Postmodern Relativism and Obamania

Politeia offers an analysis of the left's response to the New Yorker cover satire of Barack Obama's fist bump from heaven, "Obamaphobia!":

In the humorless, pathological personality cult that is the Obama campaign, all supporters had to to do was reverse the mechanism to morph satire and caricature - in fact all criticism of the Obama couple - into something morally equivalent to blasphemy.

Here's more on that moral equivalence:

Relativism is an ideological hell-hole ... made acceptable and fashionable in speculative-philosophical circles by the anti-modernists Kant and Hegel (see also the Introduction to "The Dialectics"). Further investigations produce a host of other infestations: discrepancies, inconsistencies, as well as paradoxymora lurking under every stone; realivori, and objectiraptors pouncing at every turn.

Relativism is an oxymoron that causes serious cognitive as well as psychological damage. Those affected confuse fact with opinion, people with ideas, public opinion with truth, religion with parliamentary democracy, it undermines self-esteem, crushes morality, causes tolerance of the intolerant and turns tolerance into intolerance, confuses criticism with offences against etiquette (and now blasphemy and racism), reality with myth, truth with delusion, and equal with identical; it polarizes, and leads to making moral choices on the basis of other people's opinions; it leads to malignant Narcissism and severe egocentrism, but other than that, it's perfectly rational ...

See also (and perhaps as a case study), the New York Times, "We’re Not Laughing at You, or With You."

Related: "The Postmodern Culture of Animal Rights Activism."

Islamic Resentment Against the West

Neptunus Lex offers his take on progress in the war on terror:

The sources of Islamic resentment against the West are complex and multi-faceted. Our lofty ideals about democracy were always viewed with suspicion when our actions in the region were to make common cause with oppressive kings and tyrants. The issue of Palestinian statehood and the perceived injustices of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank smolder in hearts throughout the umma, but there is little hope for real compromise when too many Palestinians cherish the dream of destroying their Israeli “peace partners” in detail rather than coming to any form of accomodation with their existence. Even if some way were found to bridge that gap, the al Qaeda jihadis that dream of re-establishing the caliphate seek also to undo the Spanish reconquista along the way - a goal that is probably not worth serious consideration in Spain.

So where are we now?

Tactically. In Iraq we have taken a battle that al Qaeda called a “must-win” and made them lose. When we leave - and leave we will - we will have left behind the nearest approximation to a liberal democracy that the region’s culture will currently support, while demonstrating our capacity to take a blow and return it severalfold. The rats are fleeing the sinking ship:

Al-Qaeda may be considering shifting its focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, the top US commander in Iraq has said.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Gen David Petraeus said there was evidence that foreign fighters were being diverted away from Iraq…

He said there were signs that foreign fighters recruited by al-Qaeda to do battle in Iraq were being diverted to the largely ungoverned areas on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

While Jihad, inc. has not entirely abandoned making mayhem in Iraq, weak governments in both Afghanistan and Pakistan leaves the Pakistani FATA as a much more congenial place from whence to plan and execute terroristic savageries. The Iraqi people have seen the Qaeda vision up close and - ultimately choosing to believe that it could be defeated in an alliance of convenience with a coalition unwilling to cut and run - rejected it, opening up for themselves a brighter, more prosperous future. No matter how deeply the current of anti-westernism and anti-Americanism runs in the middle east, it has not escaped local notice that the Iraqi people - faced with the choice between violent and autocratically imposed sharia law and democratic self-determination informed by their cultural character chose the latter, often at hideous personal cost.

More at the link.

See also, Max Boot, "Are We Winning the War on Terror?"

9/11 Flight Crews Honored - Finally!

Debra Burlingame, at Pajamas Media, reports that the a memorial for the flight crews of the September 11 attacks have at last been honored with a memorial:

Nearly seven years after 19 Islamic jihadists took control of four commercial airliners with the intention of raining death and destruction on America, the flight crews who were first to die that day have finally been appropriately honored.

The 9/11 Flight Crew Memorial dedication in Grapevine, Texas, host city to Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, took place on Independence Day.

What a fitting day to remember the 33 individuals who were the first first responders and the only uniformed service members to confront the faces of evil up close, in hand-to-hand battle. From the pilots in the cockpit and the forward flight attendants who were attacked with folding knives and box cutters, to the crew members who alerted the world, to those who joined with passengers using whatever was at hand to mount a do-or-die resistance and successfully stopping the suicide killers from reaching the nation’s capital, these 33 men and women should be remembered for their bravery, dedication to duty, and shared humanity as they faced what they knew to be the last moments of their lives.

What is immediately noticeable about this glorious memorial is that it was entirely conceived and built by individuals who come from, or are closely connected to, the aviation community. Too often, memorials become mired in controversy because they stray too far from their intended purpose, which is to mark an historic event, honor the individuals whose lives shaped or were personally touched by that event, and to inspire those of us who live on, today and tomorrow, to lead our lives in a way that gives meaning to those values which we hold dear as a people.

Men and women for whom the attack on airplanes was deeply and intensely personal built this memorial. It was the vision of Valerie Thompson, an American Airlines flight attendant with 20 years seniority, for whom the 9/11 attacks were a call to action to build a permanent remembrance to her colleagues and to honor all those aviation professionals whose lives changed forever on September 11. Her husband, Dean Thompson, sculpted the one-and-a-half-life-sized bronze figures adapted from an original design by Bryce Cameron Liston. The 18-foot structure is situated on the outskirts of Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, where a steady flow of commercial jetliners in their final landing approach can be seen in the distance, adding a living reminder of what we lost and what continues to be an object of terrorist obsession.

The conclusion's at the link.

Burlingame's the sister of American Airlines pilot Charles Burlingame, who died on September 11, 2001.

See also Burlingame's essay on the World Trade Center Memorial, "The Great Ground Zero Heist," on how political correctness hijacked the memorial project in New York.

Iraqi Leader Tweaks U.S. Presidential Campaign

We're having another iteration today of the Spiegal quotation controversy, which started yesterday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's statement that he was essentially aligned with Barack Obama's 16-month troop withdrawal plan.

Comments made by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in an interview with SPIEGEL (more...) published on Saturday have stirred up the campaign teams of both Barack Obama and John McCain this weekend. And late on Saturday, Maliki tried to distance himself from the statements, saying his comments were misunderstood.

