"We handled 9/11," wrote Andrew Cuomo two years ago, "like it was a debate over a highway bill instead of a matter of people's lives." Cuomo was referring to the Democratic Party, but his reprimand snugly fits several rightist commentators. The Iraqi campaign is nearing the end of its fourth year and for several months has been wreathed in dysphemisms, the fatalistic kind.

In question would be whether this front in the war is devoid of what should be or what some of us would prefer to see. Soldiers generally believe the latter, and many thousands choose to declare it by reenlisting so that they may return to Iraq. A lot of intellectuals are convinced of the former and have reverted to what Mr. Cuomo thought disgraceful. Where broadly expressed preferences for tactics and strategy would be relevant, some editorials instead tender "policy" about "security" to "end" the "violence." As if the deaths, most of them from Iraq's civilian population, were casualties of the remote; or that rhythmic murders by the enemy could be, with just the right public initiative, enjoined.

Very little of what the enemy can muster, against Iraq's future, is irreversible — as often as the word is repeated and by whomever, when polity, construction and defensive prescriptions continue, one can't say things are "deteriorating" unless to do it a priori. What seems to be motivating this, on the right, is a dissociate carelessness, a product of boredom with the war.

If it is not distracted thought, then National Review editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg should be in some trouble. Seven weeks after obliquely terming Iraq "a mistake," at the same time calling for a plebiscite on the acceptance of allied troops, Goldberg, today, retracted the democratic offer and asked for a prepotent Iraqi to decide for all 25 million — including the Kurds? — by usurping state control and emulating the recently deceased Chilean tyrant, Augusto Pinochet.

Just three days ago, National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. reviewed Pinochet and his life, decided Chile and the West were fortunate to have been rid of the man after seventeen years and ended with an apothegmatic warning: "Power begets the abuse of it." But because Pinochet might not have been as murderous as other dictators, and because Pinochet (an authoritarian, not a totalitarian) left Chilean culture and markets mostly alone, and because Pinochet surrendered the government two years after the country was finally enfranchised; Goldberg has, if not exactly ennobled Pinochet, selected the example of his rule for salutary intercession in Iraq.

Goldberg propounds this through a series of errors, beginning with a choice between placing Fidel Castro or Augusto Pinochet in Baghdad — a strange one that no one actually needs to make. The government of Nouri al-Maliki, embattled, is still together and despite the enemy's tenacity there are no rivals behind which Iraqis have gone. The "bad options" Goldberg says that Washington has are the ones he gives us. And then, Pinochet himself, a lurid Cold War remainder whose rule could only arguably have led directly to present-day Chile. Rather, Goldberg wants correlation to prove causation: "Pinochet's abuses helped create a civil society," he asserts, crediting Pinochet with "democratic institutions and infrastructure" and "free-market reforms."

First, Chileans were already navigating constitutional government before Pinochet took it from them. Second, Pinochet plus Chile equals enterprise is not universal — the Czechs and Estonians didn't learn about economic liberty from Moscow. Third, if non-totalitarian authoritarian Pinochet made it all happen? On Pinochet Christopher Hitchens has opined, reasonably, that "free-marketeers presumably do not believe that you need torture and murder and dictatorship to implement their policies." Or Americans with any interest in the vindication of their government's foreign efforts.

The "Kirkpatrick doctrine," that of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, is part of Goldberg's justification. But Kirkpatrick advocated forbearance of authoritarian regimes opposed to the totalitarian Soviets, not dictatorial coups fifteen years later, not the political infanticide of Goldberg's design. In her own words, Kirkpatrick said "I think that it's very important for us to continue to assure Eastern Europeans and citizens of the former Soviet Union, that whatever the current difficulties, we are convinced that they have made the good choice, the right choice, for the long run."

After the removal of a Stalinist despot, and granting to popular confirmation a constitution and government, actions led by a president who ran for reelection on the probity of his administration, it upends reason to believe that the United States would not enervate the libertarian causes it has always impelled, or the national will therefor. It is disturbing enough to hear of the extent of Iran and Syria's manipulation, the murder of Iraqis by enemies of the state who wear the state's uniforms. But to openly effect an oppressive government?

Practically: who would be picked to play Pinochet; how many and which kinds of dissidents could he harass, imprison, execute; how much of the nation's resources would be his through escheat; what would be his time limit to reinstate what he undid; or would there be one?

On the right, some parochialists are resigned to leaving the Third World to the several brands of fascists — but one has to strain to recall the last time somebody wanted to forfeit an entire country, and positively. If polemics have not left us all dulled, there will be an exclamation, to Jonah Goldberg, of: What did you just say? Goldberg's article is out of character, insouciance over the betrayal of millions, but that is not an excuse.

National Review's editors and publishers, to avoid an impression of lazy inconstancy that could nag, might return to the departure of Ann Coulter five years ago. Coulter was admonished for writing, on September 13, 2001, in an obstreperous tribute to the slain Barbara Olson, that the United States "should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Goldberg, in fact, wrote about the unsuccessful conciliation and Coulter's contract halt.

Coulter, Goldberg explained, didn't fail as a person, but as a writer. What so repulsed was her implication of literally forcing a populace to obey, in Goldberg's words in 2001, "at gunpoint." Unless the Iraqi Pinochet employs dominative psychokinesis, he will have to follow Goldberg's plan with the force of arms, too. So, turn to Goldberg. If the demand for a Pinochet impersonation was a joke, it wasn't funny. If, as the saying goes, Goldberg was "just thinking out loud," he should think hereupon to himself, principally on where he went wrong.

If Coulter was too much, in the rawness of September 2001, either National Review deals with Goldberg or it tolerates what is understood in conscionable terms only as pro-fascistic. Does meaning still matter to the right? Goldberg should apologize and recant or National Review should send Goldberg the same way as Coulter — out.

If someone whispered to Harold Ford, Jr. — before a consummation in failure to be elected the junior United States Senator from Tennessee this November — that divine intervention was a resort, the congressman might have assumed that an endorsement had already been secured. "We got something else at work," announced Ford at a rally, one week after imparting his campaign manager's confidence in party doxology: "He said Republicans fear the Lord; he said Democrats fear and love the Lord." The King of Kings bid Brother Ford follow a path out of public servitude, and so it was.

About the same time, Heather Mac Donald, fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, had published a commentary piece on politics and religion, and religion and religion. Writing that "Democrats have been trying to show that they, too, have God in their hearts" since an electoral defeat two years before, Mac Donald related the open confessions of Harold Ford, Hillary Clinton and something on Capitol Hill called the Democratic Faith Working Group.

