The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage

Newsweek ramps-up the gay marriage debate with its cover story this week, "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage."

The piece starts with numerous examples of Biblical figures whose manners of living were diametrically opposed to what today's religious conservatives would champion as an appropriate traditional lifestyle for society: For example, "Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists."

Read the essay. The problem I see is the author argues an exclusively literalist case against faith-based opposition to same-sex marriage, when in fact most Americans would more likely argue an essentialist religious foundation against gay marriage, one that sees religious tradition - rather than literal prophetic realism - as the basis for an ethics privileging heterosexual marriage.

Here's how Newsweek paints religious literalism as a straw man in favor of a more holistic religious acceptance of same-sex marriage:

As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

As I have argued many times here, the case for an expansive religious interpretation of a homosexual right to marry was rejected decisively at the polls this year, and Newsweek's own poll that accompanies this article found only 31 percent of Americans in favor full-blown marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

But we can leave all of that aside for the moment, since the increasing secularism in American society seems like a steamroller at times, and its proponents have no qualms of adopting Soviet-style show-trial tactics to dehumanize those who suppor the majoritarian political process.

The fact is, conservatives may have to battle gay rights advocates on the secular battlefield, as contentious cultural issues like this are essentially uncompromising for people of faith.

Susan Shell, in a masterpiece of an article, "The Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage," lays out a classical and secular liberal case against gay marriage ("liberal" is used here in the Lockean form, with a stress on "liberty of rights," not "liberal" as used to describe the American left).

The core of Shell's argument is that marriage historically is recognized as a practice that his essentially procreative and regenerative. Not all couples bear children, but the institution's social foundation is anchored in the elevation of the basic biological union of spouses, and it is protected under the law as available to only one man and one woman, as a matter of civil principle. Shell argues, for example, marriage should only be available for the regenerative union of spouses in the ideal, as funerals are in fact only available to the dead:

When considering the institution of marriage, a useful comparison exists between how society addresses the beginning and end of human life. Like death, our relation to which is shaped and challenged but not effaced by modern technologies, generation defines our human nature, both in obvious ways and in ways difficult to fathom fully. As long as this is so, there is a special place for marriage understood as it has always been understood. That is to say, there is a need for society to recognize that human generation and its claims are an irreducible feature of the human experience.

Like the rites and practices surrounding death, marriage invests a powerful, universally shared experience with the norms and purposes of a given society. Even when couples do not "marry," as is increasingly becoming the case in parts of western Europe, they still form socially recognized partnerships that constitute a kind of marriage. If marriage in a formal sense is abolished, it will not disappear, but it will no longer perform this task so well.

A similar constraint applies to death. A society could abolish "funerals" as heretofore understood and simply call them "parties," or allow individuals to define them as they wish. Were the "liberationist" exaltation of individual choice pushed to its logical conclusion, would not a public definition of "funeral" as a rite in honor of the dead appear just as invidious as a public definition of "marriage" as an enduring sexual partnership between a man and woman? If it is discriminatory to deny gay couples the right to "marry," is it not equally unfair to deny living individuals the right to attend their own "funerals"? If it makes individuals happy, some would reply, what is the harm? Only that a society without the means of formally acknowledging, through marriage, the fact of generation, like one without the means of formally acknowledging, through funeral rites, the fact of death, seems impoverished in the most basic of human terms.

Like generation, death has a "public face" so obvious that we hardly think of it. The state issues death certificates and otherwise defines death legally. It recognizes funeral attendance as a legal excuse in certain contexts, such as jury duty. It also regulates the treatment of corpses, which may not merely be disposed of like any ordinary animal waste. Many states afford funeral corteges special privileges not enjoyed by ordinary motorists. Funeral parlors are strictly regulated, and there are limits on the purchase and destruction of cemeteries that do not apply to ordinary real estate. In short, there are a number of ways in which a liberal democratic government, as a matter of course, both acknowledges "death" and limits the funereal rites and practices of particular sects and individuals. I cannot call a party in my honor my "funeral" and expect the same public respect and deference afforded genuine rites for the dead. And it would be a grim society indeed that allowed people to treat the dead any old which way--as human lampshades, for example.

Once one grants that the link between marriage and generation may approach, in its universality and solemn significance, the link between funereal practices and death, the question of gay marriage appears in a new light. It is not that marriages are necessarily devoted to the having and rearing of children, nor that infertility need be an impediment to marriage (as is still the case for some religious groups). This country has never legally insisted that the existence of marriage depends upon "consummation" in a potentially procreative act. It is, rather, that marriage, in all the diversity of its forms, draws on a model of partnership rooted in human generation. But for that fact, marriages would be indistinguishable from partnerships of a variety of kinds. The peculiar intimacy, reciprocity, and relative permanence of marriage reflect a genealogy that is more than merely historical.

Seen in this light, the issue of gay marriage can be reduced to the following question: Is the desired union between homosexuals more like a marriage between infertile heterosexuals, unions that draw ultimate psychological and moral sustenance (at least symbolically) from the experience of human generation; or is it more like insistence on attending one's own funeral--a funeral, one might say, existing in name only? This question is not easily answered. Progress can be made, however, by attending to the stated goals of most gay marriage advocates.

Someone who is living cannot attend their own funeral, and thus, according to this logic, someone who is gay cannot attend their own marriage, as marriage has been historically constituted heterosexually in law and culture.

But Shell adds another paragraph indicating the likely backlash militant homosexuals will engender through their hardcore gay marriage advocacy:

American citizens should not have the sectarian beliefs of gay-marriage advocates imposed on them unwillingly. If proponents of gay marriage seek certain privileges of marriage, such as legal support for mutual aid and childbearing, there may well be no liberal reason to deny it to them. But if they also seek positive public celebration of homosexuality as such, then that desire must be disappointed. The requirement that homosexual attachments be publicly recognized as no different from, and equally necessary to society as, heterosexual attachments is a fundamentally illiberal demand. Gays cannot be guaranteed all of the experiences open to heterosexuals any more than tall people can be guaranteed all of the experiences open to short people. Least of all can gays be guaranteed all of the experiences that stem from the facts of human sexual reproduction and its accompanying penumbra of pleasures and cares. To insist otherwise is not only psychologically and culturally implausible; it imposes a sectarian moral view on fellow citizens who disagree and who may hold moral beliefs that are diametrically opposed to it.

Keep in mind that Shell argues this point with the acknowlegment that political libertarianism would accord homosexuals the same rights that accrue to traditional couples, such as adoption. And as we saw in the Newsweek survey, on every other gay rights issues outside of marriage equality majorities of Americans are tolerant and expansive in affording full inclusion for same-sex partners.

But the current militant authoritarianism for same-sex marriage rights - which we've seen demonstrated with nauseating clarity in the No on H8 attacks following the passage of California's Yes on 8 initiative - will almost certainly generate the kind of backlash against gay marriage equality that Shell envisions.

So, while there may indeed by a growing generation tolerance for full-blown same-sex marriage equality, the logical extension of full public affirmation of such marriage rights may well create the the kind of reaction capable of setting back the clock on gay rights altogether.

Militants Strike U.S. Convoy in Pakistan Attack

The Los Angeles Times reports that "suspected" Taliban insurgents destroyed a 150-vehicle supply convoy in Pakistan's northwest region, near Peshawar, early today. The losses were not "militarily significant," officials said:

With attention focused on tensions between India and Pakistan in the wake of the attacks in Mumbai last month, U.S. officials are concerned that Pakistan will throttle back on its confrontation with militants in the tribal areas, opening the door to more such strikes.

