NEWSPAPER COLUMNS - davidwarrenonline.com

Iceland's advances - March 14, 2012

Should we feel flattered that the Icelanders - 70 per cent of them according to some foolish poll - want to adopt our loonie as their currency, to replace their worthless krona?

No.

The proposal is apparently serious. That Iceland needs some semistable medium of exchange, given what has happened since the Icelandic banking meltdown of 2008, we must grant. Their choice is informally between the Canadian dollar, founded in our fiscal rectitude, such as it is; the Norwegian krona, with associated oil wealth; the still-prestigious Japanese yen; and the euro.

"Apparently" isn't the same as actually, however, and the proposal to adopt our Canadian dollar came from the opposition Progressive party, not the governing Social Democrats. It was first suggested only as a mental exercise, to help people imagine a package of arrangements that might, in aggregate, provide an alternative to full Icelandic membership in the European Union. (The country already belongs to the "Schengen Area," with much free-trading access.)

Another poll suggests that Icelanders, by a large margin, now grasp that they cannot join the EU the way Ireland did in 1973, in exchange for wads of free money. Those days are gone, and these days, a country's sovereignty is surrendered in exchange for a large euro-bureaucracy, with dictatorial powers to run the economy into the ground or, in the case of Iceland, sit on it so it can never recover, with the weight of many million euro-regulations.

In particular, Iceland would have to surrender her fishing industry: which remains her only visible means of support.

Iceland's prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, though formally pursuing full EU membership, has herself begun musing aloud about alternatives. She has at least partially seen through her own argument, that Iceland could have some say in the Council of Europe. The truth is that Iceland's voting influence as a member state, arriving in the supplicant position, would amount to less than zero.

Our ambassador, Alan Bones, has been encouraging them, with remarks on Icelandic radio to the effect that Canada would be happy to consider such a "loonie" arrangement, so long as Iceland does not expect to be consulted on Canada's monetary policies. And as our own economy is more than 100 times larger than Iceland's, there'd be little harm they could do.

I take it Bones was speaking with the authority of the Conservative government, and not as a consequence of months in the darkness of the near-Arctic winter, which can drive even sober people squiffy.

There are (sad) Latin American precedents for countries adopting the once-mighty U.S. dollar as their currency, officially or semi-officially. For generations, expatriated U.S. currency in foreign accounts has been referred to as "Eurodollars." Sterling once had this place, throughout and beyond an Empire upon which the sun eventually set. For that matter, the old Athenian "owls" (silver drachmae) were once recognized, as the "greenbacks" of the ancient Mediterranean.

So there is nothing novel in Iceland's notion of buying into Canada's relative stability, except the acknowledgment that we may be emerging as an economic "superpower" in the world order that follows from the decline of the United States. High-tech, resource-rich, and waking from the soft-socialist nightmare our American cousins are now drowsing into, we rise as they fall.

But only comparatively, and we'd be unwise to crow about it. Much of that vast American economy must fall on us, and as I've written before, we'll have to scramble to replace failing U.S. customers.

Much of what the Obama administration is doing, and will be doing at an accelerated pace if he wins re-election, will have repercussions here. For instance, Barack Obama's environmentalist czars will continue working on the destruction of the continent's fossil-fuel energy infrastructure, and its replacement with catastrophically inefficient wind farms, sun farms, and the like.

As his Keystone and other decisions show, he intends to punish us for exploiting our own tar sand and shale oil reserves. Intense political pressure may be brought on us to copy various U.S. green schemes. In addition to maintaining our economic enterprise, we must find the political will to resist the dust bowl ideological winds that may come screaming across our border.

On the question of currency, the challenge we face is shared with all other countries now contemplating the collapse of both the euro and the American dollar. Here, especially, we cannot afford to be smug about our comparative strength, for we look toward a pit in which we would be buried with them.

To my mind, we should ourselves be seeking the ground upon which a new international trading currency can be founded - some new gold standard or equivalent that can provide both a store of wealth, and a trading benchmark, beyond the reach of politicians' inflationary impulses.

Iceland, which wrecked itself trying to play clever leveraging games in our world of confidence-gimmick paper, is irrelevant to this challenge, and should be ignored.

The happy warrior - March 11, 2012

The demise of Andrew Breitbart, right-wing crazyman and web innovator, gonzo journalist and wild charger for the nearly libertarian wing of the U.S. Republican Party - raised in the sin of Brentwood, on the Hollywood side of Los Angeles - has gone, until now, unremarked by me.+

This was not because I had nothing to say. Rather, I was overtaken by many hundred news reports, quick obituaries, memoirs, eulogies, flashbacks, slanders, video clips, etc. I seem to have been among the tiny minority of right-wing North Americans who never met the guy and, as a consequence, I learned more about his life and times in the 15 minutes of his post-mortal fame than I had known in his (sadly docked) lifetime. Learned, indeed, enough to realize that I should have been paying more attention to him.

