Free Republic

I am not a Spaniard. Somewhere, on March 12, I saw the headline, "We are All Spaniards Now." It was an allusion to the Le Monde headline from 9/12, "We are All Americans Now."As we now know, that initial French (and German) sympathy for America was short-lived. In no time flat, the Old Europe of France and Germany sought to appease Islamism, and while claiming to be our allies, to betray us at every step of the way.Not so, the Spaniards. The 1,300 troops they sent to Iraq were largely a symbolic matter, but the symbolism was powerful.After 911, when...

According to legend, it is impossible for a vampire to enter your house unless you have invited him in. Last Sunday, the Spanish people invited a vampire to enter their house, and the question that now looms before them — and the rest of Europe as well — is how to get him back out. The vampire is terror — but not just the old homespun terrorism of the European past, but the radically new form of terror that came to the world's attention on 9/11, namely catastrophic terror. Once upon a time, back in the nineteenth century, terrorism was...

Looking back on the stunning catastrophe of the Spanish election, the one thing that no one can say is, "If only Spain had been a democracy." Spain was a democracy — the kind of democracy that we can only dream of establishing in Iraq or in other countries of the Middle East, and yet, when given the choice between standing by civilization or giving in to the demands of its enemies, Spanish democracy did not hesitate for a moment. It rallied to the side of anti-civilization. Democracy did not save Spain. On the contrary, it was the instrument by which...

As of this writing we do not yet know who planted the bombs that killed over two hundred people in Madrid yesterday. It may have been the Basque terrorists, or it may have been Al Qaeda. Or it may have been some other agent of radical Islam. If the terrorists turn out to be Basque, then the problem is clearly Spain's, and not ours. But if it was Al Qaeda, or one of its allies or competitors, then we may be on the verge of a frightening new development — the emergence of catastrophic terror as a deliberate tool for...

Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology now your enemy” is a well-known maxim, but one that is difficult to observe in practice. Nor is the reason for this hard to fathom: If you are my enemy, it is unlikely that I will go very much out of my way to learn to see things from your point of view. And if this is true even in those cases where the conflict is between groups that share a common culture, how much more true will it be when there is a profound cultural and psychological chasm between the antagonists? Yet, paradoxically, this failure...

Last week, President Bush was attacked by members of the Democratic Party for using images of 9/11 in a campaign ad, and by the next day there was the normal political and media uproar over this burning question: Should the President be scolded for daring to use such images, or should he be defended? I do not wish to weigh in on this question because, like many burning questions being asked today, I think it is absurdly irrelevant, like the burning question whether President Bush should have worn a flight jacket while aboard a helicopter. Instead the question I want...

Step back and take a long view of history, and ask yourself, If it had not happened in this way, how else could a single nation achieve overwhelming military dominance? That is to say, if America had not acquired military supremacy, who else might have? have often wished that some Hollywood mogul would put me in charge of the philosophical genre known as reality TV -- not that I mean to imply any criticism of their current level of excellence, at least not after the profound Hegelian meditations known as The Simple Life. But still I have a program or...

In my book, Civilization and Its Enemies, I argue that all successful civilizations tend to forget just how difficult it was for their ancestors to rise to a civilized state. Furthermore, I argue that if the civilization is spectacularly successful, as ours has been, it even begins to nurture the collective illusion that human beings come into the world predisposed to live harmoniously together. We get along fine, and so naturally we are puzzled when others don't. What makes them butcher each other, we wonder, when in fact the real question should be, What keeps us from doing the same...

Lee Harris is the author of "Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History," a book that argues that the war on terror is not a clash of religions but a renewal of the nasty, aeons-old struggle between the forces of civilization and "anti-civilization." (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.) A philosopher/political thinker/novelist who defines himself as "an enlightened populist," Harris has done a lot of deep thinking and writing on the implications of 9/11 and the rise of ruthless new enemies who will never play by our rules, accept our values or be persuaded by...

The Democratic Party is in a bind. It needs to disagree with President Bush — that, after all, is the point of having two parties. It also needs to be more liberal than Mr. Bush, since that is the only way it can preserve its traditional ideological basis. But on the question of Iraq, the question arises: Is there really a liberal alternative to Mr. Bush's Iraq policy? For the last several months the Democratic Party has tried to answer this question in the affirmative by employing two different rhetorical smokescreens: sentimental pacifism and multilateralism. Associated with the once hopeful...