What does a candidate's witness mean, she asks: "That he is a good person?" No disagreement between the religious and irreligious on that; both are wary of pretenders. Offer a general remark about "evangelism" to someone under 70 years of age and there is a fifty-fifty chance you will have to clarify — the seminarian calling, or the telecast hustle? This, in the first few paragraphs, was timely and more contemporary than the rest of the article which, as the opinion of Mac Donald and declared "secular conservatives," still stands.

So Mac Donald takes a sharp turn. Pretense isn't what bothers her. The mere interjection of religion she calls a "conversation-stopper." Her doubt that "a sincere belief in God prevented behavior we now view as morally repugnant" leads an injunction on theological influences entering policy, discourse, and something-other-than-God forbid, one's own mind. The stuff goes past skepticism to plain contempt, flush and terebinthinate.

Discrediting religion needs a captious eye for failings — however central human flaws might be to Christianity, which takes the brunt — and Mac Donald has got one. On repugnance, we are informed that "There were few more religious Americans than antebellum slaveholders and their political representatives; their claim to a divine mandate for slavery was based in unimpeachable Scriptural authority." A false one, as bondsmen were a regulation of the Mosaic laws against which the apostle Paul remonstrated in his letters to the Galatians.

If the misapplication of a tool invalidated its utility, we would have no use for fire, knives, hammers, automobiles, piano strings — let alone religion. Mac Donald is conflating piety, devotion, with pietism, affectation; or else doesn't mind the difference. Were the popular culture of urban blacks not meretricious and patricidal, "the sad state of the inner city" might illustrate the irrelevance of religious obedience. Mennonites, Amish and Quakers don't have the same problems; Quakers' ancestors having used the same book as the slavers to oppose the lien on men's lives.

But one might suppose Scriptural inspiration would be dismissed by Mac Donald as incidental. "It is a proven track record that makes conservative principles superior to liberalism, not the religious inclinations of their proponents." Secular rightism, taken beyond a personal stance, is a narrative of coincidences. Imagine memorizing Paul Hindemith's Sonata for Alto Horn in Eb and Piano, playing the piece without need of music for several years; and upon reaching a sufficient level of confidence, denying Hindemith's authorship or the authenticity of a score, instead maintaining that given enough musical insight a student could construct every note, rhythm and phrase for each of four movements all by himself. After all, if Hindemith's music were so compelling wouldn't anyone come to a similar conclusion?

Mac Donald thinks George Bush's avowal that "God wants everybody to be free" is "disquieting" because of a disjuncture from "worldly evidence." The president had at least two reasons for saying what he did. First, the formulation is neither novel nor strange, inscribed by Thomas Jefferson in 1776 as "certain unalienable rights," endowed by the Creator, of which "liberty" is one. Rejected by some in dialectics, free will has endured in Western thought, often proposed as self-evident and inviolate as it is providential — Mac Donald has other statements to impugn before turning to Bush's. Second, the president is not the only one judging his actions according to guiding principles. Mac Donald may not, but many millions do listen to clergy. Adjutants of the late Pope John Paul II decried the liberation of 25 million in Iraq as "a crime against humanity," the pope himself "a defeat" therefor. Mr. Bush has an interest in exegetical defense.

A-ha! Unresolvable contention! Mac Donald, who has elsewhere called the Bible "open-ended," adduces the defeatist platform of unsuccessful Senate challenger Ned Lamont. "If opposing candidates declare themselves supplicants of the divine will," she asks, "how will a voter decide who is most likely to receive divine guidance?" As they would anything else, yes? Mac Donald is welcome to submit subjects in the humanities settled beyond dispute. In the meantime, she can contemplate Pope Benedict's speech on faith and reason.

"The scientific ethos," the pontiff said in September, "is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity," by which "theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith."

Values, for Mac Donald, "are best grounded in reason and evidence, not revelation." But logical deduction is to moral philosophy what a thresher is to harvesting — a dumb machine reliant on input. If we are governed by a universal system, which is it? Islamist fascists specialize in promulgating every facet of living; or there is, for one, the Bible.

Go strictly on evidence? Empiricism leads to dutiful nescience, where human dignity becomes just one of several competing suggestions for what in the world to do with people. Barge into a discussion on a college campus, or most anywhere in Europe, or within the United Nations Human Rights Council, and you may interrupt an exercise in rationally concluding that man has no natural rights to enterprise, speech, property or life itself.

A little farther on, Mac Donald assures that "the Golden Rule and innate human empathy provide ample guidance for moral behavior." The command to do unto others as one would have done to him is correctly attributed to Jesus of Nazareth and his preaching; incorrectly when used to imply that Jesus taught nothing else. Alone, the Golden Rule instructs a relativistic pact of mutual non-intervention through which Party A, so long as he remains unmolested by Party B, shouldn't reproach the persecution of Party C by Party B; or else is not empowered to stop certain activities of Party B that will lead to B inflicting pain on C.

Only "innate empathy" can intervene, and as sure as there are those few totally without it, we have no such comfort. Ayn Rand understood that "There is no such thing as the right to enslave," but in 1957 Whittaker Chambers, reviewing Atlas Shrugged, wondered if Rand didn't know why: "Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world. ...If Man's heroism (some will prefer to say: human dignity) no longer derives from God...then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity."

From postulate to party to policy to perfect world, we can pick and choose among the materialistic detestations that the last century alone had to offer. Chambers captured the irony in the arch-individualist's oeuvre overturning her thesis. God, even the idea of a divine sovereign, is a great consolation: unlimited power wielded without fault or extremity — while man takes ahold of just a little and makes himself into a cynosure, first tumescent and then implosive, always baneful. Absent something grander, there is only the self, and that vehemence is in Mac Donald, chafed because "America's rules of religious etiquette demand that we acquiesce silently in a believer's claim of revelation." How dare they. Even the Constitution is a skeptical writ, insofar as the Founders "left God out of the Constitution," when in fact the document carefully indemnified religion against proscription or marginalization, or weird theophobia, like that of Heather Mac Donald.

And: Congress went thataway. Election results aren't devastating for the Republican Party but they are unassailable: half a dozen Senate and over two dozen House seats taken by the erstwhile minority, no opposition incumbents exacted in kind, a similar picture in the capitals of most of the fifty states. In Washington, control of the legislature changes as it usually has — cleanly.

For some on the right and in the party, this is just the opportunity for reformation, to efface certain sections of the Republican palimpsest.