For the purposes of moral instruction, I am taking him today as an example of the "happy warrior." While his ill-humoured opponents don't get this, he was an honest man, a genuine and impassioned believer in the causes he served and, in the balance, almost outrageously good-humoured.

Breitbart used the devices of tabloid exposé journalism to nail several serious malefactors, and was accused of taking at least one assault too far. But this is morally crucial: so far as I can discern, he never knowingly pushed beyond reasonable inference and, in several instances, refused to use damning material on his targets because he couldn't entirely trust his sources.

As the received practice at present in "progressive" journalism is to run with any smear, subtly labelled "allegation," then relent without correction or apology when it proves unfounded, Breitbart had comparatively high standards. And were I not myself convinced, I would not insist upon this. I would not, for instance, defend the late, highly entertaining Christopher Hitchens, on the grounds of honesty. Time and again I found him, in that regard, fast, loose, and indifferent to the inconvenient fact.

But whining about lax attitudes toward factual veracity is not the purpose of today's sermon. It is instead to celebrate this "happy warrior" quality. Hitchens was also, to his credit, a happy warrior, and a "crazyman," too, on the point of courage. The two qualities overlap so broadly that from many angles they appear to be one and the same thing. Yet there are some angles from which they may be seen to part, and I have met very courageous people who are not happy warriors, but rather prim, grim, and bordering on psychotic.

The nastiest bullies and tyrants are, sometimes, inhumanly cool under fire.

Jack Layton was a Canadian example of the happy warrior. I had a low opinion of his opinions, and even of his tactics in debate, and therefore, when he died last summer, I availed myself of "a wonderful opportunity to shut up." Call me superstitious, but I mostly agree with Chilon of Sparta that one should not badmouth the dead. ("De mortuis nil nisi bonum," in the more elegant translation of Saint Ambrose Traversari.) Leave it till after the recognized period of mourning.

Layton was a formidable enemy, and a force for ruinous public policy, in my humble but infallible opinion. Yet he was also a happy warrior, for which quality he deserved to be admired. There was a spirit of generosity about him, such that one might almost feel one was sharing a joke with him, while arguing from a position diametrically opposed.

Of politicians, it could be said, that they divide into two categories, without regard to Left or Right: happy warriors, with whom one may tangle merrily and constructively. And, sad ones, who need to be removed from public life, no matter what their other virtues. Joy, in debate, should be non-negotiable, and laughter is the correct response to any assertion that is over-the-top.

Racism at any level, misogyny and misandry, homophobia and heterophobia, along with aspersions on religious affiliation and ideological creed - should all be casually allowed in debate, on one important condition. The remarks should be amusing, but more, they should be affectionate. Tone is more important than content in maintaining civility.

And tone is the irreducible determinant of legitimate parliamentary exchange. The House of Commons (or equivalent legislature) is a gentleman's club (though it now admits ladies), in which certain gentlemanly rules prevail. In the preamble to the great unwritten code we find that, regardless of personal standing, no member is entitled to take himself seriously. The politician who cannot laugh at his own foibles, when his worst opponent has exposed them, is additionally exposed as a dangerous and potentially vindictive operator.

The topics of public debate may be perfectly serious - or may not. Laughter is itself a mechanism for identifying nonsense. I am by no means suggesting that topics as serious as life and death should be treated risibly. And the gravest respect should be shown not only for fact, but for truth, good, beauty and every thing that lies beyond personal and party interest.

But we are lost if we forget that we are all clowns, and that our purchase on great truths is always slippery. Let us therefore be happy clowns, and curl our stiff upper lips ironically.

Iran won't go away - March 10, 2012

History does not repeat itself, exactly. Instead, like literature, it offers a string bag of standard characters, and narrative elements, that can be mixed together to produce a seemingly infinite variety of stories. My emphasis is on "seemingly."

For our next world conflagration, we have all the usual elements. People express frustration at writers who keep mentioning the lessons of the last world war, and reduce everything to "Chamberlain versus Churchill." Needless to say, only the Churchill fans do this. But those two were themselves only standard political characters: the "appeaser" and the "confrontationist." They correspond to the two standard foreign policy positions.

Think of it as a puppet show, with audience participation. You want war, vote for the appeaser. You want peace, vote for the confrontationist.

Benjamin Netanyahu - surely a standard character - passed through our continent this last week, sounding the ancient note of the sacrificial goat, preparatory to sacrifice. He has been trying to win support from the English-speaking far west of the western world - the people best acquainted with the Chamberlain/Churchill narrative. He delivered a powerful Churchillian speech to the friendly American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference. He tried to sound prophetic.