U.S. military officials in Afghanistan declined to specify the number of vehicles destroyed in today's attack, but described the losses as militarily insignificant. However, the bold assault underscored the vulnerability of supplies moving by road through Pakistan.

Booman Tribune, commenting on the U.S. deployment to Afghanistan, compares the U.S. to the Soviets:

Now the American Empire is repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Empire. And the British Empire before it. Empires never learn, I guess.

Move evidence of the enemy at home, folks.

Remember Terrorism

Via Wordsmith at Flopping Aces:

See Wordsmith's entire collection of cartoons, here.

See also, Caroline Glick, "The Jihadist-Multicultural Alliance."

Continuing Partisan Debate on Iraq

As the debate over the Mumbai massacre has shown, the backlash against the Bush administration's policy of taking the fight to the terrorists continues to poison reasoned discussion on the future of American foreign policy.

We'll be seeing considerably more discussion of the Bush legacy on Iraq in the near future, as we make the transition from one administration to the next. As it is, leftists are super-senstive to any meme on the right that credits the administration with the greater security of the nation. On Iraq, leftists continue to decry the origins of the war, harping on "the lack" of international legitimacy for the deployment, and discounting any effect of the virtually treasonous backstabbing we saw among antiwar activists and top members of the Democratic Party both before and after the first shots were fired.

Along these lines, Dave Noon, of Lawyers, Guns and Money, has published a review of David Horowitz and Ben Johnson's, Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9-11.

Noon's piece, first rejected by the editors of FrontPageMagazine, is now published at The Edge of the West. Here's the introduction, for some flavor:

In a little less than two months, George W. Bush will leave office as one of the most despised presidents in American history. Taking mild comfort, perhaps, in the fact that he will end his term according to the customary schedule, Bush would nevertheless have much to envy in the presidency of Richard Nixon, who resigned — amazingly — with lower disapproval ratings than George Bush currently enjoys and could, for all his administration’s flagrant criminality, at least take credit for bringing a pair of Giant Pandas to the National Zoo. Bush, by contrast, may well be remembered as simply the least capable two-term president in the history of the republic. In accounting for this failure, there are almost too many factors to consider, but the administration’s showcase project — the war in Iraq — will weigh heavily on Bush’s historical legacy. On its own merits, the war was a profound disaster for a full four years. The much-vaunted “surge” may have contributed to an improvement in certain conditions, but the likelihood that the United States will ever be able to offer a plausible claim of “victory” in Iraq is slim. No less a figure than Gen. David Petraeus recently conceded as much.

The authors of Party of Defeat are to be congratulated, then, for struggling valiantly (if unpersuasively) upstream in their quest to vindicate this administration’s baleful legacy. They do so, however, by taking a primarily negative tack. That is, they defend Bush’s war in Iraq not so much by hailing its achievements but rather by impugning the motives of its most vocal critics, whom they argue have somehow forced the president to deviate from the path to victory. It is, in the end, a strange argument on which to hang a book. So far as I can recollect, no credible works of history or political science have ever been written based on the thesis that a minority party in a democracy — one that in fact witnessed its minority status intensified over two election cycles — somehow bears responsibility for taking the country to the brink of ruin. But Party of Defeat is not a credible work of history or political science.

Perhaps Noon, despite his training as an historian, is not familiar with the reseach on interwar Britain and France, for example, Peter Corthorn and Paul Corthorn's, In the Shadow of the Dictators: The British Left in the 1930s, or Eugen Weber's, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s.

The former explicitly examines the British left's refusal to respond seriously to the gathering threat of fascism in Europe before World War II, and the latter examines the collapse of national morale in interwar France that contributed to the country's utter collapse in the face of German power in 1940 (not unlike the evaporation of outrage and resolve among the American left since 9/11).

But no matter.

Historical accuracy is not Noon's design. There's really no rational argument that could shake folks like Noon - who populate the denialist left in ever-increasing numbers - from their hegemonic project of demonization of the Bush administration and the neoconservative right. Rather than engage Horowitz and Johnson's substantive points by other than a wave of the hand, Noon repeatedly hammers the claim that the book is not a "legitimate" work of scholarship:

In 164 pages of prose, the authors cite exactly zero historians and political scientists who enjoy any degree of credibility in the area of US-Middle Eastern history specifically or international relations more broadly. The authors are clearly not stupid men, but their footnotes reveal a research method for which the term “shoddy” is almost too generous a description.

This is such a blatantly dishonest statement I can only shake my head. Looking at the footnotes right now, I see Horowitz and Johnson cite Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay in the footnotes to Party of Defeat on page 174. Daalder and Lindsay are both political scientists and foreign policy experts (Daalder's Ph.D is from MIT, and Lindsay's from Yale). But more than this, the notes from Party of Defeat reveal a research process relying heavily on primary documents, archival materials, and first-person accounts and biographies that are central to the methods of diplomatic history. Perhaps the shift in the historical profession to the new "social history," and the concomitant refusal to teach military history to the youth of today, explains Noon's irresponsible dismissals of Horowitz and Johnson.

Indeed, Noon should pay more attention to the very scholarly literature he so pompously pumps. The Security Council authority for the use of force in Iraq embodied in a series of resolutions calling for Iraqi disarmament and compliance with multilateral demands dating from 1991. Resolution 1441, which many focus on in discrediting international action, was in fact a huge victory for the U.S. and the world body in signaling that Iraq risked a preponderant display of force in flouting the will of the international community. And even in the absence of a secondary resolution in the run-up to March 19, 2003, the U.S. - based on power, values, right, and responsibility - was obligated to act against Saddam's breach of faith.

Noon reacts to this as follows:

There are some real whoppers, such as their insistence that U.N. Resolution 1441 provided sufficient authority to launch a war against Iraq.

It's not a question of whether Resolution 1441 was "sufficient," but whether the world body in fact was prepared to act when objective international circumstances warranted it. As political scientist Anne Marie Slaughter argued on the legal rational for regime change in Iraq, Resolution 1441 and the French resistance to it:

If the United States has a majority and the French vetoes, then the United States will go ahead and will have the better of the legal argument, assuming the war is as the United States predicts—both short and successful.

At this point, how we reconcile all these views is less important than the larger divide between left and right on the legitimacy of the use of force in international affairs.

As Arthur Borden, the author of A Better Country: Why America Was Right to Confront Iraq, has written:

It is time for the nation to overcome the partisanship that has split us for the past five years. The current administration may have made errors in prosecuting the war, implementing post-Saddam renewal within Iraq, and communicating its message at home. Nevertheless, the underlying policy of protecting U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf as prosecuted by the Republican George W. Bush was in line with the long-standing bipartisan consensus as articulated clearly by Democrat Jimmy Carter and understood subsequently by both political parties.

It's the Democratic Party that has obliterated this same bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. This is what Horowitz and Johnson document in painstaking and scrupulous detail, and this is why leftists have placed their book in the nihilist crosshairs.

David Noon, unable to discredit these arguments on the merits, attacks Party of Defeat from some assumed but flimsy perch of academic superiority. As such, as I've noted previously, he "epitomizes the contemporary pacifism of the hard-left of the Democratic Party."