However, just what of party canon needs to be scratched out and what overlaid will be subject to the same differences that, it is easy to argue, impaired the defense of a majority this November. At present Republicans stand for Republicanism, tautology intended, but Republicans ended up there gradually rather than egregiously. The 1994 revolution's eponym fell in 1998; and the last serious mention of the federal budget deficit was five years ago, the day before the start of a world war, after which Republicans on Capitol Hill were complaisant over soft-statist propositions of a theretofore presumptive commander-in-chief.

Widely telecast, Republicans plan to take the party back to — somewhere not here. In the Senate, calls for moving left. In the House, a return to tabula rasa, and several extant congressmen have announced candidacy for minority leader, whip, conference chairman. Public statements generally regret drift, complacency, banality; and resolve to, in the words of Representative John Boehner, reconstruct what in 1994 "translated," for Congress, "the coalition that put Ronald Reagan in office." The 2006 loss occurred when the "coalition came apart."

Boehner and others want to put the coalition back together, and it won't be as simple as another unifying platform. The axiom of power and corruption stands, but pressure to moderate came over the last decade from a leftist party, media and clerisy, all of which spent the last five years, particularly, striking in places where the rightist majority was vulnerable. Before the midterm we heard that Republicans deserved to lose, and now hear that they are better off.

Are they? Advantages of minority status are tiny at best. There isn't much to do except refit and try again. In 2008, the party is likely to encounter an environment less hospitable to small-government ideals, and fortified to keep them out. If Democrats find it hard to legislate, the consequences of that difficulty will be easier to bear by the efforts of a sympathetic press corps. On the major networks and in the major newspapers, Washington proceedings will still be narrated as Republican misfeasance and failure, only now with the corollary that Congress a) is not responsible, and b) had its good deeds stopped up.

Some positions will be painful to adopt and maintain. Take an issue as signal this year as pork-barrel spending. Blogger Glenn Reynolds, one of the principal members of Porkbusters, a group petitioning Congress to stop measuring the legislator's worth to his constituency by the earmarked dollar, observed in October — a month after Washington's passage of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act — that "It's insiders versus outsiders, not Democrats versus Republicans, and however the elections go things aren't likely to change much because of party shifts."

As written here a year ago, unlimited incumbency lends itself to ingratiation. That is a rule, and only a little interpretation is needed to assume that it will be followed by the Democrats — Senator Chuck Schumer last week, heralding "majority for a generation," warned his party, "Our joy today will vanish if we can't produce for the American people." Schumer could have chosen a lot of words, like "speak," work," "perform" or "reform," but no, he said "produce." Unless Republicans politic against diverting federal monies thither, even to their own states and districts, a discretionary register will be used less for civil scrutiny than for public munificence.

That is a domestic conundrum. On foreign affairs, revivalists ought look to whether intervention and nation-building — held here to be essential for national security, however expensive — are as pungently consistent with other principles as reformers and critics alike might demand. Less entitlements here, plenary entitlement abroad? It can be done. Can it be argued?

Republicans have some time. There are ten days to go before Thanksgiving, and Democratic leaders are still posing to smile in photographs with President Bush. Nevertheless, big policy debates are coming up.

It was the recollection of journalist and historian William Shirer that Adolf Hitler maintained "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner." Footnoted in any appreciation of Richard Wagner is the composer's suspicion of modernity and his inveterate anti-Semitism, faults shared by the German dictator. But rather Wagner, Shirer believed, provided with his "towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths" endemic grandeur that the Third Reich could and would restore — as dictated by Hitler's expository Mein Kampf.

The Nazi manifesto could be called a product of intellectual convenience. Shirer was more descriptive. In a chapter of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich titled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich," Shirer wrote how Hitler's beliefs were dictated from Lansberg prison "in all their appalling crudeness," derived from "a weird mixture of irresponsible, megalomaniacal ideas which erupted from German thinkers during the nineteenth century." Establishing the reality of Germany after the Great War — only shallowly democratic and pluralist — Shirer contended Hitler's activation was typical among the Germanic but for "the means of applying" these things, and that the fulminant Reich embodied a primeval which "always fascinated the German mind."

It wasn't that Teutonic myth and Shirer's "odd assortment of erudite but unbalanced" intellectuals, when combined, led one to conquest. Hitler did appeal through common culture. The rudiment of his Weltanschauung, however, was simplistically dominative — the sum of concepts from Georg Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, H.S. Chamberlain and others in Hitler's "littered mind," by any reckoning, a totalist empire.

Mary Habeck, professor at John Hopkins University, has written a book Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. "What were the reasons," Habeck asks of the nineteen September 11th hijackers, "that they gave for the attack?" Reaching back eight hundred years, Habeck traces forward in time the lineage of exegetes who interpreted Islam rigidly and with increasing resistance to a popularly mollified struggle — jihad. In the Koran, we learn, Mohammed would define observance as both aggrandizement and sublimation, the former "understood by present-day Muslims to refer to...a time that has come and gone." Over the last century, several radical intellectuals struck at Western moderation. Habeck names three who contributed directly to today's Islamist fascism, and follows them closely: Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Sayyid Mawdudi.

All three men were certifiably out to lunch. As with Hitler's national socialism, to read Islamism is to wade through delirium. Habeck, like Shirer, is to be thanked for completing a transposition of conspiracist lunacy. Her book stands out on two points. First, it refutes any irredentist claims for this kind of terrorism by simply turning to the many mentions of a global caliphate. Second, it reveals the work of the three as only plausibly originalist or regressive. Al-Banna, Qutb and Mawdudi took extraordinary liberties with Islam itself, constructing sinuous arguments to arrive at very narrow, totalitarian conclusions — an "Islamic state," but one misnamed. Not only did the three authors sidestep history and geography, but lifted much from the world they contrived to destroy.

Al-Banna, for instance, "did not ignore modern European concepts like nationalism, patriotism, constitutionalism and socialism is his search for an answer. ...In a passage strangely reminiscent of communist and fascist discourse of the same time, he wrote that 'after having sown injustice, servitude and tyranny, [the West] is bewildered, and writhes in its contradictions.'" Mawdudi "envisioned the Islamic state that would be run by a small group of Koranically educated and pious clergy, somewhat like the Politburo of the Soviet state." Habeck repeatedly notes such a reliance: al-Banna "did not accept foreign ideas" but was eager to use them once they had been "transformed to conform with the Koran," while Mawdudi picked "foreign ideas and gave them an Islamic meaning and context, finding ways to justify his prescriptions from the sacred texts." These scholars and their modern equivalents have played so roughly with categories of jihad, the meaning of disbelief and its consequences, the compass of Islamic territory and even the relevance of Mohammed himself that "fundamentalist Islam" comes across to the reader as not resembling the religion much at all.