Prophets are, according to a well-established storyline, without honour in their own countries, and just as Churchill was written off as a nutjob in Depression-era England, Netanyahu has seriously alarmed detractors back home in Israel. Read Ha'aretz (the New York Times of Tel Aviv) to get some taste of how atheism flourishes in the foxholes, and liberalism at the very front line.

Netanyahu is actually more popular in the U.S. and Canada; and we probably underestimate the limitations upon his action within the Israeli military, cabinet, and Knesset. Indeed, he cultivates popularity here, to enhance his standing there.

On returning home Thursday, he told Israeli TV, "I am not standing with a stopwatch in hand. It is not a matter of days or weeks, but also not a matter of years." Israel is waiting, to see if economic penalties that hurt Iran's people, will also stop its nuclear weapons program. (Of course they won't.)

This nuclear weapons program, with missile delivery systems and all other requisites, is plain as day. You do not excavate the middle of a mountain to produce medical isotopes. The skeptics' reminder of intelligence failures in Iraq are irrelevant to this case, where there can be no dispute over the facts from which we are inferring.

That U.S. President Barack Obama is by nature an "appeaser," and thus the Chamberlain figure in our unfolding puppet play, might go without saying. He has backed off every challenge to U.S. and western interests in the Middle East, and elsewhere.

But it would be unfair to suggest that he does not realize Iran's nuclear ambition, and Israel's existentially self-defensive response to it, could ignite a conflagration into which the U.S. would be dragged. It would be fairer to suggest, that when he says that he "has Israel's back," he is being about as sincere as when he said "marriage is between a man and a woman" during the 2008 election campaign.

We know what Obama really thinks of Netanyahu; it was captured by the microphones while he was chatting with Nicolas Sarkozy in France. We know what Chamberlain really thought of Churchill, thanks to cabinet minutes disclosed to history. In both cases, something along the lines of, "knuckle-dragging warmongering idiot." In the end, it doesn't matter: Chamberlains get replaced by Churchills, not Lord Halifaxes.

Chamberlain knew perfectly well that Europe was sliding into war; that Britain could not hope to stay out of it. And in his defence, he was buying time for the rearmament of Britain, when he cynically affixed his signature at Munich.

And Obama knows, if less perfectly than Chamberlain, that he has a problem negotiations can't solve, only delay (at terrible cost over the longer term). But he is, nevertheless, trying to delay the fireworks until after his own November reelection.

So I don't think the comparison to Chamberlain is quite fair. The British prime minister was consciously playing for higher stakes than his own political survival.

For the revolutionary government of Iran, nuclear weapons are also a survival issue. The ayatollahs will no more desist from seeking nuclear weapons, than agree to retire after free and fair elections. It is not their country, but their regime they are preserving.

For Israel, the question isn't the survival of Netanyahu's government, but of Israel and her people. That is what puts Netanyahu's position, both at home and abroad, beyond conventional politics. He knows opinion polls have nothing to do with the hard reality; that Iran does not relent if his government falls.

Action appears unavoidable, from this last, Israeli view. But not in days or weeks, nor in years. I think we can translate Netanyahu's reply to inquiring Israeli media into the inevitable answer. "Months."

Truth & courage - March 7, 2012

Telling the truth is, in the best sense, a revolutionary act. It is disturbing, and divisive, and can be exceedingly unpopular - not only among those heavily invested in falsehoods, but also among those who want "peace in the family." That is how various ridiculous lies acquire the politically-correct aura. It is because there will be no peace if they are contradicted.

And it is why, even though I am what could be called a "deficit hawk," my hat goes off to the new Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, now disturbing the peace of the European Union by stating the truth about Spain's budgetary intentions. This Galician gentleman, who commands the conservative People's Party, came to power just before Christmas after nearly eight years' opposition to the socialist prime minister, José Luis Zapatero.

It was an interesting election. (All Spanish elections are interesting.) Rajoy was thought, by the chattering classes, to have blown his prospects by hanging fiscally tough, and mentioning "social issues," when there was a strong voice within his own party for tacking to the centre. By winning his landslide, Rajoy then became the media poster-boy for "meanness" - the man who threatens to break Spain's unions, generally get a grip, and deliver obedience to the EU's fiscal demands. (I have never understood how anyone could want to be a conservative politician.)

His country's problems are not small. Zapatero blew the bank, as socialist premiers are inclined to do, and moreover delivered that most ecological of accomplishments: a shrinking economy. Such politicians walk the road to ruin, by consistently taking the easy way out. Zapatero could be counted on to sign any cheque, and capitulate before any other hard demand emanating from his party's most "progressive" factions; though reversing course whenever the other side became louder. He kept "peace in a family" that is now tearing each others' guts out in recriminations.

