StrategyPage reports that Baathist dead-enders in Iraq are now using press credentials as cover. Some Iraqis working for Reuters were arrested after an attack on U.S. troops guarding a downed helicopter. Reuters is now protesting that this was an error.

Considering the virulently anti-American slant of Reuters coverage, this is bleakly funny. Those Iraqi employees thought, perhaps, that they could earn a nice bonus by doing with lead what Reuters does with ledes. Why not? After all, the terror network and Reuters share an important objective — the breaking and humbling of U.S. power.

Watch the aftermath closely. If (as seems not unlikely) there were Reuters stringers involved in the attack, you will probably see Reuters condemn the actions of its employees only on the general grounds that actually shooting Americans jeopardizes the customary privileges and immunities of the press, not because attacks on American troops are in any way intrinsically a bad thing. The anti-American slant of Reuters coverage will doubtless continue — in fact, any suggestion that it might have contributed to or enabled the violence of yesterday will be met with shock and indignation.

In the warped moral universe that Reuters and the BBC and much of America's own elite media inhabit, American power is so frightening and loathsome that Islamist barbarians are actually preferable to George W. Bush. They'll print with a straight face quotes by al-Qaeda apologists condemning the U.S. as a ‘rogue state’ and U.S. policies as terrorism, while refusing to use the word ‘terrorist’ for Al-Hamas attacks that target Israeli children for mass murder.

Reuters stringers firing bullets at American troops makes concrete a drama that has previously been abstract. Today's war on terror is not just a war between the West and fundamentalist Islam, it is a confrontation of the healthy versus the diseased portions of the West itself. The disease is Julien Benda's trahison des clercs and all its sequelae. And Reuters, marching in step with Old Europe and the American left, is objectively on the side of the West's enemies.

UPDATE: Three Reuters employees who were alleged to have been involved in the attack have been released. This does not change my evaluation that anti-U.S., pro-terrorist bias is pervasive and deep in Reuters international coverage, sufficiently so to put them on the enemy side. As an index of this bias, consider that by editorial policy Reuters will not use the word "terrorist" to describe groups like Hamas or al-Aqsa.

Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya's dictator and long-time terrorist sugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow international inspections. The NYT's December 20th article Lessons of Libya, covering this development, is unintentionally hilarious.

An honest account would probably have read something like this:

When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared him silly. Realizing that the U.S. is no longer in the mood to take shit from tin-pot tyrants in khaffiyehs, and that the U.S. military could blow its way into Tripoli and give him a free dental exam in less time than it would take for an utterly impotent U.N. to pass the resolution condemning American action, he crawled to the Brits whimpering “Don't let your big brother hurt me, pleeeassseee...”

Instead, we're treated to a bunch of waffle: "To an extent that cannot be precisely measured" and "yesterday's announcement also demonstrates the value of diplomacy and United Nations sanctions". I suspect the NYT will deny as long as it can the real lesson of Libya, which is the same as the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and, for that matter, Yugoslavia. And that is this: the disarmament of rogue states has never once been accomplished by the U.N. or by diplomacy or ‘international opinion’, but is now being driven simply and solely by the fear of American military power and the will to use it.

We are in what Karl Marx would have called a world-historical moment — the first time that American hyperpuissance has defanged a dictator without actual war. All the rules will be different from now on, and Qaddafi (wily survivor that he is) has figured them out well ahead of the Western chattering classes. The most important rule is this: do not make the U.S. fear what you might become, or it will break you.

Indeed, it seems very likely to me that future historians will date the beginning of the 21st-century Pax Americana from Qaddafi's crawfishing. The U.S. is not merely maintaining its lead in economic vigor and military heft over any conceivable opposing coalition, that lead is actually increasing. Demographic trends (notably the fact that Europeans and Japanese are not breeding at replacement levels) suggest that U.S.'s relative power, in both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ terms, will continue to increase through at least 2050.

The most visible indicator of this change, aside from the collapse of awful governments in any number of Third-World pestholes, will be the marginalization of the U.N. That organization, which has never had hard power, will now lose its soft power as well. It might have been different — but France and the other nations who aimed to set the U.N. up as a geopolitical counterforce to the U.S. overplayed their hand in the run-up to the liberation of Iraq. For that effort, the capture of Saddam and Qaddafi's surrender in the face of an American-led New World Order are fatal blows. The U.N. may survive as an umbrella for international aid agencies and a few technical standards groups, but in the future it will constrain American behavior less, not more.

The ripple effects on Middle Eastern, European, and U.S. domestic politics will be significant. Even Arab News is beginning to come around to the realization that the U.S. did the Arab world a favor by deposing Saddam Hussein, and his capture significantly betters the odds that the reconstruction of Iraq will succeed. Since U.S. power has actually accomplished the peaceful disarmament of a rogue state, making political hay in Europe from a case against U.S. unilateralism is going to become steadily more difficult. And in the U.S., the antiwar opposition is increasingly marginal and demoralized as the war goes well and George Bush's re-election now looks like a near certainty.

To borrow Churchill's phrase, this is not the end of the War on Terror. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

A reader, responding to the suggestion that we call the Baathist holdouts in Iraq werewolves, asked rhetorically whether the intent was to dehumanize them. Lurking behind this question was the theory that war supporters like me need to make our enemies into un-persons in order to justify continuing to kill them.

This question displays a kind of self-absorption by a person who cannot really imagine a moral stance different from his/her own. In such tender-minded thinking, the world is neatly divided into humans that one must treat pretty much as though they were one's next-door neighbor, and non-humans who are not part of the moral community. The possibility that a human being could be outside the moral community is essentially ignored.

But there are human beings who are outside the moral community by nature. We call them psychopaths. They lack the wiring for empathy and reciprocity that makes it possible for most human beings to cooperate; they can (and often do) commit sickening atrocities for pleasure. Fortunately, most psychopaths have other kinds of neurological deficits as well and are therefore not very bright.

Some people who probably were not born with psychopathy make themselves into psychopaths. Consider, as a relevant example, Saddam Hussein and his sons. They fed living people into shredders for amusement. No semantic debate over whether that sort of monster is "human" or "dehumanized" is going to change my judgment that that it deserves a violent death as quickly as that result can be arranged.

The Baathist holdouts in Iraq are the hench-monsters of the Husseins — the men who tore infants' eyes out and strapped women to tables in rape rooms. Calling them "werewolves" or "orcs" is not an attempt to dehumanize them; that would be pointless, since they have already dehumanized themselves.

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It's time for a bit of meme-hacking. Let's see if we can displace terms like "insurgent" or "Saddam loyalist" with one that conveys the true depth of evil we are facing. I have a candidate to propose.

A little more than sixty years ago, the U.S. and its allies went to war another psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator — Adolf Hitler. In 1944, as the Third Reich was collapsing, the SS organized a Nazi resistance to commit assassinations, sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind Allied lines. The parallels in organization and tactics with Baathist-holdout activity in Iraq are very close.

It is a matter of record from Saddam Hussein's autobiography that he admired Hitler's ruthless efficiency and sought to emulate it. We should revive for these remnant Baathist thugs the term, redolent of willful evil and darkness, that the Nazi resistance fighters used for themselves.

Call them werewolves. It's what they deserve.

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One year ago today, the World Trade Center fell in flames. And that very day, just a few hours after the event, I wrote the following:

Some friends have asked me to step outside my normal role as a technology evangelist today, to point out in public that a political panic reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attack could do a great deal more damage than the attack itself.

Today will not have been a victory for terrorism unless we make it one. If we reward in any way the Palestinians who are now celebrating this hideous crime in the streets of the West Bank, that will have been a victory for terrorism. If we accept "anti-terrorism" measures that do further damage to our Constitutional freedoms, that will have been a victory for terrorism. But if we learn the right lessons, if we make policies that preserve freedom and offer terrorists no result but a rapid and futile death, that will have been a victory for the rest of us.

We have learned today that airport security is not the answer. At least four separate terror teams were able to sail right past all the elaborate obstacles -- the demand for IDs, the metal detectors, the video cameras, the X-ray machines, the gunpowder sniffers, the gate agents and security people trained to spot terrorists by profile. There have been no reports that any other terror units were successfully prevented from achieving their objectives by these measures. In fact, the early evidence is that all these police-state-like impositions on freedom were exactly useless -- and in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center lies the proof of their failure.

