The execution of Saddam Hussein provides an opportunity for a variety of lessons, the first is that despite the nascent indifference to evil many in the West exhibit, those who have experienced it firsthand fully understand its horrors.  They also appreciate how totalitarian states not only inhibit rudimentary individual freedoms but are anathema to free market systems that are the best guarantor of economic success.

However, the lesson with the greatest potential for advancing the cause of Iraqi self-determination is one that will take time to find its way into its citizens civic thinking.  That is, the reality that the theocratic form of government is antithetical to a wholesome civic framework.  Indeed, although Iraq's newly minted constitution shares many concepts with that of the United States, it stipulates the primacy of Islamic law. 

That stated, the notion of a pluralistic Iraq beyond its three key constituent groups is something of an oxymoron.  Yet it's abundantly clear that the unhealthy way in which religion is infused into its civic fabric ought to be ample evidence to them that it is hostile to the common good.

And, that is perhaps the most challenging element in both Iraq and the Middle East.  Because, with the exception of Israel, no nation in that region is free in the manner of the U.S., there is but a fledgling and incomplete understanding of the "the common good," a concept that informs our system of government and balances individual rights against the broader need for laws which provide consistency and predictability to our daily lives.

Despite our modern notions of freedom as being tantamount to the right for self-expression, its most unalloyed definition is the ability to act in legally sanctioned ways without government interference.  Recall that our First Amendment guarantees four separate but integral freedoms.  With freedom, of course, comes responsibility and accountability--and its sibling--consequences.  Those too are somewhat foreign ideas in the Middle East all of which collude to inhibit the formation of civic and governmental structures that ensure our freedoms are retained.  It's a complex system but one virtually no American would trade for any other.

That stated, there is no reason that Iraqis, no less than the Japanese of Germans after WWII, are any less capable of developing an analogous system, one that reflects their unique culture.  But since they have spent the past 70 years under the iron rule of tyranny it will take years before the groundwork is laid for them to transition to a system that safeguards everyone's freedom with the rule of law and free markets.

The question is whether we in the West believe it's in our interest to assist them, and, if so, to what extent.  That's obviously a political question, one that the last election is answering in ways not altogether flattering for a nation subscribes to the idea that democratic principles are not only God-given but are the most reliable guarantor of peace and prosperity.

The world will surely construe different lessons from the execution of Saddam, but one that can't be avoided is that crimes against humanity will not go unpunished.  That, we can only pray, will be a tocsin to the last remaining dictators who are denying their citizens the fundamental human rights we too often take for granted.

As has been observed by historians, the demise of great nations begins with their civic and cultural values.  For example, although Confucianism reigned for 2000 years its system of governance thrived on stasis not dynamism which was ultimately no match for Western capitalism.

These columns have cataloged the origins of America's incipient internal decay, but Daniel Pipes, writing in The Jerusalem Post, provides a civic forensic analysis that inculpates the West's left-leaning class and charges it with pacifism, self-hatred, and complacency.

After providing a detailed and persuasive analysis, Mr. Pipes concludes as follows:

Pacifism, self-hatred, and complacency are lengthening the war against radical Islam and causing undue casualties.  Only after absorbing catastrophic human and property losses with left-leaning Westerners likely overcome this triple affliction and confront the true scope of this threat.

Attentive observers of America's liberal class can attest to its less than subtle protests against these charges, arguing that it's the manner in which Republicans have prosecuted the war against the Islamic extremists that is an assault on our civil liberties, and that we have failed to examine our own complicity in the problem. 

They also recoil against the well-documented charge that they are reticent to exercise the military option, countering that they would, indeed, do so, but more deftly.  All of this is political legerdemain calculated to leverage electoral power in the absence of a bona fide foreign policy.  Curiously--and dangerously--it has been an effective strategy.

Although military analysts will disagree concerning the reasons for the outcomes of a given war there is virtual unanimity among them concerning the causal relationship between the early identification of the enemy and victory.  That may seem like an effortless process but, as has been demonstrated at least twice last century, timeliness of intervention has been, to put it kindly, inconsistent.

In a masterful analysis of a relatively unknown WWII battle--the Battle of Layte Gulf in October 1944--Evan Thomas' book Sea of Thunder raises the disquieting question concerning a tactical blunder by Admiral "Bull" Halsey.  Had he intercepted and annihilated Japanese Admiral Takeo Kurita's fleet Japan might have been defeated by the spring of 1945, which would have obviated the mass carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Although tactical missteps are instructive, they are of less utility when it comes to our unique challenge, which is achieving a consensus on this enemy.  Although there are many reasons for this, primary among them is the inability of many on the left to endorse a blanket condemnation of an entire sub-section of Muslims--it strikes them as an unacceptable abridgment of their exquisitely refined system of moral taxonomy which includes every genus of misdemeanor but none for felons, who are the real evildoers.