In the interview, Maliki expressed support of Obama's plan to withdraw US troops from Iraq within 16 months. "That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of changes."

Maliki was quick to back away from an outright endorsement of Obama, saying "who they choose as their president is the Americans' business." But he then went on to say: "But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited"....

SPIEGEL sticks to its version of the conversation.

Maliki's comments immediately hit the headlines of US papers and Web sites across the country, partly the result of a White House employee inadvertently sending out a news alert to its full media distribution list. The White House said it was an error and that it was meant to be sent internally only.

The Obama campaign was quick to welcome Maliki's expression of support, with his top foreign policy advisor, Susan Rice, saying "Senator Obama welcomes Prime Minister Maliki's support for a 16 month timeline for the redeployment of US combat brigades. This presents an important opportunity to transition to Iraqi responsibility, while restoring our military and increasing our commitment to finish the fight in Afghanistan."

Obama should welcome an expression of support, since he's long been wrong on Iraq, and he's jonesing for some positive press on his war policy, which has become increasingly irrelevant to facts on the ground (recall the Obama camp went so far as to scrub its criticism of the surge from the campaign's official page).

Allahpundit's offered some of the best analysis of the issue yesterday (here), and he links this morning to this interview with Joseph Lieberman, who notes that "Obama couldn't travel to Iraq today" if we'd followed his earlier, incessant proposals for a precipitous withdrawal:

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Related:

The left's triumphalism is in full ejaculation over at Matthew Yglesias' page, and this comment is particularly revealing of Marxist mindset that has gripped these folks:

Der SPIEGEL is the most important and reputable news magazine in Germany, and it also offers the biggest news website in German. It is majority-owned by the employees, which means that there's no big shareholder in the background pulling the strings and influencing the reporting. Spiegel's _factual statements_ are regarded with utmost credibility in Germany, even when the commentaries and editorials can be controversial.

The probability that Der SPIEGEL not only mistranslated the same things multiple times AND having Maliki fail to recognize this when his interview was signed off (standard practice) is so low that you need to be literally BRAINDEAD to believe it.

Well, that describes CNN, for example.

Sorry, but America has no free credible mass media left.

One more data-point of evidence of the left's hope for a shift to socialism in the U.S.

Iran's Genocidal Hatred of Israel

David Noon is disappointed that Israeli historians are favoring preventive military action against Iran's nuclear development program. To Noon, and many other lefties disconnected from the realites of international life, for a historian to make a reappraisal of previously held views is heresy from pacifist shibboleths and left-wing ideological conformity.

Thus, it's even more interesting to read Andrew Bostom's article, "Shi'ite Iran's Genocidal Jew Hatred":

Earlier this week Professors Moshe Sharon and Benny Morris both opined solemnly about an inevitable Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. These two respected Israeli academicians, despite holding very disparate political views, also concurred on the moral justification for such pre-emptive action -- the annihilationist threat to Israel posed by a Shi'ite Iranian regime gripped with an apocalyptic, Jew-hating fervor. The pillars of this continuous modern campaign of annihilationist antisemitism are the motifs from traditional Islamic Jew hatred, including, most significantly, Islamic eschatology. These deep-seated Islamic theological motifs are further conjoined to Holocaust denial, and the development of a nuclear weapons program intended expressly for Israel's eradication.

There's lots more at the link, plus Bostom's got the whole series available at his blog.

Obscenities in the Blogosphere

I've never thought using obscenities in blogging was acceptable.

When I started, I read political scientists who were bloggers (folks who had career reputations to maintain), and I considered blogging as a new form of journalism. Cursing just seemed unprofessional, and when I did see some use profanity it was normally accompanied by equally crass opinions. It was easy to dismiss these people as unserious.

I imagine someone would have to research it, but my feeling is that lefty bloggers are more comfortable with profanity in their blogging than conservatives. Certainly top left-wing bloggers, who are discussed in Katherine Seelye's piece, "Easing Off Online Obscenities," find crude language in blogging acceptable, even advantageous, and they've invented little decision rules on when cursing might be fine and dandy:

Has anyone noticed a decline in the use of obscenities in the blogosphere lately (well, at least when various public figures aren’t being quoted)?

Some prominent bloggers on a panel here at Netroots Nation said today that for a variety of reasons, they have scaled back their use of profanity. Others said they were swearing as much as they ever had.

Digby Parton, who writes on Hullabaloo.com, said she initially thought of her blog as an ephemeral form of conversation among friends and used vulgarities freely. But now she is read by a substantially wider circle and has cleaned up her language.
“I don’t use the same amount of profanity,” she said. “We’re taken much more seriously as a political force,” and she has a stronger sense that her words are “out there for posterity”....

Amanda Marcotte, who writes on pandagon.net and had been the blogmaster for John Edwards’s presidential campaign until some of her outside writings were deemed anti-Catholic, described her stance on the matter this way: “I curse and I’m vulgar and I make really, really dirty jokes.”

She said she uses obscenities to entertain people and “to show hypocrisy and the ridiculousness of society.”

Jesse Taylor, who founded pandagon in 2002 and was the online communications director for Gov. Ted Strickland, Democrat of Ohio, until earlier this year, moderated the panel. He said he found that he had been using obscenities so frequently that he simply tired of it (and was also constrained by outside writing that did not allow it).

Now, he said, “My use of profanity is much more targeted.” He still sometimes uses vulgarities as shorthand, he said, but he has found that using them less often gives them more power.

The panelists said there were various things they tried to avoid. Mr. Papa said he tried not to write about killing, especially in connection with mentions of the president. Digby said she was not comfortable criticizing people about their appearance. Ms. Marcotte said she tried to see how vulgar she could be “without crossing the line into being sexist.” She added: “My vulgarity stands out because people can’t believe a young woman is saying these things.”

In the end, no one seemed too concerned about the use of obscenities in the blogosphere or whether it undermined their arguments. They more or less shrugged over the recent off-color language used by Jesse Jackson about Senator Barack Obama, language that some mainstream media repeated and others did not.

I've noted previously how lefties use profanity in their campaigns of demonization. For the left nihilists, it must come across as more powerful, more essential, when President Bush, Joseph Lieberman, or right-wing commentators like Jonah Goldberg, are attacked with a big fat "f***" bomb.