Rajoy inherits not only the mess, but a public sector now accustomed to getting whatever it wants, promptly.

The key issue he now faces is this. Angela Merkel and the boys have specified that the Spanish budgetary deficit for the coming fiscal year will be held to 4.4 per cent of GDP. The previous year's target had been six per cent, and the Zapatero government did not come anywhere close. Having had his chance to review the national accounts, Rajoy sees that "4.4" cannot be done. He has stated publicly that he can do "5.8," which is to say, a shave better than Zapatero failed to do last year. Like it or lump it.

About one quarter of Spain's labour force is currently unemployed. And that is after a cosmetic adjustment, for by older methods of reckoning it is closer to one third. The economy is officially shrinking at around two per cent per year, against the demographic background of a rapidly aging population, from decades at one of Europe's lowest fertility rates, lately aggravated by Zapatero's social policies, which encouraged contraception, abortion, sterilization, easy divorce, same-sex marriage, and everything else that weighs "progressively" towards human extinction.

Spain has been wilfully self-destructing, yet may now have reached the stage where, however old and tired, her people begin wondering if they should do something to pull themselves out of the death spiral. Rajoy's landslide victory gave some hint of this intention.

Now, given the stagnant economy, the unemployment, and other indications of secular progress, such as high levels of consumer debt - in combination with entrapment within the euro currency system which does not let failing economies depreciate - it would be positively insane to raise taxes sharply, while putting many more people out of work.

Greece, Italy, and other European countries have faced this situation. Over the years they found the answer was to cook the books. That worked for a while, but led finally to political receivership, with European Commissioners dictating the terminal dive into the ground. (Italy's surreal situation is more escapable than that of Greece, as I hinted in a past column.)

Rajoy says that he will actually do that "5.8," come hell, high water, and angry organized "entitlement" beneficiaries. And you look at the man, and over his past, and you think, he just might. He will even enforce spending limits upon Spain's regional governments. His government confirmed yesterday that these will not be "optional."

But note, not "4.4." That isn't possible. And declaring that involves telling the Germans, and the Euromasters generally, to stick it.

The easy way out would have been to give lip service to their target; then miss it while continuing to live a lie. Rajoy won't do that. He will make his stand on the truth, and take the consequences. And that is where real recovery begins: in direct defiance of that culture of lying, that culture of death.

Privacy - March 4, 2012

When politicians and Google executives are arguing over privacy policy, citizens would be wise to stop using the Internet. It is unfortunate that few can afford to do that.

Let us immediately set aside the obtuse notion of a purely personal privacy. Everyone has privacy within the confines of his own mind, if he can learn how to use it; everyone always did. The trick to keeping a secret has always been as difficult as it is simple: don't open your mouth. (And try not to look too guilty.) It is a tactic that works amazingly well, and when it is sustained, even your friends lose the ability to read your mind.

A lot of things in life are extremely simple, but ever so difficult, in the same way. Most of the complaints about the complexity of modern life are entirely bogus. Did you know, for instance, that it is possible to avoid pregnancy, with 100 per cent success, through abstinence? Guffaw as you may, I bet you secretly knew: that it is equally effective in avoiding paternity and maternity. The only problem is resisting temptation, and as Oscar Wilde said, he could resist anything, but that.

With the passage of years, I have found it is important to confute obtuse notions, directly. The rhetoric of the privacy crusaders wanders over a wide range of possibilities, and impossibilities, often confusing them gratuitously. Your right to privacy will hardly be guaranteed by Nanny State, which has an interest in knowing everything about you.

It is entirely a matter between you and God, Who, if one subscribes to standard theological positions which acknowledge His omniscience, is reading your innermost thoughts even now.

Which is perhaps why religious people - the vast majority in every society until the day before yesterday in historical time - tend to make less of an issue of privacy, than irreligious people. The latter would rather keep God out of this, and having closed Him out the question becomes, who next?

Now, humans being what we are, hardwired in many respects, even the religious are irreligious in some moments (and vice versa). There are some things about ourselves we would not have known. There are even some reasonable demands for privacy, in this world where tyrants prowl - tyrants as big as Stalin, or as small as your little sister. I would guess that out of every 100 typical requirements for privacy, as many as three may be perfectly reasonable: a figure that has risen so high only since the imposition of "political correctness."

Privacy in communications has ever been a question not of principle, but of tactics. If you want to impart thoughts reliably to some, but not to others, you must meet "privately."

