I’m not sure where I stand on the current debate over legislation to conform to the Hamdan Supreme Court decision. I believe that some of the “coercive interrogation techniques” that have been used by the CIA on a half dozen or so detainees, do amount to torture, and I don’t like the idea of the U.S.A. condoning it. On the other hand it seems more than likely that the plot to blow up nine or ten airliners leaving London was broken up because of the use of such techniques, or worse, on the part of the Pakistanis. Was it worth damaging our moral authority, which nobody believes we have anyway, except for American Republicans, to prevent the planes from being blown up? How will the torturers who prevented this obscenity be dealt with on Judgment Day? If you were God, how would You judge them?

There are infinite alternative universes that could have replaced this one, had we not gone into Iraq. Some might be better than the current reality and some might be much worse. Which one would have happened is impossible for anyone to know. We don’t even know how this one is going to turn out. Arguing about what might have been is of no use. Arguing about where we go from here is essential. Some people think that we will have the best outcome if we get out of Iraq as quickly as possible. Others think that we should send more troops to Iraq and confront Syria and Iran as well. And there are all shades of opinion in between, on both the left and the right, mostly on the right. Nobody knows for sure what the best possible course of action is.

Given all that, given the ultimate unknowability of it all, it would seem that the conversation should be more civil. All this “Bush lied”, “cooked up in Texas”, “betrayed his country”, makes as little sense as arguing about what might have been. I don’t mind a little heat, but the vehemence and paranoia of the national conversation is alarming to me, as alarming in a way as the jihadists.

I have to say I do think it is unpatriotic. Not the proposed policies. God only knows what the right policy is. There is nothing unpatriotic about advocating withdrawal from Iraq, if you honestly believe that is the best thing for your country. It’s the vitriol, the hatred, the loathing, and the lies directed at the President and his cabinet during wartime that seem unpatriotic to me. And there’s a lot of it. I know where they’re comin’ from, been there, done that, but those who poison the conversation in this way are not only unpatriotic, they are nuts, except for those who are merely cynical. How many are there? How many Americans, secretly, in their heart of hearts, are hoping that George Bush gets his comeuppance in Iraq, the way we all used to hope that America would lose in Vietnam? Maybe not as many as during Vietnam, but we lost in Vietnam, arguably because so many of us wanted to lose. And that’s the only way we can possibly lose this war. It’s the way the North almost lost the Civil War.

This is not a generic, everybody does it, kind of problem. It is a problem on the Left. Of course there has been some return fire from the Right, but surprisingly little, considering. The most egregious example the Left can cite currently is the use of the word “appeasement” by Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld did not ascribe the sentiment to anyone in particular. He merely asserted that such a body of opinion exists. The use of this single word has launched howls of outrage in thousands of columns, blog posts, TV punditry, and calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation. Of course his use of the word was political, but it is certainly within the bounds of civil discourse to say that such a sentiment exists and that it is harmful.

The kind of poisonous rhetoric coming from the left is not good politics. Many more votes are lost than are gained by it. It is a distorted religious impulse, not a political one. Maybe we should rename the War on Terror, the War on Distorted Religious Impulses.

There seems to be universal condemnation of the Lebanon ceasefire on the Right, which I don’t really understand. To me it looks like what will happen is that Hezbollah will refuse to quit rocketing Israel, at which point Israel will resume the offensive, and at least some of the onus will then shift to Hezbollah. Or, Hezbollah will stop, but will then refuse to disarm, with the same result, and the European weenies will have one less excuse to blame Israel first. Anything that makes Israel look more like a victim has got to be helpful. This doesn’t seem like such a stupid plan to me. I could be wrong, but I just don’t see how anyone can be so sure that this is a bad strategy. This war we are engaged in is after all at least as much a battle of perceptions as it is a military contest. It is no doubt true that this makes Israel and the U.S. look weak and will encourage all of the Middle East nutcases to think that the jihadists are the strong horse, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing either. Why not try a little rope-a-dope? We are the strong horse and deluding the weak horse into thinking otherwise can work to our advantage. Pride goeth before a fall. The conservative reaction seems simplistic and premature.