I see it all the time. It turns my stomach, and I'm no wilting lilly.

Perhaps there's a time for it (if I pound my thumb with a hammer while working around the house, I doubt I'd be worried about throwing out a few choice expletives), but I don't expect serious people to take seriously the foul-mouthed potty rants of a bunch of raving online revolutionaries as incisive political analysis.

I mean, the tenor of most these discussions is inbred, to stroke the desires of crooked libidinous demonization among like-minded hard-left cohorts. I mean, just look at how Netroots Nation announced their panel on the bounds of acceptable blog language, "Different Tones and Wider Nets:"

One of the great debates of blogging is the general rudeness and shrillness acceptable within the discourse. Does profanity exempt you from being taken seriously? Are you necessarily "calmer" because you don't drop a few four-letter words? We'll discuss the tone and attitude of various pockets of bloggers, and also why, no matter what, Michelle Malkin is still worse.

That blurb is right on the main Netroots Nation homepage, and it's simply unfathomable to me that such discourse is considered okay. Michelle Malkin is worse that anyone's use of profanity?

It's not as if the bloggers profiled have advanced their journalistic or political careers by deploying gutter language. Amanda Marcotte, indeed, not only got the boot from John Edwards' campaign in 2004, her controversy cast tremendous doubts on Edwards himself: Did he endorse her vile language and demonization? Did he condone hate speech? Was this considered an acceptable level of discourse for a presidential candidate?

The answer is clearly no (see Jawa Report for the specifics of Marcotte's case). But the left bloggers want to make their own rules. They think the mainstream press "needs to let its hair down," which I perceive as the lefties' push to lower the bar on what's proper.

How might we explain all of this? Well, in my view, these folks are essentially Marxist, and at base, we might consider Marxist thought a doctrine of hatred, a secular demonology:

We hate those, whose existence urges us to reconsider our theories and our vocabularies. We hate what places a safe and irresponsible categorization of the world in jeopardy. We hate what threatens the purity and predictability of our perception of the world, our mode of discourse, and in effect, our mental security.

Thus, for the left, rather than consider that vulgarity has no proper place in the respectable exchange of ideas, crude language is a tool to beat down those who would challenge their way of seeing the world, especially those allegedly in the right-wing superstructure of greedy imperialistic designs.

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UPDATE: Dana over Common Sense Political Thought has a fabulous expansion of this topic, "Profanity Does Not Equal Persuasion.

Dana links to Pandagon, where we see, frankly, insane ramblings on why using profanity is okay, for example, from Atrios (actually, paraphrased Duncan Black):

Atrios says (extreme paraphrase) that, rather than worrying that snark and vulgarity will allow the right to shut down discourse, we should recognize that the right has already shut down the discourse and snark and vulgarity are a useful tool to shine a light on that fact. I would add that vulgarity isn’t just the light but the jackhammer - the right has built a bulwark of insensateness, and vulgarity and snark seem to be the only things which reliably break that down, even on a temporary basis. The reaction from righty bloggers when a progressive fails to live up to their fake idea of civility reveals that the bulwark is really a facade - the strong ideological defense they’ve built up is vital, since whenever it drops we see clearly that they don’t actually have an ideology.

To be fair, I noticed Pamela Leavey, of the Democratic Daily, was realistic in her sense of what's appropriate:

Personally after writing online for the Kerry campaign blog in ‘04, I’ve always written here with the “posterity” thing in mind. My thoughts have always leaned towards… You never know who’s out there reading your blog…

That's not the biggest moral repudiation of profane blogging, but certainly heading in the right direction.

Epitaph for Imperialism? Or, the Death of President Bush Foretold

Today's big foreign policy spin is the report that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has apparently backed Barack Obama's amorphous troop withdrawal plan for Iraq.

There's a malevolently otherworldly reaction to this around the leftosphere, where many appear to suggest that the success of the surge somehow validates the radical left-wing surrender agenda of the Democratic Party and the netroots base. Indeed, the overall response is positively Kafkaesque.

"The Survivor" by George Grosz 1944, Private Collection

In truth, Barack Obama has been consistently wrong on Iraq (see Peter Wehner's devastating portrait of Obama's flailing Iraq policy), especially throughout 2007.

Now, as Jennifer Rubin points out, Obama, in a statement, has seized on Maliki's agreement to a "horizon" framework as an endorsement of the radical meme that Iraq's not the frontline in the war on terror:

Now, instead of vague illusions to a ‘general time horizon,’ it’s time to pressure Iraq’s leaders to reach the political accommodation necessary for long-term stability, and to refocus on strengthening our military and finishing the fight in Afghanistan.

Obama's playing the Afghan card, pandering to the surrender hordes, but as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, if Americans would have quit Iraq according to the pullout demands of the antiwar left, the Iraqis would now be under al Qaeda's totalitarian thumb, and the Islamists would have claimed a victory over the Great Satan:

Bear this in mind next time you hear any easy talk about "the hunt for the real enemy" or any loose babble that suggests that we can only confront our foes in one place at a time.

But there's more afoot today than some kind of political game-changer seen in Maliki's statement. Some on the left are arguing that the entire foreign policy debate over the last six-years is hereby decided in favor of the antiwar nihilists, game, set, and match.

Going even further is Spencer Ackerman, whose unhinged ravings fall categorically beyond the pale of reasonable partisan foreign policy debate:

The Iraq war is and has always been an obscenity, a filthy lie born of avarice and lust for power masquerading as virtue. This is what imperialism looks like. But the age of empire is over. The same hubris that led Bush into the Iraq disaster led him to miscalculate, again and again, over how to entrench it. But now he is impotent, unable to impose his will, and the nakedness of his attempted imposition has led the American and the Iraqi peoples to wake up and end his nightmare. May his war-crimes prosecutor be Iraqi; may his judge be American; and may he die in the Hague.

This is not the talk of someone's who's concerned about the appropriate role of American power in the world, or the proper balance between force and statecraft.

No, Ackerman demonizes the entire thrust of Bush administration foreign policy, and his concluding statement would see President Bush subject to an international authority above American law, prosecuted for alleged crimes against humanity, convicted at the Hague's star chamber, and executed like some murderous Third World tyrant - like, say, Saddam Hussein.