Why Rabbi Holtzberg Was Murdered

Here's Mark Steyn on the causes of Mumbai:

We are told that the “vast majority” of the 1.6-1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra’s estimate) are “moderate.” Maybe so, but they’re also quiet. And, as the AIDs activists used to say, “Silence=Acceptance.” It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam — “Allahu Akbar.”

I wrote in my book, America Alone, that “reforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Koran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Bombay in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual. And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, “worry about image.” Not enough.

See also, "Deepak Chopra's Response to Sean Hannity."

U.S. Dollar Provides Stability in Financial Storm

The U.S. financial crisis has triggered numerous announcements that crashing markets signal the inevitable decline of the United States as the world's major power.

For example, the anti-American blog, Newshoggers, announced in September that the international system was becoming "more multi-polar, with the U.S. losing its superpower status as the world's financial powerhouse."

That's wishful thinking, of course (the anti-American left sees U.S. power as the font of evil in the world, and increasing multipolarity will rein-in America's alleged neoimperial project). The U.S. will remain the world's dominant economic power as long as no other states possess comparable economic capabilities.

One of the best indicators of a nation's power is the role of its currency. For over half a century, the U.S. dollar has been the world's major international unit of exchange, providing liquidity to countries facing balance of payments problems and serving as the unit of worth to which all the world's money aligned. Even after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the dollar served as the key currency of international trade, and at this late date over 80 percent of world's commercial and financial transactions are conducted in dollars.

Counterintuitively, as the American economy continues to shake out, international investors have been rushing into dollars as a safe-haven against risk. The Wall Street Journal has the report, "The Dollar Powers Through the Turmoil":

Amid the worst financial crisis in decades, the U.S. dollar has come roaring back to life.

Over the past four months, as investors around the world fled from risk, the dollar recouped more than two years' worth of losses against a broad group of currencies, including its swoon in the early part of this year.

Since the start of August, the dollar has strengthened 23% against the euro, 34% against the British pound, and still more against some currencies in developing countries ....

To the surprise of many observers, the greenback turned out to be a major beneficiary of the global flight from risky assets and the unwinding of bets based on borrowed cash, much of it in dollars. In a time of extreme financial stress, investors sought the relative safety of the world's reserve currency, and if possible, U.S. Treasury bonds.

The ever-widening scope of the crisis also helped the buck: It rapidly became clear that the U.S. is far from the only country with economic woes and hobbled banks.

For investors, the dollar's resurgence is proving a tricky puzzle. Some believe that the comeback will prove to be short-lived, given the enormous challenges facing the U.S. economy. But others say it's likely to endure well into next year as economies around the globe grapple with a sharp slowdown.

Read the whole thing, here.

The piece includes the usual discussion of the pros and cons of a rising dollar on exports and tourism. But what's fascinating is how this type of commentary is not much different from earlier times, whether the U.S. economy was booming or wheb facing a recession.

For America's detractors, the shift to a "multi-polar" world may have to wait a little longer.

The Obama Inauguration

Anticipation is high for the presidential inauguration Barack Obama.

The Los Angeles Times puts the event in historical perspective:

The inauguration has been forecast to draw anywhere from 1 million to 4 million. Whatever the actual number, for those who voted for him and even those who did not, there is little doubt that the Obama swearing-in will go down as a milestone in the nation's history, an American moment.

Elizabeth Scalia notes how Obama backers literally can't wait, with some pushing for the resignation of President Bush:

In this interregnum season of political transition, the whole nation is in a state of suspense; it watches a right-leaning government prepare to head out to a political wilderness as a left-leaning one processes in from same.

For fervent Democrats and the press — but I am redundant — it is a period of giddy impatience.

For the rest of the nation, this transition and its necessary waiting is a time of reflection. After the noise of an excruciating two-year campaign, those who voted for Obama in November — and especially those who did not — are taking advantage of the relative post-election calm to reflect on all of the fears and hopes that went with the hype. In a quintessentially American manner, they are — whether with joy or resignation — doing the introspective work needed to be opened to the man who will be their president on January 20, 2009. As they wait, they watch bright stars being plucked from the political constellations to serve the new administration and they wonder what is about to occur in their world.

Those who had counted on a President Obama moving herky-jerk away from capitalism and sovereignty are finding some surprisingly centrist cabinet selections at odds with their notion of “hope.” Others fear such selections constitute nothing more than plausible deniability in the face of an inexorable march toward Marxism, and “hope” feels — literally — like all they have.

There's more at the link.

Deepak Chopra's Response to Sean Hannity

I'm frankly caught off guard by the intensity and comprehensiveness of Deepak Chopra's response to the conservative reaction to his allegations of America's responsibility for the Mumbai attacks.

I've written about Chopra twice already (here and here), and in the second post, Gotham Chopra defended his father in the comments (here). Deepak Chopra appeared on a number of cable news shows to discuss the Mumbai terror attacks. Dorothy Rabinowitz cites some of his comments, for example:

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay" [emphasis added].

The video of Chopra blaming the West is here.

There's no doubt as to what he's alleged.

Chopra responded to Rabinowitz in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, as did Chopra's son, Gotham (both which I discussed, which in turn triggered a response from Gotham, as noted).

Well, it turns out Chopra's also gone after Sean Hannity for calling him out on his anti-Americanism. Here's this from his letter to Hannity published at the Huffington Post:

I am really disappointed in you. Do you not remember your other guest when I was on, former Defense Secretary Bill Cohen? He made the same point I did about America's policy toward the jihadists: "Are we creating more terrorists than killing them?" Ironically, this question is attributed to Donald Rumsfeld.

It really doesn't matter to me personally whether you agree with me or not. Leaving our debate aside, your habit of taking statements out of context and playing the blaming game is sad. You have a powerful platform that influences many people. Why do you use your influence to monger fear, militancy, divisiveness, and jingoism?

I was hoping to come back on your show and have a reflective, intelligent dialogue, but perhaps the attack mode is the only way you know to make a living. The best excuse for your dishonest accusations against me is that you don't believe what you're saying. The far right has deflated, so you are there to pump it up with hot air.

Actually, Chopra doesn't cite Secretary Cohen's comments accurately, nor the attibution to Secretary Rumsfeld.

Here are Cohen's comments from the Hannity and Colmes transcript at Fox News:

COLMES: Let me get some reaction from Secretary Cohen.

Secretary Cohen, welcome to the show. Do you subscribe to what Deepak is saying here in that — that we have to get to the root causes here and there is some complicity here on a global scale?

WILLIAM COHEN, FMR. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Well, I think, ultimately, we have to look at root causes. I think, initially, we have to track down and take out the terrorists who are launching these attacks.

I think what Deepak is suggesting is something about what Secretary Rumsfeld, as a matter of fact, raised a serious issue when he was secretary of defense. Are we creating more terrorists than we're killing?

And so what we have to do is to go after the hard core, to root out the hard core terrorists who are inflicting these terrible, terrible crimes against humanity, at the same time, then look to how can we help elevate the people in various parts of the world so that the jihadists aren't able to really manipulate and exploit them.

So I think we have to have a two-pronged attack. Go after the terrorists and root them out as best we can and then try to raise the level of civil support and social support for those groups so they aren't vulnerable to the jihadist.