With only half of the nation recognizing the growing storm on our horizon, any hope of a timely intervention is simply not feasible.  Therefore, barring a change of political sensibility among our left-leaning brethren, it appears likely that this war will be a grim replication of those before it, featuring cataclysmic human losses, after which they will awaken from their self-induced slumber.

There are many reasons for Americans of all political stripes to be disappointed with President Bush's performance in the past two years, but a paucity of courage and determination is not among them.  Former New York City mayor, Ed Koch, a Democrat in the Truman, Kennedy, Jackson mold, writes compellingly about why Mr. Bush can claim the mantle of principled courage, often against daunting opposition.

Courage is a trait we all admire but usually only when we agree with the specific goal at issue.  Indeed, if it is divisive or controversial, or worse, at odds with our values, our level of conviction with respect to the courage of a leader diminishes accordingly.  That's to be expected, but what's surprising is that the issue at hand--the future of Iraq and the Middle East--is as controversial as it appears.

Indeed, if the goal of toppling Saddam Hussein was laudable, and if the secondary goal of seeding a rudimentary form of self-determination in Iraq was worthwhile, is it only because former was easy and the latter a profound challenge that many Americans have concluded the overall plan is unworthy of our blood and treasure?  If so, was our civil war worth the more than half million souls that were lost, or was our victory in WWII worth the 415,000 lives we lost? 

It is a legitimate question because the true valuation of any cause is politically fungible, which is to say it would be deemed worthwhile under one set of circumstances and dismissed a hopeless cause under another.  And, it's the character of those circumstances that are driven by our ability to see beyond the disheartening and painful moment when victory seems so remote.  And that is the very quintessence of courage.

Lodging cavalier and emotional charges based on partial information and the advantage of not bearing ultimate responsibility has an allure that politicians, analysts, and the media have clearly been unable to resist.  But doing so is not only counterproductive it reflects an intellectually effete response to challenging predicaments by short-circuiting the heavy lifting that any initiative worth our time requires.

In that regard we have failed the test of civic maturity and history will judge us harshly, as well it should.

It's axiomatic that most Americans have a dim historical understanding of the numerous challenges our nation has faced, each of which might have jeopardized the relative calm and stability we've enjoyed at home.  Michael Barone provides that context with a review of U.S. history, demonstrating that the outcomes of our wars and conflicts which, from our distant vantage, we typically take for granted, were in fact tenuous.

The examples illustrate that although we're conditioned to believe that we are always provided a variety of options, any one of which is reasonably acceptable, it's often the case in war that none of them is, and the war in Iraq is no exception.

That leaves President Bush in a precarious predicament because nothing he has tried thus far has been uniformly successful, although meaningful progress has been made in many areas of Iraq.  The failure in Mr. Bush's performance in the past two years has been his slow capitulation to the forces of Islamic extremism and, critically, the political forces here and in Europe.

Although there were many appeasers in the mid-1930s and no one wanted to go to war, there were principled leaders who understood both what was at stake and, ultimately, what would be required to prevail. 

The decimation at Pearl Harbor that pushed America into war is a twist of history that is roughly equivalent to our 9/11, but the political aftershock of the latter has already disappeared.  But that is merely further evidence of the fact that most Americans have a remarkably poor understanding of world events not to mention historical antecedents that defined the outcomes of major wars.

In the final analysis it will require that President Bush brings to the challenges of the Middle East a firm and unwavering sense of principle, one that will be challenged by the forces for appeasement and political indolence. 

Those who argue that the United Nations, in particular Security Council, should be our universal salvation, are embracing a chimera that Ahmadinejad knows will provide him ample time to acquire a nuclear weapon.  Indee, sanctions are only effective when the political will is sufficiently uniform and consistent and that is not the case in the equation we currently face, as Russian intransigence has demonstrated.

Diplomacy can and should run its course, but the president must insist upon meaningful consequences and an unequivocal declaration that Iran will not be a nuclearized power in the Middle East.  The deeper challenge he faces is that Ahmadinejad fully understands and has been exploiting the political dimension of this broader war.  Specifically, the notions of imperialism, of racism, of double standards, are all being employed with predictably success.

That demands that the case be made that Iran is not a benign force that should enjoy rights equal to all other nations.  If President Bush fails to make the case that a nuclearized Iran is a threat not only to Israel but to the region and the United States, ours will be a future that will make the horrors of WWII pale by comparison.

In this season, so completely suffused by the Word of God, we are obliged to closely examine the message of Christ and how His supreme sacrifice has manifested itself in our lives. 