This is the highest stage of moral relativist anti-Americanism, topped-off with a flourish of abject secular demonology.

Can it be any wonder that large numbers of Americans have serious concerns - even fears - for the future of this country under a Barack Obama administration?

See also, Allahpundit, "Maliki: Obama’s 16-Month Timetable Sounds Good; Update: Spiegel Changes Quote."

Image Credit: All Things Beautiful, "The Big Push - To Take America Down A Peg Or Two."

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UPDATE! Welcome Protein Wisdom readers!

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UPDATE II: CNN reports that Nuri al-Maliki has renounced Spiegel's original story, where he was quoted as in agreement with Barack Obama on a 16-month troop withdrawal:

A German magazine quoted Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as saying that he backed a proposal by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months.

"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months," he said in an interview with Der Spiegel that was released Saturday.

"That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes," he said.

But a spokesman for al-Maliki said his remarks "were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately."

I wonder, then, if we're not really at the end of imperialism.

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UPDATE III: Welcome Just One Minute readers!

Kent State's Radical Academic Jihadist

FrontPageMag has posted the Discover the Networks listing for Professor Julio Pino, of the Department of History at Kent State University.

Pino's department page lists this biographical information:

Julio Cèsar Pino is Associate Professor of History at Kent State University, Ohio, specializing in Latin American History. He received his Ph.d in History from the University of California at Los Angeles. His current courses include "Comparative Latin American Revolutions.", “Afro-Latin America” and “History of Women in Latin America" and In 1997 he published Family and Favela: the Reproduction of Poverty in Rio de Janeiro (Greenwood Press), dealing with household organization and the feminization of poverty in the Rio shantytowns...

This academic background sounds fairly straightforward, given the "social movements" emphasis in contemporary historical studies. However, Pino's apparently a convert to Islam and he's alleged to self-identify as the "most dangerous Muslim in America."

Here's this from Discover the Networks:

Disillusioned with Catholicism and Christianity generally, Pino in 2000 became a Muslim after reading The Qur’an on a plane ride. “All religions claim they are more than just a religion but a complete way of life, but only in Islam is this vow fulfilled,” he says....

In an April 2002 guest column for the Kent State campus newspaper, Pino penned an effusive tribute to Ayat al-Akras, a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber who had murdered two Israelis at a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29. In that piece -- titled “Singing out Prayer for a Youth Martyr” -- Pino insisted that Akras was no terrorist but had “died a martyr’s death … in occupied Jerusalem, Palestine.” Pino also derided President Bush as a “numbskull,” and called for boycotts of all Israeli and American products.

In 2005 Pino wrote another controversial letter to his campus newspaper, this time lauding University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill for his “righteous obsession with European and American genocide and terrorism against peoples of color all over the world, from 1492 to 2001.” Pino also claimed that during the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy had planned a “genocide against the Cuban people”; that President Bill Clinton had killed “more than 500,000 Iraqi children” via sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq; and that “cocaine cowboy” George W. Bush had “added an extra 100,000 corpses to the pile of brown colored [Iraqi] corpses.” Referring to his students at Kent State as his "little jihadists" and his “beloved Taliban,” Pino made it clear that he sought to indoctrinate, not merely educate, the young men and women in his classes. He concluded that “[i]n an America rapidly descending toward Christian fascism, we need more Ward Churchills.”

Pino says that his worldview is animated by his “unfulfilled need to bring social justice to the world.” In the classes he teaches at Kent State, he compels his students to approach the study of Latin American history from the perspective of leftist “Third World” politics, which he identifies with such revolutionaries as Fidel Castro and the communist Sandinista regimes of Central America. Pino blames the political upheavals of Central America wholly on the “daily” butchery of “American-trained death-squads,” and praises the Sandinistas for having “succeeded in building a society free of class exploitation and gender inequality.”

There's more at the link. See also Pino's own essay, "Born in the Fist of the Revolution: A Cuban Professor's Journey to Allah."

Pino's apparently been at the center of campus controversies at Kent State, for example, when the chair of the department was removed from the chairmanship for granting Pino academic leave for travel to the Middle East (an academic pilgrimage for jihad?).

Some of Pino's students apparently are not that happy with the professor's teaching. The first entry at Pino's RateMyProfessors link say, "makes Noam Chomsky look patriotic..."

That's not the best endorsement of radical teaching, athough maybe some leftist blog outfits can give Pino a gig if things don't work out at Kent State.

The Postmodern Culture of Animal Rights Activism

Last week, in "Human Rights for Animals?", I suggested that postmodern ideology explains the push in Europe to grant human rights to non-humans.

It turns out that Wesley Smith, at the Weekly Standard, has picked up on Spain's bid to grant rights to apes, seeing this as a threat to Western civilization's Judeo-Christian moral philosophy:

Specifically, by including animals in the "community of equals" and in effect declaring apes to be persons, the Great Ape Project would break the spine of Judeo-Christian moral philosophy, which holds that humans enjoy equal and incalculable moral worth, regardless of our respective capacities, age, and state of health. Once man is demoted to merely another animal in the forest, universal human rights will have to be tossed out and new criteria devised to determine which human/animal lives matter and which individuals can be treated like, well, animals.

Note some additional thoughts on the postmodern, relativistic mindset:

We are witnessing a broad based backlash against reason in our culture. This backlash is widely promoted in contemporary higher education. The argument is that every time somebody claims to be in possession of the truth (especially religious truth), it ends up repressing people. So its best to make no claims to truth at all.

Rejecting objective truth is the cornerstone of postmodernism. In essence, postmodern ideology declares an end to all ideology and all claims to truth. How has this seemingly anti intellectual outlook gained such wide acceptance in history's most advanced civilization? That question requires us to understand how postmodernists conceive the past three hundred years of western history.

Postmodernism abandons modernism, the humanist philosophy of the European Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinking is based on the authority of French philosopher Rene Descartes' autonomous man--the one who starts from his own thought ("I think, therefore I am") and builds his world view systematically from reason alone. Naively, postmodernists charge, modernists assumed that the mind was a "mirror of nature," meaning that our perceptions of reality actually correspond to the way the world is. From this presumption, modernists built a culture that exalted technological achievement and mastery over the natural order. Expansion-minded capitalism and liberal democracy, outgrowths of modernist autonomous individualism, subjugated the earth to the eurocentric, male dominated paradigm.