As can be seen in the full context of Cohen's quotation, he's suggesting that it is appropriate for Chopra to suggest that the deployment of military force against the terrorist generated a backlash among the jihadis, and with perhaps increased recruitment and terrorist mobilization, as Secretary Rumsfeld surmised (and as analysts debated back in 2003 and 2004, when al Qaeda had shifted its global operations to Iraq).

But that's just a passing acknowledgement. What Cohen's comments do is validate the U.S. policy of "rooting out" terrorist in their sanctuaries: "... what we have to do is to go after the hard core, to root out the hard core terrorists who are inflicting these terrible, terrible crimes against humanity ... "

It is this exact U.S. policy of taking the fight to the terrorists that Chopra blames for the phenomenon of contemporary terror, that is, the U.S. is responsible for Mumbai, not the killers.

Readers might note that the Bush administration's Iraq policy is apparently the source of Chopra's enraged derangement, and so it is with Gotham Chopra as well.

It's a sad commentary on the state of political discourse in the U.S. that the toppling of the regime in Baghdad is so rabidly reviled by the antiwar left, although the international community would not have known the extent of Iraq's weapons development program had the U.S. not fought to enforce 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions. All the major Western intelligence agencies suspected Baghdad to be in material breach of its disarmament responsibities, and the U.S. and multilateral action to disarm the regime had bipartisan support in the United States Congress.

As Arthur Borden has written:

We know now that by evicting the weapons inspectors in 1998, Saddam initiated a game of bluff. He would let the inspectors return if necessary, but only to certify that he had no WMD, whereupon they could be evicted again. Then he would be free of the inspections and of the sanctions for good. Uncontained, and without on-the-ground monitoring, he would quickly awaken his hibernating nuclear program and acquire WMD. His long-term intent was clear. Thus absent his removal, Saddam was on course to win the game.

When the United States and its allies entered Iraq in 2003, it was with considerable support of Americans on both sides of the political aisle. Unfortunately, such bipartisanship as there was disappeared when no WMD were found in Iraq. The minority party turned this discovery into an opportunity to fragment the nation. Rather than celebrating the overthrow of Saddam and his ambitions - including the undeniable risk of a dominant, WMD-equipped Iraq - it accused the administration of lying to create a cause for war. It was, of course, Saddam who had deceived the world, but the character of his secretive and aggressive regime was forgotten.

Borden's impeccable logic, also seen in his book, A Better Country: Why America Was Right to Confront Iraq, is unlikely to change many minds among the antiwar hordes, who have invested in an entire Orwellian fortress of denial as part of its hegemonic campaign of anti-Americanism and international moral equivalence.

Deepak Chopra is not a credible source of analysis on the causes and responses to international terrorism. He has no business speaking out about international events, other than to wish condolences to the families of those who were killed. Dorothy Rabinowitz and Sean Hannity have Chopra's nihilism pegged, and this full-court press by Chopra and his son to demonize those who would stand up for the truth is beneath contempt.

Cut and Run in Afghanistan?

Cernig, writing at the terrorist-enabling left-wing blog, Newshoggers, seeks to deligitimize the continuing U.S. and multinational presence in Afghanistan:

The US military is building a new barracks for an expected 20,000 additional troops in Afghanistan. Various luminaries are calling for new strategies there, ones that recognise the military reality that force alone cannot "win" in Afghanistan and the geopolitical reality that no efforts at all can "win" if Pakistan is opposed to them. Turkey is mediating between Pakistan and Afghanistan in an attempt to acheive reconcilliation between the two sometime-rivals and the incoming Obama administration plans a new aid and training program to attempt to reverse the inexorable decline of what used to be an Afghan success story.

But all may be missing an important point - the war in Afghanistan should be over, and the mandate for a US and allied presence there has lost its rationale. Doug Saunders, writing in Canada's Globe and Mail on Friday, noted that the Western presence in Afghanistan is authorised under Chapter VII of the UN Charter ....

Our soldiers are authorized to oust the Taliban, but only insofar as those “Taliban” are the ones who are going to allow al-Qaeda to operate again.

And, as several analysts have pointed out, the presence of Western forces in Afghanistan, along with the karzai government's rampant corruption and inefficiency, are what now drives Taliban militancy in Afghanistan. Western forces have become more a part of the problem than a solution ....

We've already seen too many times the negative consequences of "mission creep", not least of which is the undermining of international law and of UN mandates themselves, if they can be stretched like taffy to cover eventualities they were never intended to. If there's a new mission, it needs a new authorisation and a clearly defined set of objectives. If there isn't, then it's time to bring everyone home.

This essay is among a number of related artices found on the antiwar left that have sought to portray a military response to Mumbai, which would require a large-scale deployment along the Afghan-Pakistan border to root out terror sanctuaries there, as a "Bush- Cheney" plot of extremist right-wing propaganda to prop up the American military-war complex, for an endless campaign of neo-imperialist aggression on the periphery and the shredding of the Constitution at home.

All this talk at Newshoggers on Afghanistan about "new strategies" and that "force alone" will not work is hogwash.

On Mumbai, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has urged the government of Pakistan to act decisively in responding to the massacre:

She said: “There is urgency in getting to the bottom of it; there is urgency in bringing the perpetrators to justice; and there is urgency for using the information to disrupt and prevent further attacks.”

Sources privy to the meetings said Pakistan had expressed its readiness to work jointly with India in investigating the incident, but had wanted such a cooperation to be comprehensive and also addressed its own concerns.

However, Rice was reportedly not ready to listen to Pakistan’’s grievances about India’’s interference in Balochistan, the role of Indian consulates along the Afghan border in promoting instability in Pakistan and other such issues. Instead, she told Pakistani leaders that she would like to discuss only the issue at hand.

The "issue at hand" is the out-of-control militants who have a free-hand in the tribal areas, and until Islamabad moves to dismantle the terror cells, other regional efforts of Afghan security and Indo-Pakistion diplomacy and trade cooperation will take a backseat.

The role of Afghanistan is integral to all of this. A collapse of the Afghan regime will restore the regional balance of power to where it was prior to September, 2001. The U.S. is right to seek a build-up of basing capabilities, which will facilitate the shift toward revamped COIN operations for the Afghan state. This will not be, of course, an exclusive military operation. As was true under the Petraeus surge in Iraq, a multipronged approach of miltary tactics combined with inter-factional outreach and cooperation, will provide the basis for a victory over the extremists.

The threat in South Asia is not al Qaeda - the key actors of interest for antiwar opponents - but the follow-on terrorists operating on the same ideology of Islamist extremism, and to deny this threat by arguing that the "war is over" is ignorant and irresponsible. It is a policy of cut-and-run, the very same strategy of defeat that the antiwar left pushed to abandon Iraq to the forces of world darkness over the last few years.

Just 31 Percent Support Gay Marriage, Poll Finds

Just 31 percent of respondents supported "full marriage rights for same-sex couples," a new Newsweek poll has found.

The Newsweek survey finds across-the-board support for full civil equality for gay Americans, but on the key question of definining marriage as between one man and one women, the country is a long way from overturning what is seen by a majority as a divine union of spouses.

Here's the key question item:

Thinking again about legal rights for gay and lesbian couples, which of the following comes CLOSEST to your position on this issue? Do you support FULL marriage rights for same-sex couples, OR support civil unions or partnerships for same-sex couples, BUT NOT full marriage rights, OR do you oppose ANY legal recognition for same-sex couples?

