I recommend to your collective and individual attention the cover essay in yesterday's New York Times Magazine by Michael Ignatieff. It can be found online. [That link is: tinyurl.com/38ooow.]

J

J, thanks for the link.

As for the article . . . it is yet another example of verbose journalism that leads exactly nowhere. If we were to pin down Michael Ignatieff, ask him whether we should invade Iraq, and demand an answer with the threat of torture, he would reply, "Uhhh...I dunno." The article goes nowhere. Full of didactic strawmen that point toward criticism of Bush, Americans, and Western Civilization, it offers exactly zero solutions. Here's to hoping Michael stays in journalism and never runs for office. He'd make an outstanding college professor, too.

This article, quite representative of the antiwar argument, has fundamental flaws:

1. It doesn't mention good or evil. Post-modern, post-Christian, fanatical humanism detests the thought that God might exist or that human behavior can be morally judged. With religious fervor equalled only by Islamist jihad, cynical journalists, academicians, and Hollywood foreign policy experts like Barbara Streisand insist that there is no good or evil, and that all expressions of American foreign policy from Somali famine relief to protection of Albanian Muslims are all motivated by American greed and lust for empire. ("Hey, Babs, who the HELL would want to add Kosovo or Somalia to their empire?!?!") Such militant agnosticism poo-poos any thought that there are evil people out there, and they somehow turn a blind eye to rape, torture, murder, and political repression while trying to balance that humanistic halo they like to sport at parties. Good and evil exist. God says so. (Even our enemies agree with that.) Human history demonstrates it in spades. Hussein is a bad man. Killing or capturing him would roll back some darkness and bring liberty to many.

2. The author's historical parallels are ridiculous. The existence of WMD invalidates his arguments. Augustus and his successors did not face a world in which the contents of a suitcase could kill hundreds of thousands of people. Quit reclining in molested history and change your major to modern math: WMD in the hands of bad men is a real problem. Wishing we had done something in the shadow of the mushroom cloud is not the solution. War against the bad guys is our best bet.

3. Ignatieff and his ilk employ one of the most absurd strawmen in every article or email note they write: the "failure to end human history" argument. This line of reasoning proceeds thus: "Even if we win this war, bad things will continue to happen." Duh. How does one answer that brilliant observation? No one is arguing that ousting Hussein will usher in world peace. As long as mankind exists, there will be problems. So what? Sitting on our hands and contemplating how bad white people have been doesn't solve anything either. No, Mr. Ignatieff, history will not end with our destruction of Saddam. But as Gandalf advised King Theoden: "To cast aside regret and fear. To do the deed at hand. . . . If we fail, we fall. If we succeed, then we will face the next task." It's a damn shame we have to look to fictional wizards for such wisdom.

4. Ignatieff talked himself into a tizzy fit, using the word "empire." The article begins with a timid proposition that, umm, we might be an "empire" of sorts, sort of. Several pages later, the author, having fully digested his own strawman, waxes eloquent about our imperial ambitions, imperial limitations, imperial legacy, etc. — ad imperial nauseum. We are not an empire. We went to Afghanistan to kill the bad guys that killed innocent Americans. We are going to Iraq to kill another bad guy. We're doing the best we can to squash people who embrace the "murder innocents to get better sex in heaven" ideology. It's a bad ideology that calls for destructive violence to quell it. There's nothing imperial in our motivation, no matter how sexy the word is to the author or his co-religionists.

5. Both the author and the Bush Administration go astray when mindlessly attaching an affection for "democracy" to our foreign policy. The founders of our country did not want a democracy, nor a republic. They wanted and created a mixed and balanced Constitution that would provide the best chance of restraining both democratic excess and the over-accumulation of power in the Executive. It's time for us to remember that. Thomas Jefferson would have recoiled in horror over the prospect of democracy. He rightly saw that democracies, unchecked by a strong executive, were capable of destructive excess. Mixed, balanced government is what the American Experiment is about. And it works pretty well. (This is why we like Musharaf, for instance. Jefferson would have like him too.)

6. Ignatieff also fell lock, stock, and barrel for the terrorists' main objective: to link all Middle Eastern policies with the so-called Palestinian issue. The author insists (perhaps the only clear point he offered in the article) that our invasion of Iraq must somehow walk hand in hand with creating a Palestinian state. I disagree completely. No matter how often we sing the song Hamas wants us to sing about the "imperative" of such a state, it is not imperative. There are literally millions of acres of available land for Arabic-speaking worshippers of Allah at every point of the compass from Palestine: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Sudan, among others. The last thing this region needs is another Islamic state founded upon racial bigotry, religious fanaticism, and economic incompetence. The only real imperative is a geographically viable Jewish state, which we have not achieved. The Israelis are surrounded by enemies who are implacable and dedicated to destroying them. (If you dispute this point, I want you to sit and count silently to six million before answering. That's one for every Jew murdered during the Holocaust. It should take you about two and a half months of counting if you do it 24/7. Think about it.) Meanwhile, the Israelis have built up the only civilized society in the region. The conclusion is clear: Israel should rule in Palestine and offer the Arabs (as they have done in the past since '48) the option of staying or leaving. This would be a peaceful solution that would offend only those who harbor hatred for Jews. In any case, you can bet that the probably inevitable state of Palestine will be the most failed Islamic state yet seen in history. It will be an incessantly impoverished, politically repressed engine of terror, whose solution for every social, economic, and security problem they have will be to hate America and Israel.

