The Proud Duck

Thoughts on policy, history, faith, baseball when I get around to it, waterfowl, and life in general by a junior attorney who'd much rather have Jonah Goldberg's job. Or possibly Darin Erstad's.

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Friday, July 29, 2005
 
Stanford history professor David M. Kennedy has ruffled some feathers by describing American professional soldiers as "mercenaries" and comparing them to Hessians.

That was just wrong on so many levels that I had to respond, via e-mail:

"Dear Professor Kennedy:

I was frankly astonished to see a history professor at an elite university compare modern American soldiers, even imprecisely, to the "Hessian" mercenaries imported by George III to fight in the American Revolution. The comparison breaks down on too many levels to count.

Not only are modern American soldiers not "mercenaries" in the traditional sense of soldiers of fortune who fight for the highest bidder, but technically, neither were the Hessians. George III acquired German regiments not by hiring individual soldiers or companies (as Renaissance princes might have hired German landsknechts or Swiss pikemen), but rather by making arrangements with the rulers of the petty German states for their units to be put at British disposal. The hapless individual German soldiers themselves were generally conscripted, not hired in the manner of traditional mercenaries.

The founders' enthusiasm for militias and distrust of standing armies is well documented. It's also largely accepted that the enthusiasm for militias was remarkably naive and generally led to disaster after disaster as militias proved unable (with some notable exceptions like Bennington and Cowpens) to cope with professional soldiers. The quintessential example of the folly of relying on militia was the battle of Bladensburg, in which the militia defending Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812 ran off at the first salvo of British rockets and let the capital be burned.

Incidentally, President Jefferson was so enamored of the "citizen military" concept, and so concerned (like you) that a standing military would tempt the country to adventurism that he essentially scrapped plans to expand the Navy -- the branch of the service perhaps least suited to the "citizen-soldier" concept because of the great expense of ships -- and poured resources into tiny coastal-defense gunboats, to be manned by wartime volunteers. The gunboats turned out to be virtually useless against the threats to American maritime interests that followed, including North African pirates (too far away for a coastal force to reach) and the British blockade in 1812 (who wants to take on a heavy frigate with a matchbox gunboat?)

That's where I think you make your greatest mistake: Fundamentally, the purpose of a military is to win wars. A generation of military leaders has concluded that a conscripted force is less effective than a professional one, especially in a modern battlefield environment in which extensive training and individual motivation are at a premium. Switching to a conscripted force, in the judgment of those who are in the best position to know, would make the military less effective. A less effective asset is one that is more costly to use. "More costly" in a military context means that more people get killed. When you're asking men to place their lives in harm's way, there is no excuse for allowing secondary considerations to detract from their effectiveness and increase the odds that they will be part of an increased cost.

I suspect that your perception that there is a separation between America and its warriors is a regional or perhaps an ideological thing. Vast numbers of Americans either serve, have served, have friends or relatives who do or have, or at one point seriously considered military service. (For the record, if Stanford's admissions officers had accepted my own application back in 1990 instead of collapsing in hysterical laughter, I had a naval ROTC scholarship lined up.) People with these links to the military may be a little rarer on elite university campuses, but America hardly has an insular warrior class to anywhere near the extent of your argument."
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Tuesday, July 26, 2005
 
On NRO Financial, John Tamny explains why he doesn't think the American current-account deficit is a problem.

My response, e-mailed to him:

"Dear Mr. Tamny,

Interesting article in today's National Review Online. I think you may be overlooking one of the negative consequences of large American trade deficits -- the effect on the American housing market.

You wrote, correctly, that "all trade logically must balance," and noted that dollars flowing out of the country to buy cheap Chinese goods generally come back in the form of investment, driven by "foreigners' insatiable appetite for U.S. equities and land, along with our public and private debt."

Foreign investment in American equities is generally a good thing: It supplies American companies with money to use for capital investment, ideally making American business more productive. But foreign investment in American land -- directly, through purchases, and indirectly, through purchases of mortgage-backed securities -- is different. That's because a house, unlike a security, has characteristics both of an asset and of a consumer good. And houses are generally not fungible; people are often reluctant or unable to relocate, and have to pay what the market demands. For various reasons, renting a house is not a perfect substitute for ownership.

