On March 11 I commented on Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's argument that liberal historians underestimated the innovative nature of President Bush's foreign policy. Gaddis believes that Bush is one of only three presidents to institute a "grand strategy" in US foreign policy history. Christian D. Brose of The Public Interest reviews the book in which Gaddis advances his thesis, Surprise, Security and the American Experience, in today's WSJ (free).

Gaddis makes clear that Bush's response to 9-11, though innovative, did not signal a reckless disregard of America's historic foreign policy in times of crisis. In the aftermath of the War of 1812 and the burning of Washington, President James Monroe (guided by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams) established what became known 20 years after his death as the Monroe Doctrine, which declared America's right to act unilaterally in the Western hemisphere to protect the young nation (coast to coast) from encroachment by the European powers. After Pearl Harbor, America found its interests required the building of alliances -- first with the Allies to defeat Germany and Japan and then, to counter the Soviets, within NATO. These international organizations lent legitimacy to America's ideological standards during the Cold War.

The book concludes, says Brose, by arguing that Bush borrows more from the Monroe Doctrine than from FDR's or Truman's WWII or Cold War policies, and he's certainly correct. Once again we must rely upon our own willpower, military might, and clear thinking to combat an enemy that few others seem willing to engage. Once again, our homeland has been attacked and our mightiest buildings destroyed. And while charges that Bush's policies are unilateralist are patently false, surely unilateralism in the defense of one's homeland is no vice.

Yesterday, the lone conservative Democrat left standing in the United States Senate - Georgia Senator Zell Miller - made a remarkable speech. He called former Clinton and Bush counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke most to blame for the September 11 attacks because he was in the "catbird seat" for more than a decade.

Miller went on to say: "It's obvious to me that this country is rapidly dividing itself into two camps -- the wimps and the warriors. The ones who want to argue and assess and appease, and the ones who want to carry this fight to our enemies and kill them before they kill us."

The Senator's assessment has many parallels historically, the most famous 20th Century example of course being Chamberlain (wimp) vs. Churchill (warrior), another one being the writers Sartre (wimp) vs. Camus (warrior). The Washington Times this past Sunday had a review of Camus & Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It. Similarly, one was a wimp for being a communist when it was in vogue - Sartre, and one was a warrior for being anti-communist when it was tough - Camus. Who's got the classic books being read by high school and college students because he got it right - Camus. Who's widely considered the man of the century - Churchill. And who won't be remembered mid-21st century at all - Richard Clarke. We must stand tall.

Christopher Hitchens eviscerates Richard Clarke's posturing in a new dispatch. It's further proof that the Clarke controversy is being investigated almost solely by opinion writers and the conservative press. Hitchens's conclusion:

"To listen to Clarke now, you could almost imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan and eviction of the Taliban—the actual first response of the administration to Sept. 11—had not taken place. To listen to Clarke, also, you would suppose that any Iraqi connection to terrorism was sucked straight out of Rumsfeld's or Wolfowitz's thumb. One theory that does collapse completely is that of administration foreknowledge—the Bush people were evidently in no shape to take any quick advantage of the events and seemingly hadn't bothered to plant even one Iraqi among the mainly Saudi hijackers. But in my experience, dud theories die only to be replaced by new and even dumber ones. The current reigning favorite is that fighting al-Qaida in Iraq is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida."

A key problem for the anti-war, go-soft-on-terrorism crowd is that the only alternative policy they can offer is the Clinton strategy (which they designed), which was utterly ineffective at preventing a major disaster. Hence their need for a revisionist history of that administration's response to terrorism, for which they have little evidence but large imaginations. They want to oppose Bush's foreign policy, but they must avoid coming across as limousine liberals who want to see America's stature reduced lest we ruin the world. So they're attacking the prosecution of the war on terror as insufficient, although they've offered no alternative vision for making America safe from future terrorism. This is a tough row for any party to hoe, even with the help of an embarrassingly compliant media.

With the approach of the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, China is cracking down not only on living dissidents and their families, but on survivors of those murdered on that infamous day. I noted earlier the mainland's saber-rattling over election squabbles in Taiwan. Chinese president Hu Jintao is clearly worried that democracy, which has taken hold in Taiwan, will prove infectious among his own people.

This is borne out in China's cynical exploitation of Taiwanese democracy's growing pains. Taiwan is weathering the storm and will, it appears, emerge with its democratic institutions in tact. Nevertheless, China is pointing to Taiwan's troubles to argue that Hong Kong shouldn't be allowed to hold free elections. The WSJ ($) reports that China's official Xinhua news agency says that "the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress would 'give interpretations' on Hong Kong's Basic Law [Hong Kong's constitution] during an April 2 - 6 meeting. The provisions they will interpret govern how much leeway there is to introduce direct elections for the city's chief executive and the full Legislature."

Such talk is dampening hopes that Hong Kong and Taiwan would act as agents of change on the mainland. Perhaps it should, but Taiwan isn't about to fall under the boot heel of Beijing, and Hong Kong's democratizing institutions, along with its financial markets and Westward-looking culture, are resilient to mere political pressure. China does seem intent on insuring that liberalizing forces on Taiwan and in Hong Kong are contained and, when possible, weakened through intimidation and internal propaganda. The Bush administration should send a clear signal to China that it won't tolerate the bullying of Taiwan, and that China is expected to abide by the Basic Law of Hong Kong.

The previous post deals with the Eastern Mediterranean in the twenty-first century. But to understand the significance of its subject (the Turk-Greek rapprochement), a little historical knowledge is necessary. Some of that can be acquired painlessly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City viewing a stunning new exhibit, "Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261 - 1557)," which I toured Sunday afternoon. Since this blog deals principally with politics and democracy rather than art history, I'll simply urge you to see it before it closes on July 4.

Notable, however, is the absence of politically correct interpretation in the exhibit's accompanying texts. This is all the more remarkable since Byzantium was in its heyday an imperial power -- the new Rome, no less -- and the seat of massive missionary activities to the Slavs and the Black Sea area. To boot, the art on display is almost entirely sacred, as one would expect. Perhaps the age of the works, coupled with the exotic nature of Byzantium and the excellence of the Met's staff, spared us this round. But as I say, get to the Met before Independence Day.