I watched the bloggingheads.tv diavlog between Ann Althouse and Robert Wright last night. Ann is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a registered Democrat who has voted for Democrats all her life, and still votes for Democrats more often than not, but she voted for Bush in his second term. Her blog, which I read regularly, is not primarily political, but she does sometimes post about politics. Her political posts take liberal positions as often as they do conservative ones. She has noticed that conservative blogs link to her when she takes conservative positions and ignore her when she takes liberal ones, but the lefty blogs never link to her, no matter what she says.

On the left any deviation from the party line on any issue is grounds for excommunication, especially if it involves support for the evil Bush, but on the right there is vigorous debate on every issue from stem cells to Iraq. Thus Joe Lieberman becomes Rape-Gurney Joe, whereas Rudy Giuliani and John McCain are the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination. Tolerance for divergent points of view is much more prevalent on the right than it is on the left. Intelligent critical analysis of the war in Iraq is much more likely to come from the right than from the left. The effect of this liberal intolerance and rigidity is to drive any liberal who has second thoughts about any aspect of the liberal laundry list into the arms of the right.

Her experience is very much like my own in my interactions with people of different political points of view, and also my observations of the changes in my own psychology in the process of moving from the left to the right. If one is a member in good standing of the left, it’s not necessarily noticeable, until that is, you change your mind about one of the liberal required ideas. I’m sure there are enclaves that exist of conservatives who only associate with other conservatives and live in a bubble where the rightness of their politics is never questioned, but I’m not aware of any, and I think it is much less common on the right than it is on the left.

As one steps out of liberal orthodoxy and is confronted with the suspicion and anger and rejection that ensues, it is a revelation. You lose a lot of friends, but there is an exhilarating feeling of mental freedom as you realize that now you can think whatever you like. This is not conjecture. This is the truth of my own personal experience, and it is the reported experience of a great many other people who have gone through a similar process. Once you deviate from the party line on any single seminal liberal issue, the war, abortion, the environment, gay marriage, affirmative action, school vouchers, corporate perfidy, campaign finance reform, gun control, the capital gains or inheritance tax, military recruitment on campus — the look of horror and mistrust on the faces of your associates triggers the beginning of the slow, painful process of leaving the cult.

It is a shocking and enlightening experience. And then you discover that most people who call themselves conservatives are not the demons you thought they were. There is a willingness to debate and disagree and think about important issues. It is very liberating. My theory about why this is so is that the difference between the left and the right is the difference between a semi-religious belief in utopianism and a mature understanding that, as my father was fond of saying, people are no damn good. And they will always be no damn good. It is the obsession with a futureperfect world that closes the fevered, liberal mind, and it is an acknowledgment of the imperfection of all things that humbles the conservative mind.

I realize these are gross (imperfect) generalizations, and that there are many apposite examples on both sides, but I do believe that this is the fuzzy line that divides the polity. The reason the Democratic Party seems so bereft of new ideas about Iraq or social security or taxation or educational reform, etc. is because the psychology and rigid, politically correct peer pressure of the left cripples the mind. I know many don’t agree, and I am aware that I am an imperfect vessel, but I think I am pretty much right about this.

Apparently the plot to blow up nine or ten airplanes was foiled because of information obtained by the arrest of a couple of jihadists in Pakistan. I sure hope they weren’t mistreated during interrogation.

Looks like Iraq may be sliding into civil war. Hezbollah is making their bid to overthrow the legitimate government of Lebanon, under the pretense of defending Lebanon from the evil Jews. This is really a Lebanese civil war, with several external participants. Of course there is Sudan. If some deus ex machina were to descend on Iran, overthrow the mullahs, and institute democracy, can there be any doubt that a well-armed militia would be formed by the theocracy’s fanatic supporters? And we would have another civil war in the Middle East. The mullahs may be unpopular, but they’re not that unpopular. If democracy were to come to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, they would either elect the Islamists outright, or they would be facing a civil war. The entire Middle East is one big potential and actual civil war, that has been held in check for decades by the imposition of fascist dictatorships, with U.S. backing. During that time, the Islamists have only grown stronger and more united and better-armed and organized. It is difficult to think of an Arab country that would not slide into civil war, if it were to become a democracy. Kuwait and a few others possibly.