7. Ignatieff made one good point, probably by accident. (Kidding.) Our foreign policy does appear to be mainly military. We have yet to graduate to good grand strategy. I blame the effete State Department primarily, but the other departments of the US government are also culpable. Any war plan we produce — for Afghanistan, Iraq, or whereever — should have the full participation of Commerce, Treasury, CIA, FBI, and State. Every plan for conquest should have a sister plan for economic investment, tax incentives for American businesses that participate in the region, and similar incentives for foreign businesses that provide jobs for the conquered population. Instead of heading up such an effort, Colin Powell runs around waving his arms and calling for peace everywhere. Together, he and the Pope have contributed exactly nothing to the solution of our strategic problems. Peace is not a policy. We need policy makers who understand grand strategy. Too bad we can't clone Pitt the Elder or Robert Clive.

8. The author protests that international law will be offended by our actions. In my view international law has all the weight and importance of medieval astrology. Like the star-gazers who offered policy insights to European kings, today's legal experts are full of. . . . Well, politeness rules out the completion of this sentence. As I recently wrote in an article, law is too important to be left to lawyers. Law is a strategic matter. We must destroy evil-doers that mean us harm. I don't give a tinker's cuss how international law feels about that.

9. And, to address another of Ignatieff's protests, I also don't care how Europe feels about it. We created Europe after WWII. The Marshal Plan and Truman Doctrine are the reason France, Italy, Germany, and England exist today. Like teenagers rebelling against their parents, we must try to ignore their insults and for goodness sake, not give them the keys to the family car! They will grow up eventually.

10. As for the author's visitation of the human rights issue...antiwar writers somehow expect us to feel bad that we invoke this issue as one of the reasons for war, while seemingly ignoring the issue elsewhere. This is analogous to walking down the street, observing a rape in progress, and telling the young lady, "I'm sorry, dear, but since I can't stop all rapes in the world, I can't morally justify helping you either." The fact is that our invasion of Iraq will stop the human rights abuses there. If that doesn't make you feel good about being an American, I pity you — I truly do. No we can't solve all human rights issues, but the American GI has done more to protect people from abuse than any theologian who ever lived or any antiwar activist cooling it in a San Franscisco cafe. And, to be perfectly frank about this — I have no interest in protecting the human rights of Islamic terrorists. In fact, I think they ought to be tortured for information and then publicly killed, along with their families and fellow-travelers. You see, I hate terrorism and think it should be eradicated. Human rights are for those who respect human rights.

11. The author also questions American foreign policy on the issue of WHICH failed states should we seek to fix? This is yet another "Duh" of antiwar advocates. The answer is simple: we fix the ones that matter. The important ones. Iraq is important. Rwanda isn't. North Korea is important. Somalia isn't. It's not our fault that some states sit atop oil reserves or nukes and others don't. The fact that some states are historically significant and others join Uzbekistan and Monaco in the "Where exactly are those countries?" category is not our fault. Our foreign policy priorities must attend to the important states. Double Duh.

12. Finally, along those lines, the author's attempts to make America feel guilty for the collective failure of Islamic culture are to be rejected forthwith. Islam used to represent the most modern society in the world. A thousand years ago, the greatest advances in politics, mathematics, science, economics, and philosophy were in Islamic countries. (Our ancestors were eating beetles and trying to figure out how to read at the time.) Along with such progress came a reasonable toleration for other religions and world-views. But as modern Islamic countries fell prey to the avarice, self-service, and bigotry of the Nassers, Husseins, and Saudis, the culture has become the backwater of the world. Most Islamic countries are devastated by poverty, darkened by political repression, and haunted by mystical knuckleheads in turbans who teach the solution to all this is to murder Jews and Americans. This failure is not our fault. America has contributed billions of dollars, billions of man-hours, and countless lives to try to help these losers fix themselves. And we will continue to do so. But when they get to feeling their oats and decide [to] do their benefactors harm, the only solution is to whack 'em hard. We will do just that in Iraq, and the world will be better for it, vacillating antiwar-ites notwithstanding.

But other than that, I have no opinion.

R