Each age exerts profound influences on the people who inhabit it and ours is by no means immune from that phenomenon.  Because of that we are naturally inclined to feel that our age and generation are unique, that our challenges are remote and distinct from those of prior ages.  That sentiment, while powerful and convincing is, of course, one shared by our forebears with as much or more conviction.

The timeless nature of Christ's message is why it achieves the potency and relevancy that it does.  The civic and intellectual heresy that our age exhibits is only explicable when one realizes that it's predicated on an ignorance that is itself symptomatic of a cultural narcissism so fervent as to approach sycophancy.

Therefore, by immersing ourselves in the chronology of history in the context of Christmas we can eschew the common habit of convincing ourselves of the uniqueness of our circumstance.

To that end, the Roman Martyrology for Christmas contains a formal announcement of the birth of Christ in the style of a proclamation.  It begins with creation and relates the birth of the Lord to the major events and personages of sacred and secular history.

Today, the twenty-fifth day of December, unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and earth and then formed man and woman in his own image.

Several thousand years after the flood, when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant.

Twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah; thirteen centuries after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt.

Eleven hundred years after the time of Ruth and the Judges; one thousand years from the anointing of David as king; in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel.

In the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad; the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome.

The forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus; the whole world being at peace, Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming, being conceived by the Holy Spirit, and nine months having passed since his conception, was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary.

Today is the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

Next, we turn to an exegesis of Pope Benedict XVI's 2006 encyclical Deus Caritas Est by Avery Cardinal Dulles (First Things, January 2007):

Pope Benedict notes that as love grows it becomes less covetous and more concerned with the good of the other.  The first and greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our might.  Our love of God must be continually purified.  In order to love God with a pure, unselfish love surpassing our affection for any creature, we need the help of divine grace...Twice in his encyclical, the pope refers to the statement in John's first letter, "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins."

At the end of The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis makes an important statement that he does not develop at the length it deserves:  Grace can arouse in us a higher kind of love than either eros or agape as he understands them.  God, according to Lewis, "can awake in man, towards Himself, a supernatural appreciative love.  This is of all gifts the most to be desired.  Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life."

May the blessings of Christ and his message of love and hope be yours this holy season, and may it inform the quality and character of the New Year.

Whether purposeful or ironic, on occasion a reader's comment will be particularly illustrative of a salient point in a given post which merits highlighting in a subsequent editorial.  Such is the case with the post titled "Celebrating the Self" which led 'Zen' to make the following comment:

There must have been something amiss with child-rearing and education in the 50s, because it was NOT immune from meaningful challenge. Indeed many have awakened and seen it for what it was -- one way of looking at the world. But not the only way. Just because you disagree does not mean that it is universally wrong. It is only wrong for you. Phil, you are tunnel visioned.

This comment, perhaps more than a legion of liberal academics, captures with quintessential irony, modern liberalism's Achilles heel, which was the very essence of the post's original point. 

No age, culture, or civilization is immune from 'meaningful challenge,' and it is indeed the case that the 50s had its unique legacy of civic and cultural foibles.  Rather, the argument with respect to the merits of the values that underwrote a particular generation is whether, on balance, they constitute the most reliable equation for the perpetuation of society without circumscribing individual freedoms.

Zen's argument is predicated on an implicit endorsement of the post-modernist's vision that is at once devoid of absolutes and embraces every lifestyle and political philosophy with a remarkably purblind fervor that effectively ignores 2000 years of history.

The fact that he argues that "many have awakened and seen it [the 50s]for what it was -- one way of looking at the world," provides cogent, if tangential evidence that the 'awakening' that swept the nation in the interim was itself a false discovery of heretical values that have, in fact, been recycled innumerable times over the centuries and, after reproving their inefficacy, were ultimately discarded.   

It's only those so thoroughly intoxicated by the presumptive power of their newly defined freedom--which is nothing more than a license for personal anarchy--who demonstrate such a cavalier intellectual indifference to the fact that our Republic's traditional values are merely the distilled reiteration of those that had their roots in Periclean Athens, and were matured in the crucible of centuries of civic, economic, and military history.

By now you have probably celebrated yourself by indulging Time magazine's Person of the Year, a daft and banal toast to 'self' that betrays the atrophied nature of our culture.  George Will's editorial brings the full panoply of this charade into fine relief by demonstrating its utterly vacuous goal of bringing our collective notion of self and its incestuous cousin, esteem, to an ignoble cultural crescendo.

Mr. Will can be forgiven for his severe criticism of bloggers, the majority of whom, after all, confess that their primary motivation is showcasing themselves for family, friends, and, in less savory cases, the anonymous.  But that also proves that he would usefully benefit from exploring the more serious blogs which toil in relative isolation, but that bring more than a modicum of insight and thoughtful comment to our national dialog.