For all Americans, 31 percent support gay marriage, 32 percent civil unions, and 30 percent want no legal protection for gay marriage or civil unions.

Newsweek's essay stresses the growing tolerance for homosexuals in society overall:

When voters in California, Florida and Arizona approved measures banning same-sex marriage last month, opponents lamented that the country appeared to be turning increasingly intolerant toward gay and lesbian rights. But the latest NEWSWEEK Poll finds growing public support for gay marriage and civil unions—and strong backing for the granting of certain rights associated with marriage, to same-sex couples.

But on the controversy over same-sex unions, it all depends on how question items are posed: When respondents were asked if they supported some kind of legally-sanctioned gay and lesbian partnerships, 55 percent agreed. But when questions are broken down precisely on the issue of traditional marriage, less than one-third support the traditional conception of marriage for homosexual couples.

On every other measure of civil equality for gay Americans, the public showed majority support - for example, on adoption and inheritance rights for gay or lesbian couples; Social Security benefits for same-sex domestic partners; health insurance and other employee benefits, hospital visitation rights, openly gay service in the military; equal protection in workplace hiring and promotion; equality in housing opportunity; and gays and lesbians should be allowed to teach elementary and high school children.

On all of these items, a majority of Americans support homosexual equality.

The most striking finding, however, is that a majority of 62 percent of Americans say religious beliefs are central to defining marriage, with a plurality of 41 percent of Americans seeing marriage as exclusively a religious matter.

This is why radical leftists attack Americans who are religious traditionalists as "Christianists."

For gay rights activists to achieve their goal of full marriage equality under the law, they must marginalize Americans of faith who reject a redefinition of culture away from traditional or scriptural foundations.

See more analysis of the gay marriage controversy here.

Debating Atheist Nihilism

Regular readers may remember my post from some time back on our freaky anti-religionist counter-culture, "Atheist Nihilism."

Well it turns out that today's story of an athiest statement of coequal political status sheds a needed light on that debate - in this month when we celebrate the birth of Christ.

As MSNBC reports, authorities in Washington State allowed an atheist sign to be displayed opposite a traditional Christian Nativity scene at the Capitol Building in Olympia. The athiest statement included this passage:

There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds ...

Such blatant hostility to traditional American values apparently angered the state's residents, who have been flooding the governor's office with more than 200 calls an hour, and that's not to mention an apparent avalanche of e-mails as well.

It turns out, in any case, that this display of militant atheism, which was sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, was too much even for Paul at the well-known far-left blog, Shakesville, where he comments on the athiest group's surprise at the backlash:

Oh, puh-LEEZE. You can't for a second tell me that you were expecting any other reaction when you put this sign up. As I've documented far too many times, there are people out there whipped into a frenzy over the manufactured "War on Christmas" that are dying to find examples that it's really happening. And I've got a little news for you, radical athiests: When you do stuff like this, it appears as if it does exist, and you're not helping ....

You know something? I seriously f***ing doubt that there was anything on the Nativity scene explicity stating anything about non-believers going to hell. Symbolically? Well, that's arguable. But to say that there was an explicit message is disingenuous, it insults the atheists that can tell the godd****d difference between an expression of celebration of a religious holiday and an attack on themselves or atheism itself, and it's just f***ing annoying. (This is, of course, completely separate from atheists - not to mention religious people, for that matter - who object to religious displays in public spaces for constitutional reasons. There's a difference between that and "You hurt my feelings!") Besides, if you're an atheist, why the f**k are you worried about anyone saying you're going to hell it the first place? You don't believe in hell, remember? "I guess they don't follow their own commandments." Oh, shut the f**k up. You wanted this. You were hoping they would do this so you could use that stupid line.

Never mind the incongruity between Paul principled outrage and his crass vulgarity (common to leftists, of faith or otherwise, apparently).

But what's interesting is not only that Paul's correct (and it's rare that I agree with the lefties), but that his comments have pissed off Brian at Incertus, who would normally be allied with Shakesville on the usual range of all-encompassing anti-conservative derangement. Incertus' post is entitled, "Controversial? Why?":

Dear Paul ... you're not only wrong, but you managed to be more offensive than I ever imagined you capable of being while doing it. Please take your self-righteousness and false equivalencies, fold them up until they have four or five very pointy ends, and insert them in the most uncomfortable place you can imagine.

Well, no, Paul is not wrong. There are no "false equivalencies" here: The Freedom From Religion Foundation sucks, frankly.

It's a pretty good indication that when folks up in Washington, a "blue state" if there ever was one, get upset with extremist displays of atheist nihilism, such anti-religionism is obviously way beyond the pale

It's one thing to tolerate diversity of opinion. But when such views themselves become so oppositional as to be inherently hostile toward folks of otherwise good-faith and acceptance of difference in opinion - and this during a time of year when people are reaching out to join hands in callling for peace on earth - then it's obvious something's really out of whack here.

I've already identfied Incertus for its extreme anti-capitalist political agenda. Now with the author's variation on the Marxist attack on religion as the "opiate of the masses," it's clear that this particular blog's neo-Stalinist agenda is truly hegemonic in its anti-American project.

It’s Not the 1930s: Time to Retire Talk of Depression

I respect Robert Reich, the former Clinton administration Labor Secretary who is presently a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley.

Still, he's stretching reason in making the case that the current economic downturn should rightly be called a "depression":

When FDR took office in 1933, one out of four American workers was jobless. We're not there yet, but we're trending in that direction.

Read the whole thing for Reich's argument in context.

I've written numerous times to reject the comparison between now and the 1930s (see "War Mobilization Ended the Great Depression"). Times are tough today, sure, and they will get tougher, but there's a fundamental incommensurability here: I seriously doubt the country will ever have as deep a crisis as we saw in America after the stock market crash of 1929. As Daniel Gross recently pointed out:

All this historically inaccurate nostalgia can occasionally make you want to clock somebody with one of the three volumes of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s New Deal history. The Credit Debacle of 2008 and the Great Depression may have similar origins: both got going when financial crisis led to a reduction in consumer demand. But the two phenomena differ substantially. Instead of workers with 5 o'clock shadows asking, "Brother, can you spare a dime?" we have clean-shaven financial-services executives asking congressmen if they can spare $100 billion. More substantively, the economic trauma the nation suffered in the 1930s makes today's woes look like flesh wounds.

"By the afternoon of March 3, scarcely a bank in the country was open to do business," FDR said in his March 12, 1933, fireside chat (now available on a very cool podcast at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Web site). In 1933 some 4,000 commercial banks failed, causing depositors to take huge losses. (There was no FDIC back then.) The recession that started in August 1929 lasted for a grinding 43 months, during which unemployment soared to 25 percent and national income was cut in half. By contrast, through mid-November of this year, only 19 banks had failed. The Federal Reserve last week said it expects unemployment to top out at 7.6 percent in 2009. Economists surveyed by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank believe the recession, which started in April 2008, will be over by next summer. (Of course, the same guys back in January forecast that the economy would grow nicely in 2008 and 2009.) But don't take it from me. Take it from this year's Nobel laureate in economics. "The world economy is not in depression," Paul Krugman writes in his just-reissued book "The Return of Depression Economics." "It probably won't fall into depression, despite the magnitude of the current crisis (although I wish I was completely sure about that)."

It's time to retire the notion of an economic "depression."