Amid the clashes occurring around us on several levels (ethnic, religious, national), a hopeful sign is the thaw between Greece and Turkey. Stephen Schwartz notes that Greece's recent elections, in contrast to Spain's, saw the ouster of a Socialist government that for years had antagonized its neighbors and the US. Kostas Karamanlis's New Democracy Party, the center-right victors, promise to liberalize the Greek economy as part of a plan to modernize the country's infrastructure. We too easily forget that, in the post-Cold War world, when the superiority of the free market is clear, most of the reactionaries are on the left. Fanning the flames of hatred toward the Turks helped the outgoing Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) draw closer to radical Arab militants in a Mediterranean version of radical chic, since (as Schwartz points out) Arab Islamists hate the Turks for their tradition of secularism and centuries of Ottoman rule. Many Greeks still smart from that same rule, carried out from the former Eastern Roman capital of Constantinople (Istanbul).

Schwartz's essays concludes: "In the age of terrorism, a rapprochement between Greece, the cradle of democracy, and Turkey, the pioneer of Muslim secularism, is welcome news for the civilized world. It is of course anathema to al-Qaeda." It isn't surprising that the road to warmer relations between these age-old enemies was a democratic one. Modernizing, bourgeois societies have better things to do than nurse historical enmities.

That's the title of an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal ($) that quotes Richard Clarke's testimony last week in which he admits that following his recommendations from January 26, 2001, forward would not have prevented the atrocities of 9-11.

"Mr. [Slade] Gorton: 'Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25 of 2001 . . . including aid to the Northern Alliance which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted, say, on January 26, 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?'"

"Mr. Clarke: 'No.'"

As the Journal notes, this revelation received virtually no press coverage last week. Indeed, the coverage of the Clarke testimony is notable for the press's determination NOT to dig into his background. When Republicans and the conservative press did the media's job for them, they were charged with attempting to undermine Clarke's credibility -- as if they were creating new Clarke transcripts ex nihilo rather than simply researching his extensive paper trail and reporting their findings. Legally, ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it; willful ignorance in journalism is usually called bias, if not plain lying.

The Washington Post reports today that hundreds of demonstrators from as far away as Chicago and Cleveland "stormed the small yard of President Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove . . . pounding on his windows, shoving signs at others and challenging Rove to talk to them about a bill that deals with educational opportunities for immigrants." It notes that "Rove obliged their first request and opened his door long enough to say, 'Get off my property.'" The group was advocating for DREAM, the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, which the Post describes as "a bill that would permit immigrants who have lived in the United States for at least five years to apply for legal resident status once they graduate from high school. The measure would eliminate provisions of current federal law that discourage states from providing in-state tuition to undocumented student immigrants."

A sanctimonious tone sympathetic to the protestors and dismissive of Rove's legitimate worries at hundreds of trespassors banging on his windows pervades the piece, leaving one to wonder what the Post might have said had busloads of conservative activists swarmed the home of a liberal political aid. What's more, a friend reports that this story was omitted from the Post's daily "Headlines and Columnists" email even though it ran on page B1, the front page of the Metro Section. The question is whether the editors left the story out of the email because they were more embarrassed by the story's subject, which reveals the protestors to be thugs, or the overt political sympathies of the reporter, Steven Ginsberg.

Finally getting to the April Atlantic and came across this article by Jack Beatty about President George W. Bush's faith.

The article made me wish I hadn't just renewed my subscription. Beatty blames Bush's faith "in things unseen" as the reason why we haven't found weapons of mass destruction -- he imagined them just like he imagines Jesus!

As an inside observer to the Bush Administration's very real successes in the human rights realm on issues such as combating international sex trafficking and brokering a fair deal that will end the persecution of Christians in Southern Sudan, there is no doubt that Bush's faith guides him to making these policy decisions. However to suggest, like Mr. Beatty does, that Bush uses his faith as a means to avoid using reason, well I am sure he used reason when passing his coursework at Yale and Harvard. But of course, he only attended those schools because his Daddy got him in. Well, President Bush could have failed out. But maybe, it was Jesus who got him through, so that some punk like Beatty would not be President of the United States when those two planes hit the twin towers.

With the Taiwanese election still contested by the apparent loser, Nationalist Party candidate Lien Chan, China is predictably trying to leverage the situation to interfere in Taiwan's affairs and, if possible, derail the island nation's democratic experiment. Today comes word that Beijing is warning that it won't allow Taiwan to descend into chaos -- this from the government that massacred its own people in Tiananmen Square 15 years ago this June. (This link takes you to declassified documents describing that event.)

"We will not sit by unconcerned should the post-election situation in Taiwan get out of control, leading to social turmoil, endangering the lives and property of our compatriots and affecting stability across the Taiwan Strait," said the New China News Agency today. Not that the mainland has had any elections itself, nor has it been free from chaos.

The assassination attempt on President Chen Shui-bian earlier this week, and the conspiracy theories to which it has given birth, mark serious challenges to Taiwan's budding democratic institutions. They do not, however, open the door to meddling from the mainland. The US must make clear that it will not allow China to use the disputed election in Taiwan as a pretext for interference in the island's internal affairs.

The Washington Times reports that a new oral test is now available to determine whether one has HIV. Such a test could have remarkable effects in Africa where an estimated 4.7 million in South Africa alone have the disease and across the continent nearly nearly 37 million people suffer from it.

With so many vulnerable people, it's no surprise that much of the continent remains worn-torn and despotic. A healthy Africa will lead to a peaceful and democratic Africa.

A reminder that Democracy Project's chairman, Candace de Russy, will appear as part of a panel discussion today on C-SPAN 2's Book TV. The topic is R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s new book, Madame Hillary. It airs today at 6:00 pm and tomorrow at 10:00 am.

The chairman of Democracy Project, Candace de Russy, will appear on C-SPAN 2's Book TV this weekend as part of a panel discussion of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s, new book Madame Hillary. She's joined on the panel by Alfred Regnery of the American Spectator, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, Niger Innis of the Congress for Racial Equality, and others. Check it out at 6:00 pm Saturday and 10:00 am Sunday.

Each issue of The Atlantic Monthly is generally so excellent, it takes me time to wade through all of the articles. The January/February issue has an article by Francis Fukuyama titled Nation-Building 101.

The article begins with two quotes, both by President George W. Bush. The first was Bush in campaign-mode, prior to September 11:

"I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war."

The second Bushism comes from the President just last month:

"We meet here during a crucial period in the history of our nation, and of the civilized world. Part of that history was written by others; the rest will be written by us...Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations; including our own; we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more."

It's September 11, stupid. Even Clinton Administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the same yesterday at the 9/11 Commission Hearings. Before 9/11, all of us -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- had no understanding of the perils of Wahhabism or Osama bin Laden. If we had heard of them, it was only in passing; something that happened to somebody else somewhere else. As Fukuyama says, "the September 11 terrorist attacks changed American politics."

