Proportionality

Proportionality:

The Economist has a good overview of what the Just War tradition has to say on the subject, and how it applies to Israel today. They finish:

In the end, some philosophers think, debate about the ethics of war will have to reintegrate two ancient questions— about the right to go to war, and the methods that may be used— which have become artificially separated in modern times. To put it more simply, nobody will be impressed with a line that goes: “We didn't start this war, so our cause is just—but now that it's begun, we'll fight as dirty as we like.” Augustine saw the questions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello as intertwined—and so, probably, should modern man.

The Just War reading of proportionality, which began with Augustine, does have a jus in bello aspect which is not mentioned in the article. It is based on the idea of nationalism, which was once an ideal for whom men held great hopes. Like some advocates of democracy promotion today, advocates of nationalism believed that it could bring an end to war -- or at least lessen it notably.

The idea was that every group of people had a unique take on life, and needed its own space so that it could have laws that accorded with that take. Scots needed to be Scots, not ruled by English laws; the same for the Irish. The same for the Slavs. The same, some argued, for the Jews.

When such nations came to exist, they were seen as having a real sovereignity: this is, indeed, why we today view the nation-state as the righteous seat of sovereignty. These nations were viewed as arising from natural law, and a hedge against the horrors of war. Should such a state fall and come to be dominated by others, advocates of nationalism believed, war could be the only result: a righteous war for independence.

Insofar as Israel today can demonstrate that it is facing the destruction of its state, it can therefore justify almost any conduct as "proportionate." It's not just a question of whether you get to go to war; it's a question of what you can do in war. If you're fighting to preserve a nation, you can do most anything -- because the international system views the survival of your nation-state as almost the highest good of the system, the best way of ensuring peace.

What we're seeing in Israel today is just what we've seen ever since these ideas were instituted. Nationalism proves to be a better engine for war than for peace. If every group with a definable ethnic or cultural identity deserves its own nation, what if two of them claim the same piece of land (as in Northern Ireland, where Protestant majorities exist with Irish Catholic minorities who consider the others not Irish but "New English")?

What if there's a disagreement about whether a given group is properly independent, or should properly be subject to a central authority? Consider the case of Taiwan -- definitely ethnic Han Chinese, but wishing to be independent of the People's Republic, which in turn claims to be the rightful government of all Chinese eveywhere.

What if existing borders of states encase several ethnic groups, some of whom later decide they'd prefer their own nation? For example, consider the case of Indonesia, which won its independence from the Dutch and established its borders based on their colonial borders. Now comes the East Timorese, wanting to separate from this new nation -- and now the Papuans.

The system recognizes, in theory, all of these claims -- and justifies almost anything in the name of establishing a free, or protecting the independence of an existing, nation-state for each such group.

This is partially why we find the terrorists getting treated with kid gloves by so-called "international law" types: they are viewed, usually, as valid liberation movements or resistance to colonial oppression. As such, whatever they do is justified.

If you've been wondering what the root of this cancer is, now you know. It's the shattered bones of the last great attempt to find peace on earth.

More Muslim Mayhem

Israel's War Comes To Seattle:

He says: "I’m a Muslim-American. I’m angry at Isreal."

So he shoots six unarmed women.

What courage! What devotion!

Oh, and what skill -- he kills only one of them, even though there was no appreciable resistance and he had the only gun in the room.

I don't want to hear that Muslim-Americans are angry at Israel, so they kill Jewish-Americans. Jewish-Americans are probably angry too. What is supposed to matter, though, is that these are fellow Americans.

It's natural to have a sentiment for the old country, and it's only human to feel more strongly for those whom you regard as brothers (as Muslims do among themselves) than for those whom you don't. Still, America is an idea as much as it is a country: a place where we leave the old tribes behind, and become a new people. E pluribus unum.

In other words, if you're a Muslim who wants to shoot Jewish-Americans in response to Israel's policies, you're not a "Muslim-American." I don't care what your citizenship is. I don't care if you were born in Fargo. You haven't got the idea. You are not one of us.