Those Americans who desire to own homes primarily as consumer goods -- i.e. to live in them -- are being forced to compete with investors armed with funds either directly brought from overseas, or raised thanks to extraordinarily cheap credit that foreign dollar holdings have enabled. The result is that in many markets, the costs of homeownership dramatically exceed the cost of renting equivalent housing, home affordability is near record lows, and unusually large numbers of purchasers are only able to buy using exotic mortgage interests that are only viable as long as housing prices continue to appreciate dramatically.

In other words, foreign money has tended to squeeze out the marginal home consumer-buyer by increasing the degree to which housing is an investment vehicle rather than a consumer good. In southern California, it is virtually impossible for even a relatively well-off household (like mine) to afford a home even in a marginal area without resorting to a death-or-glory negative-amortization option ARM -- because people using those risky vehicles are bidding up prices on the same houses conservative purchasers are in the market for. These risky loans are often bundled into mortgage-backed securities and sold off to those dollar-flush foreign investors you discussed, minimizing the risks to the loan originators but not to the borrowers themselves.

In short, foreign dollar holdings are forcing American homebuyers to expose themselves to significantly greater risk than buying a home used to entail -- because the housing market has been transformed largely into an investment market, with correspondingly increased risk. It's made the American Dream into the American Gamble.

On the one hand, cheap foreign manufacturing provides me with the opportunity to buy my daughter a Barbie for a few bucks less than it would have cost to make her in America. The flip side of cheap foreign manufacturing is a trade imbalance that returns dollars to America in the form of investment, which lately has flowed less into productive sectors of the economy and more into inflating the cost of an essential consumer good/asset hybrid.

Two bucks off the price of a Barbie in exchange for tripling the cost of an ordinary suburban house in seven years. Not what I'd call a fair trade."
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Friday, July 22, 2005
 
From an interview of a British sociologist and theologian in The Spectator, some similar thoughts to those I expressed in my last two posts:

"Forget your mental image of a sociology professor. David Martin, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the LSE, is a softly spoken conservative Anglican. His critique of the concept of secularisation, begun in the 1960s, brought a new rigour to the study of religion in Britain, and established a flourishing conversation between sociology and theology.
Inevitably, we begin with the issue of the hour: Islam and violence. Professor Martin does not settle for the easy mantra that all religions are naturally peaceful. Instead, choosing his words very carefully, and pausing to ask whether his comments are printable, he tells me what he thinks.

‘I wish that I could sound more positive, but the bombings don’t come as any surprise to me. There is a deeply rooted ideology of violence in Islam — a military psychology. Of course most Muslims don’t want to go around bombing people, but those few who do turn to violence are able to find a certain amount of justification in the Koran. I suppose that might not be the most helpful thing to say, but it seems undeniable.’

Is it not a religion of peace? ‘Well, it seeks peace, but on its own terms. As Rowan Williams has said, it’s a fine religion, but it places a high premium on victory. And I think that’s right, and I fear that many young men will see violence as the means to that victory. There’s a large enough mood of militancy in Islam for it to be a real problem. And that’s not just a recent thing caused by resentment over Iraq and Afghanistan: it’s been emerging over several decades throughout the Middle East and Pakistan.’

Does Islam find it harder than other religions to reform, to incorporate secular liberal values? ‘The problem is that it came into contact with the modern world very fast, so it reacts with horror at the sheer range of options in secularism. That seems like confusion and chaos when your tradition is based on a single right way of behaving and strong warnings against the infidel. The Koran is a very “us and them” book. It’s hard to see how a Muslim school dominated by the Koran can encourage assimilation, and can promote the idea of equality between the sexes, for example."
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Tuesday, July 19, 2005
 
Hugh Hewitt, on his blog, wrote, "The idea that all of Islam is the problem is a fringe opinion."

My response, expanding on my previous post below:

Dear Hugh,

On today's blog, you wrote, "The idea that all of Islam is the problem is a fringe opinion." I deeply respect your judgment, but I think you may be going a bit too far -- or possibly I'm misreading your meaning.

In one sense, you're right: Ultimately, the responsibility for jihadist outrages lies firmly with the heretical death-cultists who perpetrate them, not with the rest of the world's Muslims, who reject their ideology and tactics with varying degrees of unequivocation.

But I don't think you can avoid considering whether Islam is just horribly unlucky, to have had such an awful run of bad apples bob to its surface, or whether there is something to Islam, as an ideology, that will tend to produce a disproportionate share of violent fanatics.