There are two civil wars in the Middle East. The first is the struggle between the radical Sunni and the radical Shia for leadership of the Jihad. This has been all but decided now in favor of Iran and the Shia. The other coming civil war will be between the Jihad and everybody else in the Middle East. The Jihadists are in the minority, but they are an organized military force and everybody else is not. So the Jihad will win, unless the U.S. utterly destroys them, on behalf of everybody else. We would then have to equip and train their military and police forces, and help them in other ways, until they got on their feet as a functioning democracy, without an armed milita trying to overthrow them. Sound familiar? Iraq is just the beginning. And we are just beginning to realize what a messy, daunting task it is.

What’s the alternative? We could get the Hell out of the Middle East, and just let them discuss among themselves. But if we do this, the end result of the bloody civil war that would erupt, would likely be the entire Middle East in the control of the Islamists, led by Iran, armed with nuclear weapons.

Is there some other option? Am I missing something?

Finally the Democratic Party has agreed upon a unified position on the war. The following statement was issued this morning by Howard Dean, spokesman for the Party:

“Bush and the neocons could be wrong about everything. It could be that if we had left Saddam Hussein in power, things would be better in the Middle East, or at least no worse. It could be that the Jihad will never be more than a nuisance for us here in the U.S.A., less of a threat than holiday highway accidents. It could be that it will just peter out from lack of interest. It’s possible that the declarations of war against the entire Western world issuing from Iran and Hezbollah and Al Qaeda and North Korea are just the pathetic fantasies of madmen, best ignored. Maybe nuclear weapons in the hands of the Iranian mullahs and Kim Jong Il won’t really matter all that much. Perhaps we can just absorb the occasional bombing or deadly virus outbreak or Jew-shooting without any substantial impact on our way of life. Maybe we can just wait it out. Who knows? We certainly hope so. Vote for hope. Vote Democratic.”

Who knows?

What is happening is that the radical Muslim world is making progress toward healing the splits between Sunni and Shia, and Arabs and Persians. Al Qaeda was hit hard after 9/11. Iran laid back while that was happening, waiting for Al Qaeda to be weakened enough so that Iran, the largest funder of terror organizations in the world, could seize leadership of the Jihad. Much like Coumbian drug cartels count on the DEA to take care of eliminating their rivals. Al Qaeda is Sunni. Iran is Shia. Saudi Arabia, the Minister of Education of the Jihad and funder of Al Qaeda, is Sunni. Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, is Shia. Mukti Al Sadr, with his Hezbollah-lite militia in Iraq, is Shia. Hezbollah is Shia. Hamas is Sunni.

Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s guru, has started saying that he has come to heal the thousand year old Sunni-Shia split. Ahmadinejad believes in the coming of the twelfth imam, but has harbored and helped Al Qaeda, and is quite willing to join forces as long as Iran is the master. Osama Bin Laden’s son has been sent, by Iran, where he has been residing, to Lebanon to help Hezbollah. Alliances are being formed. All of these wars and maneuvers are market research, including the tentative civil war in Iraq. What will the response be if I do a little bit of this, or that? What does this tell me about the will and capabilities of the enemy, which in the Jihad’s case is everyone in the world who does not surrender to Allah in the proscribed manner?

The big challenge on the Jihadist side is to bridge the gap between Sunni and Shia, Arab and Persian, and present a unified, WMD-equipped force to the infidels, including a Stalin-Hitler pact with North Korea. Our challenge is the same, to unite the civilized nation-states to be of one mind, more or less, in this war. Where are Churchill, FDR, and Eisenhower when we need them? So far, they are doing a much better job of it than we are. However, I am fairly confident that the civilized, democratic, crisis-driven nations, while slow to respond, will eventually realize the danger and come together. When that happens, the Jihadists will have been suckered into a draw play, and will be very surprised at the ferocity of the response, much as Hezbollah has been taken aback by the Israeli response in Lebanon.