Note that whatever method you use, from the relatively high security of a private rendezvous at a remote location, to the relatively low security of sealed correspondence, there is no security. For once you have told anyone a secret, it is out of the bag. So far as my researches extend, studies have yet to confirm that two is the maximum number of persons who can ever keep a secret. (And remember here, a maximum is not an average.) But I have massive anecdotal evidence.

This was true through all the centuries - millennia, billennia, whatever - before any earthling went "online."

The reader who shares my amateur interest in archeology will have noticed the crowded design of most ancient communities; even village cottages cosying together against the cold, wolf-ridden (or hot, snakeinfested) world outside. Bible readers will recall that those who had things to say only to each other, in places like Capernaum, habitually took a walk outside the village, where they would not be heard. (On the other hand, they would be observed, walking together.)

In our vast modern cities, we have parks.

Now, things like urban parks are themselves an invention of modernity - were only possible as a byproduct of urban sprawl, as vacant lands became available at the edges of dense settlements, which could be appropriated by the expanding municipality before they were completely surrounded by new developments. In the middle of any "old city" - typically walled, and/or moated, whether that was the City of London, or Venice, or Damascus, or Old Delhi, or ancient Suzhou - there was no room for such luxuries. Often, no room for foliage at all, except pinched in little courtyards, invisible from the street.

Urban privacy was secured by walls, and by a way of building which consumed the whole lot. There were no "yards" in the North American fashion. Some privacy could be secured for the family within these walls. But ho: for the family, not its individual members. (Well, curtains around beds.) Privacy for "the individual" is largely a modern invention: a "right" which in fact requires wealth.

Rights are something you have the power to enforce. No power, no rights. Our ancestors understood this; we like to dream. We want everything both ways - to have, in this case, a completely open medium of communication, in which privacy is assured. The whole notion is ridiculous: nothing can be simultaneously open and closed.

Live with it.

Witch ethics? - March 3, 2012

According to an article published by the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics, currently getting a lot of press, it's all right to kill babies. Abortion, even "late term abortion," is not the issue here.

The authors, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, adopt the prolife argument that there is no essential difference between a child in the mother's womb, and a child newly born. They then turn this argument on its head, to say if it is permissible to abort the unborn child, then it is permissible to kill the newborn.

Their clinching argument comes from an examination of 18 European birth registries. Apparently, Down syndrome was diagnosed prenatally in only 64 per cent of cases. In 36 per cent it thus came as a surprise. If the presence of Down syndrome, which the authors call a "disease," is reason enough to kill a fetus, why should the parents of such an infant be put to the burden of keeping it, through the ill-luck of a missed diagnosis? Alternatively, why should the State be put to the expense?

As I am the father of a beloved Down syndrome son, the reader will imagine how much this argument disgusts me. But long before that (prenatally undiagnosed) child was born, I associated eugenic arguments with the pointed Darwinism of Hitler.

Such "emotional" objections are obviated by the authors, for they go on to find no objection to any argument parents might have for killing their newborn child. (Maybe they wanted a boy and got a girl "by mistake"?)

This is called "infanticide" in received English. But as the authors realize, the term has acquired some moral loading over the centuries, and they suggest replacing it with the euphemism, "post-birth abortion." This kind of wordplay is a commonplace of our age; a certain George Orwell wrote all about it. As Trevor Stammers, a medical ethics specialist in an English Catholic college, told the Daily Telegraph, we could as well refer to abortion as "antenatal infanticide."

So let's just call it "infanticide." And rather than get emotional about it, let us remember that infanticide has been practised and accepted in many (if not most) non-Christian cultures, and was, like slavery, perfectly acceptable in the pagan, "classical" civilization that preceded our Christian "dark ages."

Far from joyfully embracing the sanctity of all human life, the ancient Greeks looked upon life as an almost unbearable burden, and the Stoic, Epicurean, and Cynical philosophies alike worked from this premise. Read your early Church Fathers, and you will see that they were tangling directly not with the results, but with the premises of ancient reasoning.

And that is what pagan philosophers are doing today, in reverse: challenging the Christian premises upon which Western Civ was founded, to serve the advance of - something else.

The contemporary argument for infanticide is hardly new. It is taken almost for granted among the many followers of the Peter Singer school of applied ethics. Working from what he calls a secular, "preference utilitarian" perspective, and quite consciously from the political Left, the celebrated Princeton professor from Australia has found that it is possible to overthrow all the old Western Civ reasoning, simply by substituting new premises.

In, for instance, his groundbreaking article "Heavy Petting," Singer argued against our taboo on bestiality. If you enjoy having sex with your dog, and your dog seems to like it, then what is the problem? Only a problem if the dog (or some other animal) doesn't seem to like it, for Singer is also an animal rights activist, who has opposed "speciesism." And no, I am not making this up. Google-search, and you will soon find his essay.

