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Carl Levin.
The Democratic
Armed Services Committee chairman had the misfortune of slyly taking
the side of an American adversary in an important foreign-policy
question, just as the country was about to experience an overwhelming
wave of patriotic fervor.
As I pointed
out in the Wall
Street Journal last week, Levin's version of the Defense
Authorization Bill attempted to essentially preserve the ABM treaty
with legislative language, a not-so-subtle signal to the Russians
that there shouldn't be forthcoming negotiations with the Bush administration.
Today, Levin
has agreed to strip out the language — which he had been defending
to the hilt — and restore the $1.3 billion in missile-defense
funding he had cut.
How weak had
Levin's position become? He was faced down by the stentorian Republican
weak sister John Warner.
Levin wants
it stipulated that the added-back $1.3 billion go either to missile
defense or counterterrorism programs. But the Bush administration
says it will devote the full $1.3 billion to missile defense, and
will work to have this language stripped out in conference.
Levin's surrender
shows that the macro-political effect of last week's attack has
been to convince people that the U.S. has dangerous enemies, and
should protect itself from them in every way possible.
Islam Questions
The last week has, of course, brought a flurry of commentary on
Arab political culture and Islam. David
Pryce-Jones wrote an excellent piece in NR explaining
the sources of Moslem hatred for the U.S. But the relation of Islamic
fundamentalism to mainstream Islam is still a bit of a puzzle to
me.
Is it true
that Islam is essentially peaceful, and that terroristic fundamentalism
is an obvious perversion? Bernard Lewis had an excellent piece in
Foreign Affairs a couple of years ago suggesting that the
answer is "yes," but that it's also a complicated question.
Here's a central passage from his piece:
To most Americans,
[Osama bin Laden's 1998] declaration is a travesty, a gross distortion
of the nature and purpose of the American presence in Arabia.
They should also know that for many — perhaps most —
Muslims, the declaration is an equally grotesque travesty of the
nature of Islam and even of its doctrine of jihad. The Quran speaks
of peace as well as of war. The hundreds of thousands of traditions
and sayings attributed with varying reliability to the Prophet,
interpreted in various ways by the ulema, offer a wide
range of guidance. The militant and violent interpretation is
one among many. The standard juristic treatises on sharia
normally contain a chapter on jihad, understood in the military
sense as regular warfare against infidels and apostates. But these
treatises prescribe correct behavior and respect for the rules
of war in such matters as the opening and termination of hostilities
and the treatment of noncombatants and prisoners, not to speak
of diplomatic envoys. The jurists also discuss — and sometimes
differ on — the actual conduct of war. Some permit, some
restrict, and some disapprove of the use of mangonels, poisoned
arrows, and the poisoning of enemy water supplies — the missile
and chemical warfare of the Middle Ages — out of concern
for the indiscriminate casualties that these weapons inflict.
At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder.
At no point do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved
bystanders.
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