We have learned today that increased surveillance is not the answer. The FBI's "Carnivore" tap on the U.S.'s Internet service providers didn't spot or prevent this disaster; nor did the NSA's illegal Echelon wiretaps on international telecommunications. Video monitoring of public areas could have accomplished exactly nothing against terrorists taking even elementary concealment measures. If we could somehow extend airport-level security to the entire U.S., it would be just as useless against any determined and even marginally competent enemy.

We have learned today that trying to keep civilian weapons out of airplanes and other areas vulnerable to terrorist attack is not the answer either -- indeed, it is arguable that the lawmakers who disarmed all the non-terrorists on those four airplanes, leaving them no chance to stop the hijackers, bear part of the moral responsibility for this catastrophe.

I expect that in the next few months, far too many politicians and pundits will press for draconian "anti-terrorist" laws and regulations. Those who do so will be, whether intentionally or not, cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to destroy our way of life -- and we should all remember that fact come election time.

As an Internet technologist, I have learned that distributed problems require distributed solutions -- that centralization of power, the first resort of politicians who feed on crisis, is actually worse than useless, because centralizers regard the more effective coping strategies as threats and act to thwart them.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to this shattering tragedy as well as the Israelis, who have a long history of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and terrorists. But it is in that policy of a distributed response to a distributed threat, with every single citizen taking personal responsibility for the defense of life and freedom, that our best hope for preventing recurrences of today's mass murders almost certainly lies.

If we learn that lesson, perhaps today's deaths will not have been in vain.

As I reread the above, it does not seem to me that we have yet learned our lesson. We have taken steps towards arming pilots, but not passengers. Tiger-team probes of airport security have shown that the rate at which weapons can be smuggled through remains 30% -- unchanged since before 9/11. A year later, therefore, the frisk searches of little old ladies and the no-sharp-edges prohibitions have bought us no security at all.

The scorecard is not entirely bleak. Al-Qaeda has not been able to mount another successful mass murder. Post-9/11 legal changes through the Patriot Act and related legislation have been troubling, but not disastrous. And the war against the Taliban was a rather less complicated success than one might have expected -- civilian casualties minimal, no uprising of the mythical "Arab Street", and Al-Qaeda's infrastructure smashed. Osama bin-Laden is probably dead.

Still, the war is far from over. Islamic terrorism has not been repudiated by the ulema, the college of elders who prescribe the interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith. The call to violent jihad wired into the foundations of Islam has not yet been broken or tamed into a form civilization can coexist with. Accomplishing that is the true challenge that faces us, one greater and more subtle than merely military victory.

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One of the problems we face in the war against terror is that al-Qaeda is not quite a conspiracy in the traditional sense. It's something else that is more difficult to characterize and target.

(I wrote what follows three years before 9/11.)

Political and occult conspiracy theories can make for good propaganda and excellent satire (vide Illuminatus! or any of half a dozen other examples). As guides to action, however, they are generally dangerously misleading.

Misleading, because they assume more capacity for large groups to keep secrets and maintain absolutely unitary conscious policies than human beings in groups actually seem to possess. The history of documented "conspiracies" and failed attempts at same is very revealing in this regard — above a certain fairly small size, somebody always blows the gaff. This is why successful terrorist organizations are invariably quite small.

Dangerously misleading because conspiracy theories, offering the easy drama of a small group of conscious villains, distract our attention from a subtler but much more pervasive phenomenon -- one I shall label the "prospiracy".

What distinguishes prospiracies from conspiracies is that the members don't necessarily know they are members, nor are they fully conscious of what binds them together. Prospiracies are not created through oaths sworn by guttering torchlight, but by shared ideology or institutional culture. In many cases, members accept the prospiracy's goals and values without thinking through their consequences as fully as they might if the process of joining were formal and initiatory.

What makes a prospiracy like a conspiracy and distinguishes it from a mere subcultural group? The presence of a "secret doctrine" or shared goals which its core members admit among themselves but not to perceived outsiders; commonly, a goal which is stronger than the publicly declared purpose of the group, or irrelevant to that declared purpose but associated with it in some contingent (usually historical) way.

On the other hand, a prospiracy is unlike a conspiracy in that it lacks well-defined lines of authority. Its leaders wield influence over the other members, but seldom actual power. It also lacks a clear-cut distinction between "ins" and "outs".

Prospiracy scales better than conspiracy, and thus can be far more dangerous. Because anyone can join simply by buying the "secret" doctrine, people frequently recruit themselves. Because the "secret" isn't written on stone tablets in an inner sanctum, it's totally deniable. In fact, members sometimes deny it to themselves (not that that ultimately matters). What keeps a prospiracy together is not conscious commitment but the memetic logic of its positions.

As an exercise (and to avoid any appearance of axe-grinding), I'll leave the reader to apply this model for his or herself. There are plenty of juicy examples out there. I'm a "member" of at least two of them myself.

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Ta-daa! In ritual obeisance to the customs of the blogosphere, I now perform my very first fisking. Of Der Fisk himself, in his 8 Nov 2002 column "Bush fights for another clean shot in his war".

"A clean shot" was The Washington Post's revolting description of the murder of the al-Qa'ida leaders in Yemen by a US "Predator" unmanned aircraft. With grovelling approval, the US press used Israel's own mendacious description of such murders as a "targeted killing" — and shame on the BBC for parroting the same words on Wednesday.

One wonders which word in the phrase "targeted killing" Mr. Fisk is having problems with. Since he avers that the phrase "targeted killing" is "mendacious", we can deduce that he believes either the word "killing" or the word "targeted" to be false descriptions.

We must therefore conclude that in Mr. Fisk's universe, either (a) members of al-Qaeda can be reduced to patch of carbonized char without the event properly qualifying as a "killing", or (b) the drone operators weren't targeting that vehicle at all — they unleashed a Hellfire on a random patch of the Hadrahamaut that just happened to have a half-dozen known terrorists moseying through it at at the moment of impact.

How about a little journalistic freedom here? Like asking why this important al-Qa'ida leader could not have been arrested. Or tried before an open court. Or, at the least, taken to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation.

One imagines Mr. Fisk during World War II, exclaiming in horror because the Allies neglected to capture entire divisions of the Waffen-SS intact and subject each Aryan superman to individual criminal trials.

Mr. Fisk's difficulty with grasping the concept of "warfare" and "enemy combatant" is truly remarkable. Or perhaps not so remarkable, considering his apparent failure to grasp the terms "targeted" and "killing".

Instead, the Americans release a clutch of Guantanamo "suspects", one of whom — having been held for 11 months in solitary confinement — turns out to be around 100 years old and so senile that he can't string a sentence together. And this is the "war on terror"?

Yes, Mr. Fisk, it is. It's a war in which our soldiers gives individual enemy combatants food, shelter, and medical care for 11 months while their terrorists continue mass-murdering innocent civilian women and children.

But a "clean shot" is what President Bush appears to want to take at the United Nations. First, he wants to force it to adopt a resolution about which the Security Council has the gravest reservations. Then he warns that he might destroy the UN's integrity by ignoring it altogether. In other words, he wants to destroy the UN. Does George Bush realise that the United States was the prime creator of this institution, just as it was of the League of Nations under President Woodrow Wilson?

Interesting that Mr. Fisk should mention the League of Nations. This would be the same League of Nations that collapsed after 1938 due to its utter failure to prevent clear-cut aggression by Nazi Germany? One wonders how Mr. Fisk supposes the U.N. can possibly escape the League's fate if it fails to sponsor effective action against a genocidal, murdering tyrant who has stated for the record that he models himself on Hitler.

I congratulate Mr. Fisk — the phrase "destroy the U.N.'s integrity"; it is very entertaining. In other news, George Bush is plotting to destroy Messalina's chastity, William Jefferson Clinton's truthfulness, and Robert Fisk's grasp on reality.

Supposing that the U.S. was the prime creator of the U.N., and supposing that was a mistake, is Mr. Fisk proposing that we should not have the integrity to shoot our own dog?

"Targeted killing" — courtesy of the Bush administration — is now what the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon can call "legitimate warfare". And Vladimir Putin, too. Now the Russians — I kid thee not, as Captain Queeg said in the Caine Mutiny — are talking about "targeted killing" in their renewed war on Chechnya. After the disastrous "rescue" of the Moscow theatre hostages by the so-called "elite" Russian Alpha Special forces (beware, oh reader, any rescue by "elite" forces, should you be taken hostage), Putin is supported by Bush and Tony Blair in his renewed onslaught against the broken Muslim people of Chechnya.

We note for the record that should Mr. Fisk be captured by terrorists, he would prefer to be rescued by non-elite forces; perhaps a troop of Girl Scouts waving copies of The Guardian would satisfy him. I would defer to Mr. Fisk evident belief that "non-elite" rescuers would increase his chances of surviving the experience, were it not that I dislike the sight of dying Girl Scouts.