Since the 1930s the U.S. has had cyclical economic recessions of varying depth and duration. I recall walking door-to-door in 1992 (for just two days, as a canvasser for CalPIRG, which I hated) asking people for political contributions. People wanted to give, but they were hurting economically, and many said it felt like "a depression." Santa Barbara at the time was going through the trauma of the post-Cold War defense conversion, and I recall tons of shuttered retail stores up and down Santa Barbara's normally-upscale State Street. In Fresno, where I lived while finishing up my undergraduate work until July, I met people who were leaving the state to start fresh in the Rocky Mountain states and other points east. I worked at Chevron station at the time, and folks came in to fill-up with all of their belongings loaded up on pick-up trucks, towing U-Hauls behind 'em. It was a difficult time.

More recently, I'm reminded of how bad the economy was during the 1970s, when the U.S. struggled through two oil shocks and "stagflation" stumped Keynesian economists. President Carter was reduced to announcing the country's "malaise." We had gas lines and rationing, and interest rates hit 20 percent by the early 1980s. It was another very difficult time.

I'll eat my words if unemployment hits 25 percent in the months ahead, but I'm confident that we'll see things bottom out in 2009. We'll have a continuing deflation in housing for some time, probably over the next couple of years. But the Obama administration will restore some confidence to markets and consumers with an aggressive stimulus program seeking to put people to work, stabilize employment, and build infrastructure and "green" industries.

Meanwhile, today we're seeing oil prices tumbling, and some economists are predicting that gas may be as cheap $1 a gallon early next year. Reduced energy prices will boost all sectors of the economy, from consumer spending to shipping and transportation, to air travel and industrial production. People will start taking longer vacations next year, and home heating costs will decline. Cheaper energy costs will act as a Keynesian stimulus, and consumers will increase demand of goods and services as the expansionary multiplier of cheap fuel provides a stimulus that no government "rebate" check could match.

Again, this could be all wrong. Three months ago folks thought $700 billion would stablize the financial system; now analysts are suggesting a $1 trillion dollar spending package will be needed for effective pump-priming.

Still, leftists might as well hang up the discourse of the "depression." No matter what, the U.S. under Barack Obama will see one of the biggest expansions of state power and domestic policy since the Johnson administration of the 1960s.

But the black-and-white desolation of soups kitchens and Dorothea Lange-imagery is long ago, and the United States today is a post-industrial service economy with higher technology and more flexible labor markets than ever before. We have a better regulatory structure and we are a wealthier people as a whole, with a quality of life - in cars, computers, and the comforts of home - that would make Depression-era citizens gasp at the scale of everyday luxuries.

As Roosevelt himself might say, "we have nothing to fear but itself," so leftist can lay off their economic fear-mongering.

Simpson Will Do at Least Nine Years Behind Bars

I watched O.J. Simpson's sentencing this morning.

I was reading online and looked up a few minutes after CNN had begun broadcasting the drama from the courtroom of Clark County District Court Judge Jackie Glass. Judge Glass previewed her ruling with an emphatic and riveting statement that her decision was in no way influenced by events 13 years ago, when Simpson was aquitted in his trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. She proceeded deliberately to hand down sentences for Simpson and his accomplice, Clarence Stewart. The reading was legalistic, with the sentences announced in months (rather than years), so it took me a couple of seconds to figure out the terms of incarceration. On the main counts, first for Stewart, then Simpson, it sounded like 15 years in Nevada's correctional facilities with a possibility of parole after about five years.

In the end, as the Los Angeles Times reports, Simpson will do at least nine years behind bars for the kidnapping and robbery of two sports memorabilia dealers in Las Vegas.

Especially dramatic was when CNN showed a picture-in-picture image of Fred Goldman, Ronald's father, along with other family members:

Among those in the courtroom to hear the sentencing was Fred Goldman, whose son was slain alongside Simpson's ex-wife in 1994. Simpson was tried for the murders but acquitted in 1995. Two years later, a civil jury found him liable for their wrongful deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to their families. During the trial, prosecutors argued Simpson's desire to avoid paying the judgment led to the Las Vegas incident. He stashed mementos with friends to keep them out of the hands of the Goldmans, whom he nicknamed the "gold diggers," and then became frustrated when they were not returned, the prosecutors claimed.

The judge took pains to say that the sentencing was not "payback" for the 1995 acquittal, as Simpson's attorneys have suggested. Glass said that as a judge, she respected the Los Angeles jury's decision.

"There are many people who disagree with that verdict, but that doesn't matter to me," she said.

Be sure to check out the Times' photo gallery, which includes images of Simpson begging for leniency.

Deepak Chopra Responds to Dorothy Rabinowitz

Deepak Chopra has responded to Dorothy Rabinowitz's Mumbai essay in a letter to the editor at the Wall Street Journal:

Dorothy Rabinowitz's Dec. 1 commentary "Deepak Blames America," is a personal attack on me. Since your newspaper wholeheartedly cheered the disastrous war in Iraq, I can understand why you continue to mount a rear guard action in defense of the Bush administration's approach to militant Islam.

That approach involves unilateral militant aggression without the slightest care for the effect being made on the vast majority of peaceful Muslims. Now that the right wing can no longer continue this discredited policy overtly, Ms. Rabinowitz and her ilk have adopted a fall-back position: Attack anyone who suggests a new way.

I stand by my remarks and have full confidence that the Obama administration will adopt a "root cause" approach of the kind I endorsed. The very thing Ms. Rabinowitz derides is our best hope for peace.

This is a typical response to criticism by those who are utterly paralyzed in the face of unspeakable evil in the world. The response is, frankly, to blame the Bush administration for the chillingly remorseless massacre of the innocents in India last week.

I wrote previously about this in my essay, "Moral Paralysis on Mumbai." I do not know Deepak Chopra other than by seeing him on TV on occasion. My first thoughts upon reading the Rabinowitz piece, as well as a couple of other reports of Chopra's appearance on cable news interviews (see video above), was that the man should stick to self-awareness and transcendentalism. International security issues require hard thinking. The realm's not conducive to fluffy new age exhortations such as "happy thoughts make happy molecules!"

Chopra's original comments on Mumbai that the "war on terror" has "caused" the outbursts of contemporary nihilist violence are not only preposterous, but morally repugnant. Rabinowitz nailed it with her original essay, and Chopra's horror that she would dare criticize him has produced a characteristic resort to victimhood rather than a defense of his own derangement in the face of the Bush administration's audacious foreign policy.

But wait! All is not lost. The Wall Street Journal has also published a letter from Chopra's son, Gotham. It's more stunned outrage at Rabinowitz's moral clarity, but this part's worth examining:

Our collective inability to construct a creative solution that goes beyond declaring a "war on terrorism" or insanely cheering "shock and awe" campaigns in Arab regions is a complicit part of the problems we face. Yes -- America, with all the democratic ideals for freedom and liberty it declares to the rest of the world, has a fundamental responsibility to stay true to them and be held accountable when we fail to even give the appearance that we care for them, as unfortunately the Bush regime has shown the past eight years. To pretend that we have no part in a global community plagued by the sickness that is Islamic fundamentalism largely brought on by economic disparity and ideological hypocrisy, not to mention policy and actual oil money and arms that nurture it, is to perpetuate and encourage more brazen attacks. To think that this creative solution should not appeal in some way to the world's 1.6 billion Muslims, the vast majority of whom are not terrorists, is plain negligence.

Go ahead and read the rest, here.