<p>The Democratic Party is in a bind. It needs to disagree with George Bush -- that, after all, is the point of having two parties. It also needs to be more liberal than George Bush, since that is the only way it can preserve its traditional ideological basis. But on the question of Iraq, the question arises: Is there really a liberal alternative to Mr. Bush's Iraq policy?</p>

With Lee Harris, I have shared the view that the West entered a new historical epoch on the morning of Sept. 11th, 2001, and that the ways of thinking that had served us (often not very well) through the wars of the 20th century would have to be abandoned. We would have to think again about the nature of our civilization, and of its enemies — for we were now faced with an existential threat different in kind. This is the Mr. Harris whose essay on "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology", two summers ago, gave the most cogent account of what...

Imagine how you would feel if you had just become the proud parent of a bouncing baby boy, and you suddenly discovered that people you did not know from Adam were publishing critical reviews about your child's most intimate parts, with many of them written in a decidedly snide and hostile tone. Now take this and multiply it by authorial vanity -- the most powerful force known to man -- and you will have a dim sensation of how someone feels whose book has just seen the light of day. This is the experience I am currently going through,...

Is it fair to judge a man by a single shriek?I am referring to the sound that Howard Dean made the night of his dismal third place showing in the Iowa Caucus -- a sound that National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg has thoughtfully transcribed for those who did not get a chance to hear it on TV as a word beginning with Y, followed by 16 E's, 6 A's, 3 G's, and 6 H's: YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAGGGHHHHH. But even if it the sound Governor Dean made contained 28 E's and 16 A's, still the question remains: Is it fair to judge his...

Those seeking to find evidence of God's providential intervention in the affairs of men need only to reflect upon the political career of Al Gore.This is a man who had four chances to become President. First, he might have been elected in his own right in 1992, if Bill Clinton's vastly superior charm had not dazzled the Democratic Party. Second, Gore might have succeeded President Clinton if the latter had done the gentlemanly thing and resigned as President at the first hint of the Lewinsky scandal, or if Congress had removed him from office. Third, Gore might have won the...

The author Victor Davis Hanson, in an otherwise excellent attack on the malaise of modern intellectuals, refers dismissively to "honor and shame" as "the stuff of tribal societies." Of course he is right; it is the stuff of tribal societies; and in making this point, he is also making the same point that several readers made about my article, "Blaming Christmas," namely, that the sense of honor by itself is no guarantee that those motivated by this sense will act decently or morally: "As much, perhaps more, wrong has been done in the name of 'honor' as has [been done...

Why is there a terror alert in the United States some two years and three months after President Bush declared his war on terrorism? Wasn't that the whole point of invading Afghanistan and Iraq — to make certain that nothing like 9/11 happens to us again? This question has been raised during the last week, and I would like to try to answer it, if only because it badly needs an answer. I regret that the Bush administration ever made it appear as if our occupation of Iraq was a new front on the war on terror, because if it...

Since the capture of Saddam Hussein last Saturday, there has arisen a debate over whether we should feel sympathy or pity for his fall and subsequent humiliation; and no less a moral authority than a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church weighed in, asserting that he felt genuine compassion for Saddam Hussein, and berating the United States for its moral insensitivity in releasing the video tape made immediately after he was taken captive. This discussion made me start thinking about the use -- and abuse -- of compassion, and the first thing that came to my mind was a simple...

"Saddam has done nothing to us." This line jumped out at me while I was reading a Philadelphia Enquirer article by Don Harrison entitled, "Capture still does not justify Iraq war," referring, of course, to the capture this weekend of Saddam Hussein. The article's author goes on to explain that while Saddam is "a vile monster" and that it is a good thing that he will be brought to justice, "his capture does not, in any way, justify our ill-advised, ill-timed, ill-planned act of aggression." Well, obviously. If the second Iraq war was indeed a stupid act of aggression, what...

 There is a famous scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy's little dog, Toto, pulls the curtain back, and the illusionary wizard is revealed to be a small and insignificant human being, whose power came solely from the fear he was able to engender in the imagination of those he held in thrall. I thought of this scene Sunday morning when, alerted by a friend's phone call at 7:30, I turned on my TV and saw the unforgettable video of the former dictator of Iraq. It was not the first time that I had seen his face, of course....