Of interest near the end of Habeck's book is the lack of effort among radicals to clarify an "Islamic state." One contemporary group tried, sketching a constitution "that envisions a totalitarian dictatorship without a legislature or formal judiciary that could check the unchallenged power of the ruler. Private behavior — and even secret thoughts — would be regulated by the state." Is it reductionism, at all, to find a parallel in a maxim of history's most flamboyant dictator, "absolute responsibility unconditionally combined with absolute authority"? Hitler — or any tyrant that was — hadn't come up with anything basically unique.

Professor Habeck draws prudent conclusions, more conservative than those here. In the last chapter of Knowing the Enemy, she writes that Islamism's "innovations" are deviant canon and the use of violence as good works. However alloyed, Islamism still qualifies, for Habeck, as a religious calling. Should it? Or is it common culture used as a transmitter? What, in this judgment, is exclusive to Islam but for the historical context and means of expression? If none of it is, the differences between, say, Islamist fascists and Chinese Communists are simply degrees of malignance; therein a potential for American strategic opposition, even military engagement, against dozens of countries for many years. It wouldn't be popular but under the circumstances more sensible than implicating Islam and supporting, as suggested by some, the placation of secular autocracy — as easily and fruitlessly as one might have had the Weimar Reichstag ban Tristan und Isolde.

About halfway through his Monday afternoon radio broadcast Rush Limbaugh turned to a short essay written by blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds two days before. Calling his work "A GOP Pre-Mortem," Reynolds gave his etiology of what would happen when, as he believed likely, "the GOP fares badly next month." Testily, Limbaugh depreciated the argument as soon as he introduced it, rejecting Reynolds' thesis — "Republicans deserve to lose"— as "a fool reason," and then asking, rhetorically, if the congressional alternative was just as deserved. He enumerated some of what Democrats had themselves promised to bring, as a majority, to the 110th Congress: arbitrary military withdrawal from Iraq, higher taxes, dudgeon and public inquiries and indictments over the White House's war conduct. The list was accurate, surely compelling in an exchange other than this one, where it was something of a red herring.

Would that Limbaugh have directly addressed Reynolds' own numbered sequence, "unforced errors" of the Republican Party, six of them in all. Step back. Reynolds' critique is strongest as a personal statement; not as a recounting of congressional events over the last twenty months, or an appraisal of Republican fidelity to rightist convictions. Applied broadly as Reynolds intends it to be, the argument, under omissions and inconsistencies, falters.

What is not immediately, or ever, apparent in the "pre-mortem" is which part or parts of the electorate — on whose support majorities have depended for the last two elections — will abandon Republicans this time, or why. That adjoining constituencies must accept some interests to be advanced in mutual exclusion of others ought not need mention, yet Reynolds concludes that "Republicans have managed to leave every segment of the base unhappy." Not quite so, or else candidates would be polling around zero.

Of the six transgressions: one is posited to have angered libertarians; another, judicial ideologues; two more, national security voters; and the last pair, the scrupulous. Over what? "Things that weren't even all that important." Leave aside the matter of withholding support where exculpation would be more appropriate, and consider the elections themselves. These are midterms, the House and a third of the Senate in contention. But in only three of the "unforced errors" did Congress affront public opinion. Where the White House was responsible for unpopular and inadvisable policy, why turn on the legislature? And if Republicans on Capitol Hill defied the Bush administration to assume politically favorable positions, as they did in force during the events on the other half of Reynolds' list, how and whom did they betray?

Limbaugh might have expounded on the left's escape from Reynolds' scrutiny. Reynolds qualified his essay only with the empty remark "Democrats don't really deserve to win, either." So — what, a two-year recess? The phrase "unforced error" has a very specific connotation, and Republicans made the decisions they did in response to certain counteractions — political circumstances, the Democratic Party and George Bush.

For the 2005 court-ordered privation of Terry Schiavo, the first "error," Reynolds does note Ralph Nader, one of the strange bedfellows made during the final legal dispute. Ten more bedfellows constituted one-fifth of the Democrats voting with Republicans for federal review of Schiavo's case, and nearly one quarter of the Congressional Black Caucus. If the religious are an electoral pillar of the right's, the monophonic American black vote is such of the left's — and there, as part of the bifurcated Democratic vote on the House floor, proportionally three times that of all Republicans voting against, was a wing of the Caucus.

Reynolds refers to the Supreme Court nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers as an eponymous "debacle," which is curious, since the compromise nomination a) produced very little negative mainstream press; b) polled with only slightly less popularity than the previous nominee, John Roberts; was c) retracted amid ululations from some rightists; and finally d) followed by the successful appointment of Samuel Alito. "The damage was done," writes Reynolds. OK, but why would restitution consist of replacing Republican senators, who didn't like Miers, with a selection to ensure another benign jurist like the counsel?

The White House was also at odds with Capitol Hill on a rescinded Emirati bid for a British port company operating in the United States, and various sutural measures for the border shared with Mexico. Congress, President Bush protested, "ought to listen to what I have to say to this." Congress answered him by anathematizing Dubai Ports World in committee. Not one week ago, there were rumors that the president would lose a border-fence bill, passed by an adjourned congress, in his pocket. Reynolds argues that all of this diminished the president's standing in national security. Maybe — but opposite Bush each time was an unsympathetic Republican congress. And the president isn't on the ballot.

Back in May, House Speaker Dennis Hastert rebuked the Justice Department for having collected evidence for graft charges against Democrat William Jefferson through a raid on the Rayburn House Office Building. He was one of a few representatives to call the action unconstitutional and demand the forfeiture of materials seized — a recondite position that made for bad politics. Hastert was not one of several congressmen who insinuated that Jefferson's troubles were the work of precipitate bigots. The speaker was, however, joined in his demurral by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Who threatened to bring down the San Francisco Democrat's party this November? Exactly one person to date, an anonymous staffer from the Congressional Black Caucus who was quoted by The Hill.

Reynolds' justification for the last "error" is inchoate — whatever the details, he writes, exiled lecher Mark Foley was "probably enough" to make the majority party irredeemable. So the impression of Republican obscurantism shall lead the right to elect a legislature that will, where Republicans simply failed, promulgate disappointments as a matter of ideological course, perhaps save for a sex outrage — unless, say, an elder stateswoman has been chasing after somebody's granddaughter? Reynolds is supported by polls, certainly. But the worst criticisms of Republicans come from judging the party in isolation. To the sense of rightist voters waiting until a general election to express displeasure — there are reasons, other than Republican vapidity, why statist ennui overshadows the Gingrich spirit. Two hundred twenty-something, if the right's avengers have their way.