Not surprisingly, nowhere to be found in Gotham Chopra's letter is a condemnation of the Mumbai killers. I'm almost sick as I write this, again..., thinking of the Holtzbergs, and all of the innocent people of India, who were caught in this time-warp of barbarian evil (in some cases from pure curiosity, as was true of Manush Goheil, a tailor in the city, who stepped out of his shop to check out the commotion, to be gunned down by one of the terrorists, who opened fire on him from the top floor of the Chabad house - that is, gunned down by the same murderers who tortured and massacred Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg and seven others at the Jewish mission).

American foreign policy has been the world's anchor since World War II. We have maintained a strategic presence in South Asia as the region's offshore balancer and arsenal of anti-Soviet hegemony. Since 9/11, American forces toppled the Taliban and eliminated the potential threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We have much work to do, not least of which will be to finish the job begun in Operation Enduring Freedom.

The first priority of the coming antiterror agenda will be to organize an American-led multilateral response to the Mumbia attacks, with India and Pakistan as primary actors in the coalition, to root out Lashkar-e-Taiba sanctuaries along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

This is the first fundamental responsibility of the West today (lest the terrorists win this round and prepare for the next), while we, of course, continue the larger, systemic goal of economic development and global cooperation that can help toward the achievement of international peace.

Comparing Health Care

We may very well be on the way to some variation of single-payer health care in this country, with the coming Obama administration to push for government mandates to guarantee universal coverage.

One of the leading advocates on the left for universal health is Ezra Klein. He offers some provocative thoughts on all of this in his post, "What is Life Worth?", especially this comparison of health systems in the U.S. and Britain:

People often compare American health care to Canadian health care. It's the wrong comparison. The inverse of the American health care system is the British health care system. Where we are the priciest, they are the cheapest. We refuse to make any explicit decisions, instead denying care based on criteria that makes the denial the fault of the patient rather than the system. You don't have enough money for the treatment. They make all their decisions explicit, relying on criteria that makes the denial the fault of the system's judgments. We don't think that treatment worth the cost. Their system gives patients someone to be angry at. Ours has no connection to value. Their system creates more blame, ours engenders more tragedy.

Beyond the techno-babble of "explicit decisions" and "treatment worth the cost," we have Klein making an essentially normative argument pitting state control versus personal responsibility in health provision.

Which works better? Well, while we're on the British case, recall the big story from last summer on Britain's experience with the nationalization of dental care. Access to good dental health declined in Britain with the advent of a single payer system, as this Telegraph story indicates:

The shake-up of NHS dentistry has been a disaster with standards of care dropping and almost one million fewer people being treated on the health service under the new system, a damning report by MPs has found ....

Instead of improving access to NHS dentistry the reforms have made it worse, the report by the House of Commons Health Select Committee found.

The number of dentists working in the health service has fallen, the number of NHS treatments carried out has dropped and in many areas patients are still experiencing severe difficulties in finding a dentist to treat them.

Worryingly, complex treatments carried out on the NHS have dropped by half while both referrals to hospital and tooth extractions have increased.

This suggests dentists are simply removing teeth rather than taking on complicated treatments because they have become uneconomical to provide ....

The Government hoped the new contracts would give more patients the chance to register with an NHS dentist, encourage more preventive work and reduce the "drill and fill'' culture.

They were also designed to simplify the payments system, so that instead of being paid per treatment, dentists were given a flat annual salary in return for carrying out an agreed amount of work known as units of dental activity (UDAs).

However, the select committee found that as a result of the changes, dentists no longer had any financial incentive to give appropriate treatment.

For folks like Ezra Klein - who have been pushing for a radical expansion of the state sector - well before the economy started cooperated with a collectivist-inspiring crisis of capitalism - the key will be to demonstrate how an expansion of state-control and governmental mandates will not worsen care in the United States.

Rather than build bureaucracy and limit choice among service providers, government should seek to increase competition in insurance markets, and find ways to subsidize, through grants and tax incentives, the affordabiliy of health coverage for lower income and disadvantaged Americans.

Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba

This morning's Los Angeles Times focuses on Pakistan's ties to Islamist militants:

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the self-styled "Army of the Pure," has left its footprints in the snows of Kashmir, the back alleys of Lahore and Karachi, the harsh terrain along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier -- and now, investigators say, in Mumbai, India, the scene of last week's horrific rampage by gunmen.

The growing case against the Pakistan-based militant organization speaks directly to a doubt that has plagued U.S.-Pakistani relations since the two countries became allies after the Sept. 11 attacks: whether present or former officials in Pakistan's powerful security establishment continue to nurture radical Islamic groups.

Pakistan's relatively weak civilian government, in power less than a year, has shown a degree of reluctance to forcefully confront militant groups or to assert control over the intelligence establishment -- a pattern that could bode ill as fallout from the attacks on India's financial capital poisons relations between the two nuclear-armed countries.

Lashkar-e-Taiba's alleged social wing, which gained prominence after Lashkar was officially banned in 2002, operates openly on a sprawling campus outside the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore. Its head, Hafiz Saeed, was one of the founders of Lashkar and is on a list of about 20 militant suspects India has demanded be handed over.

Pakistan's government vehemently denies involvement in the Mumbai attacks, which left more than 170 people dead and 300 injured, and U.S. officials say no formal links between the attackers and Pakistani officialdom have been found.

However, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Pakistani officials during a visit Thursday that the evidence gathered so far by Indian and Western investigators against Pakistan-based militants was compelling enough that Islamabad should be acting on it.

Successive Pakistani governments have tolerated and even abetted Lashkar-e-Taiba, which for much of its two-decade history was used by Pakistan's intelligence service as a proxy for fighting Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.

Pakistani officials insist that in recent years the country's premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, has been purged of militant sympathizers. But as recently as four months ago, U.S. intelligence officials alleged that the ISI aided militants who struck another Indian target, its embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

"You could argue that if you have 20 years of active sponsorship, it takes time for these linkages to disappear from the state apparatus," said Ishtiaq Ahmad, a professor of international relations at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

Read the whole thing, here.

This passage is key:

The investigation of the Mumbai attacks is complicated, analysts say, by the fact that much of Lashkar-e-Taiba's operational capability has migrated from the Pakistan-controlled slice of Kashmir to the lawless tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, where many of its camps and training centers are now believed to be.

Someone, the United States, the Pakistani government, India, or a multiltateral coalition, needs to go into the area and sweep out the sanctuaries. It's no brainer. You go to the source. Lashkar-e-Taiba is said to have been working out of the tribal areas since 1990, the group has ties to al-Qaeda, and the borderlands are the mountainous redoubts where Osama bin Laden and the Taliban extremist fled after the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in 2001.

If we didn't finish the job then; it's time to do it now. The terrorists have spoken. How will the West respond?

Unflinching Against Evil

I don't advocate the state-sponsored assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I do, however, believe that the U.S. government has a responsibilty to defend the nation against the abundantly-manifest evil that exists in the world. The Nazis were evil, Soviet totalitarianism was evil, Saddam Hussein was evil, and the Mumbai terrorists were evil. We defeated the former three in two hot wars and a cold one, and I hope that this nation will rise to confront the latest demonstration of evil we saw in the terrorists who massacred the innocents in India.