Word from the House of Commons is that the British military won't be able to mount an operation similar in scope to the one in Iraq until 2008 or 2009. With commitments around the world already gobbling up the defense budget and manpower, General Sir Michael Walker told a Commons defense committe that it would take years to rebuild. We can hope these fears are exaggerated, but prudence dictates that we take them seriously.

And this depressing news comes from London, which has done a better job at maintaining its armed forces than other NATO countries of Europe. It's another reason for the US to continue to upgrade its own armed forces -- after all, upon whom are we to rely in a future emergency?

In an exclusive interview with Fox News Channel last weekend, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shared a tour of his Pentagon office suite and the mementos that surround him every day. One caught my attention.

Rumsfeld keeps beneath the glass on one of his tables an outer-space view of North and South Korea at night. The photo illustrates the illuminated night sky in the southern state, a grid of electrified civilization that snakes across the democratic nation. To the north, all is black, save Pyongyang, the only location in North Korea generating enough light to be seen from space.

This photo is telling in so many ways. It illustrates the political and intellectual darkness smothering the people of North Korea. It depicts the product of years of tyrannical and maniacal repression by a brutal dynasty of dictators. The photo illustrates the dichotomy between liberty and oppression, discourse and censorship, and open hands and clenched fists.

As Mr. Rumsfeld said, North and South Koreans are common people who share a common heritage. The photo proves that, given the freedom to choose and the motivation to do so, any people can accomplish extraordinary things. In North Korea, though, progress is choked by the government's stranglehold.

South Korea is a beacon of hope, and let us all pray its light someday will shine on North Korea, too.

If too often these days the "personal is the political," as the '60s cliché held, then the response to terrorism has also been politicized. Exiting Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar defends his government's response to the Madrid train bombings by flatly denying media reports that his ministers lied to Spaniards in a failed effort to shift blame toward ETA and away from Al Qaeda. In this presidential election year, we're witnessing more than a little demagoguery on our own soil, as Richard Clarke and others try to blame President Bush for all manner of mistakes before and after 9-11. Spaniards went to the polls only three days after 3-11 -- when tempers were hot and facts hard to come by. When Americans vote this November, over three years after the towers fell and we began our thankless task of rooting out the supporters of terrorism and turmoil in the Middle East, they'll have cooler heads and reliable information. The opposition won't find them quite so malleable as their Spanish counterparts.

That's what Middle East scholar Dan Pipes became when he went public with damaging information on relations between the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), on whose board he sits, and the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID). Over his strong objections, the USIP, which is taxpayer-funded, co-hosted a workshop with CSID on March 19. CSID, however, employs many Islamic radicals, including one Kamran Bokhari, who holds a fellowship. Pipes writes:

"Mr. Bokhari also happens to have served for years as the North American spokesman for Al-Muhajiroun, perhaps the most extreme Islamist group operating in the West. For example, it celebrated the first anniversary of 9/11 with a conference titled, 'Towering Day in History.' It celebrated the second anniversary by hailing 'The Magnificent 19.' Its Web site currently features a picture of the U.S. Capitol building exploding."

He goes on to nail the real problem caused by USIP's unwillingness to act responsibly: By giving its imprimatur to CSID, it confers a high degree of legitimacy to a radical organization. This is an old trick pulled by both radicals and their willing accomplices. In exchange for warm fuzzy feelings or, no doubt in some cases, cold hard cash, legitimate institutions bestow on radical groups or individuals the aura of normalcy. This allows for the mainstreaming of radical ideologies. After all, if the authorities we trust say a certain group or idea is OK, then there's nothing to worry about.

Bully for Dan Pipes for standing up for what's right.

It's no surprise that Islamo-Fascism took root best in Europe. As Win states in his post of two day's ago, Europe needs to get serious about assimilating its growing Arab population. Reuel Marc Gerecht explores, in the most recent issue of the Weekly Standard, why the radical Islam that threatens the West is "a Molotov cocktail of the third-world socialist Frantz Fanon and the Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb."

In a post on his new web site, Victor Davis Hanson contemplates a world that, since his youth not so many years ago, has been turned upside down. As a youth growing up on a farm near Selma, California, Hanson was surrounded by reactionaries who blamed East Coast Jews for low agricultural prices, were driven to paranoia by conspiracy theories about secret cabals who ruled the world, took for granted that skin color was bone deep and the principal determinant of character and destiny, and saw distant peoples as incapable of self-rule. His parents taught him to reject this intellectually myopic worldview and to understand that we're all fundamentally the same regardless of race, ethnicity, or class. The world was complex, people who fail need scapegoats, and we're called to transcend the meanest urges of our appetitive natures.

Today, however, all the old reactionary language comes from the mouths of self-proclaimed liberals and purportedly open-minded academics:

"[I] think there is a deeper pathology involved. The leadership of the American Left is no longer a product of the mill, farm, or shop—and no longer strives for a 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and vigilance about a totalitarian Soviet Union. Here in California, Workers' Compensation fraud, not its absence, has nearly ruined the state; rampant illegal immigration cloaked in cynicism, exploitation, and racial chauvinism, not assimilation and integration of different peoples, is threatening the body politic. Corruption, waste, and fraud of a Democratic governor, not too low income and sales taxes, have bankrupted the state. Massive Medical fraud, not neglect and insensitivity, threaten ample health care to the poor."

Hanson's essay deserves wide circulation, so spread the word.

The Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan offers a wealth of information on US presidents from Washington to Bush. Its web site is refreshed daily and is a logical starting point for Net-based research on presidential history. My friend Gleaves Whitney took the helm last summer and has reinvigorated the Center, which now hosts prominent speakers on a regular basis. Check out the News section for newspaper stories on President Bush and his predecessors.

That's the lesson from Fouad Ajami's insightful piece in today's Wall Street Journal ($). Titled "The Moor's Last Laugh," it reminds us that Europe is indeed a peninsula of Asia laying across a small sea from North Africa and the Middle East. When Americans think of Europe, they often imagine a highly civilized land rich in history and culture, and in that they're correct. But we might want to dust off our Renaissance history books to recall a period in which Arab culture played a comparable role in Continental politics.

"The geography of Islam -- and of the Islamic imagination -- has shifted in recent years. The faith has become portable. Muslims who fled their countries brought Islam with them. Men came into bilad al kufr (the lands of unbelief), but a new breed of Islamists radicalized the faith there, in the midst of the kafir (unbeliever). The new lands were owed scant loyalty, if any, and political-religious radicals savored the space afforded them by Western civil society. But they resented the logic of assimilation. They denied their sisters and daughters the right to mix with 'strangers.' You would have thought that the pluralism and tumult of this open European world would spawn a version of the faith to match it. But precisely the opposite happened. In bilad al kufr, the faith became sharpened for battle."

