that war, and don’t think I was wrong, and why I support this one). I opposed it strongly enough to join teams that organized some fairly large demonstrations against the war. And there was always an interesting dynamic; we organized one demonstration to take place in the Bay Area, and one subgroup announced their intention to fill some cars with gasoline, set them on fire, and so try and close the tunnel into Alameda, a major Naval base.

The pathetic inadequacy of this as a tactic aside, I fought it (literally, we had quite the physical confrontation) because I felt that it was a fundamentally different thing – it was not a political protest, designed to make a political point and sway the opinion of the public and the leadership, it was in essence an attack on the military and the state.

I argued that we wanted to have clear proposals, and structure our demonstrations so that moms would bring their babies in strollers (I won the argument, by the way).

Adolescent fantasies of rebellion aside, these two strains…one arguing for the head and heart, and the other going for the gut…seem to define much of the dissent we see today. We haven’t seen dissenters going as far as my colleagues proposed to do, but the war is yet young (and the police and keepers-of-order are a little further ahead of the curve).

More to follow…

A senior pentagon official has confirmed to Fox News on Sunday that coalition forces have discovered a “huge” chemical weapons factory near the Iraqi city of An Najaf, which is situated some 225 miles south of Baghdad.

Coalition troops are also said to be holding the general in charge of the facility.

From Fox News (and the BBC via NPR).

[Belated update: I eat crow for not updating this as no evidence of chemical weapons was found at the plant]

A great article in today’s New York Times Magazine, talking about the philosophical and historical roots of Islamist radicalism.

To anyone who has looked closely enough, Al Qaeda and its sister organizations plainly enjoy yet another strength, arguably the greatest strength of all, something truly imposing — though in the Western press this final strength has received very little attention. Bin Laden is a Saudi plutocrat with Yemeni ancestors, and most of the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 were likewise Saudis, and the provenance of those people has focused everyone’s attention on the Arabian peninsula. But Al Qaeda has broader roots. The organization was created in the late 1980’s by an affiliation of three armed factions — bin Laden’s circle of ”Afghan” Arabs, together with two factions from Egypt, the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the latter led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from an older current, a school of thought from within Egypt’s fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the 1950’s and 60’s. And at the heart of that single school of thought stood, until his execution in 1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb — the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide.

…In 1952, in the days before staging his coup d’etat, Colonel Nasser is said to have paid a visit to Qutb at his home, presumably to get his backing. Some people expected that, after taking power, Nasser would appoint Qutb to be the new revolutionary minister of education. But once the Pan-Arabists had thrown out the old king, the differences between the two movements began to overwhelm the similarities, and Qutb was not appointed. Instead, Nasser cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, and after someone tried to assassinate him, he blamed the Brotherhood and cracked down even harder. Some of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most distinguished intellectuals and theologians escaped into exile. Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, was one of those people. He fled to Saudi Arabia and ended up as a distinguished Saudi professor of Islamic Studies. Many years later, Osama bin Laden would be one of Muhammad Qutb’s students.

…

These people believe that, in the entire world, they alone are preserving Islam from extinction. They feel they are benefiting the world, even if they are committing random massacres. They are certainly not worried about death. Qutb gave these people a reason to yearn for death. Wisdom, piety, death and immortality are, in his vision of the world, the same. For a pious life is a life of struggle or jihad for Islam, and struggle means martyrdom. We may think: those are creepy ideas. And yes, the ideas are creepy. But there is, in Qutb’s presentation, a weird allure in those ideas.

It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas — it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.

…

Yes, indeed, because while we can readily defeat the armies that defend the territories that house, succor, and train Islamist warriors, our philosophical weakness exposes us to attack from within, as today’s horrible news shows:

CAMP NEW JERSEY, Kuwait, March 23 — One soldier from the 101st Airborne Division was killed and 13 were wounded this morning when two hand grenades were thrown into the 1st Brigade tactical operations center at Camp Pennsylvania in central Kuwait, U.S. Army officials said.

A U.S. soldier assigned to the brigade was in custody, the officials said.

We will win the campaign for the territories that were used by these movements, but the more serious issue is how to change the minds of the people who are attracted to them…how to stop the ideology – and the others that exploit the same vulnerability – from spreading.

I don’t think this is just a matter of Islamist sharia vs. Western liberalism; I think that the attack on Western culture resonates on faultlines within our culture and ourselves.

I’ve called this crisis “A War On Bad Philosophy,” and I intend to continue waving that flag.

Compane the commentary on Qutb:

Martyrdom was among his themes. He discusses passages in the Koran’s sura ”The Cow,” and he explains that death as a martyr is nothing to fear. Yes, some people will have to be sacrificed. ”Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God are honorable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.”

Qutb wrote: ”To all intents and purposes, those people may very well appear lifeless, but life and death are not judged by superficial physical means alone. Life is chiefly characterized by activity, growth and persistence, while death is a state of total loss of function, of complete inertia and lifelessness. But the death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood. Their influence on those they leave behind also grows and spreads. Thus after their death they remain an active force in shaping the life of their community and giving it direction. It is in this sense that such people, having sacrificed their lives for the sake of God, retain their active existence in everyday life. . . .

”There is no real sense of loss in their death, since they continue to live.”

With my favorite quote from The Roots of Romanticism by Isiah Berlin:

Suppose you went and spoke with [long list of European Romatic intellectual figures, including Hugo, de Staël, Schlegel, Goethe, Coleridge, Byron]

Suppose you had spoken to these persons. You would have found that their ideal of life was approximately of the following kind. The values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to an ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in knowledge, or in the advancement of science, not interested in political power, not interested in happiness, not interested, above all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in living at peace with your government, even loyalty to your king, or your republic. You would have found common sense, moderation, was very far from their thoughts. You would have found that they believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your body, and you would have found that they believed in the value of martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was for. You would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in its philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man who is willing to sacrifice a great deal for principles or some conviction, who is not prepared to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes in it … this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.

No matter what it was: that is the important thing.

The void filled with Byronic passion is what Qutb means to fill; we in the West have a set of secular values to fill them, but they are out of favor now.

They may need to come back.

Apologies for not following up on the two open series; Iraq and Risk. I’ve been under the weather (self-inflicted damage from not reading the instructions on a prescription bottle), and more, events have kind of moved past the issues I’ve been talking about.

I’m going back over the criticism of Bush’s handling of ‘selling’ the war, and turning it into my suggestions for the kind of long-term actions that will make this war have been worth winning.

And I was focusing the ‘Risk in Politics’ piece on Bush and his decision to go to war; it will certainly need to be updated.

But most of all, today, I want to send my own best wishes out to the men and women from our military and the U.K.’s and Australia’s, and whoever else is marching, riding, or flying alongside them. Be brave, be honorable, be careful, be successful; come home to us safe and proud.

Thank you all for defending us all.