For those faithful few, it turns out that Newsweek learned nothing from last week's failure of judgment and professional discipline — the publication of a false story ending in an apology and reluctant retraction. With a lede that can only be described as impetuous in its breathlessness, Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff turn from singular, anonymous sources for their work in the leftist magazine's May 30 edition to the International Committee of the Red Cross, members of which claim that captured Taliban were indeed subject to the vicarious horror of hardbound brutality. Copies of the Koran were harmed in the making of American wartime detention, say the allies of terrorists and the Hippocratics visiting them, and Newsweek believes the public has a right to know something about the stories, be they true or not. Qualifying phrases are present where absent one book-brutality tale ago, but the Wall Street Journal today editorialized that the ICRC hardly stands up as a credible witness. A field representative of the ICRC, you see, apparently indulged in a certain disqualifying moral equivalence, comparing American soldiers to the authoritarian armies their forebears defeated. And, too, the organization itself has abused its respected status:

[T]he ICRC is only too happy to throw [its] confidentiality rule out the window when it suits its ideological purposes. It did so in the wake of the false Newsweek report about the treatment of the Quran at Guantanamo Bay. The ICRC's Washington office volunteered to the world's media that it had given the Pentagon "multiple" reports from Guantanamo detainees about mishandling of the Quran, after which the detainee complaints had ceased. Pentagon officials confirmed the news, adding that the incidents had been both "minor" and "inadvertent."

...This behavior has unfortunately become an ICRC pattern. A pair of earlier ICRC reports on U.S. detention policies in Iraq and at Guantanamo were leaked to the press, and readily confirmed by ICRC officials in Geneva. The Guantanamo report, moreover, called the practice of indefinite detention at that prison "tantamount to torture," a phrase that has since been repeated everywhere by people wanting to damage the U.S. As we pointed out at the time, that statement was absurd, given that the ICRC's main complaint about the Gitmo detainees is that they were not granted prisoner of war status. POWs are explicitly allowed by the Geneva Conventions to be held indefinitely — that is, for the duration of a conflict. Another problem has been the ICRC's pretense that its policy document called Protocol 1 — once dubbed "a shield for terrorists" by the New York Times — is settled international law and applies to the U.S.

The Journal is generous, here, as the Taliban eagerly violated every requirement affording them Geneva protection. But like the Patriot Act, American detainment of men who were observed or believed in good faith to be trying to kill Americans, Afghans and other innocent people the day before they were caught is a topic fit for the left's worst and most incurious shibboleths; passion, not reason, dominate. Unattributed anecdotes are preferred to vindications of US soldiers, such as that from one Mohammed Ismail Agha late last year. What signatories has Newsweek chosen for its protest piece? An international organization demonstrably hostile to the United States and terrorists who now more than ever have a sponsored platform on which to claim anything about conditions under American detention, from textual torture on up. Neither of these collective parties should be taken seriously, least of all when their most substantive allegations are grossly distorted renderings of events. But both shed light, in the wake of bad journalism that got called out, on Newsweek's resolution — and whether rightists should ignore a deeper institutional problem.

I've written briefly on the liberalization of America's long-standing, dictatorial ally Egypt twice before (here and here). The bilateral relationship is both nonprovocative and unstable. Egyptian leaders have, since Anwar Sadat, aided benevolent American interests in the Near East. But successive reigns through force have left Egyptian society no less stagnant than the rest of the region, and current strongman Hosni Mubarak could see the country move towards democracy or sink into state-controlled or proletarian-borne violence. My previous comments have involved possibilities for broad reform; like all dictators, however, Mubarak is loathe to humble himself. What to do? Joe Katzman has background, thoughts and suggestions.

If you read weblogs, it's likely you've heard of a Damascus-based English teacher's discovery of average Syrians respecting and supporting President Bush. A leftist, the teacher was startled and protested in disbelief, "Because of Bush's ideas many people in my country think that all of you are terrorists."

His students insisted otherwise. But take a long look at that statement: it's bigotry of the self-congratulatory. In fact, "Bush's ideas" are a mainstream appeal to a revival of worldwide American philanthropy. Because of them, "many people" have come to believe that all Syrians are not only capable and willing to live in peaceful, democratic sovereignty but are worth American sacrifice to achieve it. If there's anyone "many people" believe are terrorists, they're a part of the terrorist-supporting Assad regime that oppresses Syrians every day of their lives.

Unfortunately, a foreigner's humanity always seems to be lost on the stubborn leftist, who will gladly accept an absence of justice if it brings an absence of conflict, too.