But, back to Time magazine's paean to selfhood, the supremacy of the individual's experience, and the myriad ways in which we're encouraged to impose our version of the rules on the universe.  Although Mr. Will's focus on the Web was apposite with respect to the narcissism that infects every element of American culture, that manifestation is, more accurately, merely a symptom of a cultural malevolence that lurks in a deeper substratum.

With the unilateral focus on 'self' and its presumed omnipotence is the civically noxious corollary which is the depreciation of such quaint notions as duty and obligation.  Deeply ingrained in our civic history, that formerly sacred pair of virtues reflected our tacit recognition of what ultimately keeps our Republic strong. 

Today, our educational system provides meaningful incentives to circumvent the heavy lifting required to have a nominal command of history, a more than glancing familiarity with English prose and poetry, and a reasonable facility for analytical thinking, in particular the rigors of mathematics, physics, and the like.  Indeed, the traditional 'Three-Rs' or 'reading, writing, and arithmetic' have been supplanted by the new version, 'racism, reproduction, and recycling.'

Intermingled throughout our children's educational experience is a nearly limitless supply of the lessons that effectively guarantee the wholly unproductive belief in the primacy of 'self.'  That is the precise antithesis of the flinty selflessness that was implicit in our educational system and complemented at home, which is now vilified as autocratic and oppressive. 

The steely discipline that informed child-rearing and education in the 50s was so potent exactly because it was communicated with remarkable fidelity in every venue of the child's life.  It was, in effect, an invisible cultural background hum of the child's universe, and it was therefore something immune from meaningful challenge. 

Today, borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted," and the ghastly results are as omnipresent as they are hostile to the common good.

With the Democrats' ascension to power in Congress it might be wise and timely to begin looking at the specifics that are likely to inform their agenda.  Pete du Pont, Chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, begins that process with a glimpse behind the curtain.

We might start with the caveat that cyclical changes in political power are often bittersweet, and the electorate often doesn't have a deep understanding of the downstream implications of decisions made in the heat of an election.  Indeed, although electoral fatigue over Iraq, a variety of scandals, and profligate spending did little to endear the voters to Republican principles, it is arguable they may not be pleased with the economic implications of the Democrats' plans for them.

Reading Mr. du Pont's litany of fiscal sea changes likely to be embraced by the liberals' pent-up demand, from tax increases to protectionism, one wonders whether or not the average American is truly champing at the bit for our Democratic brethren to take the helm.

However, beyond the obvious panoply of liberal economic policy changes are the values and principles that underwrite them, and it's worth examining them so people can be clear about what precisely they signed on to.

For most Americans, the historical war that was waged over the impacts of lower versus higher taxes drew to a glorious close which demonstrated that the former creates jobs, increased savings, and more robust productivity.  Logic and prudence would lead reasonable people to conclude that from the ashes of that war would rise, Phoenix-like, the kind of economic policies most likely to raise all boats regardless of where they were on the income continuum.

But, as evidence of the powerful half-life of cynical political motivations, many Democrats believe their best chances to acquire and retain power is through the craven mechanism of income redistribution.  Egalitarianism, whether in social class or economic well-being, is the very touchstone of modern liberalism and, though it is wholly undeserving as a policy goal, were it not for human nature it might be nominally achievable.  But since we humans are nothing if not widely divergent in talent, work ethic, and perseverance, there will always be commensurately wide differences in performance and compensation.

For the fragile, modern day Democratic sensibility, that's a reality that can't be countenanced, not because it is counter-intuitive, but because it leaves unharnessed the raw political power inherent in ensuring an entire economic class is beholden to them.  Indeed, for many on the left, freedom should be prescriptively defined to excise from the result any chance for failure, primarily because theirs is an emotive political polity that myopically overlooks the crucial lessons we learn when we stumble or fall.

Decent people instinctively believe in the virtue of providing temporary assistance to those who have fallen on hard times.  Although human suffering and want is inevitable it's something we should all be aware of and work to mitigate.  However, a deeper understanding of human nature encourages us to see beyond the superficial aspect of those in need and, ideally, should caution us to be restrained in how we fashion programs intended to assist our fellow man. 

To wit, pauperizing people by presuming certain of them are less capable of success than others, by presupposing that people on the lower economic rungs are permanently mired there, or by insulting them with race-based preferences, are anachronistic policies that are best left buried in the rubble of history.

One of the prima facie reasons many political analysts cited for the need for a change in Congressional leadership is so they can 'get something done in Washington.'  Indeed, doing the work of the American people, solving our social and economic problems as well as those in Iraq and elsewhere, were key among reasons picked up by exit polling data. 