I don't see how any one could argue that basic cultural assumptions can have no effect on the frequency with which certain characteristics occur within a population. Consider Max Weber's "Protestant work ethic" thesis, or the argument in Michael Novak's book "On Two Wings" that the cultural assumptions of the Judeo-Christian tradition inclined Americans to embrace liberty. Since all religions, like all ideologies, have a human element, all religions have flaws along with the good in them. The leaders of my own Mormon Church like to say the Church "makes bad men good and good men better." I like to add "and proud men insufferable, and unstable men absolutely nuts." On the one hand, we produce a disproportionate number of strong families; on the other hand, we can be insular and lacking somewhat in individual initiative and in cutting-edge creativity. It's all part of the package, and each religion's package contains a different mix.

A person with a truly decent character and enlightened mind can immerse himself in virtually any religion and find in it the foundation for a sublime spiritual life. The problem is that there is not an unlimited supply of decent, enlightened souls on the earth. With a very few truly saintly exceptions, most of us have at least one or two smudges of human viciousness -- which we are loath to acknowledge -- in some dark corner of our hearts. And vast numbers of us couldn't reflect our way out of a paper bag with GoogleMaps directions printed on the inside. The problem with Islam is not that, applied by the best that apply it, it can't produce just as much enlightenment as other religions. The problem is that it's insufficiently idiot-proof.

Islam's particular ideological package seems, along with the good Islam accomplishes, to be producing a disproportionate number of international terrorists, and making it difficult for any large portion of the Islamic world fully to reconcile itself to pluralism and modernity. The point of observing this is not to denigrate Islam -- it is to acknowledge that Muslims, if they are to make their religion as noble as it has the potential to be, need to work harder than others to overcome their religion's apparently built-in susceptibility to misinterpreted by disproportionate numbers of those marginal minds, who can be found in any religion and will always be with us.

When you're second best, as the old rental car ad goes, you try harder. When you recognize you have a handicap, you work to overcome it. To pretend that Islam, as an ideology, has nothing at all to do with violent fanaticism is fantasy, and will only serve to discourage Muslims from undertaking the proper measures to put their house of faith in order."
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So Congressman Tom Tancredo thinks that one possible response to a jihadist nuclear attack on the United States could be to bomb Mecca.

Islam Isn't Going Anywhere.

As if it needs saying, I think that's a really, really bad idea -- even though I suspect it would make a lot of people horrified by televised images of the radioactive ruins of, say, Boston feel better for a few hours. Even if one took the position that this really is a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations between Islam proper and the West, I can't think of any major religion that ever went away simply because its holiest city was destroyed. Judaism didn't end with the destruction(s) of the Temple, after all.

I'm sure plenty of two-bit cults have been annihilated and forgotten over the centuries -- but it's a lot easier to do that kind of thing when the adherents of a religion are all behind the walls of one city, which you can lay waste and be done with it, Assyrian-style. Islam is never going to be beaten out of existence, even if anyone wanted to do it -- not with close to a billion people scattered around the whole world.

Islam, As Presently Constituted, Has A Problem.

Most Muslims are not international terrorists. But most international terrorists appear to be Muslims. It's not "Muslim-bashing" to question why this is.

A person with a truly decent character and enlightened mind can immerse himself in virtually any religion and find in it the foundation for a sublime spiritual life. The problem is that there is not an unlimited supply of decent, enlightened souls on the earth. With a very few truly saintly exceptions, most of us have at least one or two smudges of human viciousness -- which we are loath to acknowledge -- in some dark corner of our characters. And vast numbers of us couldn't reflect our way out of a paper bag with Google Maps directions printed on the inside.

The problem with Islam is not that, applied by the best that apply it, it cannot produce as much enlightenment as other religions. The problem is that it's insufficiently idiot-proof.

The Old Testament of the Bible contains plenty of accounts of God's chosen people waging whatever the Hebrew word is for "jihad" -- but those are historical accounts, not hortatory passages. The Koran, on the other hand, does have more than a few passages, aimed directly at readers, directing them to make war on the unbelievers. There is a strong sense that what ultimately matters is membership in the ummah, or Islamic world -- an attribute, incidentally, which Islam shares with not a few Protestant Christian sects that believe that Christian identity is all important, surpassing even the living of a Christian life. (I refer to the variation on the widespread Protestant doctrine of solafidianism -- salvation by faith alone -- which holds that once a believer adopts Christianity by an oral confession, his salvation is assured regardless of what he does later.)