But modernism planted the seeds of its own undoing. As arrogant, autonomous modernists conquered the globe and subjugated nature in the name of progress, oppressed and marginalized people have responded. "Progress toward what?" they cry. Postmodernists say that the idols of autonomous reason and technological proliferation have brought the modern age to the brink of disaster. The "myth of progress" ends up in a nightmare of violence, both for marginalized people and for the earth.

Enter postmodernism. Postmodernism rejects modernism's autonomous individualism and all that follows from it. Rather than seeing humanity as an ocean of individuals, postmodernists think of humans as "social constructs." We do not exist or think independently of the community with which we identify. So we can't have independent or autonomous access to reality. All of our thinking is contextual. Rather than conceiving the mind as a mirror of nature, postmodernists argue that we view reality through the lens of culture. Consequently, postmodernists reject the possibility of objective truth. Reality itself turns out to be a "social construct" or paradigm. In the place of objective truth and what postmodernists call "metanarratives" (comprehensive world views), we find "local narratives," or stories about reality that "work" for particular communities--but have no validity beyond that community. Indeed, postmodernists reject the whole language of truth and reality in favor of literary terms like narrative and story. It's all about interpretation, not about what's real or true.

Postmodernists hold that the pretense of objective truth always does violence by excluding other voices (regarding other world views to be invalid), and marginalizing the vulnerable by scripting them out of the story. Truth claims, we are told, are essentially tools to legitimate power. That's why in postmodern culture, the person to be feared is the one who believes that we can discover ultimate truth. The dogmatist, the totalizer, the absolutist is both naive and dangerous.

A growing number, especially among the emerging generation, believe that reason and truth are inherently political and subversive. That's why they are often so cynical. According to the voices in contemporary culture that shape "Generation X" thinking, claims to truth are clever disguises for the pernicious "will to power." Consequently, rather than dominating others with our "version of reality," we should accept all beliefs as equally valid. Openness without the restraint of reason, and tolerance without moral appraisal are the new postmodern mandates.

See also, Dennis Prager, "Moral Absolutes: The Case for Judeo-Christian Values..."

Related: Victor Davis Hanson, "'Bomb Texas': The Psychological Roots of Anti-Americanism," and Dr. Sanity, "The Intellecutal and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Left."

Public Opinion Optimistic on Unfair Campaigning?

Gallup reports that a majority of Americans is optimistic that both John McCain and Barack Obama will campaign respectably, not sinking to unfair mudslinging:

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have both claimed that they will not engage in below-the-belt attacks during this race. And while the candidates have made some pointed comments regarding their issue differences, they have largely refrained from intense personal attacks to this point. History has shown, however, that campaigns tend to get considerably more negative as Election Day approaches, so it is an open question as to whether the candidates will keep their promises for the duration of the campaign.

A recent USA Today/Gallup survey shows that most Americans are at least somewhat optimistic that one or both candidates will follow through on that promise. But a variety of data show that many people view the tone of a race from a partisan perspective. As a result, there is likely to be little agreement about what constitutes fair or unfair attacks on the campaign trail once the general-election advertising season begins in earnest.

In the June 15-19 USA Today/Gallup poll, Americans were asked about the likelihood that the presidential candidates would keep their promises to refrain from personal attacks. Specifically, respondents were asked "Both John McCain and Barack Obama have said they want to conduct a presidential campaign based only on the issues and not based on personal attacks. How likely do you think (John McCain/Barack Obama) is to conduct a campaign based only on the issues?"

See also, Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar , "How Negative Campaigns Shrink Electorate, Manipulate News Media."

New Yorker's Referendum on Obama

Eleanor Clift argues that the New Yorker was woefully dull in believing that the Obama fist-bump cover would go over well as high-brow satire. Clift offers this reader's e-mail to the New Yorker as an example:

Your embarrassing attempt at satire is disgraceful in this climate of fear and ignorance. There is no journalistic freedom to justify this cartoon that could have easily been generated by the merchants of hate and fear and will certainly be used by them to justify their own moronic diatribes against this most American family. Shame on you New Yorker for this blatant attention grabbing exercise!

It's seems, however, that the cartoon hits so close to home that the left's not content to let this satire play out. A good case in point is No More Mister Nice Blog's post, "One More Word About That Magazine Cover":

I wonder what the reaction would have been if, one September or other in the past couple of years, the cover of The New Yorker featured a cartoon in which Dick Cheney in a hard hat oversaw the wiring of the Twin Towers with explosives, while out on the WTC plaza Ariel Sharon handed out flyers to yarmulke-wearing office workers that said STAY HOME FROM WORK ON TUESDAY! and, in a cutaway, George W. Bush sat down in the Situation Room with Osama bin Laden over artist's simulations of planes flying into buildings, as a calendar on the wall read SEPT. 10, 2001.

I'm sure the reaction would be that anyone who didn't think it was funny was just a snotty elitist who contemptuously assumed other people wouldn't recognize a joke as a joke. Don't you agree?

No, I dont, but since there's apparently a prohibition against analyzing satire, so I'll just note that satire seeks to hold up authentic human vices to ridicule, and Barack Obama's genuine vices include a still murky sympathy to the very images the New Yorker hoped to lampoon.

If, as Clift notes, this election's going to be a "referendum on Obama," with luck we'll see more New Yorker-style satirical "CliffsNotes" to inform the electorate's decision-making.

See also, "We Are All Racist For Not Hating that 'New Yorker' Cover."

Naomi Klein's Anti-Imperialist Blueprint for the Left

Jonathan Chait, at the New Republic, has a long review of Naomi Klein's, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Klein's book is an attack on free-market triumphalism, and Chait argues Klein's penned the ultimate far left-wing jeremiad against modernity, with corporate power as the center of the new age of imperialist war.

Here's Chait's introduction:

It seems like a very long time--though in truth only a few years have passed--since the most sinister force on the planet that the left could imagine was Nike. In 2001, Time proclaimed that the anti-globalization movement had become the "defining cause" of a new generation, and that the spokesperson for the cause was the Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein. For puzzled outsiders grasping to understand why bands of youths had begun following the World Trade Organization wherever it went, brandishing oversize puppets and occasionally smashing up the local Starbucks, Klein was there to explain. She has always downplayed her place within the movement, but in fact her influence is as considerable as her press clippings proclaim. Her achievement, and it is no small feat, has been to revive economicism--and more grandiosely, materialism--as the central locus of left-wing politics.