That Giubilini and Minerva belong to the Singer school of reasoning is evident from their various faculty affiliations. They work explicitly from Singer's "personhood" position: Just because a being is genetically human does not mean he is a "person." It is for the new "preference utilitarian" experts of the ethics faculties to determine who gets that status, and who does not. Those who do, get "rights" protection. Those who don't may be freely slaughtered. (Hitler used this argument precisely, in withdrawing "personhood" from Jews, Gypsies, cripples, homosexuals, etc.)

Julian Savulescu, the Oxford ethics professor who edits this BMJ journal, has characterized opponents in the "debate" as practitioners of "witch ethics." As he explained to the Daily Telegraph, "a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her." We, who betray any emotion in resisting an argument for killing babies, are "fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society."

So let me get this on the record. If the witches are opposed to infanticide, then I'm with the witches. And if killing babies is among "the very values of a liberal society," then I'm against liberal society, too.

Come to grief - February 29, 2012

When one cannot trust one's own allies not to murder one, one is in a fix. It is not an unusual fix, as the history of this planet goes, and particularly the history of Afghanistan. But the circumstances in which two American officers at the Interior Ministry in Kabul lost their lives on Saturday were discouraging. The assailant seems to have been an Afghan police intelligence officer. That says something. That he was able to escape after the shootings says more.

The incident was one of many which followed news of the Koran burnings at the Bagram airfield.

That event, from what I can gather, was reported in detail within Afghanistan. I am not being droll here: I mean the fact that the tomes were tossed in the "burn pit" by mistake, having already been defaced by Taliban prisoners who were using them to pass messages, was widely circulated. To the western mind, this should make a difference in the perceived profanation: intention always counts.

But to the mind of many Afghan people, quite capable of stoning a woman to death for adultery after she has been raped, it made no difference. Nor, dare I add, could President Barack Obama's public apology over the affair make any difference: for it was the kind of profanation for which apologies are not accepted. Obama, consciously doing "the right thing" to defuse tensions, is consistently out of his depth in dealing with these matters; for despite his own Islamic background in Kenya, and Indonesia, he is a product of Ivy League America. George W. Bush would have done the same.

It is pointless to rail against a worldview that differs from ours profoundly. One cannot reason with people who accept none of our premises, and to the point, none of our inherited western notions about justice and mercy. The people in Afghanistan who even begin to understand our moral categories, remain a tiny minority. And note: we are in their country.

To the "traditional" Afghan mind, regardless of ethnic-linguistic group, the West presents moral horror. As Laura King, a Los Angeles Times reporter, describes, it is a vision of malls, smartphones, girls with gel-spiked hair, restaurants full of foreigners drinking alcohol, where the sexes freely mix, and who knows what going on behind the walls of the guarded compounds.

News of the Koran burnings fed into that, along with recent video of U.S. marines urinating on Taliban corpses. That news was presented by female anchors on television, plastered in western makeup and with no coverings for their hair.

Forget implicit western feminism: Afghan women as well as men are appalled by such scenes, which convey to the received Afghan world view a destructive immodesty. As one who travelled fairly extensively through Afghanistan as a young man, in the days when it was still a kingdom, I grimace at the decade-long slap in the face we have, unintentionally, administered. For the "democratization" of Afghanistan is not associated with "higher moral values," but with libertine demoralization. It rides a magic carpet of cheap consumerism, itself alien and misunderstood.

Afghans, enmired in the unending catastrophe that began even before the Soviet invasion of 1979, when "westernized," secular leftists first seized control in Kabul, feel twisted and shorn. They had no preparation for "post-modernity." Things like the Taliban, and al-Qaeda, inconceivable in the Afghan past, were themselves products of this titanic clash. An essentially tribal society, whose mores developed organically through countless centuries, encountered the black hole of post-modern nihilism. And on that analogy from physics: those not absorbed were spun off at the most extraordinary angles.

As it is the 29th of February, let me perform an uncustomary retraction. Looking back over the history of the last 10 years, through which I have been writing these columns, I'm now persuaded of a major misjudgement. While I supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq - still do, and "would do it again" without qualms - I see ever more clearly that the "Bush doctrine" of exporting "democracy" was an unnecessary mistake.

Our interests in these countries were military; we had dangerous enemies to destroy. That was achieved with dispatch by U.S. and allied forces: with remarkably few casualties all round. We had a continued interest in preventing the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, and in the destruction of Islamist cells in Iraq. All fine and good: these were necessary adventures, for the defence of legitimate western interests.

I was never comfortable with the grand bureaucratic project of "nation building" that followed. But while I hinted at my objections, I nevertheless conferred the benefit of the doubt on an American-led project, predicated on post-War successes in Germany and Japan.

