November 19, 2001, Issue

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.