But what the shift in Congressional power truly heralds is a return to policies that harbor a darker, more latent motivation, and that is to corner the market on political power, even if it means compromising our economic future due to the remarkably depreciated value it places on the average American.

It's an unambiguously cynical approach to public policy but apparently worth the price for our brave new Democrats.

In one of the more clever feats of polemical legerdemain, E.J. Dionne informs us that conservative ideas are obsolete and that the principles of liberalism are now 'chic.'  Mr. Dionne argues that America's youth are the most reliable political bellwether and evidences President Reagan's capture of large swaths of that group in the 1984 election to buttress his point.  Now, he says, our youthful minds voted in droves for Democrats in the last election.

He begins with the painfully inapt comparison of Rush Limbaugh to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, asserting, in effect, that the former no longer commands a large audience and that the latter are part of "the chic medium [of] televised political comedy."  It would be a fascinating spectacle to see Mr. Limbaugh debate either of those two intellectual marionettes.  But the fact of the matter is that his radio show continues to set records and he has a faithful listening audience that, in contrast to Messrs. Stewart and Colbert, doesn't look to him for comedic relief but rather for hard political analysis.

From there Mr. Dionne argues that while it was the case that Democrats were out of touch with 'the real America,' now it's Republicans who are seen as outside the mainstream.  Indeed, he states that:

Now, religious moderates and liberals are speaking in their own tongues, and free-thinking, down-to-earth citizens of the Rocky Mountain states are, in large numbers, fed up with right-wing ideology.

He segues to the war in Iraq as the presumed cogency of his argument and that now it is those who supported the wisdom of the war that are obliged to defend the indefensible.

Although cultural tolerance is a principle of dubious merit, there is no question that America suffers from a surfeit of it, and the fact that it's truly a rigid artifact of liberal ideology is evidenced by the fact that it's a behavior they demand but don't reciprocate. 

Therefore, we can't be surprised that the 'free-thinking' among us have an effective license to embarrass themselves with impunity because the corollary of tolerance is the immunization that all manner of viewpoints enjoys in our post-modern world where cultural mayhem reigns supreme.

Second, the war in Iraq has been so effectively vilified and traduced--abetted, ironically by many 'conservatives'--by the media, political pundits, our academic elite and Hollywood panjandrums, that the fact that our original goal, to depose a retched dictator, has been achieved, has been successfully obfuscated.

After that journey into ersatz reality, Mr. Dionne makes what is easily his most kaleidoscopic argument, that the Iraq Survey Group's report is "the accepted definition of reality" in Iraq.  Most of those who have read the report--and their numbers are surely minuscule in comparison with those who endorse the MSM's characterization of it--would want to take serious exception to that blanket assertion, but, again, the arrogance of the left knows no limits and is by definition beyond appeasement.

Mr. Dionne does make one credible statement, and, to the extent it is true, it constitutes grave abdication of principle by conservatives.  He observes that:

Suddenly, economic inequality is a problem even conservatives are taking seriously.

In yet another testimony of how liberalism's forces in the media and academia routinely combine to transform a fundamental reality of existence into a veritable constitutional crisis, Dionne and his minions have convinced mainstream Americans (and many Republicans) that 'economic inequality' is not just a reality of life, it's an affront to our collective sense of civic decency.  That, of course, demands their one-response-fits-all solution--income redistribution.

He finishes his political exegesis by arguing that it's the political losers who typically accommodate the winners by which he means that Republicans will move towards the political center.  But since that's already happened, any further movement will clearly place them in the enemy's camp. 

If that's where they want to be it will be yet another example of a party lost in the political wilderness because it listened to the siren song of popular wisdom that enticed them to ignore their principles for the chance of regaining political power. 

It will be a despicable legacy if it comes to fruition.

The world may be getting its wish.  As Robert Samuelson reports in a recent editorial, America's role as the undisputed world leader in instituting a stable world order appears to be eroding. 

As Mr. Samuelson's informative chronicle demonstrates, the 20th century holds a veritable mother lode of shining examples of the U.S. using its redoubtable economic and military strength both to rescue virtually helpless nations from aggressors and to seed democratic principles in otherwise inhospitable ground.  Although the results have not been uniformly positive, no reading of history could discount the myriad ways in which America has been a force for good. 

Given the mounting unpopularity of the U.S. we must ask whether America has changed or the world?  Certainly the events of 9/11 and the evident threat of Islamic extremism worldwide seemed perfectly aligned with an American president's principles that have been unwavering despite growing unpopularity at home and stinging rebukes from enemies and allies alike. 