I'm a cynical critic of the US media, but last month Newsweek ran a brave and brilliant and terrifying report on the Chechen war. In a deeply moving account of Russian cruelty in Chechnya, it recounted a Russian army raid on an unprotected Muslim village. Russian soldiers broke into a civilian home and shot all inside. One of the victims was a Chechen girl. As she lay dying of her wounds, a Russian soldier began to rape her. "Hurry up Kolya," his friend shouted, "while she's still warm."

In other words, Russian soldiers behaved like al-Qaeda terrorists, and this is a bad thing. Excellent, Mr. Fisk; you appear to be showing some sign of an actual moral sense here.

Now, I have a question. If you or I was that girl's husband or lover or brother or father, would we not be prepared to take hostages in a Moscow theatre — Even if this meant — as it did — that, asphyxiated by Russian gas, we would be executed with a bullet in the head, as the Chechen women hostage-takers were — But no matter. The "war on terror" means that Kolya and the boys will be back in action soon, courtesy of Messrs Putin, Bush and Blair.

Ahh. So, Mr. Fisk is taking the position that the Russians' atrocious behavior in Chechnya justifies hostage-taking and the cold-blooded murder of hostages in a Moscow theater. Very interesting.

Let's follow the logic of just retribution here. If the rape of a dying girl in Chechnya by Russian soldiers justifies terrorizing and murdering hostages in a Moscow theater, then what sort of behavior might the murder of 3000 innocent civilians in Manhattan justify?

We gather that Mr. Fisk thinks it does not justify whacking half a dozen known terrorists, including the organizer of the U.S.S. Cole bombing, in the Yemeni desert. We conclude that Mr. Fisk concedes the righteousness of retribution, all right, but values the life of each al-Qaeda terrorist more than those of five hundred unsuspecting victims of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Let me quote that very brave Israeli, Mordechai Vanunu, the man who tried to warn the West of Israel's massive nuclear war technology, imprisoned for 12 years of solitary confinement — and betrayed, so it appears, by one Robert Maxwell. In a poem he wrote in confinement, Vanunu said: "I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don't look left or right, don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp."

Mr. Fisk apparently believes that Mr. Vanunu had no responsibility to betray his country's defensive capabilities in the presence of enemies bent on its utter destruction. Or did I somehow miss the incident in which Israel aggressively atom-bombed a neighbor?

Kolya would have understood that. So would the US Air Force officer "flying" the drone which murdered the al-Qa'ida men in Yemen. So would the Israeli pilot who bombed an apartment block in Gaza, killing nine small children as well as well as his Hamas target, an "operation" — that was the description, for God's sake — which Ariel Sharon described as "a great success".

Mr. Fisk, whose love for legalism and international due process commends giving al-Qaeda terrorists individual criminal trials, seems curiously unaware of that portion of the Geneva Convention relating to the use of non-combatants as human shields.

One wonders if he would be persuaded by the Geneva Convention language assigning responsibility for these deaths not to Israel, but to Hamas.

One suspects not. In Mr. Fisk's universe, it's clear that there is one set of rules for Israelis and another for terrorists. Hamas terrorists committing atrocities are justified by Israeli actions, while Israelis committing what Mr. Fisk prefers to consider atrocities are evil and the behavior of Hamas completely irrelevant.

But we know, from Mr. Fisk's famous report of his beating in Afghanistan, what his actual rule is: hating Americans justifies anything.

These days, we all believe in "clean shots". I wish that George Bush could read history. Not just Britain's colonial history, in which we contrived to use gas against the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq in the 1930s. Not just his own country's support for Saddam Hussein throughout his war with Iran.

This would be the same Iran that belligerantly and unlawfully seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979, correct? And held Americans hostage for 120 days, committing an act of war under the international law Mr. Fisk claims to so scrupulously respect?

It would be entertaining to watch Mr. Fisk argue that Saddam Hussein was not then fit to be an ally of the U.S. against its enemies, but is now — after twenty years of atrocities aggressive warfare — such an upstanding citizen of the international community that we should stand idly by while he arms himself with nuclear weapons.

The Iranians once produced a devastating book of coloured photographs of the gas blisters sustained by their soldiers in that war. I looked at them again this week. If you were these men, you would want to die. They all did. I wish someone could remind George Bush of the words of Lawrence of Arabia, that "making war or rebellion is messy, like eating soup off a knife."

I wonder if Mr. Fisk can point to any instance in which George Bush ever stated that he expected the war with al-Qaeda to be "clean"? If I recall correctly. "clean shot" was the Washington Post's phrase.

Can Mr. Fisk fail to be aware that the Post's editorial board is run by ideological enemies of George Bush, persons who would, outside of wartime, hew rather closer to Mr. Fisk's positions than George Bush's?

Mr. Fisk, I don't think any American policymaker doubts that war is hell. Nor that terrorism is even worse.

And I suppose I would like Americans to remember the arrogance of colonial power.

We have quite vivid historical memories of the arrogance of Mr. Fisk's particular colonial power, in fact. We recall fighting a revolution to deal with it.

If Mr. Fisk could point out any American colonies in Iraq, or Iran, or Palestine, or Chechnya, we would be greatly educated.

Here, for example, is the last French executioner in Algeria during the 1956-62 war of independence, Fernand Meysonnier, boasting only last month of his prowess at the guillotine. "You must never give the guy the time to think. Because if you do he starts moving his head around and that's when you have the mess-ups. The blade comes through his jaw, and you have to use a butcher's knife to finish it off. It is an exorbitant power — to kill one's fellow man." So perished the brave Muslims of the Algerian fight for freedom.

Ah. Did I miss the part where American were using guillotines as a method of execution, then?

No, I hope we will not commit war crimes in Iraq — there will be plenty of them for us to watch — but I would like to think that the United Nations can restrain George Bush and Vladimir Putin and, I suppose, Tony Blair. But one thing is sure. Kolya will be with them.

Mr. Fisk's surety that American troops will while away their time in Baghdad raping dying Iraqi girls appears to come from the same eccentric brain circuitry that supposes U.S. to be a "colonial" power and to be in imminent danger of performing botched executions with guillotines and butcher knives.

Mr. Fisk neglects an important difference between U.S. soldiers and al-Qaeda terrorists.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, U.S. soldiers found guilty of such behavior can be — and, on the rare occasions it has occurred, frequently have been — court-martialed and shot. Not that it seems Mr. Fisk would be likely to acknowledge the existence of this law, or that it is ever applies.

To Mr. Fisk's inability to grasp the terms "targeted" and "killing" we may therefore add an inability to grasp the terms "barbarism" and "civilization".

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It's out. The Manifesto site is here. The Manifesto has been submitted to PetitionOnline. To show your support, please add one of thw web buttons to your splash page.

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Changes are deliberately not marked. Read the whole thing, this is a final pre-publication draft. Most of the changes from version 4 are deletions of excess verbiage.

Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from across the blogosphere. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. Since this process has to close sometime, I'm declaring that there wuill be at most one pre-publication draft.

I will post a fair copy of the final version. For legal purposes, this work is ©2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Email me for distribution terms -- I'm not especially interested in making money from it, but I want some artistic control of how it's used.

However, this may not happen for a week, as I am about to go on the Linux Lunacy Caribbean cruise.

Brian O'Connell has supplied this excellent button for JavaScript-aware browsers:

And Erica from Sperari has suppiled a very tasteful static button:

These buttons will be included with the final version.

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers, politicians, and activists operating within conventional political categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist' measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the premises of the anti-idiotarian position:

1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;

2. THAT the terrorists and their state sponsors have declared and are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but against its core virtues: against the freedom of thought and speech and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery, slavery, and fanaticism;

3. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;

5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated the scope of their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;

6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;

7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamist terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

RE DECLARE that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind, to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Islamo-fascist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against terror must be to displace and discredit those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacable assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of force;

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the ordinary citizen's right and duty to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrow of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left -- the moral blindness that refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place than any culture in which jihad, 'honor killings', and female genital mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED; we have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much to enable and excuse their evil. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that those we delegate to lead pursue the war against terror with an unflagging will to victory and all means necessary — while remaining always mindful that we must not become what we fight;

WE SHALL REMEMBER that the West's keenest weapons are reason and the truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against the expedient lie from our own side, lest our victories become tainted and hollow, sowing trouble for the future.