It takes a particularly enlightened mind -- or an enlightening philosophical environment -- to reconcile a religious teaching that God is concerned mostly with whether a person identifies with a particular group with the reality of pluralism. Protestant Christianity in America has succeeded in making this reconciliation without too much of a mess (the odd abortion clinic bomber aside), I submit, because of two things.

First, Christian doctrine was largely formulated by the apostle Paul, who was highly educated and immersed in Hellenistic philosophy and culture, with the result that the civilization that developed in Christendom became a kind of hybrid between Athens and Jerusalem, as Leo Strauss put it. The "Believe as we do or be damned" aspect of Christianity -- which undoubtedly is there (see Mark 16:16; Acts 4:12) -- is thus balanced at least somewhat by a tradition of reason and universality.

Second, the American civilization in which what is probably the most significant concentration of Protestant Christianity is found has from the beginning been a pioneer of respecting different traditions, largely because since its earliest settlers were themselves religiously diverse, there was no alternative.

Islamic culture thus may face an uphill battle if it is to avoid producing a disproportionate amount of religious aggression.
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Friday, July 08, 2005
 

Predictably, even before the bodies of the latest victims of jihad have been recovered, the usual suspects make the usual noises: It's all our fault -- the bombers are motivated by justifiable anger over American or British foreign policy, and who are we to be outraged over the murder of civilians when civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the West Bank?

Leaving aside what ought to be the elementary distinction between intentionally killing civilians and doing so accidentally -- just as there is a distinction between a fatal car crash and a murder -- what assurances can the appeasers give us that their prescription (give terrorists what they want) would stop their attacks?

They (meaning that certain inverse-jingo Left constituency whose motto seems to be "the opponent of my country, right or wrong") point to the fact that terrorists aren't bombing Sweden -- a more or less free country -- and declare this evidence that it's not "freedom" that the terrorists hate, as is sometimes said, but particular policies of particular countries.

Unfortunately, there's no way of testing this hypothesis without actually putting it into practice, which carries risks of its own, more about which later. Let's say, though, that we take George Galloway's advice and pull out of Iraq. And Afghanistan, too, since the London bombers mentioned that campaign as well. To make sure the bases are covered, sell Israel down the river, too, cutting off all aid and cooperation.

Would that really work? Would jihadists really say, "Thanks, America; you've satisfied our grievances. Go back to your pleasant infidel lives; you'll hear nothing further from us"?

Maybe. It seems to have worked for Spain: After the Spanish cut and run from Iraq, nobody's blown up any more trains there.

Even if it's true that Spain's capitulation bought peace in its time, though, I wonder whether that approach would work for the United States. No offense to middle-sized European states, but they're a dime a dozen. Your local jihadist can cross Spain or Sweden off his target list without putting himself out of business; there's always Britain, or Denmark, or Italy, or Australia -- not to mention the Great Satan itself.

And why should we expect a jihadist to want to put himself out of business? Even more or less sober Western activist groups don't shut down when they get what they want; they find new raisons d'etre and keep operating -- and fundraising. Look at the ACLU, for example; by all rights, they should have declared victory over real threats to civil liberties thirty years ago and disbanded along with the March of Dimes (which, having beaten polio, should also have closed up shop). There is too much capital and meaning invested in these causes for them to go away. Instead, they focus on smaller and smaller details, while investing them with the same breathless significance.

It is reasonable to expect that jihadists are similarly constituted. As Christopher Hitchens eloquently wrote, the jihadists' list of grievances is rather longer than their Western apologists would have it. That list goes well beyond the usual Iraq-Afghanistan-Palestine trinity to, for example,

"[t]he grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way."

In other words, these are people who have plenty of grievances with which to justify their manifest love for murder. 9/11 happened before there ever were American campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And that brings us to the next point: I believe that even if every country in the world could buy off terrorists by refusing to stand against them, the United States would be the one exception. The jihadists need at least one enemy, and we're the enemy of last resort.

They need an enemy because they're not men enough to deal with one of the hardest things in the world to deal with: cognitive dissonance involving their most deeply-held assumptions and beliefs.

