The Argument for a Principled Accommodation

Dear Mr. Brooks,

Among clever, witty co-workers (Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman), on Meet the Press, you made the funniest statement. And like most insightful comedy, your remark sprang from tragedy. "In my black moments," you said, "I sometimes think President Bush is the Manchurian Candidate sent to discredit everything I believe in." As a registered Libertarian, I share some of your pain. Yet, without major party affiliation to bind and blind me, I quickly perceived the war mongering of this Administration. I never bought into the neo-con self-delusion of spreading Democracy, at gunpoint, throughout the Islamic World. What an excursion into the stratosphere of wishful thinking!

There are four basic responses to the challenge of Islamic Fundamentalism.

1) Capitulation.
2) Religious War
3) A Principled Accommodation
4) Victory

Capitulation should not be taken seriously. The Islamic Fundamentalists, though they may fantasize about exterminating us, do not wish to rule us. They do not want such depraved, secular people to experience the joys of their Caliphate.

Religious Warfare is a distinct possibility. I am sure that Pat Robertson, between selling his diet shake and praying for John Paul Stevens to die, dreams of a War of Civilizations. Frankly, I do not see anything in that for me and the secular majority. Focus on the Family's utopia too closely resembles the Caliphate. And after all these millenia of religious extremism, God must yearn for a secular world, don't you think? How many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people have been butchered in God's name? This continuous stream of sanctified blood, century after century, surely has convinced God that we are too primitive to comprehend Him. Don't you think?

A Principled Accommodation with the Islamic World can be pulled off by men of good faith. (Lying about WMD to justify a blood for oil foreign policy does not quite pass muster as good faith.) Yet, such an Accommodation, realistically, must include a Jeffersonian-style Embargo. The traditional societies of the Islamic World are de-stabilized by all of our garbage - the music, the movies, the halter tops, the blue jeans, etc. etc. etc. We must help those countries keep the garbage out. That, of course, means an even more enormous trade deficit. So be it.

Victory means sacrifice. High Taxes. Conscription. Etc. We haven't the stomach for such sacrifice. (And, as a Libertarian, such sacrifice defies my principles.) The necessary instrument to achieve Victory - an elected, representative and sovereign United Nations - does not even exist. Americans are not the only ones unwilling to sacrifice the graven images of Nationalism just to achieve Victory over the Caliphate.

The Bush Doctrine - defying and castigating the World to impose Democracy on Iraq at gunpoint - cannot achieve Victory. The necessary means to achieve the stated ends add up to an UnPrincipled Accommodation with the Islamic World.

Will we ever work off this angst over 9/11 and start Thinking?