Europe's leaders might want to get serious about assimilating their Arab and Islamic citizens and guest workers before they're overwhelmed by these young men sharpened for battle. And they'd better act now, for they're not getting any younger.

As promised, I have taken a closer look at the Pew Global Attitudes Project's "A Year After Iraq" report and found some surprising findings:

1.) 67% of French surveyed believe that the Iraqi people will be better off without Hussein.
2.) 65% of Germans surveyed believe that the Iraqi people will be better off without Hussein.
3.) More Russians than not believe getting United Nations approval is unnecessary for the use of force.
4.) The French like Americans more than Americans like the French.
5.) Most Europeans do not want the European Union to be as powerful as the United States.
6.) More than seven-in-ten Jordanians (73%) and nearly as many Moroccans (65%) express an unfavorable opinion of the U.N.
7.) 81% of Americans support the War on Terror.
8.) In the United States, there is significantly more sympathy for Israel than for the Palestinians – by a margin of roughly four-to-one (46% vs. 12%). This has been the case fairly consistently over the past decade.
9.) Over ninety-percent of French, British, and German citizens have an unfavorable rating of Osama bin Laden.

What does all of this mean? It means that global attitudes about the War on Terror are significantly more complex that the Pew Charitable Trust's press release reveals.

As a native Georgian, I've grown accustomed to being embarrassed by Jimmy Carter's remarks on public policy. His evolution into an elder statesman touted as more effective as an ex-president than he ever was as president surely speaks more to the enervation of left-wing punditry than to anything he's said or done in the past 24 years.

In an interview with the Independent, President Carter (as the headline says) "savages" George Bush and Tony Blair:

"There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently. That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington, claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein was responsible for [the] 9/11 attacks, claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And I think that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair probably knew that many of the allegations were based on uncertain intelligence ... a decision was made to go to war [then people said] 'Let's find a reason to do so."

Yesterday hundreds of thousands protested the liberation of Iraq from one of the most bloodthirsty regimes on earth. Today, an ex-president and Nobel Peace Prize winner with a reputation as a humanitarian attacked the leaders whose policies set in motion the process of bringing the rule of law to the Arab countries of the Middle East. As I noted here yesterday, 57 percent of Iraqis think life is better now than under Saddam, and 71 percent believe their lives will improve in the coming year. Does that matter to Jimmy Carter? Is he naive, or does he deny that the removal of Saddam makes America safer even as it opens the prisons and ends the mass killings in Iraq? Or is his partisanship so naked as to belie his reputation as an honest peacemaker? Perhaps reflecting on the fact that his position concurs with Pat Buchanan's will give Mr. Carter cause to change his mind. It should at least give both men heartburn.

The headlines from major news web sites around the world are startling: "Global Protests Mark Iraq War"; Anti-war Protesters Scale Big Ben"; "Greepeace Calls Time on War." Imagine hundreds of thousands taking to the streets to protest the war on Hitler and Mussolini, Saddam's ideological kinsmen. Today's left has so lost its bearings in its hatred for George Bush, the US, and the fact that attaining and preserving peace and justice requires strength and, at times, even war that it marches in support of a bloody tyrant who enslaved his people, invaded his neighbors, employed WMDs, and murdered hundreds of thousands. These are protests by affluent, mostly white middle and upper middle class citizens of stable, peaceful democracies, and their actions reveal their desire to turn their parts of the world into gated communities. As long as the derelicts stay out of their neighborhoods, all's well.

They ignore this week's opinion poll of Iraqis, which shows that 57 percent of Iraqis say life is better now than under Saddam, while only 19 percent say it's worse. Equally important, Iraqis who for decades had no hope for a better life for their children now look to the future with hope. Fully 71 percent believe their lives will improve in the year ahead, against only 6 percent who think it will be worse and 9 percent the same. All thanks to the very troops the spoiled children of the West spent today protesting.

Conservative Party leader Michael Howard had harsh words for incoming Spanish Premier Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero today:

"Countries cannot insulate themselves from terrorist attack by opting out of the war on terror," he said. "We cannot buy ourselves immunity by changing our foreign policy. Apart from the moral cowardice of that position, it can never work in practice."

And Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that September 11 could have been avoided if the international community hadn't "turned the other cheek" for so long. The Daily Telegraph adds that: "His remarks contain implicit criticism of the former American administration led by President Bill Clinton, whose country was the main target for al-Qa'eda, and suggests that the war on terror should have been launched in the mid-Nineties."

It's reassuring to hear both major parties in the UK reaffirm their commitment to waging war on terrorists rather than allowing a chain reaction to develop after Sunday's elections in Spain. Their resoluteness should fortify other leaders and help isolate, and hopefully moderate, Zapatero.

It is remarkable the lengths to which a nation and its leader will go to stand against the United States. While French obstructionism and stubborness is legendary, performing naval exercises with the Chinese is off the wall. But, maybe not, if it is the economic interest of France to align with China as the New Zealand Herald indicates above.

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine. Out of the depths, I call to you, Lord. So begins the extraordinary prayer of Spain's ambassador to the US, Javier Ruperez, offered for the victims of the Madrid terrorist attack at St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington. Reprinted in today's Wall Street Journal ($), the prayer includes an encomium for democracy:

"[W]e owe them, and we owe it to ourselves, the resounding and decisive reaffirmation, as if it were a Ten Commandments of civic faith, regarding the elemental truths which convene us here: that there is no cause or justification which allows or explains the use of blind and indiscriminate violence; that the dignity of human beings and the rights stemming from it are imprescriptible; that democracy is the best system to guarantee them; that the tolerance preached and practiced by that system is the result of centuries of suffering and learning; that the terrorists, no matter where they are, whatever their claims or ideologies, are not merely the murderers of bodies, but also, and especially, the Beelzebubs of modern times, determined to send us back to the darkness of the ages without a name."

He concludes:

"Lord, from the depths of our despair, I ask you to enlighten us in leading this apocalyptic battle, I ask you to provide us clarity in the purposes and perseverance in the effort to attain them, I ask you to bestow strength to all of the peoples of the earth who suffer from the blight of terrorism, so that they may never think that by yielding they can crush the beast, so that they may never abdicate their rights, so that they may never barter their freedom. And I also ask you that your power and mercy free us, in the future, from what we are suffering today. From the depths of our abandonment, Lord, you who are truth and life, in memory of all of the victims of terrorism, hear our heartbreaking prayer."

Amen.

Immigration and assimilation are again central to America's cultural debates. Indeed, Democracy Project, Inc., was founded in part to address these problems. Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute reviewed four recent works on American immigration history in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. As Ms. Jacoby notes, many elements of today's debates come straight from similar arguments of the 1920s forward: nativists vs. proponents of more open borders; and those fearful of foreign cultures vs. those who argued that, as a nation of immigrants, America is strengthened by fresh blood.