One can imagine a President Gore handling the diplomatic front with more finesse and Clintonean soft touches designed to keep our allies convinced of America's inherent goodness.  But one can't imagine Mr. Gore handling the rigors of counter-terrorism and defanging the threats from the Islamic terrorists with the same unapologetic determination as President Bush.

Therefore, it's clear that circumstances have colluded to incite many of our allies to dislike us, charging everything from a lack of humility to an arrogance unworthy of our great nation.  Indeed, in the area of political demeanor Mr. Bush is undeserving of a passing grade.  That reality undermines every putatively positive effort by the U.S., from relief efforts following natural disasters to assistance in Africa with HIV/AIDS to bringing freedom to 24 million Afghanistan citizens and deposing a dictator in Iraq.

But beyond those more superficial aspects of this conundrum is the undeniable fact that the world has, indeed, changed, and not for the better.  At its heart is a nascent international diffidence to confront obvious belligerents in their infancy rather than to wait until they have gathered the requisite military might to become a major threat.

It may amount to poorly learned history lessons, but the more credible explanation is that the notion of confrontation itself has suffered at the hands of our 'soft power' diplomats who are merely the symptoms of a cultural disease that has infected every civic institution, from our bastions of presumed higher learning to every level of government. 

The world is clearly leveling in terms of the allocation of power.  From India and China to Europe, economic strength and the political framework that informs it are starting to favor an equation that includes a tectonic emasculation of American hegemony. 

That may bring smiles to the faces of those whose ire we have raised but it does not bode well for the civilized world's ability to mitigate the threat of a full-throated nuclear Iran and North Korea whose black market would provide terrorists across the globe with weapons to threaten both the U.S. and its allies.

For anyone still in the thrall of the Potomac potentates who crafted the Iraq Survey Group's report, we recommend Charles Krauthammer's editorial that illustrates how its intent, design, and execution of was so fundamentally misguided as to render it obsolete off the press.

Mr. Krauthammer calls the report's authors the "establishment 10" which correctly identifies their uniquely unimaginative intellectual genus.  Indeed, when the need calls for innovation and creativity to confront a refractory problem, we are given a panel more suited for studying the impact of bovine flatulence on global warming.

The most salient and crucial inference Mr. Krauthammer makes is that the report's primary recommendation--gradual retreat--is predicated on the conclusion that defeat is imminent or inevitable or both.  That is a determination these wise men presumably made based on media hype because had they spoken with the troops on the ground the conclusion would have been dramatically different.

This intellectually cloistered panel, driven above all else by the need for consensus, which effectively obviates innovation and boldness, appears to have begun with a numbingly finite group of suppositions.  The essence of that premise inevitably drove them to a commensurately lackluster list of 79 recommendations.  The monochronicity of their thinking astounds even the water cooler analysts who are inclined to question why the panel believes a tandem track strategy of military and political victory isn't possible.

It's because boldness and an implicit endorsement of American exceptionalism are conspicuous by their absence in this group as well as most of our politicians who reflexively apologize to the world at large for the Bush Administration's insistence that democracy, individual freedoms, and the rule of law are values worth fighting for.

As Mr. Krauthammer observes, this is the last best hope for the Bush Administration.  But, it should also be noted that the same is true for the reputation of U.S. foreign policy.  The world is replete with political flash points, incipient and seething religious hatreds, and, in the not too distant future, the potential for a nuclear confrontation.  Despite Europe's abiding disdain for America under this administration if an attack of major proportions occurs, in particular, one that foreshadows a threat of more regional or global dimensions, we can be assured that the civilized world will look to the U.S. to take the lead in confronting those responsible.

It's the price of being not just the world's only super-power but, more specifically, the one under this administration that has at least a modicum of understanding of what's truly at stake.  That's light years ahead of the conventional group-think so abundantly in evidence in the Iraq Survey Group's report.

'Blaming the Victim'?

Viewers of CSPAN this morning can be excused for thinking they were part of a time-travel experiment as Trenton, New Jersey Mayor Douglas Palmer, the new president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, held forth in a kind of anachronistic reprisal of a 60s view of poverty in America.

When callers suggested that many urban Americans' woes are self-inflicted, from those whose decisions early in life led to predictable social and economic ills later in life to those wholly indifferent to bettering themselves, true to his liberal values he charged that callers were "blaming the victim."

We can stipulate that we all have a civic obligation to assist those less fortunate or those in temporary need of assistance, and Americans in that regard express that concern with real generosity.  However, in the case of people who are inveterate users of charity and who suffer no major physical or mental impairment, we are obliged from a scarcity of resources perspective to ask 'Who is the real victim?'. 