From the time of Marx, and through the Depression, the left concerned itself primarily with economic inequality. The analysis of injustice in terms of class conflict and the forces of production was the canonical one. But the postwar boom--the authors of the Port Huron Statement famously described themselves as "bred in at least modest comfort"--turned the left's attention to foreign policy and national security in the Cold War, and to civil rights, and to feminism. By the 1980s, left-wing politics had withdrawn almost entirely into academia and other liberal enclaves, which it ruthlessly policed for any dissent from the verities of multiculturalist dogma and identity politics.

The essay continues with an involved discussion of the development of Klein's ideological thinking, and we see that September 11, for Klein and others, was a wake-up call for rejuvenated left-wing anti-imperialism.

Her basic premise is that the Chicago School of free-market economics is behind every ailment in the global public sphere. But there's the problem that Klein's one-size-fits-all approach is simplistic and selecitive. Klein, for example, claims that not only was the Iraq war a U.S. imperialist project, but that top Bush administration officials pushed the war directly for personal war profiteering, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney:

"When he leaves office in 2009 and is able to cash in his Halliburton holdings," she charges, "Cheney will have the opportunity to profit extravagantly from the stunning improvement in Halliburton's fortunes." This is a spectacular accusation -that the driving force behind the Iraq war stands to gain millions of dollars from it. You might wonder why John Kerry did not make this an issue in 2004, or why liberal pundits have not crusaded against Cheney's blatant self-dealing. The answer, of course, is that it is completely untrue. Cheney has signed a legally binding agreement to donate to charity any increase in his Halliburton stock.

Reading these passages indicates how perfectly Klein's writing cradles the conspiracist ideologies of today's far-left. But Chait simply doesn't buy it, and takes her to task for an abject ignorance of the role of ideas in Bush administration foreign policy:

She pays shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas. She recognizes that neoconservatism sits at the heart of the Iraq war project, but she does not seem to know what neoconservatism is; and she makes no effort to find out. Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one breathtaking sentence:

Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think-tanks with which [Milton] Friedman had long associations--Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute--called itself "neoconservative," a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.

Where to begin? First, neoconservative ideology dates not from the 1990s but from the 1960s, and the label came into widespread use in the 1970s. Second, while neoconservatism is highly congenial to corporate interests, it is distinctly less so than other forms of conservatism. The original neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, did not reject the New Deal. They favor what they now call "national greatness" over small government. And their foreign policy often collides head-on with corporate interests: neoconservatives favor saber-rattling in places such as China or the Middle East, where American corporations frown on political risk, and favor open relations and increased trade. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has always had an uneasy relationship with neoconservatism. (Russell Kirk delivered a famous speech at the Heritage Foundation in which he declared that "not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.") And the Cato Institute is not neoconservative at all. It was virulently opposed to the Iraq war in particular, and it opposes interventionism in foreign policy in general.

Finally, there is the central role that Klein imputes to her villain Friedman, both in this one glorious passage and throughout her book. In her telling, he is the intellectual guru of the shock doctrine, whose minions have carried out his corporatist agenda from Santiago to Baghdad. Klein calls the neocon movement "Friedmanite to the core," and identifies the Iraq war as a "careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology" over which Friedman presided. What she does not mention--not once, not anywhere, in her book--is that Friedman argued against the Iraq war from the beginning, calling it an act of "aggression."

That last line is really key: Klein simply ignores any bit of fact that disconfirms her anti-American theory.

In another review of The Shock Doctrine, Stephen Holmes, at the London Review of Books, offers this insightful little nugget:

Klein’s basic argument is curiously difficult to follow. One problem is her conflation of free-market ideology with corporate greed. There are plenty of connections between the two, of course, but it is impossible to understand the relation between the economic ideals of Milton Friedman and the economic aims of Halliburton or Lockheed Martin unless they are kept analytically distinct.

They aren't "analytical distinct" for Klein, apparently, which is exactly the point: The Shock Doctrine aims not analyze but to delegitimize the right. Her work is a manfesto for the left, a blueprint for the anti-capitalist revolution.

It's no surprise, therefore, that Klein's a darling of the hard left media and the netroots community, at places like Harper's, the Huffington Post, and the Nation.

Netroots Applauds Moulitsas' Lieberman Obscenity

I've sent an e-mail to Susan Davis of the Wall Street Journal. I'm hoping to get an exact quote, or thereabouts, on the obscenity Markos Moulitsas is said to have used in attacking Senator Joseph Lieberman at today's Netroots Nation meeting in Austin, Texas.

In addition to Davis' essay, the New York Times also mentions Moulitisas' anti-Lieberman attack.

Note first that Harold Ford made good on his promise to appear at the Yearly Kos/Netroots Nation meeting (he made the offer in an earlier appearance with Moulitsas on Meet the Press). During his panel, Ford was heckled by attendees when he spoke of his former colleagues at Fox News:

Here's Davis' report:

Can Democrats bridge the ideological divides within the party? A lunch keynote session at the Netroots Nation annual convention here in Austin tried to address that with a discussion between liberal DailyKos.com founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and the not-so-liberal Democratic Leadership Council’s Harold Ford Jr.. The answer was, well, unclear.

Sure, Moulitsas and Ford both offered platitudes about how Democrats need to come together in November to elect Sen. Barack Obama, and how the factors that unite Democrats are greater than those that divide them.

But what divides them makes them angry.

The political leanings of the crowd were skewed decidedly to the left of Ford, a former centrist U.S. House member from Tennessee who lost his 2006 Senate bid to Republican Bob Corker. Ford gamely made an agreement with Moulitsas last year following a joint appearance on “Meet the Press” that each would attend the other’s political conferences as a sign of goodwill.

The crowd in the convention hall was less generous. One questioner pressed Ford on why he has taken actions “smearing Democrats,” in part by appearing on Fox News. Ford’s response that he has “great respect and admiration” for his former Fox colleagues was met with hisses and boos. (Although he duly noted his contract is with MSNBC these days.)