One important difference between today's immigration problems and those of earlier decades has been illuminated by Victor Davis Hanson in his book Mexifornia. Namely, the ongoing efforts of multiculturalists and proponents of bilingual education to convince Latino immigrants that they needn't adopt American culture. Combined with a fluid border and their status as permanent low-wage laborers, these intellectually fraudulent policies lock millions of immigrants into lives of poverty and despair.

Ms. Jacoby's remarks are on target: "Instead of trusting to America's time-tested assimilative power, we have let in millions of illegal immigrants to do the work we need done but kept them on the margins, hoping they would eventually return home or, if need be, we could deport them. Ugly as it was, this stratagem worked for much of the 20th century; but it works far less well today, in large part because values are catching up with unsavory practices and exposing our hypocrisy."

It's time to launch proactive efforts to ensure that assimilation once again becomes official American policy. Our values demand it.

There has been a turnabout in Bush campaign strategy this past week, turning up the heat on Kerry. Cheney cooks Kerry in this speech at the Reagan Presidential Library -- persuasively defending the War on Terror and trumpeting its effects including a neutered Khadafi in Libya and the ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Perhaps most damaging to the Democrats is the following truth:

"Even if we set aside these inconsistencies and changing rationales, at least this much is clear: Had the decision belonged to Senator Kerry, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, today, in Iraq. In fact, Saddam Hussein would almost certainly still be in control of Kuwait."

As Gomer Pyle would say "Surprise, Surprise," Europe and the Middle East hate us. The Pew Global Attitudes Project commissioned a study, chaired none other than by the feckless Madeleine Albright, finding that the French, Germans, and Russians and the Muslim-nations of Jordan, Morroco, Pakistan, and Turkey believe the United States is conducting its campaign against terror to control oil in the Middle East and to dominate the World. What about September 11? Couldn't that be the reason we are conducting the War on Terror? I look forward to chomping my teeth into this one.

P.S. In actuality, the Pew Global Attitudes Project is really run by the Tides Center. These are the same folks financing "Peaceful Tomorrows," the offended group of families crying foul over the Bush campaign advertisements that include pictures of 9/11.

Christopher Hitchens makes the same points found on this and many other blogs -- that appeasement breeds additional attrocities -- but he does so with more skill and a sharper edge than most.

On the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ($), meanwhile, Amir Taheri examines the possibility that the Madrid bombing was a coordinated attack involving both al Qaeda and ETA. I heard that possited Monday morning but little has been said about it since. Taheri concludes:

"An objective alliance of radical groups, from the extreme left to the Islamists, is already in place in many countries. This alliance has organized numerous marches opposing the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and conducts a vigorous campaign against any attempt at 'imposing' democracy on any other Muslim country. The core of this alliance's ideology consists of an acute form of anti-Americanism which assumes that the U.S. represents evil in a Manichean view of the world. The truth is that there is no good terrorism and that the current European wave of anti-Americanism cannot but encourage those who wish to impose their will on the world through terror. Whether or not they actually joined forces to plan and execute the Madrid attacks, ETA and al Qaeda remain objective political allies."

Toss in the anti-war far right in America and you've got an alliance that, for all its intellectual schizophrenia, hates our freedom to reject its mad schemes.

With word that the French Justice Ministry is taking seriously a threat from Islamic radicals to launch attacks on its soil, Old Europe's new status as a land of volunteer hostages becomes clearer. A group called "Servants of Allah the Powerful and Wise" is making the threats because, unidentified "security experts" quoted in a Reuters story claim, France cooperates with authorities fighting Islamic militants in North Africa.

But didn't France lead efforts to block America's "unilateral" action in Iraq? Yes, but it also prohibited head scarves from being worn by Islamic school girls and, despite it all, remains a functioning democracy. More to the point, France is part of the old heartland of Western Civilization, a former stronghold of the former Christendom. In its post-Christian phase, it is no less Western and, therefore, no less an abomination to Islamist terrorists emboldened by neighboring Spain's emotional collapse at the polls last Sunday.

It's a lesson that must be repeated and argued all the way to November: appeasement never works; it always fails. As Al Qaeda and its allies lick their bloody chops in light of Old Europe's seemingly eternal fecklessness, America must continue to prosecute the war with all speed and with steely determination. It's snowing in Delaware today, but it's going to be a long, hot summer.

Via Instapundit, an interview on NPR with someone who's grown tired of Boomer adulation of Vietnam. As he says, compared to their parents' generation (Depression, WWII, Korea), what else have they got to reminisce about?

Thanks to Ken Masugi at Claremont for pointing out Victor Davis Hanson's new web site. Anything that brings Hanson's writings together is welcome, as his commentary has been the most cogent to date on the aftermath of 9-11. In today's posting, Hanson does the math on the Madrid terror attack:

"Let me get this straight. Two-and-a-half years after September 11, on a similar eleventh day of the month, 911 days following 9-11, and on the eve of Spanish elections, Al Qaeda or its epigones blows up 200 and wounds 1,400 Spaniards. This horrific attack follows chaotic months when Turks were similarly butchered (who opposed the Iraq War), Saudis were targeted (who opposed the Iraqi war), Moroccans were blown apart (who opposed the Iraqi war) and French periodically threatened (who opposed the Iraqi War).

And the response? If we were looking for Churchill to step from the rubble, we got instead Daladier. The Spanish electorate immediately and overwhelmingly connected the horror with its present conservative government’s support for Operation Iraqi Freedom. If the United States went to Afghanistan in 26 days following the murder of 3,000 of its citizens to hunt down their killers and remove the fascists who sponsored them, Spaniards took to the streets with Paz placards and about 48 hours later voted in record numbers to appease the terrorists."

Everything Victor Davis Hanson writes is worth reading, and his web site will be a daily stop.

The ouster of the Popular Party in Spain's elections yesterday will hopefully make Americans who understand the necessity of taking the war on terror to the terrorists even more convinced in the righteousness of their cause. If Socialist Party leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero makes good on his pledge to bring home Spanish troops in Iraq unless the UN takes over there in June, he will set back Spain's entry into the modern world. For the true reactionaries in this battle are those who favor the status quo ante, when complacency and cowardice were deemed sufficient to protect cynical Europeans from bloodthirsty thugs. The results of this policy were disastrous in the 1930s, and they'll result in more corruption and bloodshed today unless the slide toward appeasement can be stopped.