If you can't leave the old tribe behind -- just enough to avoid killing other Americans who aren't tribesmen, that's all we ask -- you should rethink whether or not you want to be here. It won't be hard for the rest of us to rethink whether or not we want you in the community. We don't strip people of their citizenship in America, but neither are we bound to accept people that make war on our women, or exercise their tribal ideas of religion by shooting up social clubs. We can put you in prison, or we can kill you. We have the death penalty here, and many of us are not unarmed victims.

On which point, I should like my Jewish female readers to note that they are targets. You know who you are. There are people who want to kill you. This guy is said to have been a lone maniac. Perhaps he was. You know there are organized groups that want the same thing. You know this is true.

There is only one way to ensure that this kind of thing doesn't happen to your families. You need to get over whatever aversions you have, pick out a handgun that suits your frame, and learn to use it, more accurately than these people.

Fortunately, that's not a high bar to cross.

You're the only ones who can stop this. The police will not be there. If this isn't to happen where you are, you have to stop it.

The NRA will help you find a teacher here. Wherever you are, they can help you.

Drop me a line if you want to talk about it.

I won't stand by and let people break America, not for Israel and not for Islam. Frankly, neither are worth it in my opinion. She is our common charge. We are the Sons of Liberty. This flame will not die. That is a promise and a warning.

Military Blue States

OP-FOR on NRO:

John at OP-FOR has a piece at National Review (a good piece, Eric?). He's chastizing, properly, so-called "elite" schools for their treatment of military recruiters, and their discouragement of their students from military service.

Which brings us to the comments at BlackFive, when Jimbo posted about the piece:

True story: I tried joining the Army a year ago and had to get one of those fancy $1,300 psych evaluations that only a professional civilian consultant can do in order to get a waiver at MEPS ["Military Entrance Processing Station" -- the place where you go to get the paperwork done and your medical exams]. Within the first 5 minutes of the interview with the psychologist I convinced him I didn't have any problems. Then instead of ending the interview there, he went on and on for the next 15 minutes about how someone like me shouldn't be joining the military. Apparently I had a 95 on the ASVAB and was doing well in college (3.6 GPA) and he was telling me, to summarize: "You're just going to be cannon fodder in the miltary. You have too much potential. Read some anti-military books to see how much of a mistake joining the military is. Your MMPI-2 results show you can take criticism, but they're going to yell at you in boot camp!"

At MEPS he faxed over his 1 paragraph evaluation that said because of my goal orientation, and ironically, my ability to handle stress, I wouldn't be fit for the military because I potentially could be insubordinate at Boot Camp. The opposite of everything he said to my face about me. Basically, the guy was your typical smug blue state anti-war liberal who wants to rescue those who don't need rescuing. He rescued two other kids that day with the same evaluation -- he just changed the names at the top of the page.

It's a year later and my recruiter gave me a call saying I can now take another psych evaluation. I'm not really sure what to think. Maybe I'll act dumb and desperate and try failing the evaluation this time?

I get called a chickenhawk by the same kind of people who keep me from enlisting.

So, basically the psych doctor didn't feel even a little bit bad about getting this poor guy damned as a psycho who couldn't be trusted to serve as a private, in order to keep him out of the military. For the rest of his life, if he applies for gov't service jobs, the kid is going to be asked, "Were you ever refused entry to the military?" and he'll have to say, "Yes, I was found psychologically unsuitable."

Can he prove he's not? It's not like proving that you don't have an ulcer. With a real medical condition, they can look and see. You can't "see" a psychological condition. How does this kid clear his name?

The best he can do is find another civilian expert, pay out another grand, and then -- if it goes well, and he doesn't get another anti-military jerk (or some psychologist who feels that young men with such feelings of aggression that they want to join the military need to be medicated and feminized) -- he'll have a "he said / she said" defense. 'Only one of them thinks I'm crazy! And they can't really prove anything one way or the other, so... um, why are you looking at me like that?'