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE: There just isn't a group of people to which a good, collective-parochial leftist won't condescend.

William F. Buckley says John Danforth resigned as Ambassador to the United Nations after five months on the job because playing Sisyphus didn't appeal. I think he's right.

While the United Nations is a lost cause, international cooperation is not. Jed Babbin, interviewed by Right Wing News, echoed some sentiments on smart Post-Cold War alliances I made just about a year ago.

The lodestone of this weblog, indeed my intellectual cast, is that man's freedom and dignity make for his greatest earthly solace. Democracy will sustain itself and save humankind by destroying authoritarianism. The two kinds of rule were not meant to coexist; the former was meant to push the latter, a destructive vestige of animal nature, into extinction. Our mortal flaws will remain, but we will all live under the protection of nations that exist to accommodate our efforts to do better. I'd offer you links if they didn't number into the thousands. My colorful essay and the most powerful evidence yet that this war is a war for freedom — that dictatorships cannot compete with liberated societies — should suffice, though I encourage you to read what I and those to whom I link have written.

Still — tragically, maddeningly, perilously — too many academic minds subscribe to elitism, parochialism and other relativistic arguments against the universality of freedom. So it's heartening to read a blunt statement like this one from Amir Taheri:

Afghanistan's first free elections ever, held last month, has had a big impact on the entire region: If the Afghans did it, why not us?

Taheri wisely makes this appeal a practical one: democracy can come to all, provided the free world can apply the most effective method to each despotism. For Iraq and Afghanistan, and as I believe, Iran and Syria, the authoritarian regime must be forcibly removed and its supporters dispersed; the purveyors of rule through strength shamed and kept from power. For nations whose dictators are tolerating a slow but inexorable shift of power to people — Taheri names them, "Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and Morocco" — a deft choreography of popular encouragement and pressure on the state may suffice. But there is one understanding: that it can and must be done.

It's a matching set. First, as seen on Drudge:

A John F. Kennedy School of Government researcher has cast doubt on the widely held belief that terrorism stems from poverty, finding instead that terrorist violence is related to a nation's level of political freedom.

Yes. As one fellow put it, "History testifies that from either the exploits of a dictator's rule or the mischief of his oppressed people, it is from unelected, unrelenting, compulsory rule that the world's greatest miseries spring." Second, from Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi:

The assault on Fallujah that began yesterday must be seen as a critical part of the worldwide war on terror, Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi says. "This is a war that we are waging on behalf of the civilized nations around the world," he said in an interview conducted for The Washington Times. "The rule of law must prevail, and there's no other way forward."

Imagine! Let's hope this information finds a deeper root in the American — and international — mind.

Australian Prime Minister and stalwart U.S. ally John Howard has been reelected. The prime minister's party victory against the Australian left is electorally substantial and culturally powerful, considering that most press agencies had ensured audiences of the race's closeness for weeks. It would appear that in wartime, undecideds do not all vote for the incumbent when he has engaged the country in a challenging conflict. Wretchard of Belmont Club celebrates the triumph, marking the parallels of legendary "ordinariness" between John Howard and George W. Bush.

Now that the first of the Anglo-American triumvirate has been confirmed as his nation's rightful leader, Prime Minister Howard may want to repay a certain favor to John Kerry.

Justice is served, partially:

A Yemeni judge sentenced two men to death and four others to prison terms ranging from five to 10 years Wednesday for orchestrating the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, an attack blamed on Usama bin Laden's terror network.

Saudi-born Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location, and Jamal al-Badawi, a 35-year-old Yemeni, were both sentenced to death for plotting, preparing and involvement in the bombing, which killed 17 U.S. sailors as their destroyer refueled in the southern Yemeni port of Aden.

Four years, almost to the day. Six men. al-Nashiri and al-Badawi will be punished appropraitely for their crimes, but how many others in the operation got away? John Kerry and supporters, this is a picture of your "law enforcement war," and it's no way to fight against terror.

Meanwhile, the United States and its allies, under the leadership of President Bush, have dropped the majority of al Qaeda's leadership — in three years.

Andrew McCarthy, lead prosecuter against 1993 World Trade Center bombing leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, offers a colossally backwards assessment of the war in today's National Review online. Convinced that removing authoritarian societies (the same that corrupted Islam after Arabism's intellectual and military fuel had run out) is a diversion to winning the war on terror, McCarthy treads into culturally relativist foolishness on the order of declaring that penicillin is a diversion from the war on toxic bacteria:

Thinking about the war's outcome implicates a second salient point. Contrary to the increasingly received wisdom, we are not in Iraq — or Afghanistan for that matter — to transform tyrannies into democracies. It would be great, and surely in our interest, if we could accomplish that as a corollary. But it's not why we came. The war on militant Islam is about eradicating a mortal, global threat to the United States. It is, moreover, worth bearing in mind that wiping out the enemy, aside from being the first and foremost imperative, happens also to be the best path to stability and, eventually, democracy in places like Iraq.