On Monday, a Central Intelligence Agency report, insofar selectively and illegally divulged to the New York Times, stated that the deposition of Saddam Hussein and multinational occupation of Iraq engendered Near East terrorism. On Tuesday, when President Bush ordered partial content of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate revealed for people's consumption, the report stated that, indeed, a foreign presence in Iraq fulfilled a certain propagandistic prophecy — but Iraq's salience was also the threat to Islamic fascism posed by counterterrorist and democratist successes.

On Wednesday, the United States Military Academy published an al Qaeda epistle from December of last year, its topic familiar: Islamist impuissance and failure. The same day, the Program on International Policy Attitudes released a poll of Iraqi attitudes that, rough as the survey was, showed no ambivalence towards the prospect of American forces leaving so Iraqis could turn their attention to hated al Qaeda operatives as soon as possible. Brought to mind was a year-old Pew study in which respondents in six Muslim countries spurned the same Islamist call to jihad we were told on Monday they wanted to answer.

Now, polls are inductive and their implications can only be made by projecting the tiny part onto the very large whole. Still, there are constants in Near Eastern opinion, such as the broad dislike of Jews expressed in every country Pew visited. Yet as the Middle East Media Research Institute proves, sympathy for messianic fascism is as prevalent in discourse conducted and constrained by most states in that region as traducement for male-pattern baldness on Madison Avenue — and the poll numbers evince public contravention.

Nobody has taken a census of active or prospective terrorists, so we don't know precisely who they are. The nineteen 2001 al Qaeda hijackers made clear that affluence was no inoculation. Abnormalities can be extrapolated from the defining accomplishments of someone like Mohammed Atta. Guantanamo Bay detainees remain a danger to their wardens. Beyond that, what is drawn from interviews with terrorists but literal transmissions of what a terrorist believes, with just a hint as to the subject's criminality? This has been asked before but must be again: what drives a man to invest his time or even his life in the preferential, not incidental or accidental, murder of innocents? Better, what other than psychopathy?

This distinction matters quite a bit when the debate is over a quantifiable number of people committing terrorism who would not have otherwise, as based on an impression of cultural indignation — one that is often instigated by Near Eastern tyrants, encouraged by conformist cultures and framed in telephoto lenses of Reuters and the Associated Press. The Monday version of the National Intelligence Estimate reinforced the position held by opponents of intervention, mostly on the left but on the isolationist right, too: that the intrusive removal of a dictator so offended people that they decided to respond with wanton killing, mainly under the direction of al Qaeda or Ba'athists.

Now, the military layman knows that strategies may initially exacerbate adverse conditions, such as mobilization of the enemy before its eventual defeat. National Review's Jonah Goldberg accepted, for the sake of argument, the proposition that Operation Iraqi Freedom "stirred up a hornet's nest." Yes but, opined Goldberg, "If my backyard is festooned with hornet nests, I will likely be safer from a sting on any given day if I do nothing than I will be on the day or days I begin destroying them." A reader responded within the day: "The only problem with your analogy is that you don't create more hornets when you destroy the hornets' nest," and the speculation ended there.

In non-state authoritarianism is something both primal and unprecedented. The men who are al Qaeda — those who are willing, not imbeciles or captives strapped to bombs — are not conscripts. Recruits of a democracy's army learn to observe the laws of war, engage military targets with precision and, increasingly, moonlight as civil infrastructure administrators. Terrorists flaunt military conduct, make sport of civilian butchery and raise standards of living of others only to extract dependency. With, say, the Wehrmacht, an American in theater could always find some distant comfort in knowing that the soldiers oppugning him might not have if it weren't for their "Fuhrer" — Stephen Ambrose once wrote that GIs found the strongest propinquity, next to the Dutch, with the Germans. For a country, one could be caught up by nationalism — in the terror cell, the shared trait is slavering aggression.

For al Qaeda and its affiliates, there is the assumption that the enemy is not comprised of the insane. On how sound a basis? If the foregoing analogy is apt: What is to say the hornets weren't hornets that were simply quiescent, not a terrorist reserve so much as a vein of disturbed or malign men who disgust most of their countrymen as much as they do us. Iraq is the war's affirmed central battlefield and it may divert men from their courses in life to terrorism. Unconfirmed is whether the men get mad or were mad to begin with, and which use of antonomasia applies. Would the terrorist have been a Perry Como, or a Jack the Ripper?

Any Republican running for Governor of Ohio this year would expect to labor under the burden of legislative disappointment and gubernatorial disgrace but Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell should have been, as one who is heterodox, spared some aggregate blame. He hasn't been, it seems, and against Democratic opponent Ted Strickland polls at a deficit of anywhere between twelve and twenty points. If prevailing analyses are correct, affiliation is enough to include Blackwell in the circuit channeling public discontent.

Ohio is known nationally for four attributes, two historical and two contemporary. It is the American political median and presidential bellwether, its economy has gone torpid and its capital executive would if it were possible be evicted from his Columbus mansion.

Governor Bob Taft, who over the last four years walked stepwise into ignominy, figures as the most popular reason for Ohioans to disencumber themselves of the Republican Party in at least one elected office. He wasn't always. The man views private assets in terms of confiscation but inasmuch as he does, he settles comfortably with Ohio Republicans and would appeal to the typical Democrat. He is prosaic, but Taft resides in the state that exalted George Voinovich. What spent the public's good will was Taft's being disingenuous (his 2002 opponent was accused of wishing to impose the kinds of taxes Taft himself levied once re-elected), then venal (gifts and favors were illegally traded) and then obtuse (the impeachable Taft abides an approval rating below 20 percent).

Of course, inordinate taxation works just the same no matter who is responsible — Ohio nearly leads the Union as the state to where one relocates not to succeed in business but fill state coffers. One study placed it at unflattering ends of rankings, third-highest in taxes and third-slowest in growth. On this matter particularly Blackwell has distinguished — estranged — himself from Taft and much of the rest of the party. In 2003 Blackwell steered a statewide petition to repeal a tax increase approved by a bicameral Republican majority and signed by Taft. The petition collapsed and the secretary was publicly chastised by the state party chairman and a majority leader, but Blackwell was quoted as saying something not likely uttered in Senate or House chambers: "Spending drives our tax policy and our tax policy feeds our spending sprees," he said, reminding taxpayers that services and entitlements are always leveraged against an individual's earnings and prospects.