As these alliances form and the market research is done, one perhaps unintended side effect is that the issues are clarified for everyone. The Hamas and Hezbollah actions are not just market research for Iran or Al Qaeda. We also benefit from the results. We learn as much about them as they learn about us, and exactly who is zooming who becomes more and more obvious. For all the MSM sympathy for the Lebanese civilian hostages of Hezbollah, regrettably killed by Israel, certain facts have moved toward the exalted rank of conventional wisdom, e.g., Iran, and its subservient ally Syria, are behind the Hezbollah attacks, and are their necessary and sufficient supporters. This was a fringe opinion a few weeks ago. Now to deny it, is to relegate oneself to Dante’s circle of the unserious. It has also begun to take root in the zeitgeist that the nature of the war in Iraq has changed, that the insurgency has yielded to “sectarian violence”. This is vastly important and is part and parcel of what is happening in Lebanon. Al Sadr has pledged to send troops to Lebanon in support of Hezbollah. Howard Dean has castigated Maliki for being insufficiently pro-Israel.

World War III, or IV, depending on how you count, is beginning. Would that it were not so. If I were a betting man, I would bet on civilization, but there were a lot of smart Romans who lost that bet.

The murderous rift between Sunni and Shia in the Muslim world is indicative of the psychology of our enemy. Sunni consider Shia to be worse than Jews, let alone pigs. Both sides consider the other to be an unforgivable heresy that must be, to coin a phrase, wiped from the face of the Earth. They are fighting about events that occurred over a thousand years ago, and doctrinal differences on the order of those between Southern Baptists and Northern Baptists. These disagreements are widely considered to be justification for murder. This mentality is incomprehensible to the Western mind, but it is a fact of life in Arabia and Persia.

The West continually makes the universal human error of assuming that the person we are talking to is more or less like us. We assume, in other words, that ultimately they are reasonable people who want the same things we all want, peace, prosperity, freedom, opportunity. We assume that the daily exhortations to eliminate the Jews and infidels and “moderate Muslims” are just empty rhetoric. They can’t really mean it. Millions of people couldn’t possibly be that crazy. But, if we need proof, we need only look at the thousand year Shia-Sunni global civil war.

Savages is a word you’re not supposed to use these days, dehumanizing the enemy and all. The word may have disappeared, but its meanings linger on, waiting to get their word back. One of those meanings is “primitive; uncivilized”. It is popular in civilized circles to exalt the primitive and to equate it with civilization. From “Dances with Wolves” Indians to “Lawrence of Arabia” Arabs, tribal people are portrayed as noble members of sophisticated cultures every bit as valid as any other. The anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley, in his book War Before Civilization, points out that two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples. He calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of their population to war each year.

This is not a clash of civilizations. This is a clash between civilization and barbarism. In the civilized, post-tribal world, war has all but died out since the fall of the Soviet Union. But war continues to rage in the areas of the world that are still cursed with tribalism. Now modern communications and weapons technology and the price of oil has given them the ability to strike us, and the inability of so many civilized people in the U.S. and Europe to confront the reality of savagery is crippling our ability to respond. So far we are officially unable to even name our enemy, thus “The Global War on Terror”. I won’t quibble about what word to substitute for “terror”. I would be happy with “Islamofascism” or “Jihadism” or “Iran”.

Watching the bomb-go-boom-many-people-die reporting from Iraq on network news, an interesting fact appears in the fog. The increased violence is primarily Shia militia and death squads killing Sunni. You don’t hear much about Al Qaeda anymore since the Baathists got tired of them and probably fingered Zarqawi and started talking about amnesty. Now what we are seeing is the Shia, who have been remarkably restrained until now, starting to get even. This is not a good thing of course, but it is not directed at the Americans or at the Iraqi government. It is directed at the Sunni. The Sunni are even asking the Americans to stay to protect them. If this escalates into all-out civil war between Shia and Sunni, it would be very bad, but there isn’t really any doubt about who would win. As long as this revenge killing is stopped well short of genocide, it could conceivably turn out OK. It is actually an improvement that the violence is no longer about Islamism versus democracy or a restoration of Baathism. It is now mostly about revenge and the Sunni seem about ready to throw in the towel in exchange for survival.