Missile-Defense Backdown
Poor Carl Levin.

September 21, 2001 4:10 p.m.

oor 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.