Psychology should simply be banned from federal hiring decisions, and also from court proceedings. It is not a science, it's fortune-telling. We wouldn't let a tarot card reader ruin a kid's life and put something this damaging in his permanent record. We shouldn't let a "scientist" like this do it, either.

Arganti

Arganti:

Praise a day at evening, a wife when dead,
a sword when tried... and beer when it's drunk.

-The Havamal

Today I can praise a very good cat, who went by the name of Arganti. She came to me as a kitten out of a hurricane the size of Texas, which left the areas near Savannah filled with wrack. The moment she saw me, her tail shot up, and she started running. Fool that I am, I took her in when she literally followed me home -- and then sent her off to live with Sovay, which she has done in queenly comfort these several years.

Sadly today I hear that she died suddenly, though not without such help as science can offer. She was always good for the things that make cats good: she was temperate toward people, not so to vermin, and she would sit on your shoulder like a pirate's parrot while you walked around.

Farewell, then, to a very good cat. I am glad to have known her. Men and dogs have an ancient alliance both pure and noble, but the cat remains a surprise.

Web of Trust

"The Web of Trust"

Bill Whittle's latest is, as always, a remarkable explanation of the things that underlie our lives. Whittle has mastered the art of seeing what Chesterton saw when writing of the stoplight, called in his day a "signal box":

A great many people talk as if this claim of ours, that all things are poetical, were a mere literary ingenuity, a play on words. Precisely the contrary is true. It is the idea that some things are not poetical which is literary, which is a mere product of words. The word "signal-box" is unpoetical. But the thing signal-box is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death. That is the plain, genuine description of what it is; the prose only comes in with what it is called.

Whittle sees the poetry in things that few pause to consider, and from that can envision the whole grandeur of civilization. He can see the men laying fiber cables and other men molding plastics, and still more men training for years in the use of inventions like radar -- itself a wonder. And he can put it all together for us, and show us how all that work underlies the business of bringing a plane down to the earth.

Yet I find that I think he has misread something fairly fundamental to his argument, something he says is coastline rather than map. The idea that "human beings are interchangable" is simply not quite right. The truth is that human beings are not interchangable at all -- each one is individual. This isn't just because of upbringing, as Whittle suggests, and why it isn't is a truth of the same material as the rest of his argument.

Let me explain. Whittle writes:

I mean that had Baby Billy been dropped off in the heart of the Amazon rainforest and raised by Yanomami tribesmen (and according to my mother there were times when I was in real danger of this happening), I would have spent my youth learning to hunt monkeys with my bow and 6ft. long arrows, and generally hanging around the shabono sleeping in till almost 6am. Likewise, if Baby Kopenawa had my parents, he’d probably be cranking out online essays at irregular intervals and shooting instrument approaches in experimental canard airplanes.

I think we can all agree that it's entirely plausible that Billy Baby could have been given over to Yanomami tribesmen, and grown up to hunt monkeys. There would be nothing strange in that.

Yet it is very unlikely that Baby Kopenawa would have grown up to crank out essays of the type and quality of Whittle's own, to say nothing of having his fascination with airplanes. It is not impossible, but it is not likely.

Civilization not only entails the web of trust that Whittle discusses, but it also requires a far greater degree of specialization. Whittle-the-Amazonian would have learned to hunt monkeys because everyone has to hunt monkeys. Kopenawa, by contrast, would have found himself facing a whole array of choices, to which his native intelligence and individual aspects would have inclined him to some and away from others. To succeed, which means to survive, Whittle of the Amazon would have had to do more or less exactly what everyone else did. To succeed, which means to prosper, Kopenawa would have to do what he did best.

What would that have been? There is a fair amount of research, and a great deal of practical experience, that suggests that there really are genetic inheritances that pertain to kinds of intelligence as well as physical attributes. Individual variation is more important than group membership, but if one were to exchange not one baby but thousands of babies, there would be trends that we could identify. One of the consequences of civilization and its specializations is coming to terms with that. As whole nations and peoples become civilized and specialized, the market begins stratifying them according to which intelligences are most marketable. As we understand more about the mechanism, we may wish to think more about whether to try to modify the market's results -- and if so, how we could do so.

