November 5, 2001, Issue

What We’re Not Fighting For
The list includes short skirts, dancing, and secularism.
By Ramesh Ponnuru

There is a danger that in the course of arguing for the war, liberals will settle on an interpretation of it that is both wrong and dangerous. According to this interpretation, what we are fighting against is "fundamentalism." What we are fighting for is "tolerance," "pluralism," "modernity," and "the open society" - and these terms are, with varying degrees of explicitness, to be understood as liberals understand them. Many liberals tend to regard what Alan Wolfe calls "moral freedom" as the essence of freedom and the highest achievement of our civilization.


Ayatollah Attitude
Iran’s place in the new war.
By Ray Takeyh

For an entire generation of Iran's clerics, relations with the U.S. have been mired in visceral emotion. From Tehran's perspective, the U.S. is more than another great power with which Iran must deal; it embodies a whole range of political and cultural grievances. Iran's clerics take only limited comfort in America's destruction of their Afghan foes - because it implies a further projection of U.S. power. And this is where the apparent convergence of U.S. and Iranian perspectives falters; because while Tehran can live, however uneasily, with a Taliban-led Afghanistan, it dreads the prospect of a pro-Western regime in Afghanistan and further U.S. inroads into Central Asia.

Security Blanket
Will it smother the nation’s capital?
By Byron York

Given the sheer scope and deadliness of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it's hard for city officials to claim that the new emphasis on security is excessive. Still, local leaders worry that today's new security, much of which is arguably necessary, will set off a creeping closure of parts of the city. After all, it is one of the characteristics of a bureaucracy to measure its importance by the security measures it can command. With Congress and the White House tightly locked up, what is to keep the Transportation Department from arguing that it, too, might become a target for terrorism and therefore needs the authority to shut down streets nearby? Or the IRS? Or the Labor Department? Or dozens of other agencies?


Your Papers, Please
Against a national ID card.
By John Derbyshire

In this, as in so many other things, Ronald Reagan set the example. He did not waver in his support for Second Amendment rights even when he himself was shot by a lunatic, regarding such an occurrence as part of the price for living in a free society. In the same spirit, when the subject of a national ID card, as an aid to controlling illegal immigration, was raised during a cabinet meeting, Reagan dismissed it with the sardonic remark: "Maybe we should just brand all babies." In the present climate, one hesitates to tell that story, for fear the idea might be taken up in all seriousness and appear a few days later as a New York Times editorial.

Playing Nice?
That old devil ‘bipartisanship.’
By Kate O’Beirne

An obituary for bipartisanship that ran on the New York Times's editorial page points up the fundamental problem - for Republicans - with the call for putting allegedly partisan concerns aside: When partisanship is shelved, the media play referee - and blow the whistle only on the Republican team. Prosecuting America's new war on terrorism is properly the administration's first priority, and the White House is right to want to avoid the kind of gratuitous partisan bickering that could sour congressional unity on the war front. But there is little reason for fruitless foraging for bipartisan consensus on crucial initiatives to improve the country's economy and security.

Kofi’s Hour
The absurd Nobel Peace Prize.
By Theodore Dalrymple

Some people might say that to award Mr. Annan the Peace Prize at such a moment is a little like the award of the Victoria Cross to Neville Chamberlain would have been on his return from Munich. In a sense, though, it is pointless to hold poor Mr. Annan responsible for disaster in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and so forth. His job, as he puts it, is from hell. No one could do it and satisfy everyone. But the need, or even the desire, to satisfy everyone is what is so profoundly corrupting about the job. It is a job from hell only for a certain kind of person: a person, that is, with a degree of moral integrity, intellectual honesty, and self-respect. For the time-serving apparatchik, for the inveterate trimmer, for the sailor before the wind, and above all for the social climber with a lust for an eternal pension in Swiss francs, no billet in the world could be closer to paradise.

Canines to the Rescue
Best friends, and examples.
By Jonah Goldberg

It's been widely remarked that the only allies we can count on from "the first . . . to the last" (Tony Blair's words) are the British. In a sense, this is true: The loyalty of our friends across the pond is peerless. But as the images of September 11's aftermath remind us, there is another, often overlooked comrade whose fidelity is even more impressive, at least in a statistical sense. For while the British are unique among some 200 nations, canine fidelity is unique among the more than 10 million species of the earth.

The New Cold War
Familiar battle lines, unfortunately.
By David Pryce-Jones

Communist and Islamic extremism both have militaristic and imperial aims, directed to recruit where possible, and to attack elsewhere. Their claims to be universal imply the actual destruction of all other values. Communism turned out to be the Russian national interest in disguise. Soviet grievances against the West were unreal, but the expression of them was rational. In contrast, Islamic extremism has a restricted territorial base, and by definition cannot appeal to non-Muslims. The phenomenon arises from the complex interplay of an identity wounded by modernity, and the complete political and social failures of Muslim states. The grievances here are real, but their expression is irrational, even suicidal. Islamic extremism is therefore a more unpredictable and elusive enemy.

Fatal Contact
The Western influence on Islamic radicals.
By John O’Sullivan

The Islam to which Atta "returned," however, was not one of the relatively relaxed strains available in the Arab world, but radical Islamism. This is a harsh, puritanical, politicized version of Islam, which - while it claims to return to the first traditions of the religion — actually couples them to radical strains in Western political thought.


Under Our Very Noses
The terrorist next door.
By Adrian Karatnycky

The key hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, were well-educated children of privilege. None of them suffered first-hand economic privation or political oppression. Equally important, it is becoming clear that hundreds, if not thousands, of graduates of bin Laden's schools for terror are Muslims who have grown up and been educated in the United States and Europe. To understand the September 11 terrorists, we should have in mind the profile of the classic revolutionary: deracinated, middle class, shaped in part by exile.


In Castro’s Service
The undertold story of Cuba’s spying, and terror.
By John J. Miller

What makes Cuban espionage especially troubling now is the Castro regime's longstanding support of terrorism. Cuba is one of the seven countries on the State Department's terrorism list. It may not compare to Iraq or the Taliban, but its indulgence of terrorists is beyond dispute. Last year, Cuba was the only country attending the Ibero-American Summit in Panama that refused to join a condemnation of terrorism. This spring, Castro toured Libya, Syria, and Iran. At Tehran University on May 10, the dictator declared, "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees. The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up."