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to win their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by terrorism and rogue states:

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			17 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

Blogspot comments

I am planning on publishing the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto soon, via petitiononline.com and possibly other channels. My hope is that enough bloggers will sign it and talk about it to get the position it describes some notice in the more blog-friendly of the mainstream media.

Towards this end, I'm seeking volunteers to design a web button for the Manifesto. Use your imagination -- but I'm thinking a design using the letters A I M in red, white and blue might be appropriate.

Blogspot comments

Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are marked in red; changes from 2 to 3 are marked in blue; changes from 3 to 4 are marked in purple.

Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from across the blogosphere. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. Since this process has to close sometime, I'm declaring that there will be at most one more pre-publication draft.

I will post a fair copy of the final version. For legal purposes, this work is ©2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Email me for distribution terms -- I'm not especially interested in making money from it, but I want some artistic control of how it's used.

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers, politicians, and activists operating within conventional political categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist' measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of the anti-idiotarian position:

1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;

2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and a smoldering resentment of the West's success and by their own culture's failures;

3. THAT the terrorists have declared and are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery, slavery, and fanaticism;

4. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

5. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;

6. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;

7. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;

8. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Islamo-fascist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of force;

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the ordinary citizen's right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left -- the moral blindness that refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place than any culture in which jihad, 'honor killings', and female genital mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians, who did so much both to make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that those we delegate to lead pursue the war against terror with an unflagging will to victory and all means necessary — while remaining always mindful that in the process of fighting the enemy we must not stoop to the enemy's level of contempt for human rights and dignity, must not become what we fight;

WE SHALL REMEMBER that in this struggle more than previous conventional wars, the West's keenest weapons are reason and the truth; that it is our obligation as citizens to insist on reason and the truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against the expedient lie from our own side, lest our victories become tainted and hollow, leaving root causes unaddressed and sowing trouble for the future.

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to win their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by terrorism and rogue states:

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			17 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

Blogspot comments

Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are marked in red; changes from 2 to 3 are marked in blue. I think the changes largely speak for themselves. I will say that I think some of the criticisms I received reflect a conservative bias in the blogosphere population, and that for appeal to a wider audience it is necessary to excoriate the Right a little harder than a lot of people here will be completely comfortable with.

I have removed the paragraph about profiling, not out of political correctness but because I have been presented with good arguments that profiling is easy for terrorists to game against (and apparently they have often done so in Israel).

It has been suggested that I should add the heroes of Flight 93 to the list of those we swear shall not have died in vain. But they had already achieved that; they saved many lives and provided a moral example which shall not be forgotten.

Congratulations to the trivia spotters who identified "to be dealt with as wolves are" as a quote from H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. Jerry Pournelle did, I believe, quote it in Prince Of Sparta. I had always assumed Piper was referring to the Viking sentence of outlawry, in which the outlaw was declared a "wolf's head". Apparently there is a 1703 historical cite from the US as well.

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers, politicians, and activists operating within conventional political categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist' measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to the enemy is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of the anti-idiotarian position:

1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;

2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and a smoldering resentment of the West's success and Islam's failures;

3. THAT the terrorists have declared and are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the qualities which separate civilized human beings from bestiality, slavery, and fanaticism;

   THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;

5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;

6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;

7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Islamo-fascist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of force.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the ordinary citizen's right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left -- the moral blindness that refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place than any culture in which jihad, 'honor killings', and female genital mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians, who did so much both to make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to win their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by terrorism and rogue states;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			16 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

Blogspot comments

Substantive changes from version 1 are marked in red. I think the changes largely speak for themselves. I will say that I think some of the criticisms I received reflect a conservative bias in the blogosphere population, and that for appeal to a wider audience it is necessary to excoriate the Right a little harder than a lot of people here will be completely comfortable with.

Major trivia points to anyone who can identify the source of the phrase I was quoting in my first draft, the longer form of which reads "we declare them the enemies of all men, to be dealt with as wolves are". And no, a Web search won't do it.

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers, politicians, and activists operating within conventional political categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist' measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to the enemy is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of the anti-idiotarian position:

1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;
2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and a smoldering resentment of the West's success and Islam's failures;
3. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;
5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;
6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;
7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Islamo-fascist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness' requires us not to notice the dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the population.

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of force.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm not merely airline pilots but ordinary citizens, and to recognize the citizen's right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the conquest and occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left -- the moral blindness that refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place than any culture in which jihad, 'honor killings', and female genital mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by terrorism and rogue states;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			16 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

Blogspot comments

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers, politicians, and activists operating within conventional political categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist' measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically descending to almost the same level of religious jihad as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to the enemy is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of the anti-idiotarian position:

1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;
2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and a smoldering resentment of the West's success and Islam's failures;
3. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;
5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated their future malice;
6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;
7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as wolves are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Islamo-fascist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam and not in any significant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness' requires us not to notice and use the dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the population.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members of the Islamic terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear blackmail of the West, the conquest and occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

ism of the Left -- the moral blindness that refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place than any culture in which jihad, 'honor killings', and female genital mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian religious chauvinism and bigotry that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our self-declared enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent culture from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by terrorism and rogue states;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

					Eric S. Raymond
					16 October 2002

					____________________
					(your signature here)

Blogspot comments

I just sent the following letter to the Boston Globe after reading Elaine Scarry's excellent piece Failsafe!:

Congratulations on having the bravery to publish Elaine Scarry's "Failsafe". She is right to point out that distributed threats require distributed countermeasures. She is right to point out that centralized defense of the U.S. massively failed us. She is right to point out that the founders of the U.S. envisioned citizens, not standing armies, as the backbone of the nation's defense.

After all that argument and build-up, it is only unfortunate that she stopped short of the logical conclusion: that to prevent future hijackings, the logical course is to arm the passengers.

The extension to other situations involving crime, terrorism, and politics (insofar as the three are distinguishable at all) is left as an exercise for the reader.

Blogspot comments

Steven den Beste wrote a long, intelligent and insightful essay on who the enemy is. I think he is right to see Afghanistan, Iraq, and the suppression of Al-Qaeda as phases of longer, wider war — a clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can't live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we've done but for what we are.

I wonder if Steve sees what this implies in the longer time horizon, though? The cultures that produced Al-Qaeda, despite swimming in oil wealth that should have made it easy, have failed in all essential ways to join the modern world. They mutilate the genitalia of the female half of their population, they educate only a vanishingly small number of scientists and engineers, and their politics is a perpetual brawl conducted by tribes with flags. Their capability to get with even the 20th century on their own has been tested and found wanting, let alone the 21st.

Steve may well be right that the only solution to a festering boil like Iraq or Saudi Arabia starts with military defeat, Western occupation, and a forced restructuring of society along the lines of what Douglas MacArthur did to the Japanese after 1945.

I used to think we could corrupt Islamism out of existence, make it fat and lazy with cheap consumer goods and seduce it with porn. Maybe that would be the best way to go if we had two generations to solve the problem. But if the likes of Hussein is breeding botulism and about to get his hands on nukes, we've run out of time. We can't afford the soft option if the price of futzing around might be a mushroom cloud over Manhattan, or over Tel Aviv.

We must win. And we must impose our will and our culture on the losers, not for old-fashioned reasons like gold or oil or craving conquest, but because the likely alternative is nuclear megadeath, plague in our home cities, and the smell of Sarin in the morning. Is there anyone left who doubts that Saddam Hussein, who nerve-gassed Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands in the 1980s, would use nukes if he had them?

There's a word for the process of conquering a third-world pesthole and imposing your culture on it. It's called imperialism.

In the 19th century, the Western powers built empires for prestige and economic advantage. In the 21st century, we may be discovering that we need to get back into the imperialism business as a matter of survival. It may turn out that the 20th century was an interlude doomed to end as cheap transportation made the world smaller and improving weapons technology made large-scale destruction inexpensive even for barbarian thugs like Saddam Hussein.

Envy the British of Sir Richard Burton's time. They could conquer half the world for simple gain without worrying about the Fuzzy-Wuzzies or the Ndebele aerosol-dropping pasteurella pestis on Knightsbridge. We -- and I mean specifically the U.S. now -- may have to conquer the Islamic world a second time, simply because the risks of war and the moral hazards of imperialism are less threatening than the prospect of some Allah-crazed Islamofascist detonating a knapsack nuke on the Smithsonian Mall.