In retrospect, the circumstances were so utterly different, and the times so utterly changed, that the mission was unachievable, and could only come to grief.

Human trafficking - February 26, 2012

Suppose, for a moment, that the institution of slavery had survived various 18th-and 19th-century challenges. The practice had continued to be frowned upon by religious people, and governments had intervened, but not to end the trade, only criminalize some aspects of it. In particular, the slaves had to enter into their contracts of bondage voluntarily; and there were various locations at which they could not work.

This may seem a ridiculous proposition, but only because we suffer from anachronism. Most of us take our own current attitudes for granted when judging the past, thanks to a failure to teach history seriously. Most will not even try to mentally inhabit the past and thus learn how plausible much different attitudes were in another era; let alone try to think forward from there, to some alternative present. Yet this what I'm asking my reader to do.

So: we have slavery, but we also have laws to limit the trade, and keep it, as much as possible, out of view of "respectable" people. We accept, without much thought, that some people become slaves because it's their way to keep food on the table. There may be others who are actually attracted to slavery as a way of life or who get a thrill from it - at first.

Humans are strange creatures, and some actually enjoy being tied up and whipped. Libertarians may argue that, if that's your thing, and the arrangement is voluntary, no law should stand in your way.

Slavery is dangerous work. Your own body is bought and sold, for use by another, and you cannot know what master you will get. There are laws, of course, preventing any master from harming you, physically. If some psychopath has been buying slaves, for the purpose of murdering them, he may certainly be prosecuted. But then, as some pundits argue, there are all kinds of dangerous jobs in our society: it goes with the trade, and you sold yourself in. "Live with it."

One might even imagine a court decision which, while acknowledging this fact, points out that the very restrictions placed on the slave trade increase the dangers to which slaves are exposed. Imagine, if you can, a case brought by three eccentric slaves, who make an entertaining spectacle in the courtroom. The judge, at their behest, strikes down laws restricting the slave trade in Ontario, arguing that while "respectable" people may be appalled to have the slave trade made more visible, the safety of the slaves themselves must be the priority.

People who have lived outside a slave culture have great difficulty imagining what slavery involves. Those unacquainted with prostitution may likewise entertain romantic nonsense about the lives of prostitutes.

With our "modern" attitudes, we imagine that when the slaves were freed, they just walked. In reality, many slaves dreaded freedom, for the world beyond their plantation was full of frightening unknowns, and how were they now going to feed themselves? A very large part of the work of freeing slaves consisted of a Christian missionary effort, to equip former slaves with the material, intellectual, and spiritual resources to face freedom - in a world prejudiced against former slaves. We fail to realize, today, that this effort was every bit as important as the legal campaign.

The trafficking in human beings is, according to Christian teaching at least, a real evil. That is why the institution of slavery, on which the whole economy of the ancient pagan world depended, began fading away in the Christian "Dark Ages." It is why, when the institution revived after the Middle Ages, despite constant condemnation from places such as Rome, the campaign to put an end to the slave trade was led by "fanatical" Christians.

Human trafficking nevertheless survives today, even in Canada, at its most virulent in the sex trade. True, people may enter the trade voluntarily, for the money or whatever reason, but many are effectively sold into it, imported from abroad.

The relationship between a prostitute and a pimp is anyway different in kind from other commercial relations, for the very reason that human bodies are for sale. This, at least to a Christian view, is an outrage to human dignity and to God. We have a trace of this view, surviving through feminism, in the shame that still attaches to being a "john."

It was Justice Susan Himel of the Ontario Superior Court who, on the grounds of work safety, struck down provisions of our prostitution laws, at the behest of three eccentric sex workers, in a memorable decision 17 months ago. Her ruling is stayed pending a decision from the Ontario Court of Appeal, coming perhaps this spring. Pressure is meanwhile on the federal government to rewrite Canada's prostitution laws, or else abandon them.

And I noticed this week, that the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has taken the leading position in lobbying the government to take effective prudential action against this human trafficking.

It's those "fanatical" Christians again!

Relatively free of enslavement themselves, to contemporary attitudes and fashions, they think that prostitution, like slavery, is absolutely wrong. Therefore we should do what we can to eliminate it. Good luck to them, in getting anyone to listen.

Playing Pyongyang - February 25, 2012

We don't think anything has changed in Korea, since the December accession of Kim Jong-il's third son (after his father's return to the dynasty's home planet). But we can't know even such simple and necessary things as, does Kim Jong-un have real power? In Beijing, American negotiators with the Pyongyang regime find no significant change in the delegation they face, nor in their habit of communicating through a froth of the same old "diplomatic" obscenities.