Is it the individual who has no interest in or motivation to--with meaningful assistance--lift himself from his Dickensian fate to one more productive of happiness as well as independence?  Or is it the untold millions whose hard-earned tax dollars Mr. Palmer and his ilk reflexively target?

Shall we Talk With Iran?

In his typically trenchant manner, Victor Davis Hanson argues that talking with Iran is the height of folly.  Professor Hanson provides a litany of pragmatic reasons that correctly characterize the hazards and implications as sufficient cause for rejecting that part of the Iraq Survey Group's recommendations.

He begins by juxtaposing history's recent examples of those we should and should not follow, with the former being Sir Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt and the latter Stanley Baldwin and Joseph P. Kennedy.

But it's also beneficial to examine why our generation appears so acutely incapable of understanding and endorsing that argument.  Although WWII appears to most of us as a distant memory or, more likely, the stuff of textbooks and grainy battle footage, its proximity as measured by the metric of principle suggests it is even more remote than six plus decades would suggest.

Sometime during our post-modern march through the 60s the insidious edicts of 'deconstruction' which took root decades earlier became more manifestly evident.  That noxious polity argues, among other things, that 'value' is not inherent or absolute, that it only exists as the product of our imputing it to something.  That philosophy, which began innocently enough as art and literary criticism, worked its way into the corners of our culture and provided civic license for a host of categorically hostile behaviors and traits that expressed themselves in everything from an acquired incapacity to judge to a deleterious diffidence on the world stage.

Now we find ourselves confronted by Iran, an unambiguously despicable rogue nation, one that just hosted a conference of Holocaust deniers, after which its president declared that the sovereign, democratic nation of Israel will soon be destroyed--and yet, the civilized world lacks the apparent will to even impose a regime of sanctions.

So, we should consign ourselves to the reality that in time Iran will be a newly minted member of the nuclear community, and that the existence of Israel may be in supreme jeopardy as a result.  If that happens the Middle East will descend into a cauldron of Islamic extremism that will make all previous challenges in recorded history look positively benign.

Wars are, indeed, lost on the political, not the military battlefield.  And this nation and its supposed allies are more politically impotent and devoid of principle than at any time in our history.

If you suffered through outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's farewell speech at the Truman Library you deserve a medal for masochism.  For a smattering of scintillating comments and reflections we turn to a piece in National Review, which features criticism of Annan that you won't read on the pages of our mainstream newspapers.

The notion that Annan's was a reform agenda would be risible were it not for the fact that he was personally responsible for the very corruption he pledged to expunge.  In polite diplomatic circles he is credited for being the first secretary-general who argued that democracy is the world's pre-eminent form of government, which for the thugocracy that comprises its membership is, in fact, a kind of revolutionary notion.

Whenever a champion of the left is in a leadership position of a corrupt body we can be assured of a cascade of euphemisms when his term comes to an end.  So it is that many in the diplomatic corps and our mainstream media talk about the "structural problems" inherent in the U.N. and note that there are "systemic issues" that prevent meaningful reform.  The truth, of course, is that it's a politically incestuous body that breeds the kind of institutional corruption that strains the imagination.

Against this background it's no wonder that Annan chose not to discuss his accomplishments but rather used the opportunity to excoriate the U.S., in particular his oblique but unequivocal criticism aimed at the Bush Administration.  His remarks will one day be seen in their proper context, one that recognizes that the civilized world's moral authority has become attenuated in the past 30 years. 

That the U.S. under President Bush has refused to be drawn into the broader world's political undertow is a reality that galls Mr. Annan and his band of thug nations at the U.N.  Principled leadership, once a hallowed characteristic worth defending, has become politically anathema and the U.S. is in the very forefront of that charge.  Being labeled 'unilateralist' and 'indifferent to the international community' has become de rigeur for Europeans who loathe Mr. Bush for eschewing everything from the International Criminal Court to the Kyoto protocols.

Multilateralism, which is the catnip of the world's elitist left, only has moral authority when grounded in the values of the rule of law and individual freedom.  When, as is the case with most of the U.N.'s work, it becomes the tool of jaded group-think and a foil for the U.S. when it takes a contrary position, it is verifiably poisonous.  The paralytic thinking that informs most of the multilateralists' nostrums is peddled as the wisdom of the ages and, paradoxically, the U.S. is called a renegade when it declines to participate.

Those who would defend the U.N. should demonstrate why it merits our support.  That it appears incapable of reform is at the core of the argument for its international obsolescence and merely asserting that it's a vital organization does not, ipso facto make it so.

As Elliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University observed yesterday on Meet the Press, the authors of the Iraq Study Group's report spent a total of four days in country, and just one of them ventured outside the safety of the Green Zone, and that was for just a few hours.