I'm not joking about the moral hazards of imperialism, either. They may be a more serious danger to a free society than the short-term exigencies of war. Witness the fact that I, a radical libertarian anarchist for more than twenty years, find myself arguing for a position not all that easy to distinguish from reactionary military expansionism. Urgent survival threats make strange bedfellows. And it is all too plausible that. if we take this path, we might degenerate from imperialists by necessity to imperialists by habit and predilection.

Still. Reality is what it is. If there's no way short of straight-up imperialism and nation-building all over the Islamic world to prevent a holocaust on American or European soil that would make 9/11 look like a garden party, then that's what we're going to have to do -- civilize the barbarians at the point of a gun.

There is precedent; the British did a pretty good job of civilizing India and we did a spectacularly effective one on Japan. And the U.S. would be well equipped to do it again; our economy is now so large that we could run a globe-spanning empire from the petty-cash drawer. Seriously. The U.S, a hyperpower so dominant that no imaginable coalition of other nations could defeat it at conventional warfare, spends a ridiculously low percentage of GNP (6%, if I recall correctly) on its military.

Civilizing the barbarians needn't even be a bloody process if you start the job right after their will has been smashed by a major defeat in war. The U.S. burned essentially every major Japanese city except Kyoto to the ground with incendiaries during World War Two and then atom-bombed two of them. This seemed to help. It would be nice if we didn't have to get so drastic this time, but it might come to that yet; judging by measures like relative GDP and number of Nobel prizes earned, the Arab/Islamic world is actually further behind the civilization curve than the Japanese were in their militarist phase. They may need to be smashed flatter before a latter-day MacArthur will be able to do anything with them.

Some of my readers will be creaming in horror. Imperialism? Barbarians? How dare I use such language? How dare I argue that the U.S. has the right to commit deliberate cultural genocide?

There's a big hole in the ground in Manhattan. That's my argument.

If Pearl Harbor was good enough reason for us to conquer Japan and run it like a proconsulate until the Japanese learned manners, then 9/11 was damn good and sufficient reason for us to do the same number on the Islamists. That meant Afghanistan, it means Iraq, and down the road it may mean Saudi Arabia as well.

History is not over.

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(Final essay of the series.)

In previous essays in this series, I have described Islam as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden's goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy. I have analyzed the reason Americans have trouble comprehending the scope of the threat, and I have explained why Western-style diplomacy is next to useless in this situation. In this final essay I'll suggest paths towards a solution.

In order to win, we must begin with realism about the scope of the war and the objectives of the enemy. We must realize that although in theory and theology al-Qaeda is making war on the entire infidel West, in practice they are only interested in attacking the U.S., the `hyperpower' that leads it.

There is no possible gain for al-Qaeda in attacking Europe and risking a change in the pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian tilt of the EU (which has just resumed support payments to the Palestinian Authority despite conclusive evidence that the money is diverted to pay for massacres of Israeli children). Nor can al-Qaeda gain any leverage by attacks on the remainder of the world. The theaters of the war will include the U.S. and terrorist base areas in the Islamic arc stretching from Morocco through the Maghreb through the Middle East to Pakistan, and perhaps in Indonesia and the Phillipines as well.

To people who view the entire world through the lens of the Western tradition, the strategy I will outline is doubtless going to sound bellicose and regressive. It is not; it is founded on a cold-blooded realization that Arab cultures (and the Arabized cultures of the rest of the Islamic world) regard victory in war as a sign of Allah's favor and regard compromise and concession as a sign of weakness.

The war against Islamic terror must be fought on three levels: homeland defense, military power projection, and cultural subversion. We must foil terrorist acts; we must imprison or kill the terrorists who plan and execute them; and we must dry up the pool of potential recruits before they become terrorists who can only be stopped by being imprisoned or killed.

Homeland defense includes all those measures designed to make the attacks on U.S. civilians less likely to succeed. These will include conventional police and security measures. It must also include a revival of the role of the unincorporated militia and the armed citizen. Al-Qaeda has limited resources, but the advantage of choosing where they will strike; since the police and military cannot be everywhere, civilians (like the passengers of flight 93) must take anti-terrorist defense into their own hands.

Military power projection includes direct military action against terrorist bases and havens. As an anarchist, I would prefer a world in which private security agencies under contract to insurance companies pursued al-Qaeda; persons of some other political persuasions might propose supranational agencies such as the U.N. Unfortunately, under the current world system there is no alternative to governments to do this work. The U.S. has begun it in Afghanistan; the war must continue in Iraq, and it is likely to encompass Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia as well.

The goal of military power projection must be twofold: physical and psychological. The physical goal must be to destroy the physical infrastructure of terrorism -- the headquarters, bases and training camps. While this is important, the psychological goal of humiliating and crushing jihadists is even more important.

Islamic armies and resistance movements are fanatical in attack but brittle on the defense. When motivated by the conviction that Allah guides their arm, suicidal bravery is routine. On the other hand, when the fortunes of a cause decline past a certain point, Arabs tend to consider the will of Allah to be manifest and abruptly abandon it. These tendencies form part of the cultural background that includes even secularized terrorist movements (such as Yasser Arafat's al-Fatah) in the Islamic world.

The U.S. was able to exploit this brittleness effectively in Afghanistan. By moving in overwhelming force when it moved at all, the U.S. was able to intimidate many warlords affiliated with the Taliban into switching sides -- an important reason the campaign involved so little actual fighting.

We must repeat this maneuver on a larger scale. We must teach the Dar-al-Islam to respect and fear the power of the West. We must not negotiate or offer concessions until it is clear from the behavior of governments, the umma, and the "Arab street" that the public will to support jihad has been broken.

Our most important long-term weapon against Islamic terrorism, however, will be cultural subversion. That is, to break the hold of the Islamist/jihadist idea on the minds of Muslims. To do this, it may be necessary to discredit the entirety of Islam; the question depends on whether any Islamic figure will be clever enough to construct an interpretation of Islam purged of jihadist tendencies, and whether that version can propagate and displace the Sunni-fundamentalist varieties now dominant in the Islamic world.

I can do no better than to quote Michelle Efird, the woman who inspired my essay We Are All Jews Now. In private mail afterwards (quoted with permission) she wrote:

I don't want to appease them, I don't want to understand them, I don't want to let them reap the benefits of our liberalism while plotting our destruction. Like most Americans, I would have been more than happy to let them pretend the last 400 years of progress never happened, as long as they didn't force their warped-vision goggles on anyone else. But since they brought the war to us, let's pave the middle east with outlet malls, fast food franchises, and Disney Mecca. Let's infect their entire population with personal liberty and dissension and critical thinking. And if that doesn't work, let's flood them with porn spam.

Osama bin Laden may, in the end, have materialized his own worst fears. The ideology of jihad has created its mirror and opposite; the dawning sense that we in the West have the right, the power, and the duty to wipe bin Laden's brand of religion from the face of the earth before it destroys us all.

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear has written an excellent essay on memes and cultural subversion.

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(Fourth essay of a series.)

In Mirror, Mirror: Why Americans Don't Understand the Threat of Jihadism, What al-Qaeda Wants and The Mirage of Moderate Islam, I have described Islam as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden's goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy. I have analyzed the reason Americans have trouble comprehending the scope of the threat. Now I'll explain why diplomacy is not a path toards a solution.

The Western tradition of diplomacy, which originated from the "balance of power" model for coexisting nation-states in Renaissance Europe, stigmatizes the use of arms as an admission of failure and elevates good-faith negotiation as a virtue of the strong. Westerners think of a plurality of nation-states with conflicting interests as the natural and right way of the world, and Western diplomacy is themed around compromise as a way of allowing the members of that plurality to continue in more or less peaceful coexistence.

Arab cultures (and the Arabized cultures of the rest of the Islamic world) are very different. The Western idea of a plurality of nation-states is considered iniquitous, a sign that men have turned away from Allah. Islam promotes a world united under a single Caliph with absolute authority in both secular and religious matters.

Further, Arabs respect strength in war. Several features of the Islamic worldview -- including fatalism and the belief that Allah guides the arm of conquerors -- reinforce this. Extending an olive branch or seeking compromise, on the other hand, is read as a sign of weakness, inviting more pressure and more attacks.

Applying the assumptions of Western diplomacy to Islamic-world conflicts, therefore, tends to have perverse results. The utter failure of diplomacy in the Israeli/Palestinan conflict is a perfect example. Yasser Arafat and his followers interpreted every Israeli compromise not as a sign of virtue requiring a reciprocal response, but as a sign that that their terror campaign was working. As the Israelis conceded more and more legitimacy to Palestinian political objectives, the terror actually intensified in pitch.