As we become more capable of editing genetic traits, new questions arise. These questions will become more rather than less important, and more rather than less numerous, with each scientific success.

Let us say, for example, that one could modify a set of genetics so that you could replace a prediliction for one kind of intelligence (say, the kind that lets you perform a given task without growing bored for hours on end) with another (say, the ability to do higher mathematics with ease and comfort). Now let's say we have a genetic group that tends toward the first kind, and which has therefore (because the market prefers mathematicians and engineers to janitors and clerks) become identifibly poorer than other groups. What do you do about that? Anything? Nothing? Does it matter? Once it becomes in our power to change, ethical issues arise that don't exist when it is beyond us.

We cannot, therefore, adopt Bill Whittle's idea as ideology -- not that he would wish you to do so. He says to look at the coastline, not the map, and that is what we must do. His point that culture is more important than genetics is certainly true. However, as part of the business of civilization, we have to look at the genetics as well.

We should think about these things, because they are the next challenge -- the mental bridge Whittle mentions, to be considered before the first rivet is driven. There is the chasm before us. We had better give it some thought.

Posts

Things To Read Today:

The discussion, as soon as I have time to sit down and discuss, will be on Bill Whittle's newest piece. Give it a read today, and we'll talk it over tomorrow.

Also, CENTCOM has a new release on a raid north of Balad.

A case of verification. Or sock puppets. Or both.

In this post, Karrde muses on basically "How do we know what we know and how do we know who to trust?" (Or something like that).

An interesting example of trust and credibility has occurred, dissected at great length by Eric Scheie of the blog Classical Values.

Starting here, (actually that may not be the start, its just where I picked it up), and continuing here, and here and here and finally (as of my posting), here Mr Scheie starts digging into the people supposedly working at (and others quoted by) a site called Capital Hill Blues, which is supposedly a sort of newsletter site covering Capitol Hill. Or something like that.

It appears that the whole site may be the work of one guy, constantly inventing new people and quoting non-existant scholars, doctors and so forth, none of them real. Or not real in so much as Google can reveal.

This has affinities with a phenomenon called 'sock puppets' --usually referring to the antic of defending or supporting oneself with a different screen name or email address---for a classic example of sock puppetry, see Ace of Spades HQ and this post on Glenn Greenwald. Actually, there's plenty more there on that affair, and it makes for curious reading.

So, reader beware. If such things are happening, they are happening everywhere.

PJM release

PJM Sends:

The folks at Pajamas Media are proud of their coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, and have put out a press release to get the word out. As regular readers know, I have very little interest in the conflict, but given the possibilities for spillover into the Iraq conflict, I have been reading up on this particular engagement. PJM's coverage really has been good, and they deserve the pat on the back (even if it is self-inflicted).

Dollard

JHD Sends:

JarHeadDad wants you to know about Pat Dollard's interviews. "Just WOW!" he writes, which is a pretty good endorsement -- I've noticed you can measure how well he likes something by looking at how few words he uses to describe it. Two words? Pretty great. Five thousand words? He hates it, has written all his congressmen, and is still mad about it.

So anyway, this is a two-word site. Go see the thing.

CENTCOM PR

CENTCOM Sends:

Continuing the regular series of things CENTCOM wants you to know, a press release they sent this morning on Iraqi Security capturing three primary targets during raids. No friendly casualties in the process.

Well done.

There is none

"From the scissors of Delilah, and the tenpenny nail of Jael, to the scimitar of
Goliath..."

In which the Geek w/a .45 and company give yours truly a hard time in the comments section, due to my inability to resist a severe temptation.

Links

Reader-Sent Links:

A few links that turned up in my email box this morning.

Reader JW sends a link to an editorial that explains US behavior according to computer science models.