There is evil in the world, and the United States has historically been the world's greatest bulwark against it. When we flinch, civilizations teeter on the brink. America has always been the last best hope of mankind. It's who we are, and what we do. There's no need to apologize for it, and it's criminal negligence to repudiate it.

The issue arises with reference to the apparent comments Pastor Rick Warren made on Sean Hannity's show. Here's Steve Benen's recap:

Pastor Rick Warren has a reputation for being far more stable and grounded than religious right leaders and TV preachers like Pat Robertson, but it's worth remembering that he's not exactly a moderate.

Last night, on Fox News, Sean Hannity insisted that United States needs to "take out" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Warren said he agreed. Hannity asked, "Am I advocating something dark, evil or something righteous?" Warren responded, "Well, actually, the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped .... In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers."

Read the rest of Benen's post, here (there's a discussion of those who have combed scripture for the biblical authority for Warren's exhortation).

My interest is the response to this on the nihilist left, among people who have been building up preemptive arguments against any forceful action in South Asia to eradicate the terror sanctuaries from which last week's killings were launched.

For example, here's Andrew Sullivan's response to Warren:

Some insist that Warren is a centrist, moderate type. He is, in fact, a very hard-core Christianist integrated firmly into the GOP. As such, he sees government as a divine institution authorized to punish evil and promote good - as fundamentalist Christians view those things.

Here's Melissa McEwan:

Even if the Bible does justify such a thing, which is dubious (see further discussion at the link), the Bible is not the handbook of the Department of Defense—a sentence I can't believe I even have to write, but there you go.

Matt Duss draws out an analogy:

In any case, if this were a conversation between an Iranian TV host and an ayatollah in which they discussed scriptural justifications for “taking out” high ranking members of the U.S. government, you’d probably see Sean Hannity running the clip on his show — while slowly shaking his head in pious disapproval — as evidence of what crazy extremists those Iranians are. As it is, they’ll probably be running this on Iranian TV as evidence of what crazy extremists those Americans are.

Spencer Ackerman, however, hits a moral-relativist home run:

Let's say a preacher appeared on a massively popular TV show and offered scriptural justification for an unprovoked attack on a foreign country. What would you say? "Oh, there goes Yusuf Qaradawi again"? Or maybe, "I truly hope these people turn away from bin Laden like some of their colleagues have"? Or perhaps, "How is it these fanatics can't understand that they, in fact, are the evil people they seek to rid the world of"?

Ah, but you'd be neglecting the cancer of religious extremism right here at home. Matt Duss at the Center for American Progress takes note of pastor Rick Warren, who appeared on Sean Hannity's scummy little Fox News show to say that the U.S. has a divine obligation to attack Iran ....

Am I drawing an equivalence between Rick Warren and Islamic extremists? Why, yes, yes I am. That's because his statements are identical to those of the demagogic, fanatical preachers who motivate perplexed children into fighting religious wars....

Andrew Sullivan claims his anti-Christianist project is rooted in his faith, but that faith cannot be Christian, for Sullivan and the others here - in their response to Hannity and Warren - represent the powerful oppositional culture of radical secularism that has taken over public intellectualism on the American left.

These folks will tell you otherwise, of course, but their ideological program is of a piece: the repudiation of objective good and absolute truth in favor of a relativist epistemology; a rejection of Thomistic doctrines of rational faith in favor of scientist ontology; welfare state expansion as the solution to social problems, such as poverty; the repudiation of patriotism as anachronistic, in favor of a global loyalty - "imagine there's no countries"; and, most of all, the refusal of God's goodness as the precursor of universal right, a rejection of the divine moral code.

This oppositional secularism - despite attempts to seek the cover of ad hoc spiritual coating - refuses the moral guideposts that allows us not only to distinguish good from evil, but for us to always choose the good.

Rick Warren is not a Iranian mullah sanctioning the stoning of women and the execution of homosexuals. He is a man of deep spiritural learning, values, and wisdom, a man who knows that Americans have a manifest charge to resist the evil darkening the world. He is not a "Christianist" who gives a "religious blessing" to murder.

And Warren is not a "demagogic, fanatical preacher" who is no better than some damned Ahmad attempting to smuggle some lethal C-4 on a civilian transcontinental jetliner.

There are distinctions to be made in this world, and when there is evil, it's to be confronted, not enabled.

When I speak of the forces arrayed against traditional culture, the folks cited above are at the top of the masthead. Their time is now, with "The One" in power. But I believe their recent electoral victory is Pyrrhic, and that eternal right - as articulated in Pastor Warren's moral clarity - will again prevail against the creepy cultural totalitarianism we're witnessing today.

$1 Trillion Stimulus Package?

The numbers floating around for the continuing rescue of the American economy are beyond the wildest dreams of even the most retrograde big-government liberal.

Bloomberg reports that the price tag for the proposed Obama administration economic stimulus package is now at $1 trillion:

The one thing that isn’t shrinking in the U.S. economy these days is the size of the stimulus package that financial experts say is needed to turn it around.

With automobile sales dropping, payrolls plunging and manufacturing contracting, economists from across the political spectrum are raising the ante on how much the government should lay out. Some are now calling for at least a $1 trillion boost.

Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University professor who was an adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner who served in President Bill Clinton’s White House, are among those who say President- elect Barack Obama should push for a package of that size.

“They need a stimulus of $500-to-$600 billion a year for at least two years to counter what is going to be a collapse in consumption,” said Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

That number may grow. This week brought news that the economy has been in recession for a year. Tomorrow the government will release November employment data, which economists say will show another 330,000 jobs lost, the most in seven years.

“Every day it looks like the stimulus package needs to be bigger,” said Bill Samuel, the lead lobbyist for the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor federation. “You’re talking $500, $600, $700 billion or even more” for a year.

‘Things Are Evolving’

Obama, who has said that enacting a stimulus plan will be his top priority once he takes office on Jan. 20, has himself been steadily increasing the amount he thinks is needed.

Earlier in the presidential campaign, he proposed a package worth $50 billion, then raised that to $175 billion as the election approached. Advisers have since said the program may total as much as $700 billion, although that number, too, may rise.

“Congress should think in terms of $900 billion in 2009, with possibly more in 2010,” said James Galbraith, a self-styled liberal economics professor at the University of Texas in Austin who has talked with the Obama transition team about the issue. “I may be higher than they are at this point,” he said, “but things are evolving.”

Whatever its size, the package is likely to include tax cuts, aid to the states, higher unemployment benefits and increased spending on infrastructure such as roads and bridges.

Recall my earlier post from September, "Paulson Plan Could Lay Foundations for Recovery"? Whatever optimism analysts had at that time has given way to a grudging confirmation that this economic crisis is virtually unprecedented, with perhaps the exception of the 1930s. The housing market in particular just continues to drag things down, and as long as home prices decline or stagnate, the rest of the financial sector - nearly universally "securitized" by mortgage-backed instruments - will continue to implode.

In this sense, it's always hard to argue against "big government," with what's essentially the collapse of the contemporary mixed economy (we have had a "free market" for decades), but the size of the stimulus being discussed is mind-boggling.

What are the limits of U.S. capacity to borrow? At what point does the credibility of the economy and the U.S. dollar evaporate?

“A stimulus of this magnitude helps push government debt as a percentage of GDP closer to dangerous levels, when inflation and interest rates start to rise,” said Thomas Atteberry, who manages $3.5 billion in fixed-income assets at First Pacific Advisors in Los Angeles.