The U.S.'s refusal to negotiate with the Taliban for anything less than the unconditional surrender of Osama bin Laden, by contrast, seemed harsh to apostles of the Western diplomatic tradition but was exactly correct in terms of Islamic psychology. Backing a clear, hard-line position with the threat of force actually gave the U.S. a moral advantage it had lacked when our policy was seen as weak and vacillating. The expected furor of the "Arab street" never materialized.

Diplomacy or negotiation are in any case of very limited use in curbing state terrorism and no use in curbing non-state terrorism. For the forseeable future, the U.S.'s capability to project military power into Third World terrorist havens will be so much greater than that of other members of any imaginable coalition of allies that having a military alliance at all will be almost pointless. Diplomacy need therefore be aimed only at preventing military opposition by nearby nation-states.

Third parties who urge `diplomatic' solutions to problems like Iraqi, Iranian, and Saudi Arabian sponsorship of al-Qaeda should be ignored. In the Islamic cultural context, force and the threat of force stand some chance of obtaining useful results. Talk does not.

(To be continued...)

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(Third in a series.)

In What al-Qaeda Wants and the first essay in this series, The Mirage of Moderate Islam, I have described Islam as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden's goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy.

I have further explained why it is difficult for anyone living within the Islamic worldview to reject or argue against these goals. Jihadism — the belief that Muslims have not merely the right but the duty to smite the infidel and propagate the Faith by force — proceeds direct from the Koran and is accepted as a core religious duty by almost all Muslims.

These are simple truths, readily discernable from reading the words of the Koran, the study of even an outline of Islamic history, and the propaganda of Osama bin Laden himself. Yet they are truths that almost no one in the West is speaking in public, in plain language. In this essay, I will examine the reasons Americans are not yet ideologically prepared to fight the war against terror as it must be fought if we are to win.

First, the U.S. government is telling a Big Lie for diplomatic reasons. It is trying to sell the idea that Islam is a `religion of peace', with al-Qaeda representing only a small fringe of extremists. Part of this is in order not to be seen attacking the religion of our Arab allies in the Middle East.

But domestic politics is an even more important motive for this Big Lie. U.S. policymakers in the know may well fear that if they described the relationship between terrorism and Islamic doctrine accurately, the current broad consensus on war policy might collapse under a hailstorm of accusations of bigotry, prejudice, and intolerance by the bien pensants who run the national media and academe. In a political climate where directing extra scrutiny at young male Middle Eastern air travellers is attacked as unacceptable `racial profiling', this fear would be well-grounded.

Second, the academy has failed us. Americans are almost universally ignorant of Islamic doctrine and history. Most of the few who have some knowledge of the area cannot connect that knowledge to current events. The Islamic-studies and Middle Eastern history establishment completely, utterly failed to anticipate al-Qaeda's revival of jihadism, ignored or rationalized the decade of anti-American terrorist acts that led up to 9/11, and is presently incapable of supplying any significant analytical help to defeating the terrorists.

The exact anatomy of this failure is well described in Martin Kramer's Ivory Towers On Sand. One background problem was a Marxist-influenced tendency to see political change as all-important and dismiss religious fervor as a spent force. Another was a reluctance to confront or discuss the continuing phenomenon of terrorism at all except through the lens of `post-colonial theory' that excused it as a legitimate tactic of the Palestinian or anti-imperialist struggle. Yet a third was the postmodern belief that objective truth is impossible. In effect, the Marxist/multiculturalist/postmodernist preoccupations of the Islamic-studies establishment rendered it incapable of seeing, thinking, or passing judgment. Confronted by the smoking hole where the World Trade Center used to be and Osama bin-Laden's gloating videos, the academics had no way of connecting their theoretical abstractions to the brutal facts and nothing to say. Nine months later, they still doesn't.

Americans outside of universities have few grounds for smugness, however. While most of the rest of us have not had our critical faculties rotted out by Marxism, multiculturalism and postmodernism in their explicit forms, a lower-grade version of the same infections has done much to damage our capacity to understand the threat of jihadism.

Americans have always had the odd parochial habit of assuming that, down deep underneath, everyone is basically like us — sharing our historically peculiar mix of pragmatism and idealism; valuing honesty and fair dealing; tolerant, materialistic, freedom-loving, open-minded, tempting to value comfort and success over ideology. We reflexively believe that everyone can be reasoned with essentially in our own terms. Most Americans don't understand fanaticism and violent evil. We have a tendency to be `fair' by assuming that in any dispute there must be some right and some wrong on both sides. It's telling that we use `extreme' as a political pejorative.

Since at least the end of World War II, this parochialism has become so acute that it has almost blinded us to serious threats. While more of the left-liberals who shilled for the Soviets and Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot during the Cold War were closet Communists than is yet publicly admitted, a good many were honest dupes who simply couldn't believe that Communists were actually motivated by the sinister craziness of hard Marxism, and therefore assumed that America must somehow be at fault. Conservatives apologizing for unsavory pro-American strongmen mostly weren't closet fascists, either; a good many of them had obvious trouble seeing caudillos as more than cigar-chomping CEOs running a particularly tough business, and never mind the gold braid and funny hats.

The see-no-evil tendency in American folk psychology created fertile ground for the rather less benign dogmas of multiculturalism ("all cultures present ways of living that are equally morally valid") and postmodernism ("there is no objective truth"). Originally constructed by Marxists (and one ex-Fascist) as part of a program to ideologically disarm the West against the radical evil of Communism, these dogmas have both outlived their original ends and seeped into American pop culture. Their effect is that many of us can no longer bring ourselves to think of any political movement, religion, or culture as radically evil unless it is safely part of history (and, for political correctness, was run by dead white European males when it was alive and kicking).

This was a relatively harmless form of self-delusion between 1992 and 2001, the decade of self-indulgence bracketed by the fall of the Soviet Empire and 9/11. No longer. We are at war. Western civilization is under attack by a foe that revels in the wholesale slaughter of civilians, one that proudly announces its intention to bring a second Holocaust of fire and blood down upon us all.

If our civilization is to survive, we will need to recover the moral judgment needed to recognize radical evil, the language in which to condemn it, and the determination to act.

In a perverse way, al-Qaeda has made this easy. They have murdered thousands in a single attack on one of our heart cities, they have attempted to unleash biological weapons on us, and have actively planned to detonate nuclear/radiological weapons in our population centers. Those who cannot recognize even this as radical evil — those who persist in arguing that the 9/11 attack was somehow justified by something United Fruit did in Guatemala or the Israelis did in Lebanon — are rapidly dealing themselves out of the game of deciding how we shall respond.

Having recognized al-Qaeda's behavior as radically evil, we must next recognize that its motivating ideology is evil, too. And the first step there is recognizing that Islam's apologists are systematically lying to us about what they believe and intend. Outside of a few fringe groups like the Dauri Bohras and a tiny minority of intellectual reformers who generally dare not speak their ideas in their own home countries, there is simply no constituency in Islam prepared to recognize Western concepts of peace, tolerance, and pluralism.

We will not be prepared to win the war against Islamic terror until we understand the following things:

• Islam is a religion of war and conversion by the sword, not peace.
• The primary threat of terrorism comes from Arabs and middle-easterners between the ages of fifteen and forty, and we must summon the will to profile accordingly.
• We are dealing with religious fanaticism rather than rational grievances against America or the West.
• Our enemies cannot be reasoned with or appeased anywhere short of surrender and submission to shari'a law.
• Apologists for mainstream Islam are systematically lying to us about Islamic doctrine in order to shield terrorists who they know are acting in strict accordance with that doctrine.

The hardest challenge for Americans is to grasp is the fact that the evil of the 9/11 hijackings, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the threat of al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction set off in American cities is not simply the evil of al-Qaeda. It is in fact the Koranically-correct expression of the tendency of Islam (Sunni fundamentalism) which is has been pre-eminent through most of Islamic history and now encompasses over 90% of the worlds Muslims.

We need to face the fact that we are confronting not just a barbaric and evil group of men, but a barbaric and evil religion. To protect ourselves, we must either force the complete reform of Islam (purging it of jihadism and its tendency towards periodic fundamentalist outbreaks) or destroy its hold over its followers.

This is a problem for Americans; first, because we have been taught that we that we must not be intolerant of other peoples' religions; and second, because fully grasping the nature of the danger Islamic poses to Western civilization requires thinking uncomfortable thoughts about the dominant Christian religion of our own culture.

The reader is at this point invited to learn more about the developing alliance between Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms. Then, to learn all about Kissing Hank's Ass. Before 9/11, "Kissing Hank's Ass" was an edgy joke. Today it demonstrates why ending the threat of religiously-motivated terror will require us to confront and destroy the fundamentalist/jihadist impulse not merely in Islam, but also in Christianity and all other eschatological monotheisms where it finds a natural home.