Here's Davis relaying Moulitsas' attack on Lieberman:

Moulitsas offered up Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Jim Webb of Virginia as two Democrats the netroots generally support because while there are policy differences between them “they aren’t afraid to be Democrats.”

Moulitsas also offered one area where he believes there is common ground. Recalling his own into-the-lion’s-den appearance at the DLC’s conference, he said he was trying not to push the envelope too far with the party’s more center wing when he slipped [and] used an off-color epithet for Sen. Joe Lieberman. The crowd here cheered at the reference, since Lieberman—aligned with the DLC—has become a sworn enemy of many in the netroots for his support of Republican Sen. John McCain in the presidential race.

Here's the New York Times on the same moment:

The two sat on stage with a moderator in front of an audience of about 2,000 people, most of them progressive bloggers, who were generally more supportive of Mr. Moulitsas than they were of Mr. Ford.

Mr. Moulitsas said he was not the one who decided for the netroots whether they approved of someone’s vote on a certain topic, but the voters were. “I didn’t decide to take on Joe Lieberman,” he said, “but the people in Connecticut decided, ‘he’s not representing us.’” Actually, Mr. Moulitsas and his blog were vocal supporters of Ned Lamont, Mr. Lieberman’s primary challenger. But the audience here applauded heartily, prompting Mr. Moulitsas to recall that when he spoke recently at Mr. Ford’s D.L.C. convention, he blurted out an obscenity about Mr. Lieberman — and also was applauded.

Moulitsas has a reputation for abject and totalizing demonology, and I'm particulary interested to know if his obscenity included anti-Semitism.

As readers will recall, Moulitsas claims his movement represents the "mainstream" of the Democratic Party, and he's on record as coordinating campaign activities with the Barack Obama campaign.

Barack Obama's moved steadily to the center but he's clearly not repudiated netroots support for his presidential bid.

Hopefully we'll see more details on Moulitsas' obscene attack on Joseph Lieberman. If Moulitsas and the netroots truly are the party's mainstream, I'm sure the general public has an interest in knowing how these folks treat one of their own past vice-presidential nominees.

See also, "Harold Ford Heckled Over Fox Comment At Netroots Nation."

Related: "At 'Netroots Nation,' Obama Campaign Goes to Ground."

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Assassinating Robert Mugabe?

Charli Carpenter, of the academic blog group at Duck of Minerva, offers a provocative case for the assassination of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe:

In the wake of Mugabe's "re-election," political violence in the country is on the increase. Jake Farr Wharton has a modest proposal:

"Mugabe’s forces violently bullied and intimidated the people of Zimbabwe into a second election. Last week, Tsvangiri withdrew his candidacy, siting that he could not stand for president when anyone who voted for him, was doing so at a very real risk to their families lives. As such, Mugabe ran unopposed and won. The many people he had killed, maimed, imprisoned, held hostage and the villages he had destroyed devastatingly culminated in a win for him. The violent intimidation worked.

Where is the UN when they are actually needed? Where is the African Union when they are actually needed? End this man in the only way he knows how, assassinate him. Let it be done and hold a new election, one overseen by the UN and African Union."

There are moral arguments to be made here. Politicians whose thugs burn little boys alive because their father supports the opposition don't deserve the protection of sovereign immunity. And Ward Thomas has made a convincing case that the norm against assassinating heads of state has little ethical basis, since it protects the guiltiest civilians while often resulting in protracted wars that cost the lives of the most innocent or, at best (when wars are fought professionally) of soldiers who have often been conscripted. Besides, the CIA would no doubt dispatch him more humanely than his own people ultimately will... recall the untimely end of Samuel Doe, former President of Liberia.

So why not assassinate Mugabe? At Elected Swineherd, Empedocles harbors doubts on pragmatic, rather than moral grounds:

"Such an operation would likely leave an open door for widespread ethnic violence in its wake. What is needed instead is a UN or SADC (South African Development Council) peacekeeping deployment to coordinate humanitarian aid and a slow political transition."

Hmm, s/he's got a point there. The Rwandan genocide was tipped off by the apparent assassination of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, after which the Tutsi population of the country was scape-goated, providing a pretext for root-and-branch massacres. Though, is Zimbabwe Rwanda? Or is it early Nazi Germany, where the stage is not yet set for full-blown genocide but the leadership has the power and political will to do so if not removed? And a peacekeeping mission? One was in place in Rwanda in April 1994....

Perhaps the best (though perhaps also the worst) reason why not to go down this road is a self-interested one: to preserve the anti-assassination norm itself ... Which still begs the question of what should be done ...

Recall that I've argued in favor of topping the Mugabe regime (here), although I hadn't thought about an assassination attempt, frankly, because the norm against such action is so deeply embedded.

For example, see the response to Carpenter's post at the American Prospect, "Shooting Those Washington Bullets Again."

Carpenter, who revised the original post, says American Prospect's essay is a misinterpretation of the original version of this post.

Suggestion for Readers: Read the full exchange, including the comment thread at the post, and leave your thoughts here .

I'd be more likely to favor toppling the regime, followed by a U.N.-backed occupation, and new elections supportive of some kind of national reconciliation government. No matter, I'm intrigued that the liberal international side of the spectrum is contemplating such boldly forceful action in favor of Zimbabwe's people.

Obama, the Democrats, and Iraq

Peter Wehner argues that the Democrats, led by Barack Obama, were against the surge before they were for it:

This is the week that the Democratic party ran up the white flag when it comes to the surge in Iraq. Leading the surrender was none other than Barack Obama, the Democratic party's presumptive nominee for president and among the most vocal critics of the counterinsurgency plan that has transformed the Iraq war from a potentially catastrophic loss to what may turn out to be a historically significant victory.

On Monday, Obama wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he acknowledged the success of the surge. "In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge," Obama wrote, "our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda--greatly weakening its effectiveness." A day later, Obama gave a speech in which he declared for the first time that "true success" and "victory in Iraq" were possible. In addition, the Obama campaign scrubbed its presidential website to remove criticism of the surge.

The debate, then, is over, and the (landslide) verdict is in: The surge has been a tremendous success.

Obama, in typical fashion, is trying to use the success of the surge he opposed to justify his long-held commitment to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq as quickly as possible. But turning Iraq into a winning political issue won't be nearly as easy as Obama once thought. He has stepped into a trap of his own making.