I listened to the BBC's broadcast at 9:00 am EST, and the exhilaration of their reporters manifested they're feelings of vindication in their fight with Tony Blair and President Bush. Americans used to take the cultural and intellectual superiority of Europeans for granted. More recently, with the growth in sophistication of our native pallets and arts, this view has mostly receded to the far left and far right, both of whom despise middle class culture and the liberty it enshrines. Look for eye-rolling among naysayers to increase in this election year -- "if only that rube Bush knew what they understand so effortlessly on the Continent" -- and for a backlash against such unctuousness.

Here are some excerpts from an extremely brave column appearing in the New York Times magazine by Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard:

"The discovery that Hussein didn't have weapons after all surprises me, but it doesn't change my view of the essential issue. I never thought the key question was what weapons he actually possessed but rather what intentions he had. Having been to Halabja in 1992, and having talked to survivors of the chemical attack that killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in March 1988, I believed that while there could be doubt about Hussein's capabilities, there could be none about the malignancy of his intentions. True, there are a lot of malignant intentions loose in our world, but Hussein had actually used chemical weapons. Looking to the future, once sanctions collapsed, inspectors had been bamboozled and oil revenues began to pick up, he was certain, sooner or later, to match intentions with capabilities."

And more:

"Critics of the war said all of this was irrelevant. The real issue was oil. But they got the relevance of oil backward. If all America cared about was oil, it would have cozied up to Hussein, as it had done in the past. Oil was an issue in the war precisely because its revenues distinguished Hussein from the run of other malignant dictators. It was the critical factor that would allow him, sooner or later, to acquire the weapons that would enable him to go after the Kurds again, complete the destruction of the Shiites, threaten Saudi Arabia and continue to support Palestinian suicide bombers and, just possibly, Al Qaeda as well.

I still do not believe that American or British leaders misrepresented Hussein's intentions or lied about the weapons they believed he possessed. In his new memoirs, Hans Blix makes it clear that he and his fellow U.N. inspectors thought Hussein was hiding something, and every intelligence service they consulted thought so too."

And even better and more:

"What I found harder to respect was how indifferent my antiwar friends seemed to be to the costs of allowing Hussein to remain in power. The costs -- of doing what they saw as the right, prudent, nonviolent thing -- would be borne by the Iraqis alone. It was Iraqis who would remain locked inside a police state. What this meant was no abstraction to anyone who had actually been in the country. So when people said, ''I know he's a dictator, but . . . ,'' the ''but'' seemed like a moral evasion. And when people said, ''He was a genocidal killer, but that was yesterday,'' I thought, Since when do crimes against humanity have a statute of limitations? And when people said, finally, ''There are a lot of dictators, and the U.S. supports most of them,'' this sounded to me like a suave alibi for doing nothing. Now, a year later, I hear the same people tell me they're glad Hussein is gone, but. . . ."

And he concludes, rightly:

"Interventions amount to a promise: we promise that we will leave the country better than we found it; we promise that those who died to get there did not die in vain. Never have these promises been harder to keep than in Iraq. The liberal internationalism I supported throughout the 1990's -- interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor -- seems like child's play in comparison. Those actions were a gamble, but the gamble came with a guarantee of impunity: if we didn't succeed, the costs of failure were not punitive. Now in Iraq the game is in earnest. There is no impunity anymore. Good people are dying, and no president, Democrat or Republican, can afford to betray that sacrifice."

Do we need more evidence that giving Aristide the boot was the right thing to do? And what's the problem with this guy? He can't make up his mind whether he resigned or was kicked out. No wonder Haiti is such a mess. This sounds like a certain junior Senator from Massachusetts.

Just opened today's Sunday New York Times and within 10 minutes found my temperature rising. On the front page is a grossly irresponsible article on the terrorist tragedy in Spain interspersing facts about the bombing with jibes at American foreign policy using recent protests in Madrid opposed to Spanish involvement in the War on Terror to suggest that the bombs would not have hit those trains if the Aznar government hadn't stuck by Bush and the United States. The Times provides front and center coverage of the 3,000 people who protested, not mentioning the eleven million people who came out two days before to protest terrorism and to show solidarity.

Perhaps worse though is the reality -- as one reads article after article on the world's international troubles and you come to the realization -- that most on the left offer absolutely no solutions to these problems except for one: run to the U.N. and get a Security Council resolution. Get a grip...only democracy will do the trick. Developing...as Drudge would say.

John Kerry has challenged George Bush to monthly debates. I suggest Bush take him up on the offer. Bush is a junkyard dog -- just remember the Al Gore debates -- he's at his best when being attacked. If Bush fumbles the first two, so be it. He's expected to. That's a heck of a lot better than fumbling in October. And if he steadily improves, that will impress the electorate and make him more endearing. It's not about looking "Presidential," it's about keeping the Presidency.

For Kerry -- you better be ready if he does accept.

Nationally known attorney Alan Dershowitz feared for his physical safety as he exited Faneuil Hall in Boston recently after receiving a justice award from the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, he writes in the Israeli Insider. As excerpted in today's Washington Times, Dershowitz says: "[T]he sign carriers were shouting epithets at me that crossed the line from civility to bigotry. 'Dershowitz and Hitler, just the same, the only difference is the name.' The sin that ... warranted this comparison between me and the man who murdered dozens of my family members was my support for Israel. ... If a dozen Boston police were not protecting me, I have little doubt I would have been physically attacked. Their eyes were ablaze with fanatical zeal." It matters not to such thugs that Dershowitz is famously liberal; their hatred knows no political bounds. As with their kindred spirits, the terrorists in Madrid and across the globe, hatred is the central feature of their sick and evil worldview.

Acknowledging that the liberal bias of many of his peers leads them to downplay or ignore President Bush's revolution in foreign policy, Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis tells Bill Sammon of the Washington Times that Bush has instituted one of only three "grand strategies" in US history. "'The academic world is of course predominantly liberal, predominately Democratic, so there is a predisposition to be less critical of a Democratic administration than there is a Republican administration,' he said." "'There certainly has been a tendency to underestimate Bush himself and to view him in the way that Reagan was viewed when he first came in — as being a cipher, manipulated by his own advisers,' he added. 'That turned out not to be true of Reagan, and it's turning out not to be true of Bush as well.'"

Today in Madrid, 173 people were killed by Basque separatists. Maybe this will wake Mr. Kerry up to the realization that the war on terror is indeed a global struggle. Whether Al Qaeda and the Basque separatists are in coordination, it really matters not. Because each attack by these lunatics increases the likelihood of another strike. Where will they hit next.? Que Dios los bendiga.

