Why
West Is Best
By Paul Johnson
 It
is the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical
and self-correcting that constitutes its most decisive superiority
over any of its rivals. And it is protean not least in its ability
to detect what other societies do better, and incorporate such methods
into its own armory. All the other systems in the world, notably
the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Indian, have learned much from
the West in turn, and benefited thereby. The Islamic world has been
the least willing to adopt the West's fundamental excellences. That
is why it remains poor (despite its wealth of raw materials), unfree,
and unhappy.
Islam in Action
By David Pryce-Jones
Islam
is the fastest-growing of all religions, and in several European
countries Muslims already outnumber the Christians who attend church.
In Britain, a poll reveals that four in ten British Muslims believe
Osama bin Laden is justified in his attacks of September 11. Just
over two-thirds stated that their Muslim faith was more important
to them than their British nationality. Polls elsewhere in Europe
show comparable findings. This is the milieu now demonstrating in
support of Osama bin Laden. Time will show whether these are the
temporary troubles of integration, or on the contrary a reverse
colonialism in an age when Westerners in their turn seem to doubt
the strength and validity of their own culture and society.
The Man from Hopeless
By Mark Steyn
Amazingly,
September 11 seems only to have confirmed America's Ex-President-for-Life
in his indestructible view of his own indispensability. Any day
now, he'll forget himself and reprise his favorite impeachment-era
catchphrase: "I need to get back to work for the American people."
As he told Paul McCartney's girlfriend, he feels he'd do a better
job than Bush as he's got more experience. This was marginally more
tastefully formulated than the confidences quoted in the New York
Times, when he regretted that the deaths of 5,000 Americans hadn't
happened on his watch.
Rules for Diplomats…
By John O’Sullivan
When
U.S. policy-makers turn to such places as Afghanistan and the Balkans,
they bring with them a set of rules that often make them stumble.
Most of these rules — for instance, that you should not change borders;
you should not propose a peaceful transfer of populations; and you
must have the approval of the U.N. — are dictated by an understandable
desire to promote stability in international affairs. This has led
some conservatives to mistakenly denounce "stability" as such. But
the diplomats' actual error is to confuse stability with unbending
support of the status quo. When a status quo is unavoidably dissolving,
the correct response is to persuade the parties to abjure violence
as a means to a solution. They will then eventually be led, by the
facts on the ground, to solutions that reflect the wishes of the
local populations. And if those solutions include border changes
or transfers of population, so be it.
Screen Test
By Byron York
House
Republicans have been accused of wanting to keep the current, dangerously
inadequate, low-bid private security system in place. But the House
bill specifically calls for a well-paid screening force, as well
as for more far-reaching changes in security than does the Senate
version. The Senate bill was done hurriedly in the wake of September
11, and ignored several critical areas of air safety, like the need
for full screening of checked baggage and greater security in non-public
areas of airports. "If we had passed the Senate bill, it would have
had nice cosmetics," says John Mica. "But would it have addressed
the problems we face with aviation security? Absolutely not."
Sly Sy
By John J. Miller
If
Hersh's account is correct, it is deeply troubling. It not only
conjures up images of botched special operations of the recent past,
such as the Desert One mission in Iran (1980) and the "Black Hawk
Down" catastrophe in Somalia (1993), but also suggests that the
Pentagon won't provide basic facts about the war, even when doing
so poses no reasonable threat to national security. But if the Pentagon's
claims deserve close scrutiny — and they do — then the same must
go for Hersh's reporting. It turns out that key assertions in his
article are very probably wrong, even as Hersh uses them to opine
on the airwaves about how the war should be fought.
Crusading They Went
By John Derbyshire
If
we are to have the Crusades thrown at us by the likes of Osama bin
Laden, let us at least not abjure them. It is true that we can barely
recognize anything of ourselves in the Crusaders. They were coarse
and unwashed. Most of them were illiterate. Their honor was often
truculent, their loyalty sometimes fickle, their piety was barnacled
with the grossest kinds of superstition. But these rough soldiers
carried to the East the germ-seeds of modern civil society. Palestine
proved to be stony ground: but that is the East's loss, as the eventual
flowering of those seeds elsewhere was all of humanity's immeasurable
gain. In spirit and in values, though at an immense distance, the
Crusaders were our kin.
Martyred
By Kate O'Beirne.
Hilal
Khashan points out that religion has been a decisive factor in most
civil wars in Arabic-speaking countries, and there have been at
least a million deaths (compared with 150,000 Arab deaths in combined
Arab-Israeli wars since 1948). The murderous intentions of the extremist
Muslims have clearly overwhelmed the influence of the pacific practitioners
continually cited by President Bush. Journalist Amir Taheri noted
recently that 28 of the 30 active conflicts in the world involve
Muslim governments or communities. As Samuel P. Huntington wrote,
"Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued
that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent
Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate
otherwise."
Delay or Die?
By Richard Lowry
The
U.S. should now adopt a tougher, more clear-eyed approach to the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missile technology.
It should concentrate less on the universalist goal of bringing
all states under sweeping arms-control plans on an equal basis,
and focus instead on a frankly discriminatory objective: denying
weapons to states — most of them Islamic — that are hostile to the
West. This would be more practical than the grander efforts of the
past, but it too would be doomed, eventually, to failure (although
mere delay has its value). When rogue governments succeed in acquiring
these weapons, the U.S. will have to punish or topple them, on the
theory that the act of proliferation can't be eliminated but occasionally
noxious governments can.
Germs Against Man
By Anthony Daniels
Post-war
attempts to control the spread of biological weapons have not been
entirely successful, because man is not a trustworthy animal. After
pledging in 1972 not to engage in the production of biological weaponry,
the Soviet Union proceeded to violate this pledge over the next
two decades: Indeed, it expanded its efforts greatly, among other
things engineering types of anthrax resistant to antibiotics. In
the circumstances, one cannot help wondering whether agreements
to "share information," which are said to build trust, are quite
what is needed. Sharing bacteriological information often makes
matters worse, as it increases the risk that dangerous tools will
fall into the hands of the unscrupulous. Transparency is the panacea
of the naïve: In reality, an ounce of intelligence is worth a bucketful
of trust.
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