Islam, for those who take it seriously, is an all-encompassing worldview. As I understand it, based on my limited study, Islam posits a far greater degree of divine involvement in the world than many other religions, and certainly the modern deist-influenced Western outlook. Islam takes the idea "God is in control" virtually to the molecular level, with virtually everything that happens being not only preordained, but actively caused by acts of divine will.

It also teaches that righteousness, as set forth in the Koran, is rewarded. And there's the rub. Most any Muslim with eyes to see will notice that Islamic civilization, by and large, doesn't seem to have been particularly favored in comparison to the West since about the 1300s. (Or 1500s, if you count the Ottoman pinnacle.) The ummah is technologically backwards (importing the implements of modern civilization from their infidel inventors), militarily impotent, and widely impoverished, with the exceptions more or less limited to elites who grow rich and corrupt selling uncreated natural resources to the civilized world.

How can these things be? How can the infidels prosper and the righteous languish? Recall that, unlike its monotheistic Christian and Jewish cousins, Islam doesn't have the example of a Babylonian captivity or a crucified Savior to remind that "whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth" (Hebrews 12:6). It seems to me that there isn't an easy reconciliation between what Islam promises, and what has been the lot of Islamic civilization for the past five hundred years or so.

Except one: The Islamic world would be prospering, but for the opposition of an Enemy.

I have at times struggled with cognitive dissonance with respect to certain aspects of my own Mormon faith, which frankly isn't the easiest thing to swallow whole, as even its founder Joseph Smith acknowledged. (He said if his revelations hadn't happened to him, he probably wouldn't have believed them himself.) I have the advantage of an education rooted in the Enlightenment, and parents who raised me to think for myself and be true to the conclusions I reached. What of the Muslim extremist who has none of these advantages? Faced, on the one hand, with the prospect of being forced to question that perhaps there's something in the faith of his fathers that's retarding the civilizations saddled with it -- or on the other, blaming his civilization's dysfunction on a powerful enemy, which option will he choose?

For too many, that's an easy choice: It's all the Enemy's fault.

That's why appeasement won't work to pacify the jihadists any more than it has worked against other aggressors in the past. If not Iraq, then Afghanistan. If not Afghanistan, then Palestine. If not Palestine, well then America will be blamed for Muslim states not going completely theocratic to the jihadists' satisfaction. Or for refusing to give sharia courts jurisdiction over expatriate Muslims, as radical Muslim activists are seriously pressuring some European countries to do. Or for allowing Islam to be criticized in public. It will always be something.

Or maybe I am not generous enough to the throat-cutting jihadists. Maybe they are more reasonable than I give them credit for, and taking the Left's advice to pay the Dane-geld really would get rid of the Dane, so to speak.

I don't think so, but more to the point, the Left can't truly say so with any certainty. Recall that these are often the same people who advocate the "precautionary principle," requiring that no action be taken until it can be proven perfectly safe. Who insist that the world sacrifice literally trillions of dollars to fight the yet unknown effects of global warming. Yet they are willing to risk the usual result of appeasing an aggressor -- that the aggressor takes what is offered and, emboldened, asks for more and more -- without any more certainty than their blinkered ideology supplies.

I don't know how to win this war. I fear it will be long, and may never end entirely. While I don't believe that Islam, per se, necessarily results in murderous jihad, I suspect there may be something in its martial origins that will never cause a disproportionate number of Muslims to read it in the way today's jihadists do. Any religion, properly approached by a person of humane character and an enlightened mind, can become a beautiful force for good. I just think it takes a more enlightened mind to reach that point from Islam than with other faith traditions.

And since Islam isn't going away, the only way its violent manifestations will be kept to such a minimum that the war can be declared over will be for Muslims overwhelmingly not only to repudiate, but to crush the (arguably) heretical jihadists with the kind of ruthlessness that the jihadists' own hardness requires. As in, if an imam stands in the mosque to incite the murder of us infidel "apes and pigs," the congregation needs to rush the pulpit and tear him apart. There would be two possible motivations for the congregation to do that: either genuine disgust and rejection of the message, or fear that the message will result in a JDAM landing on the mosque roof next Friday. I hope the former will happen before the latter becomes necessary, but I have no confidence it will happen before the jihadists get lucky again -- possibly even luckier than 9/11.

All I know is that losing isn't an option. The jihadists' long list of grievances is inexhaustible.

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Wednesday, July 06, 2005
 
Liberal columnist Bonnie Erbe compares the United States to Iran. Unfavorably.