CC sends a WizBang piece called "Tell it to the Marines."

MilBlogging.com writes in their weekly newsletter, "I used to think Chuck Norris was a pretty cool guy, but that was before I featured Jack Army." Jack's deploying. Go see why he's cooler than Chuck Norris.

Politics Central:

I am somewhat remiss in not having mentioned the PJM "Politics Central" site, about which Pajamas Media tells me they are most excited.

They would today like you to hear this interview from an Israeli bunker.

Somme

The Somme:

This year is the 90th anniversary of the Somme. Our faithful friend Arts & Letters Daily points us to an article, from The Scotsman, on a new book revising the history.

I link mostly for Eric Blair's benefit, but others may also enjoy it.

Trust but verify

Trust but Verify:

In my continued thinking about history and historical sources (and following up on Grim's excellent comments below about Mexico and colonial history), I am continually returning to the issue of trust. My thoughts about trust involve both history and current events.

Historians trust certain sources. Other sources are considered cum grano salis, as the Romans would say.

Most of this trust can be defended on analytical grounds. Along the lines of what Grim said about colonial Spain and plague in Mexico, a careful review of the data can show which sources are trustworthy.

The same was true about earlier claims that surfaced: claims about who or what was most responsible for American success during the first World War. It is quite likely that the NRA-guided training program for members of the American Expeditionary Force was influential on the battles fought by the AEF in Europe. But there is also evidence that many members the AEF was trained in the field by Sergeants and Lieutenants who saw the need for accuracy in rifle use on the field. Not to mention that America's military hadn't spent 5 years sending wave after wave of soldiers against barbed wire and machine-gun-nests.

If there is a lesson about militaries to be found here, it is that an army that is able to learn from its experience and adapt while in the field is more likely to be a winner than an army that learns from its experiences and adapts after the war is over.

If there is a lesson about reading history, it is that if the source makes some claims that can be verified, it is often wise to check up on a few of those claims. Sometimes the facts are right, but the claimed results aren't fully supported.

One thought that hovers in my mind as I write this is that similar questions are raised every day when I read news stories, browse blogs, or watch the entertainment extravaganza known as TV News. Do I trust the source to report the facts accurately? Do I trust them to report the background accurately? Do I trust them not to insert unwarranted assumptions into the story? Do I trust them to do research about what they are reporting on?

Lastly, is there any way that I can verify what the are telling me?

It is questions like these that use to filter through claims of bias. It may also help identify poor reporting, sloppy research, or dependence on a single, biased source.

Megadeth Mexico

"Megadeath in Mexico"

A fascinating article by that title appears in Discovery's online site this issue (h/t Arts & Letters Daily). It's a good piece on how modern scientific research combines several disciplines (in this case, epidemology, botany, and history) to overturn the received wisdom of the ages. A combination of new documentary evidence, the clinical eye of an expert, and supporting evidence from other scientists can produce the need for serious revisions in the historic record, as well as advances in our understanding of medical history.

It's a very good read for those reasons, but that's not why I brought it up.

I bring it up as an ally to Karrde's recent piece on history and story-telling. It's tossed off almost as an aside in the Discovery piece, but the greatest threat to humanity coming to understand the truth is exactly what Karrde recognized it to be: humanity's unwillingness to hear it.

This raised two questions. First, were people prepared to absolve the Spanish of responsibility for one of the great evils of the colonial era? The destruction of ancient Mexico's culture by the Spanish invaders is an integral part of every Mexican's understanding of the country's history. The miseries of the plague years are taken as object lessons in the evils of colonialism. "My grandmother wrote histories, and the terrible things that the Spanish did were always a part of them," says Acuña-Soto.

In fact, as the new evidence shows, the Spanish didn't bring the disease, which was instead native; the Spanish didn't try to spread it as a means of destroying the native culture. In fact the King of Spain sent his personal physician to learn what they could teach him of native medicines, and while there this Spanish doctor invested a great deal of his effort (the written notes ran to fifty volumes) in trying to understand the causes of the disease and how it might be treated.