Blackwell's platform for governor, at the cost of broad appeal, has the same arresting pellucidity. What has he in store for state finances? Holding state spending at an incline parallel to growth of the tax base, requiring a two-thirds legislative majority for the passage of new taxes, telescoping marginal rates. "Government does not create wealth" is the introductory statement, one that most American politicians slip up and blurt out before they wake up from their nightmare. Abortion? Two victims per instance, Blackwell says, the mother and her child. Marriage? If it isn't a man and a woman, it — isn't. Second Amendment? The secretary is a Life Member of the National Rifle Association, thank you. Blackwell's website reads like the written statement of a scrupulous debater, not a candidate for public office.

Compare this to Ted Strickland, looking to Columbus from his place on Capitol Hill, who appears to consider himself incidental to the race — as if a buckling Taft will catch Blackwell at the shins so Strickland can step over the heap of the two of them and into office. Last month two Ohio newspapers reported Strickland to be vague — each paper's word — on policy. The leftward Columbus Dispatch politely noted that for school funding — a regime serially ruled unconstitutional by the state's supreme court — Strickland promised to present an alternative to Blackwell's "65-Cent Solution" at some point after November 7th.

Strickland's policy abstracts reflect this. The candidate is interested in "Promoting Economic Inclusion," "Establishing New Micro-Incubators" and "Creating an Ohio Development and Redevelopment Plan." While Ohio's business environment is barren enough for one to think of hydroponics, the phrases imply the market as seen from a bureaucracy, not as it actually is. If profit needs risk, what happens when a state agency sees to it that risk is removed? Columbus favors these kinds of programs already, but if this set doesn't already exist, how will it be funded? And if Columbus has done nothing for the entrepreneur under Taft, why will a "statewide process" work any differently under Strickland? Indirectly related: was jazz a spontaneous blessing from an American subculture or was it the multi-annual yield of something like Strickland's "community arts projects that will achieve the most productive results for the public," whatever the hell that means? Though obscurantist, Strickland as governor is certainly deducible, all the emphasis on words like "give," "build" and "provide" what Republican Statehouse hopeful Ed Herman drily paraphrased as "For Ohio to grow we must push more state dollars towards state-controlled economic development authorities."

It is justified that Ohioans would want an upright governor, and, too, one that will effect — force, if the legislature isn't amenable — a change in state policies. Both candidates meet the first standard. The second? Ted Strickland was perhaps too accurate in his observation that "sixteen years of Republican rule have driven Ohio to the bottom among key indicators of economic health," as his administration would be, so tendered, just as managerial and ponderous as Bob Taft's. This year, for governor, "change" will come from the Republicans.

The evening of the second Monday in June I accompanied my parents to the local veterinarian's office. In my mother's arms was Rascal, one of a pair of cats my family adopted in 1990, who had over the last twenty-four hours exhibited every moribund quality of an animal fit for barbiturate mercy. What the vet had diagnosed as a minor stroke the week before deprived the russet tabby of mobility and lucidity. Rascal was drawn, unsteady and capable of little more than sleep, and the vet's standing rule for "a pet no longer acting like a pet" applied.

I took — have taken — the death rationally. Rascal enjoyed both longevity and affection, her declension so gradual it was graceful. But there are moments, crystalline in memory, that evoke on account of man's dignity toward those creatures over which he has dominion: my mother letting Rascal crawl on the front porch to where the cat had many times in her youth scrambled, disobediently, out the door; Rascal craning her neck to peek out the car window; in the lobby of the animal hospital, one last look from the old cat, cognizant or otherwise; and the doctor's aide, with a laconic condolence, carrying Rascal down a short hall to a scrubbed, off-white room from which the dying animal would be released.

My mother and father and I drove to a restaurant where we toasted the memory of our beloved family pet and spoke of questions of ownership made relevant with Rascal's passing. How would Rascal's surviving littermate Buddy, punctilious and fussy in his own right, fare without his companion? How soon to adopt? The questions were for my parents, since I had long since moved out and had not considered owning cats for myself. Even so I advocated the continued presence of the animals at the house in which I grew up — my father was willing to adopt more within reason, while my mother took on a number of reservations. None of her extenuations seemed justified enough to deprive either my mother or a cat of warm companionship so I counseled and cajoled freely. I assumed the discussion would remain academic for some time; at least until we learned of a respectably owned dame bearing a litter.

Before the end of the month my mother was informed by a friend that the friend's acquaintance had brought home, for caretaking, a pair of litters from the shelter at which she worked. Would my mother like to go see them? She accepted the invitation and returned with a story of ninety minutes spent with a dozen tumbling, mewling kittens. One litter was a week older than the other, unanimously white with broken tabby stripes. The second litter was a mix: the mother was thin from indigence but lithe and sleek by design, of Oriental lineage. Three of her brood reflected this, two pitch males and a tortoiseshell female. The fourth and fifth kittens, a boy and a girl, were sired from a father of very different blood, notably larger than their siblings, striped silver and brown, and hirsute. My mother remarked on one of these last two, dubbed "Harry" by the shelter caretaker — he was the largest, and gregarious and unwieldy, scampering for my mother and tripping over his own feet.

My father and I were invited to accompany my mother on a second viewing and it was shortly after the three of us were led into the worker's basement nursery that I reversed my position on ownership. The first litter was evanescent, hardly to be seen. Led by the clumsy greyish champion, however, the second litter met our group and played. Before the visit was half over I had silently chosen the big tabby and the tortoiseshell. The black pair attracted my parents. These selections were made known to the worker within a week, and after another visit — between the caretaker's subtle appeal for the fifth, who proceeded to steal my mother's heart during a third visit with adoring gazes that were almost sentient — all five kittens of the second litter were reserved, three for my parents and two for myself. On the first Friday in August, the kittens were taken to their respective adoptive homes.

Shelters christen animals for clerical purposes, so it was with no compunction that — once in my custody — the girl, as homage to the Japanese keiretsu, became "Mitsubishi" and the boy, in a tribute to American colloquialisms, became "Mac." The latter is irreducible, the former abbreviated in practice to "Mitsi." After puzzling over Mac's size and length of hair I determined with some confidence that he and his sister counterpart are part Maine Coon — the Maine Coon being an American breed whose more memorable specimens possess the size, appearance and genial temperament of small collies. Mac is enormous for a kitten, stocky and sturdy. Head-on, he looks like a fuzzy rectangle. Mitsubishi is svelte, her thin frame clothed in silky, short fur. Two months ago she showed the signs of a tortoiseshell pattern; since then the coat has progressed from black with faint, butterscotch smudges to a black that dissolves, hindward, into a neutral opalescence, save for two patches of stark white — one on her jaw and the other running down her belly.