The trap was set when Obama repeatedly insisted that his superior "judgment" on Iraq is more important than experience in national security affairs. Judgment, according to Obama, is what qualifies him to be commander in chief. So what can we discern about Obama's judgment on the surge, easily the most important national security decision since the Iraq war began in March 2003?

To answer that question, we need to revisit what Obama said about the surge around the time it was announced. In October 2006--three months before the president's new strategy was unveiled--Obama said, "It is clear at this point that we cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve, and we have to do something significant to break the pattern that we've been in right now."

On January 10, 2007, the night the surge was announced, Obama declared, "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." A week later, he insisted the surge strategy would "not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly." And in reaction to the president's January 23 State of the Union address, Obama said,

I don't think the president's strategy is going to work. We went through two weeks of hearings on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; experts from across the spectrum--military and civilian, conservative and liberal--expressed great skepticism about it. My suggestion to the president has been that the only way we're going to change the dynamic in Iraq and start seeing political commendation is actually if we create a system of phased redeployment. And, frankly, the president, I think, has not been willing to consider that option, not because it's not militarily sound but because he continues to cling to the belief that somehow military solutions are going to lead to victory in Iraq.

In July, after evidence was amassing that the surge was working, Obama said, "My assessment is that the surge has not worked."

Obama, then, was not only wrong about the surge; he was spectacularly wrong. And he continued to remain wrong even as mounting evidence of its success gave way to overwhelming evidence of its success.

But Obama is not alone. Virtually the entire Democratic party, including every Democrat running for president, opposed the surge. For example, Senator Joseph Biden--considered by some pundits a foreign policy sage--declared, a few days before the surge was announced, "If he surges another 20, 30 [thousand], or whatever number he's going to, into Baghdad, it'll be a tragic mistake."

There's more at the link.

Wehner actually builds on a long story of Democratic surrender on Iraq, but what's interesting now is how the Obama turnaround genuinely demonstrates how wrong, for so long, the Democrats have been on this war.

See also, the Wall Street Journal, "Obama's 'Judgment' [on the surge]."

McCain Gets It! Obama "Most Extreme" in Senate

Here's some of the best news indicating the presidential campaign's turned the corner: It turns out that John McCain, speaking at a campaign stop in Kansas City, called out Barack Obama as the most extreme member of the U.S. Senate, further to the left than socialist Bernie Sanders:

The capacity crowd strained at times to hear McCain through the booming echo of the station’s north waiting room. But audience members applauded warmly and repeatedly as McCain riffed on a variety of topics — abortion, immigration reform, education and health care.

He criticized opponent Sen. Barack Obama for his opposition to the surge of troops in Iraq, offshore drilling and expansion of nuclear power.

“I think we should change (Obama’s slogan) to ‘no, we can’t,’ ” McCain told the crowd.

He also said Obama had the “most extreme” record in the Senate.

Asked later if he thought Obama was an extremist, McCain said: “His voting record … is more to the left than the announced socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.”

Does McCain think Obama is a socialist? “I don’t know. All I know is his voting record, and that’s what people usually judge their elected representatives by.”

Obama’s campaign, in a statement: “John McCain squandered an opportunity to talk with Missourians about solutions to our economic problems and chose instead to launch the same old tired political attacks that the American people are sick of.”

Before the town hall meeting, McCain met with reporters on his bus — the Straight Talk Express — and said he was skeptical about Obama’s upcoming trip to the Middle East.

“I hope he learns he was wrong when he said that the surge would not work in Iraq … when he set out a timetable (for withdrawal) … and when he said the war was lost.”

He also criticized Obama for not consulting active-duty military leaders more vigorously.

“Failure in Iraq would have had catastrophic consequences in Afghanistan. … He doesn’t understand warfare.”

Geez, McCain's finally getting it on Obama, none too soon either!

See also, "McCain: Obama Might Be a Socialist."

Hat Tip: Ace of Spades HQ

Bombing Iran?

Benny Morris looks at the circumstances leading to a possible Israeli military strike on Iran, and the potential strategic ramifications:

ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.

It is in the interest of neither Iran nor the United States (nor, for that matter, the rest of the world) that Iran be savaged by a nuclear strike, or that both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate. We know what would ensue: a traumatic destabilization of the Middle East with resounding political and military consequences around the globe, serious injury to the West’s oil supply and radioactive pollution of the earth’s atmosphere and water.

But should Israel’s conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level will most likely follow. Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful applications of nuclear power. And, despite the current talk of additional economic sanctions, everyone knows that such measures have so far led nowhere and are unlikely to be applied with sufficient scope to cause Iran real pain, given Russia’s and China’s continued recalcitrance and Western Europe’s (and America’s) ambivalence in behavior, if not in rhetoric. Western intelligence agencies agree that Iran will reach the “point of no return” in acquiring the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in one to four years.

Which leaves the world with only one option if it wishes to halt Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry: the military option, meaning an aerial assault by either the United States or Israel. Clearly, America has the conventional military capacity to do the job, which would involve a protracted air assault against Iran’s air defenses followed by strikes on the nuclear sites themselves. But, as a result of the Iraq imbroglio, and what is rapidly turning into the Afghan imbroglio, the American public has little enthusiasm for wars in the Islamic lands. This curtails the White House’s ability to begin yet another major military campaign in pursuit of a goal that is not seen as a vital national interest by many Americans.

Which leaves only Israel — the country threatened almost daily with destruction by Iran’s leaders. Thus the recent reports about Israeli plans and preparations to attack Iran (the period from Nov. 5 to Jan. 19 seems the best bet, as it gives the West half a year to try the diplomatic route but ensures that Israel will have support from a lame-duck White House).

There's more at the link.

Morris argues that the international community will continue to "do nothing" to stop Tehran's march to nuclear capability, and Iran will beef up its rhetorical campaign favoring Israel's annihilation, and it will continue "prodding its local clients, Hezbollah and Hamas," agents who would join a war of extermination against the Jewish state.

Morris also notes that most Israelis view Iran as an existential threat. What's amazing is how so few others do as well.

See also, Blackfive, "Israel Announces Winter Bombing Plans."

Related: "Iran's Threat to the Strait of Hormuz."