Key quote:

"After all, wouldn't it be a relief to join a society [Iran] in which religious tyranny is gossamer compared with the version we now face in the good old U.S. of A?"

That's right: Allowing an invocation at a high school graduation, or wanting to preserve the right of self-government against judges who invent Constitutional principles out of whole cloth, is worse than beheading "apostates" and "fornicators" in the town square.

Sheer gibbering lunacy, of which we may expect much more as the Democratic Party, increasingly dominated by a hard Left that actually believes this stuff, gears up to slander any jurist President Bush may nominate to the Supreme Court whose views on constitutional law fall rightward of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's.
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Friday, July 01, 2005
 
An open letter in response to a column saying President Bush "co-opts symbols of patriotism to silence dissent":

"You may not have chosen the title of your column "Bush co-opts symbols of patriotism to silence dissent" -- I've had my own unpleasant experiences with poorly-phrased captions that distort the meaning of my writing -- but I must say if President Bush is trying to "silence dissent," he's doing an awfully poor job of it. "Dissent" is shriller now than ever, and, I would add, more heedless of its effect on this country's welfare.

Do you honestly think the Left's hair-trigger criticisms of the conduct of the Iraq campaign are totally free from political motivation? Can you honestly envision Republicans being taken seriously if, in 1943, they'd been anywhere near as vituperative against the Roosevelt administration as Democrats are being now? There were plenty of opportunities. The Sherman tank was a lightly-armored deathtrap; thousands and thousands of young men died due to poor planning, strategic errors, and ghastly mistakes; civilians died by the truckload under Allied bombing; and prisoners often got far worse treatment than having their religious books dropped on the floor or being led around naked on a leash by hillbillies. The difference was that the political opposition recognized that defeat would be disastrous, and for the most part managed to subordinate their partisanship to the national interest. We are clearly not the same country today.

Calling it "shameless" to speak of 9/11 and Iraq in the same breath betrays a remarkable lack of thoughtfulness. The President did not say Iraq was involved in 9/11, but rather than 9/11, like Pearl Harbor, awakened us to the realization that we had underestimated the ability of our enemies to harm us. You seem to think our response should have been to go after the particular enemies that succeeded on 9/11, and continued to ignore the others -- including hostile regimes that gave every indication of pursuing weapons that could inflict even worse damage than we'd suffered. That is a suicidally shortsighted approach.

Do you honestly believe that an American defeat in Iraq would not have horrific consequences on American security? Just as the American surrender in Vietnam emboldened Communist ideologues around the world (sorry to sound like an old-school red-baiter, but facts are facts), strengthening the global influence of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union and heating up the Cold War to dangerous levels of tension, shouldn't you at least consider that an American defeat in Iraq will enhance the prestige and influence of the jihadist faction within Islam that really, truly wants our civilization destroyed?

You may try to distinguish your dismissal of the mission American troops are engaged in from lack of support for the troops, but objectively, you are not on their side. American soldiers, by and large, are convinced that they are engaged in a worthy cause. You are free to disagree with them -- your enlightened, educated outlook, after all, may give you more wisdom than their practical experience -- but please don't pretend you're not doing so. Objectively speaking, you are working for their cause to fail. Great powers aren't defeated by guerillas; they lose when they get tired and go home. You are trying to make that happen.

You spoke of the President "conflating" war and patriotism -- and then you turned around and gave us a nice, misleading example of "conflating" of your own. The poll you cited, showing that 58% Americans disapprove of the administration's handling of the Iraq campaign, does not, as you suggest, prove that a majority of Americans believe we were "misled" into war. Those two sentiments are distinct. I, myself, disapprove -- in retrospect -- of many of the Administration's decisions regarding the Iraq campaign. I have reservations -- now -- as to whether the campaign might have been a strategic error in the larger war on jihadist terror, in the same sense as the Italian campaign of 1944-1945 might have been unnecessary to win World War II. But that most emphatically does not mean I sign onto the Michael Moore/MoveOn.org chorus of "Bush lied, people died." It's simply not true, and only a Chomsky-addled simpleton with a mind welded tighter than an Acura chassis could think otherwise in light of the plain historical record.

You see, this is why litigators are often so dismissive of journalists' argumentation skills. If we tried to pull a slick little switch like you just tried, opposing counsel would be all over us like white on rice, followed shortly by the judge bellowing at us for trying to mislead the court.
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