Add to that the observation the fact that the group was comprised of reputable elder statesmen without even a modicum of military training among them.  Yet its military assertions are sweeping and summary in character.

Curiously, the word "realist" has been routinely applied to the report by the media, but, in fact, it suffers from an academic form of "realism," which is to say its real-world applications don't seem practical.

It is also shot through with Middle East myths and popularized chimera as chronicled by Lisa Beyer of Time, who makes the argument that the report's insistence upon the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being the political fulcrum perpetrates those canards, as she aptly calls them. 

The report's sub-text also reflects the nascent anti-Semitism that is taking root in Europe and other parts of the so-called civilized world and belies the resilience of the well-worn axiom "never again."  The apologists for Middle East tyrants and belligerents should be forced to explain on record their ingeniously crafted disdain for the region's one bona fide democracy.

Michael Barone takes the argument against the applicability of the report a step further in asserting that the its authors' assertion that regime change in Iran and Syria through negotiations is nothing short of astounding.  A rare amalgam of State Department and United Nations parlance underscores their fantastic claims which are themselves predicated on a fundamental misreading of the nature of those regimes. 

In short, there is absolutely no evidence that either of those states has any interest in a dialog that would do anything other than advance their designs of regional hegemony.  Indeed, Messrs. Baker and Hamilton, who showcased their report yesterday on Fox News Sunday, seem fixated on a political solution that would necessitate cooperation from Iran and Syria on a level unprecedented and one wholly unsupported by the facts.

That takes us back to a solution driven by the political leadership of the Shiites and Sunnis, each of whom have obvious designs on dominating the political machinery.  That they see themselves less as Iraqis and more as sectarians makes abundantly clear the dangers of theocracy as well as the challenges of remedial intervention.

Ironically, the report provides evidence that its own prescriptions are ill-advised.  Further, it would have had more credibility had it included a variety of options with logic trails and ramifications for each, but that would have been counter to its spirit, which began with a conclusion and worked in reverse to make it appear credible.

In a revealing review of contemporary man and his misaligned sensibilities, Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield takes us on a distant tour of human greatness, dignity, and the challenges that educators are obliged to face.  His analysis includes arguments for illustrating these uniquely human characteristics through great written works.  It is when he moves towards the final act of his article that the clearest juxtaposition with modern culture becomes manifest.

Lurking just below his criticism of all things modern is the actual polemical framework for his argument, which is that we have unwittingly acquired a cultural incompetence that has hobbled our capability to faithfully transfer our Western legacy to a new generation.  That places an onerous burden on our post-secondary educators because the typical college freshman is so eminently ill-equipped to the meet the challenges inherent in everything from reading the classics to grappling with philosophical conundrums to delving into the abstruse world of advanced physics.

One of the hallmarks of a superior educator is the ability to instill in his charges a healthy skepticism of dogma.  But the student must first have a fundamental understanding of the issues in advance and that is where the system fails.  Whether it is modern art or contemporary literature or ethics, the level of criticism usually suffers from a commensurate absence of historical knowledge which is crucial to having the credibility to advance a counter-argument.

Therefore, in place of that 'healthy skepticism' we often find a resigned intellectual smugness that precedes the educational experience and cavalierly dismisses the attempts to explain why Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle have been studied and revered for over 2000 years.  Or how the work of Kepler supported the Copernican revolution, or why there are profound doubts about string theory.

The excitement that the exploration of new ideas historically provided has been blunted by a wholesale lack of epistemic humility and ability to grasp that the inherited knowledge of life in 17th century Europe and its belief that it was on the cusp of a great new chapter in human history, was no less legitimate or intimately felt than ours.

Professor Mansfield's expose and its implications for higher education underscore the vital role that culture plays in every generation.  In particular, when we fail to adhere to the principles that provide the intellectual discipline required to master the fundamentals we can be assured that the transfer of knowledge to the next generation will be, to put it kindly, flawed.

Since we must stipulate that the circumscribed nature of human knowledge inevitably leads to a dim understanding of the overall trajectory of current circumstances, it places an inordinate burden on successful child-rearing and the subsequent educational process. 

Unlike other areas of human endeavor, which are more forgiving, it is clear from our current predicament that any deviation from the orderly transfer of knowledge leads to a disproportionate and malign result.  Moreover, each movement away from the original course encourages the progressive acceptance of cultural aberrations that would never have been tolerated had fidelity to principle not been sacrificed.

Therefore, course corrections that might have been possible early in the journey are now fraught with political peril because the healthy skepticism that was supplanted by an incipient presumption of omniscience has been institutionalized.  In that context the revolutionaries are those with the courage to stand up for traditional values and the principles that, ironically, provided the civic license for the thoughtless iconoclasts.

As they say in contemporary parlance, go figure.