Christianity, like Islam (and unlike almost all of the other religions of the world) has violent intolerance of other religions and the impulse to conversion by the sword wired into its doctrinal DNA. Most Americans have trouble believing the Koran means what it says about the duty of jihad because for most Christians, the parallel Christian duty to smite the infidel is a historical dead letter. But counterparts of al-Qaeda such as the Christian Identity Movement exist in the West, imbued with all of al-Qaeda's rage. Christian fundamentalists express the same hatred of modernity and determination to jam the world back into a medieval mold that motivates Osama bin Laden.

To win the war on terror, we must understand jihadism and clearly distinguish it from ethical self-defense. We must be prepared not merely to counter fanaticism not merely by killing the fanatical in self-defense, but also by discrediting the doctrines and habits of thought that make fanatics in the first place — whether they occur in the other guy's religion or our own. Islam has declared itself the immediate adversary of modernity — but more than one world religion will have to go under the knife before our children can sleep in peace.

(To be continued...)

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(Second in a series.)

In a The Mirage of Moderate Islam, I have described the Koranic roots of Islamic fanaticism, and observed that Osama bin Laden's terror war on the west is part of a recurring pattern of fundamentalist revival associated with jihad in Islamic history.

In this essay, I'll get more specific about what Osama bin Laden is really after. In the process, it will become clear why Arab-world governments are so frightened of him.

The first thing to understand is that Osama bin Laden is neither crazy nor stupid. He is a very intelligent, educated, visionary man who is operating from deep within the Islamic worldview. He's trying to do on a global scale what the Ayatollah Khomeini did in Iran in 1979; he's bucking for the job of Caliph of Islam ("Khalifa" in Arabic).

The position of Khalifa has been vacant since the last Padishah Emperor of the Ottoman Empire was deposed in 1924, when the British and French broke up the Empire after it picked the wrong side in World War One. Before that, the Caliph was in theory both the supreme temporal and spiritual ruler of the Islamic world.

I say "in theory" because the Caliph's actual authority varied considerably. In the early centuries of Islam, during the initial expansionary phase of the Empire, it was absolute -- in European terms, as though Charlemagne or Napoleon were also the Pope. It tended to decrease over time as the increasing size of the Islamic empire led to political fragmentation. Independent emirs swore nominal fealty to the Caliph and accepted his symbolic authority in religious matters, while otherwise behaving as sovereigns. An able Caliph backed by strong armies could buck this disintegrative trend and make the allegiance of the emirs more than nominal. Eventually emperors of the Ottoman Turks collected this title, and gathered most of the Islamic world under their sway. But the Ottoman Empire had been in decline for four centuries by 1924, and the title of Caliph had become almost meaningless.

One of the signature traits of Islamic revivalism is nostalgia for the halcyon days of Islamic expansion, when the Caliph was the undisputed Arm of Allah and there was plenty of plunder and rapine to go around as the armies of God smote the infidel and claimed new lands for the Dar-al-Islam.

Here's where we cue the ominous theme music. It is part of Islamic tradition that the title of Khalifa may be attained by conquest if the incumbent is not fulfilling his duties -- or if there is no incumbent. Under shari'a law and hadith, the umma (the consultative assembly of the elders of Islam) is required to recognize as Khalifa anyone who is able to fulfill the duties of the position and demonstrates the sanction of Allah by mobilizing the Dar-al-Islam in successful jihad. Jihad, here, is interpreted broadly; a war of consolidation that united a substantial portion of the Dar-al-Islam under a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy would do it.

In other words, since 1924 the position of Caliph has been waiting for a Man on Horseback. Or, for you science-fiction fans out there, a Muad'Dib. The Ayatollah Khomeini could never quite make this nut; first, because he was not a plausible warlord, and second because he's part of the 10% Shi'a minority branch that disputes the Khalifal succession. The next Caliph, if there is one, will have to belong to the 90% Sunni majority.

Osama bin Laden has behaved precisely as though he intends to fill that role. And in doing so, he has frightened the crap out of the rulers of the Arab world. Because he's played his religious and propaganda cards very well in Islamic terms, barring the detail that he may well be dead and buried under rubble in an Afghan cave.

On 9/11, bin Laden took jihad to the symbolic heart of the West more effectively than any Islamic ruler has managed since the Siege of Vienna was broken in 1683. By doing so he caught Arab rulers (especially the Saudis) in a neat theo-political trap. They have been encouraging hatred of Israel and the West, and hyping the jihadist mythology of fundamentalist Islam, as a way of diverting popular anger that might otherwise focus on their own corrupt and repressive regimes. But Bin Laden has trumped and beaten them at this game. He has acted out the Koranic duty of jihad in a way they never dared -- and in doing so, seized the religious high ground.

The sheikhs and ayatollahs now have a dilemma. If they support jihadism, they must either start a war against the West they know they cannot win or cede their own legitimacy to the Caliph-claimant who is leading the jihad. But if they come out against jihad, bin Laden or his successor can de-legitimitize them simply by pointing to the Koran. The possibility that the semi-mythical "Arab street" would revolt behind local Khomeini-equivalents hot to join al-Qaeda's jihad is quite real.

Let the last word go to the mentor of Osama bin Laden, Sheik Abdullah Azzam: "Jihad must not be abandoned until Allah alone is worshipped by mankind...Jihad and the rifle alone...no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogue." The Palestinians are, as usual, disposable pawns in a larger game. The objective of al-Qaeda's game is to follow the Koranic blueprint to its logical conclusion; global jihad, a second age of conversion by the sword, the destruction of the West, and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy.

Osama bin Laden himself may be dead now. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily stop the game, because his body hasn't been found. The Twelfth Imam of Shi'a disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 941CE; persons claiming to be him and calling the faithful to jihad emerged at intervals for a thousand years afterwards, the most recent one being the Mahdi who led an anti-British revolt in Egypt in 1899. If the jihadist tendency in Islam is not confronted and destroyed, Osama bin Laden could haunt the West for a thousand years.

(To be continued...)

Diplomatic lies notwithstanding, Islam is anything but a `religion of peace'. Any honest scholar will tell you that Islam is a religion of violence, martyrdom, and conversion by the sword. The duty to wage war for the propagation of the faith is plainly written in the Koran; Osama bin Laden's suicide bombers are part of a tradition that springs from Islam's warlike origins and has been re-affirmed in every generations by ghazis, hashishim, and numerous other varieties of holy warrior.

It is the interiorization of `jihad' as a struggle for self-mastery that is revisionist and exceptional, one proposed by only a few Westernized and progressive Muslims and (one senses) not wholeheartedly believed even by them. A truer window on the nature of Islam is the way that it divides the Earth into the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and the Dar al-Harb -- the House of War, the theater of battle to be waged with zeal until the infidel is crushed and submits to the Will of God. The very word, islam, means `submission'.

Conspicuous by their absence are any clear denunciations of bin-Ladenite terror from the members of the ulama, the loose collective of elders and theologicians that articulates the Islamic faith. Such internal criticism as we do hear is muted, equivocal, often excusing the terrorists immediately after half-heartedly condemning them. Far more common, though seldom reported in Western media, are pro-jihadi sermons that denounce America as a land of devils and praise Al-Qaeda's mass murderers in one breath with Palestinian suicide bombers as martyrs assured of a place in heaven.

There has been some play given in the media lately to the notion that the ideological force behind Islamic terrorism is not Islam per se but specifically the puritanical Wahhabi sect associated with the House of Saud. Some accounts trace the rise in terrorism to Wahhabi prosyletization in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Most versions of this theory have it that Wahhabism is an unattractive doctrine (by contrast with, say, the Sufi tradition of the Caucasus or the relaxed syncretic Buddhist-influenced Islam of Indonesia) but that it wins converts because, with billions in Saudi oil money behind it, the Wahhabites can afford to field missionaries and build schools that promulgate the puritan party line.

The trouble with this theory is that it ignores the history of Islam and the internal logic of Islamic doctrine. The history of Islam is a collection of cycles of doctrinal decay followed by fundamentalist renewal. Believers tend to drift away from strict Islam, but ever century or two some mad-eyed wanderer will come screaming out of the desert and haul the faithful back on to the Narrow Way with a blend of personal charisma, argument and force (the latter generally administered by some allied warlord who sees political gain in it).