Therese Raphael, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, nails the leadership of the UN today in an investigative piece that fills the Journal's editorial page. Following a February 9 article in the same space, Ms. Raphael details a letter found in Iraq's oil ministry demonstrating "that among those favored by Saddam with gifts of oil was Benon Sevan, director of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food Program." Sevan denies the charge and can't be reached, his spokesman says, because he's on vacation until the end of April. But documents show that he was awarded 14.2 million barrels of Iraqi oil, of which 7.291 million were disbursed.

The international scandal is too complex for an outline in a blog, so you'll have to read the piece for the details. But regarding America's foreign policy, it shows beyond a doubt that holding the US hostage to UN approval of overseas actions is a morally and intellectually bankrupt proposition. The notion that the UN somehow confers a legitimizing force in international relations, an imprimatur without which US action is tainted as illegal or illegitimate, is unsupportable. Corruption in the UN reaches to the very top of that decrepit organization. A thorough investigation of the UN is needed, clearly. More importantly, Congress and the administration must bring this story before the American public in this crucial election year, and Democrats must answer for their continued faith in both the UN and so-called multilateralism.

Just in -- Asst. Secretary for Near East Affairs William Burns told a House committee today that the Bush Administration is considering sanctioning Syria for supporting terrorism. Congress is eager for the Administration to do so by invoking the Syria Accountability Act, which gives the President authority to cut off U.S. investment to the Assad regime, restrict travel by Syrian diplomats inside the United States (sounds like a good idea!) and the ban of U.S. exports other than food or medicine to that nation.

In an address to the American Enterprise Institute last month, Charles Krauthammer laid out the intellectual and moral cause for establishing global realism as the reigning school of thought on US foreign policy. In what is perhaps the most important, visionary piece yet published on the threat of Arab-Islamic nihilism, Krauthammer critiques the four schools of thought that have dominated US foreign policy since the Founding: Isolationism, Liberal Internationalism, Realism, and Democratic Globalism. He demonstrates the weaknesses of each school and proposes something new: Democratic Realism. Borrowing from Realism the hard-nosed understanding that diplomacy must be backed by force, including unilateral force when necessary, Krauthammer makes the establishment of a freer world the end toward which American diplomacy should work.

To critics who see this as an open-ended military adventure, he says: "Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: where it counts. Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom."

He adds: "[O]ur problem is 9/11 and the roots of Arab-Islamic nihilism. September 11 felt like a new problem, but for all its shock and surprise, it is an old problem with a new face. September 11 felt like the initiation of a new history, but it was a return to history, the twentieth-century history of radical ideologies and existential enemies. The anomaly is not the world of today. The anomaly was the 1990s, our holiday from history. It felt like peace, but it was an interval of dreaming between two periods of reality."

We can never escape history, any more than we can make human nature maleable. Krauthammer's piece is the sober, historically informed critique we've needed.

Look at this truly bizarre page maintained by the North Korea regime. It's Kim Jong Il's news service. Stop back by here periodically to see what we here at Democracy Project are fighting against. Just look at the blantant praise for fellow dictator Assad in Syria. That's enough for me to know Syria is a problem too.

The signing of a new Iraqi constitution is a momentous event in Middle Eastern history. It foreshadows the rule of law, sanctity of the contract, and the rebirth of an entrepreneurial culture -- IF the US stays the course. And that means staying in Iraq well past any arbitrary election deadline. We're attempting to create a civil society in a land ravaged by decades of brutal dictatorship. Burke's "little platoons" have been destroyed or left for dead, and our firm hand for dealing with Baathist thugs, terrorists, and old fashioned crooks is mandatory if a stable, just government is to flower.

That's why the cynical criticism of Iraq's progress in the American media is particularly disturbing. The operating conceit -- that Iraq should become a bourgeois society within months of its liberation -- is shortsighted and potentially dangerous. One wonders what the Boston Globe would have written about America's founding? Their man in Bahdad wrote: "For an hour anyway, Iraqi leaders put aside their disagreements during the signing of a landmark interim constitution Monday, heaping praise on the U.S.-backed document amid patriotic songs and Quranic verses urging unity. But sectarian differences resurfaced as soon as the event ended." I.e., they got something right for an hour anyway.

Not so surprisingly, Deutsche Welle's roundup of German editorials on the Iraqi constitution reveals a more hopeful tone. Having come through two dictatorships (Hitler and the East German junta) and a devastating war, these editorialists know that democracy isn't built in a day. Perhaps American journalists, who saw only quagmire and failure in our remarkably quick capture of Baghdad, could draw a lesson or two from history. It's another argument for hiring and nurturing historically literate reporters who can assess the present in light of the past, the better to avoid the intellectual provincialism on display in their coverage of Iraq.

Speaking Friday to his home constituency in Sedgfield, England, Tony Blair laid out the foundation for a new doctrine of intervention in rogue or disfunctional states. His speech is a model of clear thinking and a stinging rebuke to critcs of the war in Iraq. To the status quo bureaucrats in his Foreign office and our State Department, he said:

"This is not a time to err on the side of caution; not a time to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not a time for the cynicism of the worldly wise who favour playing it long. Their worldly wise cynicism is actually at best naivete and at worst dereliction. When they talk, as they do now, of diplomacy coming back into fashion in respect of Iran or North Korea or Libya, do they seriously think that diplomacy alone has brought about this change? Since the war in Iraq, Libya has taken the courageous step of owning up not just to a nuclear weapons programme but to having chemical weapons, which are now being destroyed. Iran is back in the reach of the IAEA. North Korea in talks with China over its WMD. The A Q Khan network is being shut down, its trade slowly but surely being eliminated. Yet it is monstrously premature to think the threat has passed. The risk remains in the balance here and abroad."

He argues that: "Containment will not work in the face of the global threat that confronts us. The terrorists have no intention of being contained. The states that proliferate or acquire WMD illegally are doing so precisely to avoid containment."

Blair concludes by calling for a reformation of the UN to make it an agency of change, but he omits the details of that (perhaps) impossible charge. To a degree that few commentators have equalled, he throws the challenge back into the laps of the isolationists and advocates of so-called realism. President Bush would benefit from hiring Blair's speechwriters for a weekend.

Secretary of State Colin Powell reports that March is the month for the Khartoum regime to put up or shut up on making peace with the Christian rebels in the south led by John Garang's SLPM. On the heels of Powell's remarks and perhaps forshadowing future peace is a landmark agreement between the SLPM and the Khartoum-backed Equatoria Defence Force to kick out the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army from encroachments into the Sudanese south. Developing...

Writing today in NRO, Gabriel Schoenfeld asks if European-style anti-Semitism is coming our way. His article is on the mark as far as it goes -- that Islamists in Europe lead the way in anti-Jewish activity there and that the academic left in the US has adopted similar rhetoric if not violence. But we shouldn't overlook the increasing alliance between the far left and the far right in the US.