Mac and Mitsubishi are intelligent and sociable. Both come when called, following fast success with associating a verbal command with a treat; though it appears as if both believe their name to be "Mac." The two are fascinated, for some reason, with my excavation of their litter; upon hearing the shuffle of clay they regularly approach and insist upon helping. Opening the refridgerator similarly draws them into the kitchen and, were they to have their own way, into the vegetable crisper. When I am seated and working, the kittens find a nearby perch and look on.

The kittens acclimated themselves to my apartment quickly — three weeks from the day I opened an animal carrier on the floor of my bedroom to let the pair out, Mac and Mitsubishi are calm and content, and very much at home. Even so, the day they arrived, the two kittens were judicious when they weren't overwhelmed in consternation, squealing out the moment neither one could see where I had gone. Their world consisted of a triangle: litter in a half-bathroom on one arc and food and water in the kitchen on the other, the space under my bed equidistant. Sovereignty was established over the next several days in what was a sort of feline colonialism, generally consisting of two steps: one, discovery of an object; two, all the scandent possibilities. First the kittens found the balcony's sliding doors, then the curtains. They found the top of my bed, then my endtable and everything on it. The kittens encountered my pair of powder-blue wingback chairs and then the wings themselves.

Although sixteen years is time enough for entropy, I do not particularly remember Rascal or Buddy nearly as athletic or excitable and Mac and Mitsubishi. The kittens tussle and chase each other incessantly; it was with some encouragement and discouragement that I taught them not to mistake my hands as valid targets, and it will require more work to secure the same exemption for my pantlegs and shoestrings. Both kittens are eager to pretend to hunt, and so Mac and Mitsubishi are each the other's favorite plaything. I have hesitated to invest too much in cat toys; kittens and cats are pragmatists in leisure. Intention means nothing next to design, and anything with reasonable ballistic properties that can be dislodged will be dislodged — I consider myself lucky to have eschewed tchotchkes. In just one storebought item have they have not lost interest: fluorescent, crown-shaped pieces of plastic. Sold as "Cat Crazies," these are reverse Klein bottles in the sense that they cannot not exist in the cat universe.

Tireless activity has its foibles, as humans do in fact tire. Buddy and Rascal were kept in the basement of the family house, at all times and then at night, for nearly a year; and age had likely becalmed them by the time they were given unrestricted range of the house. "Lights out," to my dismay, has been interpreted by Mac and Mitsubishi as license to do whatever they want with the benefit of not being seen. My bed was designated for midnight battles and, worse, after keeping me past reasonable hours the kittens would make one clatter or another between half-past five and six o'clock in the morning. Simply closing the door carried with it risks, principally because the litter box was most effectively located in the bath off the master bedroom and a disruption of continuity, even with a second box outside, could bring confusion and attendant coprological mishaps. Even when I was ready to shut the door, I was defied on the first try. Within thirty seconds, two pairs of paws curled between the bottom rail and sill, pushing and tugging and undermining the door like sappers would a wall; then one cat apparently used the other as a battering ram and Bang! the door swung open. I tried again; the kittens obliged and I have since slept soundly.

Tomorrow I will bring Mac and Mitsubishi to the veterinarian for standard tests and other confirmations of well-being. That cost will be added to that of apartment security deposits, adoption fees, food, litter, amenities, time and sleep. What is returned? Unconditional affection; more memories, vitrescent and edifying, not so bittersweet as June's.

If the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol had not been agitating for the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld since the summer of 2001, there could be something to a Bush cabinet office reserved for Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman — yesterday challenged and bereft of Democratic endorsement for his incumbency. Presently Joe's choices are a retreat from politics and an independent candidacy: Joe as apostate, Joe as mugwump.

Should Joe run, the state electorate will have three choices: Joe Lieberman, primary victor Ned Lamont and a Republican whose name — perhaps like all Republican senatorial contestants from Connecticut since Lowell Weicker and James Buckley — dwells in obscurity. Assuming that this last one, a dark horse, is so dark that nobody can find him through November 7th, contention will really be between Joe and Ned.

Why no Joe? He is steadfast — those Democrats against him would say pertinacious — in his arguments for militarily engaging the non-state predation of terrorism, especially by weakening or deposing dictatorships directly or indirectly abetting authoritarian culture, and in their place introducing liberal reforms. The senator was memorably booed by the audience of a 2004 presidential primary debate when he did not apologize for holding a position on the Iraqi campaign largely indistinguishable from George W. Bush's.

Ned Lamont, accepted regionally as a party preference and depicted nationally as a party correction, congratulated himself last night on a very clear distinction between him and both Lieberman and Bush. As solidly as the latter pair, Lamont spoke of foreign policy — well, just Iraq, twice — with axiomatic conviction. Granting Lamont some latitude, one can string the Senate hopeful's statements together and conclude that he believes: a) helping Iraqis create a liberally democratic nation out of their country is not worth American lives and resources; b) American soldiers are hapless supernumeraries in, Lamont's words, a "civil war"; and c) what amounts to a full retreat deserves, again, Lamont's words, "the hero's welcome."

United States senators answer to a constituency and also represent the interests of the country. Still, it is a little remarkable to have Lamont, in his victory speech, repeat the sentiments coming from his narrowly focused backers — Connecticut had the most to do with his elevation as an intercessor, America to the White House. Military retraction and bureaucratic expansion, Lamont said, was "the America Connecticut voted for."

Of course, Senator Lieberman swears up and down that he taxes and spends, and decries muscular capitalism, just as much as Lamont could ever manage if he got to Washington. Check Joe's record: he's not lying. So Connecticut's substitution is over the fine point of war and reconstruction. The state's Democrats have what they want right now, and in November might have what they will want then. Is the vaguely isolationist message of Lamont what the country wants?

Polls and anecdotes show that otherwise dispirited majorities can be found to agree that Iraqis can do better than Saddam Hussein, that Hussein colluded with al Qaeda and that there is a reward in posterity for present company having at least tried to democratize Iraq. Salient here is that roughly half of all Americans believe that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Leftist media and intellectuals subtly title this one a mark of American credulity. But the broad left has been very subjective on the matter since 2003, forgetting what was written about what was experienced from 1979 onward; and ignoring a lot more. What to make of Saddam Hussein's obsession with armament that, according to the yet-definitive 2004 WMD compendium from Charles Duelfer, could only have ended inexplicably; complicated by Duelfer's conclusion that Hussein would have resumed development once free from sanctions; and, from a fraction of classified Defense Department reports, the collection of five hundred chemical rounds, confuting all the headlines declaring "no stockpiles."