That's the truth, at least, it seems to be truth in the scientific sense: the best-supported interpretation of the facts given the present evidence.

Yet Mexican histories need Spain to be evil. It's part of the founding myth. Indeed, it is a critical part. The evil exploitations of Spain, heroically thrown off by the Mexicans, set the stage for the evil manipulations of the Hapsburgs and especially the Yanquis, the brave Mexican resistance to which define the post-European period of Mexican history. The national myth is entirely founded on the idea of foreign exploiters, European and American, striving to oppress the Mexican raza.

Destabilizing that founding myth wasn't the intent of the research. It isn't, indeed, very interesting to the scientists themselves, who toss off a brief paragraph about it in a long article on the more fascinating questions of evidence. I wonder if they really know what they are unleashing here.

No matter. It is done. Historians, not only Mexican ones, must now contend with the data. History is unique in being both art and science: the story-telling and myth-making contend with the scientific development of the facts. Here is an earthquake, the aftershocks of which will trouble many a thinker and writer for a long time to come.

UPDATE: Another such earthquake comes in a new book just reviewed by Mark Steyn.

Knights

Knights of St. George:

An odd coincidence, that this story should appear at BlackFive the same day as Noel directed us to the story below. That is St. George's cross on the shield.

Congratulations, Sir Craig -- that is, sergeant.

A Dragonslayer

A Dragonslayer:

Noel was right. This is just the sort of piece that I think should be more widely read.

My reader will recall there were dragons in those days, and the lair of one was in a marsh near Selena in Lydia. It required human sacrifices. Cleodolinda, daughter of the king, drew the lot and was escorted to the marsh in bridal garments. St George, a tribune in the Roman army, happened to ride by. Making the sign of the Cross, he confronted the dragon. Pinning it to earth with his lance, he slew it with his sword. Having converted the Lydian king, and all witnesses, he then rode on to Palestine, where he died a martyr under the same Roman persecution that claimed St Alban.

This fanciful story from out of the Golden Legend (13th century) only adds to his mystique. But it was not part of the legend of St George, when he appeared before the Crusaders as a herald of victory. Or became an honoured and holy figure in Muslim legend, too, under the name Jirgis Baqiya....

We should always honor the dragonslayers. As Greyhawk said in his letter to his children, "Some must go to fight the Dragons. And if you think such things don't exist then it must be I read you the wrong sorts of stories when you were young." And then he went -- a man, like St. George was a man, who felt that he was called to it by something above his duty as a soldier.

Restrictions

On Limits:

The incomparable Winds of Change has a post called "Limits," in the comments to which Mark cited my post on the Hamadan decision. It's nice to be cited at WoC, which is one of the best thinking-blogs out there.

The author of the post is broadly correct. I honestly don't think we've begun to fight -- not, at least, to fight a war. The gamble in Iraq and Afghanistan has always been about trying to prevent the escalation of the problems we face into a world war.

If it fails -- well, a world war is what America's military was designed to fight. In many ways, the task will be rather easier if North Korea and Iran and Syria and whoever else wants in escalates the situation. We will abandon those restrictions once we pass the point at which we can credibly "police" the situation, once the threat reaches the point at which we obviously must fight rather than manage the problems.

A real war will be bloodier, by far -- but it will also be easier, because we will be liberated from the self-imposed restrictions designed to prevent escalation. We have many purpose-designed tools for such an eventuality, and there are many kinds of leverage we can apply that are only appropriate to real war.

That said, I think we ought to continue trying to win the original gamble. It is harder to do, but better for literally millions of people worldwide. People who genuinely love peace, and who are of good heart -- I think most of the anti-war crowd, particularly that faction led by the Quakers, falls into this group -- ought to support the venture.

They need to grasp that what lies behind the loss of the gamble is not peace, but real war. This is the last chance for peace.

