Before getting totally consumed with the often vacuous rhetoric of Election 2004, it is important to take stock of the one truly consuming issue before the American people—the global war on terrorism. Where are we and what’s next? Those who were anticipating some guidance from the recently released report of the 9/11 Commission should have been disappointed—no “smoking gun”, no “red meat” for partisan consumption and assignment of blame—just an invitation to several months of bureaucratic and Congressional turf wars over the substantive equivalent of how to rearrange the furniture. So while we deal with the almost totally politically driven response to the report, we had better be totally committed to this war for, be assured, our enemies most certainly are. I was struck by a comment in Charles Hill’s recent Wall Street Journal essay on the Commission report: “……a platform must be found from which to explain the dimensions of the challenge. In terms of the Second World War, we are in the late 1930’s. Churchill described the danger then. Today the Bush administration is understandably reluctant to talk frankly about a threat so fraught with religious, cultural, and civilizational implications.” How true, but Bush and his surrogates don’t have the luxury of avoiding such talk, election year or not. For the fact is that, though war talk was barely mentioned in the 2000 election campaign, we were then arguably in the seventh year of this war, and are now in the eleventh!So, what’s next? Here are some suggestions:· It’s time to launch the next offensive—Iran. Clearly, diplomatic efforts have about run their course here, the mullahs have no intention but to buy time while they pursue their nuclear weapons objectives, and the UN is, as usual, irrelevant. So far, we have been all talk, no action. We should be pursuing regime change on all fronts—political, massive radio intervention a la Radio Free Europe, and aggressive support for the internal dissidents and revolutionaries. What if these don’t work? A new test for pre-emptive military intervention and the Bush Doctrine.

· We should get serious about directly confronting Syria’s support for the insurgents and terrorists who are killing Americans and Iraqis in Iraq. The message should be “cease and desist or else!” and should be backed by a real threat of military intervention, with which the Kurdish militia would be happy to assist!

· In Iraq, it’s pretty simple: all out support for the new government’s promise to “annihilate” the insurgents (i.e., no more “Fallujahs”), hold firm to the date for January elections, and begin to structure new alliances that will be more suitable for the new global realities than the tepid response we have received from our erstwhile NATO “allies” in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Bush’s primary responsibility in all of this, for he owns the platform, is to “explain the dimensions of the challenge”, as Hill says. There will be a tendency by the “nervous Nellies” to defer any new initiatives in an election year and in the wake of the strong anti-incumbent message in the recent European Union and local European elections, particularly the big losses by Blair in the UK. The President’s problems are further compounded by John Kerry’s “nuanced” message on the war effort in Iraq, the anti-American sentiments of the European and American left, and their presumption of bad intent on his part. But, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher in another crisis, “this is no time to go wobbly”, and he must be even bolder on these points than he has recently shown. It is the right thing to do strategically for America and the world, as well as politically for him.

A recent lead article in the Weekend Journal section of The Wall Street Journal caught my attention. It was another one of those surveys of the tendency that has been prevalent in the past twenty years or so in America toward “do it yourself’ religion. At least anecdotally, this seems to me to be a condition primarily of the now late middle-aged baby boomer generation, frustrated with traditional religion and its institutions, striving for meaning in their lives, and the struggle by their former clergy to woo them back into the mainstream. The common mantra of these religious groups is their preference for “spirituality” in an environment in which, as one group founder put it, “dogma doesn’t get in the way”. Another common attribute among these groups seems to be the tendency toward “personal growth” over “fixed creed”, as David Brooks has described it. In a country that remains the most religious in all the free world, save possibly India, and which has alone sustained a competitive marketplace for religious beliefs almost since its founding, this phenomenon is not surprising, and it is probably good evidence of the tolerance that has made us immune to religious wars.I’m all for the search for personal meaning, but I’m not sure that this movement from religion to spirituality, personal growth over fixed creed, and its accompanying anti-theological “bonding” and pop-psychology is entirely healthy for our religious life as a nation, particularly to the extent that it is in some ways tied to the concerted effort by many to remove from the public square all evidence of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, which is, after all, the foundation of our common adherence to a distinctive American creed.

China Watch Update

Very quietly, with scant notice in Western media and none in China, the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre of Tiananmen Square recently passed. Only in Hong Kong was there any significant commemoration. One hopes that this does not mean that this event has lost its central place in the historical struggle for freedom and human rights. Certainly we in America shouldn’t forget it, and we are remiss in not remembering it more prominently, for I believe it will prove to have been analogous to our Lexington and Concord or Boston Massacre. In the ensuing years since 1989, what we are witnessing in China is a revolution that I predict will be viewed by historians as at least the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution of late 18th and early 19th century Europe. Massive population shifts from rural villages to urban localities are taking place there–over 300 million people since the late 1970’s and a predicted additional 250 million by 2020. Needless to say, this revolution and its concomitant surge in economic growth have enormous implications for the world and present daunting challenges for U.S. economic and foreign policy. Of course, economic integration is essential, and for that reason we should support trade liberalization at every turn through the World Trade Organization and regional free trade organizations. And we should pursue domestic economic growth, job creation, and trade policies that shun protectionism and the constant bashing of China over outsourcing. All of which is to say that we need a President who understands why these priorities are important, but also, not incidentally, why the memory of the heroes of Tiananmen Square and their struggle for political freedom should be ever in the forefront of our thinking and policy deliberations.

In the battle over the definition of marriage, there are many confusing currents, but, as usual, we can depend on Thomas Sowell to sort through them and cut to the heart of the matter, as follows:

“Love affairs are personal relations. Marriage is a legal relation. Sexual relations are between consenting adults, but now the gay activists are taking the view that they are government’s business. Then there are those strained analogies with the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King was a private citizen who did not put himself above the law; neither did he wield the power of the law. The Massachusetts judges and the mayor of San Francisco are using their authority under the law to subvert the law. The last refuge of the gay rights activists is that this is a matter of equal rights. But marriage is not an individual right. Otherwise, why limit marriage to unions of two people, or people at all? Marriage is a social contract because the issues involved go beyond the particular individuals. Unions of a man and a woman produce the future generations on whom the fate of the whole society depends. Society has something to say about that.”Note that Sowell did not use religious terminology in the above passage. And I would suggest that the moral considerations surrounding this issue that are informed by our Judeo-Christian heritage cannot, and should not, be excluded from the discussion. I would also add to Sowell’s argument against the use of the civil rights analogy that there is a big difference between civil rights denied based on race and those that are created based on behavior.

The real question from a public policy standpoint is, “who decides?” Here we are in a box from which there may be no escape short of a constitutional amendment defining marriage. It is sad that it has come to this, but our Founders could naturally conceive of no situation that might arise that would represent such a frontal assault on natural law and the moral order. The only alternative to such a divisive battle is for Congress to take its rightful place in the democratic process and deny jurisdiction to the judiciary in deciding this question. If not, we are one step closer to the end of democracy.