Ideologues suffer from projection. Missed by Lamont and his supporters is that Americans view operations in Iraq with pessimism but the dismay, though the consistency of certain survey responses, is motivated not by a fundamental difference with intervention or antipathy for George Bush but an impatience with protracted warfare. Democrats, at least those in Georgia who voted yesterday, are not so inclined to anti-pro-Bush-whatever that they will support anything conducive to it, like Cynthia McKinney and her perfervid anti-Semitism, at least one of which voters rejected for a place in Congress. A third-party candidacy by Lieberman might open an interstice through which the GOP can get to the Senate for six years, amusing lagniappe for something so unlikely in New England. Party integrity is instead in question, as it has been for years. Splits in general elections do not make for a strong party, and Bush-protest tickets have so far proven weak. If the Democratic Party faces hostile takeover, the left should know that the state of Connecticut is only one of fifty.

Skepticism is what the rational man can't go without. It is his vade mecum, and when three locations which he has been told are moving towards democracy — Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories — can be determined in respective cases hindered, waylaid and usurped by sedition and terrorism, he responds by taking the nearest democratist by the ear to explain just what in hell is happening.

Each of the three situations deserves attention to its circumstances, as well as misperceptions driving criticism. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in his speech to Congress, offers reminders of the imparted stewardship of his country, the obdurate and numerically select natures of Baghdad's enemy, and — by way of his condemnation of Israel's defense against terrorists of Hezbollah — the autonomy already present in Iraqi polity. Lebanon, the site of open and oblique hostilities between Israel, Syria and Iran, exposes the insolubility of Hezbollah's base violence in the liberalism to which a plurality of Lebanese currently aspire.

It is the Palestinian territories' election early in the year, however, that has been adopted as a precedent and portent by skeptics of democratism and its White House exponents. Skeptics argue that the ascension of terrorists shows the folly of democratization. This is wrongheaded, as it confuses transnationalism and its contrived balloting for democratism and its vision of elemental change in societies. Conservatives on the right are especially liable to this indiscrimination.

In February terrorist group Hamas, after years of aggrandizing inside the territories, rose to power through a process President Bush proudly called "democracy." William F. Buckley, Jr. swiftly wrote two thoughtful disapprobations of what he contended bore Hamas triumphal. In the first article he repudiated the inherent values, as purported, of government by consent; in the second he advised geopolitical progressives to know when to except or abstain. Whither democracy? Mr. Buckley equably approaches the question from the perception, indeed the suspicion, that a democratist pursues liberal reformation in statecraft with concupiscence. It was for Happy Days Were Here Again, a 1993 collection of Mr. Buckley's published work, that three articles were bundled in the subchapter "Three Critical Views on Democratic Fetishism."

One point of Mr. Buckley's is inarguable: what goes on in Gaza and the West Bank is not at all conducive to civil and liberal society. Palestinian rule is not and has never been a democracy. It is an abominable simulacrum, a diplomatic construct whose leaders have, since the Oslo Accords, received international monies and absolution in gross inordinacy to their plain nature and conduct. Mr. Buckley shouldn't trace this back to plans of those who advocate liberalization. Whatever the president thought he could call the process that ended up enabling Hamas, this place is the failure not of the democratists' labors but the transnationalists'.

Moral relativity is the basis for everything a transnationalist does — all countries, governments and leaders are coequal — and so it guided Oslo in 1993. One of the world's most decorated terrorists, Yasser Arafat, was offered the resources, the cachet, of an incipient state. Justification for this went along the lines that a wolf will appreciate the difference between a lamb that is being formally introduced to it and one that is being fed to it. A democratist, if anyone had asked his opinion at the time, would have balked at this and demanded a) the marginalization of anyone like Arafat from politics, and b) the martial nullification of those who intend to overbear free expression in both print and poll. This would have made impossible Arafat's handshake with the late Yitzhak Rabin and necessitated concentration, not withdrawal, of Israeli troops — one reason why, on the face of things, democratists are accused of being unrealistic.

So the Palestinian Authority was created. And? A gangland society prevails. The signal difference between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is that Hamas doesn't bother with a lot of pretense. Children are brought up on poisonous fiction and aspire to Lead Thug, Supporting Thug, Suicide Bomber; and always Jew-Killer. The transnationalists here have had ten more years than the democratists in Iraq, and yet Mesopotamia, with all its troubles, is set to overtake the territories in civil and political liberties.

Here is where conservatives like Mr. Buckley and transnationalists together part ways with democratists. They will consider, conservatives bitterly and transnationalists blithely, an election of thugs unfortunate but incontestable popular affirmation. This is faulty etiology. Given a choice, people do not knowingly subordinate themselves — never has a nation canted into tyranny without directive repression and violence. For those who would reference Adolf Hitler: at their height of electoral manipulation, the Nazis could only entrap 44 percent of the German ballot. Nor are authoritarian parties exercising sovereignty; rather, they are liable to moral estoppel in pais. Like suicide, the idea of a liberal society approving of its own termination is a freakish variable of logic. If citizens wanted to abolish their individual rights, beginning with that to vote, they wouldn't wait for a majority opinion.

The transnationalists' solution is to try again in the same environment and the conservatives' is to leave the wretched thing alone. But even though conservatives may see the intentions behind Oslo to be as notional as the democratists do, their alternative to democratization is little more than tolerance of dictatorships — which puts conservatives back with transnationalists, who believe that men who gain and keep power through force can be trusted. Saladin's politesse at the siege of Kerak in 1183, through which the wedding party of Humphrey of Tolon and Isabella of Jerusalem was left unmolested, is not found in the conduct of modern authoritarians. The challenge to conservatives is exactly how — in concrete terms, not rhetorical legerdemain — the United States is supposed to succeed in defeating, for a start, Islamist terrorism, when the Near Eastern and South Asian countries to be left politically intact incubate and breed rapacious movements as a function of their remaining dictatorial.

From the conservative argument can be drawn nostalgia for the years before the Second World War, when the Third World was as strange as it was remote, all manner of savage men razing distant wildernesses to be emperor of a hill; while the West got on with its workday. That liberty is never to return but post-apocalypse.