This drama keeps getting re-enacted because, in general, these charismatic fundamentalist looney-toons are correct in their criticism of `soft' Islam. The Koran, the actions and statements of the prophet Mohammed, and the witness of the lives of his immediate followers are pretty clear on what the religious duties of a Muslim are. Long before the 9/11 attacks, I read large portions of the Koran (in translation) and more than one history of Islam, because I collect religions. I learned about the Five Pillars and the hadith (the traditional sayings of Mohammed) and the ulama.

Moderate Muslims trying to argue against the latest version of Islamic fundamentalism are in a difficult situation. All the fundamentalists have to do to support their position is to point at the Koran, which is much more authoritative in an Islamic context than the Bible is in most Christian ones. Moderates are reduced to arguing that the Koran doesn't really mean what it says, or arguing from hadith that qualify or contradict the Koranic text. Since the Koran trumps the hadith, this is generally a losing position.

The grim truth is that Osama bin Laden's fanatic interpretation of Islam is Koranically correct. The God of the Koran and Mohammed truly does demand that idolatry be purged with fire and sword, and that infidels must be forced either to convert to Islam or (as a limited exception for Christians and Jews, the "Peoples of the Book") live as second-class citizens subject to special taxes and legal restrictions. The Koran really does endorse suicidal martyrdom and the indiscriminate killing of infidels for the faith.

(The Koran does not, however, require purdah and the veil; these are practices the Arab world picked up from Persia after the tenth century CE. Nor does it require female genital mutilation, which seems to have been acquired from sub-Saharan Africa.)

For both shallow diplomatic/political reasons and deeper psychological ones, Westerners have trouble grasping just how bloody-minded, intolerant, and prone to periodic murderous outbreaks of fundamentalist zeal Islam actually is. But we must come to grips with this. If we treat the terror war as a merely geopolitical conflict, we will be fighting the wrong battle with the wrong weapons.

It is not merely Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or even Wahhabism we are fighting, it is a fanatic tendency wired deep into the origins and doctrine of Islam itself, a tendency of which these movements are just surface signs. That tendency must be cured or cauterized out. No lesser victory will do for a world in which means and weapons of mass destruction grow ever easier for terrorists to acquire.

(To be continued...)

Blogspt comments

This afternoon I was reading a quote from a woman who had left a comment on Tim Blair's weblog. She wrote:

rld, I feel it's my duty as a woman to wear clingier clothing, flirt more outrageously, have more orgasms, and get on top more often. In short, anything that's taboo to the islamofascists."

Boo-yah, sister! This struck me as a wonderful example of what computer hackers and science-fiction fans call a `ha ha only serious', which is just the the opposite of a `ha ha only kidding'. It's a wonderfully multi-leveled utterance.

Generally when people start out with "As an X, I feel it's my duty" one expects the followthrough to be some ennobling exhortation to self-sacrifice and a stiff upper lip. The sheer cheekiness of following instead with "gonna get laid more" is wonderful -- I can imagine the sister, with a gleam in her eye and a curl of her lip, daring anybody to call her on it, and daring anybody not to notice that she is one hot chick who knows exactly how to use what she's got.

An idiot, or a conservative of the ramrod-up-the-ass school, would stop there, take her rhetorical flip-the-bird at islamofascists as more than an excuse for narcissism-tinged self-display or a thin bit of patter, and perhaps splutter with jowly indignation. Me, I got respect for this sister. I think she meant every word she said and was being wicked smart.

The true mindfucking beauty of this quote only becomes apparent when you hold both meanings (the sexual self-display and the the anti-islamofascist flip-the-bird) in your mind at once, and allow each to play off the other in a spirit of intentional irony. Our sister has uttered the perfect sexual battle cry for the islamofascists' occidentalist nightmare -- and I think she knows it.

Since 9/11 it has become easier to notice that Islamic fear and hatred of the West (and of America as its political and cultural hyperpower) is rooted in a hostility to all the freedoms and self-indulgences of urban western civilization -- commerce, mixed populations, artistic freedom, sexual license, scientific pursuits, leisure, personal safety, wealth. Indeed, one of the circumstances that justifies the term "islamofascism" is that this catalog of resentments is exactly that of classical fascism. And the icon of subversive modernity, to all fascists everywhere, has been the Jew -- rootless, cosmopolitan, urbane, commercial, and (in anti-Semitic propaganda) sexual seducer of the pure.

Two perceptive commentators (op. cit.) have written "Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Hitler, Japanese agrarian fascists, and of course Islamists all extolled the simple life of the pious peasant, pure at heart, uncorrupted by city pleasures, used to hard work and self-denial, tied to the soil, and obedient to authority. Behind the idyll of rural simplicity lies the desire to control masses of people, but also an old religious rage, which goes back at least as far as the ancient superpower Babylon."

By saying "fuck me", the sister is saying a big "fuck you" to all that. She is choosing to embody the whore of Babylon for reasons that mingle her own desire with deliberate defiance of the bearded patriarchs and their stormtroopers. She is acting out the culture war as sexual politics. She is not merely a hedonist or a rebel (though either would be bad enough) but an ultimately enraging combination of the two, conscious blasphemy written with the body under those clinging clothes.

In the fevered mind of any islamofascist, the sister is certainly urban and probably Jewish. In fact, we are all Jews now, every one of us in the West. This is what lies behind the standard-issue Arab-world mutterings about U.S. policy being controlled by Jews and Israelis, and the tremendous wave of pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli solidarity in the U.S. after 9/11. The alliance both we and the Islamists are sensing is more than geopolitical; it's founded in everybody's gut-level understanding that rage against the Jews and rage against modernity have become effectively synonymous.

Yes, we're all Jews now, even blue-eyed Germano-Celtic goyim like me. We are going to be everything the islamofascists fear and hate, and we're going to glory in it. We're going to embody all the worst nightmares of those butt-ignorant ragheads in Al-Qaeda. We're going to kill them, we're going to subvert their children with MTV, and we're going to teach their women to wear clingy clothing and say "fuck me" and "fuck you" to men whenever they damn well feel like it.

And, sister? Here's my ha ha only serious, offered in the same spirit as yours. You are a warrior. I salute you. And if you want to commit exactly the kind of scandalous, adulterous, hedonistic, casual sex best calculated to drive fascists and patriarchs up a wall sometime, I'm your guy. You can be on top.

The recent controversy over arming airline pilots against a possible repetition of the 9/11 atrocity misses a crucial problem that makes arming pilots relatively ineffective: terrorists would know in advance where the guns are, and be able to game against that.

Let's say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking. You know the pilots are armed. Then here are your tactics -- you send the pilots a message that you will begin shooting cabin crew and passengers, one every five minutes, until the pilots throw their guns into the main cabin. Just to make sure, you split your gang into an A team and a B team. After the pilots have thrown out some guns, you send the A team into the cockpit. If the pilots resist, the B team kills more people.

Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way. Your B team, armed with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky marshals (if there are any present; they're now flying on less than 1% of planes, and can't be trained fast enough for that figure to go up significantly in the foreseeable future) break cover. Now your A team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals. Game over.

Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping firearms off-board should put down that crack pipe now. Tiger team exercises after 9/11 have repeatedly demonstrated that the new, improved airport security has had effectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy's ability to sneak weapons past checkpoints -- it's still easy. Despite government spin, there is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just too hard.

For terrorists to be effectively deterred, they need to face a conterthreat they cannot scope out in advance. That's why the right solution is to arm the passengers, not just the pilots.

Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns potentially pointed at you from all directions. Go ahead; take that flight attendant hostage. You can't use her to make people give up weapons neither you nor she knows they have. You have to assume you're outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on anyone, because you don't know who might be packing.

The anti-gun bien pensants of the world wet their pants at the thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed civilians. They would have you believe that this would be a sure recipe for carnage on every flight, an epidemic of berserk yahoos blowing bullet holes through innocent bystanders and the cabin walls. When you ask why this didn't happen before 1971 when there were no firearms restrictions on airplanes, they evade the question.

The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang of terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent bystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking out the terrorists. That would be bad -- but, post-9/11, the major aim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives. Instead, it has to be preventing the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction. Thus: we should arm the passengers to save the lives of thousands more bystanders on the ground.

And, about that stray-bullet thing. Airplanes aren't balloons. They don't pop when you put a round through the fuselage. A handful of bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous; there would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere. To sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting ammunition like Glaser rounds.

Think of it. No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious baggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security guards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before boarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware. Simpler, safer, faster air travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists.

Extending this lesson to other circumstances, like when we're not surrounded by a fuselage, is left as an exercise for the reader...