I realize that sounds Orwellian -- 'the Iraq "war" is the last chance for peace' does indeed sound much like 'War is Peace.' Yet real peace is not possible in this world: there is always violence at some level. What matters is choosing the level. Iraq gives us a chance to have a better level of violence in our lives.

Insofar as we are acting like police, we aren't acting like soldiers; insofar as we are acting like soldiers, we aren't acting like murderers. In Iraq, we are acting like police most of the time -- indeed, we are behaving rather gentler than the police of many nations. Even on those occasions when we have escalated into properly military violence (as for example in Fallujah), it has always been with the intent of returning to a policing-level as soon as possible. Our warfighting has been about cracking pockets of enemies, so that we could set up a police force instead.

I keep thinking that the anti-war movement will come to recognize this fact. So far, they seem devoted to the fantasy that the US can be beaten into submission -- that, if only we can be made to lose in Iraq, that's it, that's all, the US will be a whipped puppy and will follow tamely the guidelines of our moral betters at the UN and in Europe, and on the US left.

Such a complete failure to understand America is not reasonable. No culture on earth has such a complete hatred of the idea of failure. Indeed, if there is any common culture that can be called American at all, it would have to be the culture of success -- the notion that a man should take care of himself, and that his failure to do so was a moral as well as a practical failure.

This is not a nation that will respond to a loss of its gamble in Iraq by becoming submissive. It will respond by becoming aggressive. If it cannot rebuild certain nations into successful, peaceful democracies, it will instead destroy those nations. It will not submit to a future of being blackmailed by the most murderous and least free nations of the earth. Nor ought it to do so.

That model of destructive warfighting was advocated by the Kerry campaign in 2004 (among other things it chose to advocate), and by John Derbyshire in the present context. It is a workable strategy. As just demonstrated, it has powerful advocates on both sides of the political spectrum.

If North Korea will not be reformed, it must not be allowed to dictate through terror and nuclear power the future of northern Asia. If Iran cannot be reformed, it must not be allowed to dominate the lives of millions of people in Iraq and elsewhere. If Syria will insist on backing terrorist groups as a matter of national policy, and if indeed it is beyond us to change them, then their state power must be laid waste. The future of humanity, a future in which every corner of the globe is increasingly important to the entirety of humanity, will be brighter if we strike down such tyrants.

I continue to believe in the gamble in Iraq. I continue to believe that we ought, morally, to avoid real war and pursue a type of fighting that will spread freedom and prosperity now. I hate the idea of laying waste even to a tyranny, for there are innocents there who are victims of these evil states. Far better if we can free them, help them shake off the sickness of the mind and heart that tyranny embeds in men, and teach them to rejoin peace-loving people abroad.

My feeling is that the Special Forces have the right motto, which ought to guide America: De Oppresso Liber. That is the right way for us.

But if that way proves impossible, I know America well enough to know that she will not submit. All decent people should look true war in the face, and consider again if they will not back America in Iraq and elsewhere. We have now only three paths before us, and we shall take one of them whether we like any of them: We shall succeed in Iraq and elsewhere; we shall fight a true war; or we shall see the tyrants of the world, some of whom cannot even feed their people, assume a new place of power in the world.

That last one must not be. America will not let it be -- and she does indeed have the strength to stop it. Her military was made for a war of that type. We can fight and win, if we must.

Far better, though -- far better! -- the first. All people who wish the best for all mankind should join with us in bringing peace and order to Iraq, to Afghanistan, and elsewhere as we must. Let us pursue that road as long as there is any light at all to guide us on it. It is the right road, if only we can find the strength to walk it.

Manly

"I'm Surprised She Didn't Mention Us":

I see that PowerLine has picked up on Cassidy's lengthy post on the desirability of manly men. PowerLine complains that they are surprised at having been omitted.

Not so we. Judging from the pictures selected, what is wanted is a kind of man who wears cowboy hats, carries a long blade, and likes to tie his women up and carry them around thrown over his shoulders.

Grim's Hall appreciates the compliment.