A case in point is Pat Buchanan's latest attack on Neocons (i.e., any conservative with whom he disagrees, especially if they're Jews) in The American Conservative. In a review of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror by Richard Perle and David Frum, Buchanan once again charges that being in favor of the war against nations that sponsor terror or destabilize their regions marks one as "imbibing the poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason." For only by placing the interests of Israel over those of the US could one conclude that the Bush administration is doing what must be done to make America safe. Asking "when did Hamas attack us?" Buchanan defends by omission terrorist groups that kill mostly Israelis.

Of the US alliance with Israel, he says that with the conclusion of the Cold War, "an alliance with Israel has ceased to be central to U.S. interests."

In the concluding paragraphs, Buchanan charges that the Neocons are "marinated in conceit, which may prove the neocons’ fatal flaw." His concluding sentence reads, "We all know who they are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed." And you all are conceited.

Secretary of State Powell will meet with Hong Kong pro-democracy leader Martin Lee today angering China's ruling elite. Channelnewsasia.com reports that Tsang Hin-chi, Hong Kong's delegate to the Chinese National People's Congress states that foreign powers should not be intervening in an "internal affair." I wonder whether China's ruling elite believe their rapidly expanding economy to be only an internal affair? Is China's entry into the World Trade Organization solely an internal affair? Get a grip.

Nina Shea of Freedom House reports that a last-minute provision in the new Iraqi constitution poses a grave danger to America's efforts to aid in the development of a more modern, democratic country. The new provision stipulates that no law may contradict "the universally agreed upon tenets of Islam." Yet it fails to define what these tenets are, who should determine them, and when they are applicable. These reactionary provisions could be used to establish a de facto theocracy in Iraq, deny women's rights, and by-pass the liberal democratic constitution that has rightly received so much positive press of late. The Bush administration must clamp down on this kind of back-door clerical meddling firmly and permanently. In defeated Germany and Japan, would we have stood by while Nazi or Imperial lackys forced themselves on the new legal systems that gave birth to liberty in each country? Hardly. And we must take an equally firm stance for freedom in Iraq today.

California is looking like The Golden State again. The Democracy Project's own Winfield Myers writes in the webzine American Daily that the Golden State is now attracting a smaller percentage of the nation's new immigrants than in previous decades and the fortunes of those first generation immigrants who have come is rising. Couple this trend with California's voters overwhelming support of Gov. Schwarzenegger's referendum to save the state from economic ruin and the Golden State is on the verge of looking golden again.

Diana Jean Schemo's front page story in today's New York Times examines the plight of eight-year-old Audrey Walker of rural Mountain Grove, Missouri. Her school district eliminated its gifted programs last September in what Schemo, and local education authorities, blame on the effects of the President's No Child Left Behind Program. They're doing their best to bring the rest of the area's children up to snuff, the story line goes, and there's no money left over for kids like Audrey. She's bored now and won't be able to participate in special classes aimed at keeping such kids engaged by offering more challenging curricula.

Several problems emerge as one reads the article, the thesis of which rests on false premises. The now-former teacher in the gifted program, Carolyn Groves, boasts that the projects she had offerered her students included a unit to "'Put Nursery Rhymes on Trial.'" Another allowed middle school students to create the government of Utopia. These smack of educrat political correctness more than intellectually viable alternatives to today's standard (and deeply flawed) curricula. Having taught Thomas More's Utopia at several colleges, I know it's a difficult and demanding work that, more often than not, is misread as a plan for a building a real government, which it certainly is not. (See C.S. Lewis's critique of that literalist approach in the 1948 Oxford History of English Literature.)

Moreover, Groves claims that gifted students "are the kids who are either going to turn out to be nuclear scientists or Unabombers." "It all depends," she says, "on which way they're led." This Manichean claim is absurd and, coupled with her teaching methods, makes one wonder just how great a loss the elimination of her program is.

The story reflects the cynical line of teachers' unions and colleges of education that No Child Left Behind has disrupted an otherwise exemplary education system. This failure to admit or address the shortcomings of public schooling allows educators to use the Bush plan as a scapegoat for every ill in the education establishment. And I don't have room to discuss the role of parents in their children's education -- surely the single most critical component. Mess with the NEA and you'll pay, not because they have kids' best interests at heart, but because any reform highlights the abysmal shortcomings of public education and the ignorance of so many teachers.

Today's Wall Street Journal ($) contains an article on the extreme pressure college students place on themselves to choose the right career path from the moment they arrive on campus. It quotes a 19-year-old freshman at Johns Hopkins who'd like to take "fun" courses such as art history, but is instead majoring in political science so that she'll be prepared for law school and will learn to write well. A student at Rhodes College in Memphis would like to take some religion courses but killed the idea in order to load up on even more math and science, lest her career plans in biology suffer.

Ironically, these students betray a naivite in pedagogy that belies their supposed sophistication in optimizing career opportunities by picking just the right course or major. By choosing political science courses over one in, say, art history, the Hopkins freshman won't improve her writing ability one bit, assuming approximate parity in departmental quality. Studying art history may or may not be "fun," but it's one way of loosing a bit of one's intellectual and social provincialism. Similarly, loading up on biology in lieu of other subjects will prove less helpful in graduate school than the Rhodes student assumes -- most graduate courses blow past undergraduate learning levels in weeks -- and will produce little more than a more narrowly educated scientist. Top medical schools such as Hopkins and Harvard began looking for students who are more than walking bio labs over a decade ago, not least because they were producing doctors who too often treated patients as lab rats rather than fellow humans with whom they should empathize.

Parents and educators should worry about students whose career goals are set in stone by their 17th birthday. Our economy and society offer a wondrous variety of opportunities -- far more than any other in history. It's tragic to see young people put themselves into intellectual straightjackets so early on. When they change their minds, and many will, their earlier choices will prolong their college careers and cost them and their families money. Only the colleges will benefit.

As first reported by the Weekly Standard, Vancouver-based indy mag, Adbusters, writes "Why won't anyone say they are Jewish?" The mock-ad, in pogrom-like form, places little dots next to those who happen to be Jewish (might as well be the Star of David), proceeding to identify the usual suspects, e.g. William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, et al. Of course, our Canadian friends seek to draw a comparison between the Bush Administration's strong support for Israel and the fact that many of America's foreign policy elite happen to be Jewish. Adbusters never cared to think, maybe, that these "Jews" are just smarter than thee and got there through hardwork and a willingness to live in this sometimes pleasant swamp often affectionately known as "The Federal City."