McCarthy begs the question: how can one "eradicate" a force when its region-wide production facilities — closed societies, mass unemployment and no means for redress or political expression, "religious schools" that convert the frustrated into the fanatical, mass media encouragement of hatred and violence against Jews and Westerners, support for terrorism in all forms directly from governments — are left intact? The Wall Street Journal said it best yesterday: without destroying and replacing the authoritarian culture on which terrorism feeds, the war is nothing more than a "game of whack-a-mole." How does McCarthy intend on reforming tyrannies? By asking? Unfortunately, polite deference is what the free world relied upon for the half-century following the Second World War. Russia's acceleration back towards statism and autocracy not twenty years after giving up the Soviet ghost — next to the solid roots of liberty in Germany and Japan, two nations forced to democratize — underscores the point: that a tyrant might reform on his own is the tragic, bloody exception to the rule.

McCarthy has made the same mistake reactionists make by confusing Ba'athists and terrorists with Iraqi Sunnis. The tiny number of murderers, less than one-hundredth of one percent of Iraq's population, are not to be reformed. They are to be killed or incarcerated, and the peaceful people they terrorize to be given the time, resources and protection necessary to design, build and maintain a democratic society.

Ironically, McCarthy attaches "permanence" to the strategy of snipping at the tops of weeds instead of gouging their roots. It is exactly the wrong way around: democratization is the final but irreplaceable step in destroying any authoritarian manifestation, be it Nazism, militarism, Communism or, in this case, Islamofascism. One might as well cut a man's chest open, forgo the dacron polyester, plastic, and aluminum replacement, and bid him good health and heart until the next half-operation. What are Iraq and Afghanistan producing today that they were not on September 11, 2001? Budding democrats; brave men and women, young and old, diving headfirst into a kind of danger-ridden civics that even the good American volunteerist would find intimidating. A great volume of evidence can easily knock aside McCarthy's lack of faith in Iraqis and his apparent disregard for their swift and significant investment in liberty. What are the governments of Iraq's and Afghanistan's neighbors, Iran and Syria, producing, while squelching native democrats? Islamofascists. From my essay, A Democratic Paraclete:

By no means is the failure of a well-established free state surrounded by stable democracies nearly as likely as its being consumed by a foreign, authoritarian entity in the present time. Mortality of human conscience requires the protections invested in constitutions and common laws of liberal democracies...because potential antagonists of free societies can be counted as those living within them. This should diminish neither the authenticity of consensual government nor the prodigious danger of the external rule of force, but instead emphasize bestial will as a constant of man’s affairs and the source in abstraction for all ideologies that have and will challenge the rule of law. Human nature cannot be changed but isolated and relatively unaccoutred forceful means would, in a free nation, likely remain limited to theft, murder, immorality and corruption: all indigenous and manageable flaws of democracy.

A little wordy, but my point still holds well in the Iraqi and Afghan experience: democracies do not change men but nullify their dominative tendencies through a common good dedicated to lawfulness and charity. Ideologies of power through strength are consigned to the shamed edges of free societies; the stronger the democracy, the further extremists are pushed from legitimacy. It is no coincidence that strongmen are viscerally hated by Iraqis and Afghans, acting of their own volition. In Iraq:

While al Qaeda manages to set off one or more suicide bombs a day in Iraq, it finds itself losing the war it is waging. The bombs are killing mainly Iraqis, and the Iraqis have noticed this. ...Al Qaeda makes itself unpopular by killing hundreds of Iraqis with suicide bombs. Baath makes itself hated with its continued terror campaign, kidnapping and assassinations.

Andrew McCarthy isn't offering us anything new: he suggests, in the face of adversity, retreat to the morally untroubling and physically undemanding routine of accepting the foreign captivity of tyrannized people. For him, the lessons of the last century's world wars — that the free world is, without qualification or interruption, endangered by authoritarian societies — go unheeded. The absence of freedom is a foothold for evil; peace is made only with peaceable men. To ignore this is McCarthy's own loss.

Pejman Yousefzadeh brings us news from Israel, perhaps the best news of all: our allies are winning.