Psychotic aggression is similarly conveyed in the regime's critique of the upcoming nuclear summit in Seoul, whose purpose is to discuss the safeguarding of fissile materials worldwide, to the end of keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists. North Korea was intentionally left off the agenda for that, but such subtleties are ignored. Pyongyang says the meeting, which many western leaders will attend, is cover for a surprise U.S. nuclear strike. Also, a gimmick to save the conservative governing party in South Korea's impending election. (Could it be both?)

While the world's attention is focused on Tehran's breakout as a nuclear power (and the Israeli response), never forget Pyongyang.

The two rogue regimes, mutually aiding and abetting, have for some time been playing "the crisis game." It is a form of monkey-in-the-middle, in which, just as the heat is rising on one country, the other creates a gratuitous scene to distract Washington's attention.

It is interesting to read the South Korean press on the Iranian nuclear crisis. Here is a country that already lives in the shadow of a rogue punching far above its economic weight; able to keep the U.S. pointlessly strung up in efforts to achieve six-party regional negotiations. For what? So that China and Russia can then use their glowing pit bull to extract their own concessions from the American putz.

Writing in Chosun Ilbo, Han Sung-joo (the former foreign minister, not to be confused with the sex-taped Korean beauty queen of the same romanized name), points to one of the ironies of globalization. While North Korea depends on Iran, for miscellaneous strategic services, South Korea also depends on Iran, for oil. Or, even if not on Iran, directly, on oil that comes from that troubled vicinity.

The upshot is a South Korea currently more worried about Iran's bid for nuclear weapons, than about her crazy neighbour who already has them. Moreover, statesmen from Seoul seem eager to impart advice on dealing with rogue states. The irony here is that, with much more at stake from scary proximity, they generally advise the Americans to hang tougher.

Their experience has been that Pyongyang responds to real pressure. It plays a demented, but remarkably successful game, in which its nuclear program is used to extort from the West the means of feeding its starving population. The Chinese and Russians help them with their military needs, but expect us to prop them up economically. We thus have more influence when our lifeline is receding than when it is advancing.

But the West, and especially the U.S. since President Barack Obama was elected, follows the instinct of appeasement, allied with a misty desire for the optics of "humanitarianism."

In the case of Iran, severe trade and financial sanctions, that would bite deeply into the regime's ability to buy off its rebellious people, could have influenced the ayatollahs' behaviour - a few years ago. These are now being tried, too late, as a last resort.

It is a repetition of the obvious mistake made by the Clinton and Bush administrations with North Korea. They persistently agreed to be suckered into aid arrangements, in return for promises to halt a nuclear weapons program that were incredible and uncheckable; then persistently agreed to resume negotiations, after being suckered. (The policy continues to this day.)

South Korea bought into this "strategy," partly from American pressure, partly from its own misty desire for eventual Korean reunification. They could afford it, because a nuclear North Korea was not the game-changer that a nuclear Iran will be.

Those who recall the Korean War will understand why. When the allies were pitted against North Korea's masses, we quickly swept the peninsula. But this only pulled in Chinese forces, whose much greater numbers, accepting monstrous casualties, overwhelmed our logistically challenged advance, and finally secured a trench-war stalemate. China, at this day, will not allow North Korea to fold; and boy, do they have nuclear weapons. Pyongyang only adds one wild card to the Chinese hand.

As Han Sung-joo observes, Iran now threatens the current pivot of U.S. military attention, from the Middle East back to the Pacific. It is in China's interest to keep America embroiled in the Middle East; China puts the steel in North Korea's mitten; and so if Pyongyang suddenly tries something to take the heat off Tehran, we'd be fairly safe to ignore it.

But we should call the negotiations bluff, and make Beijing pay for the feeding of its own client.

To wear the ashes - February 22, 2012

Ash Wednesday is upon us again, visibly upon my faithful Christian readers of the western, Catholic inheritance, including all Protestant churches that claim succession from the old medieval trunk - Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, most Presbyterians, many Baptists, and those eastern, Orthodox Christians who follow the western rite. (The equivalent in the East is "Clean Monday," next week by the Julian calendar.)

I provide this list, which one could fairly easily reconstruct from Wikipedia or a hundred other reference websites (many containing serious errors) not as a public service but to suggest the scale of the enterprise. The season of Lent, nearly invisible today, was once quite outward and apparent, throughout the West.

In the "secular realm," where I write this column, that history is forgotten. Religion, according to the most advanced contemporary views, is a "private matter," along with brand preferences for coffee and shampoo, air miles accumulated, websites visited, sexual proclivities, and so forth.

At most it is like "race" - a kind of stigma you were born with, and which is "not your fault," and might therefore require some reverse discrimination if, in the opinion of our bureaucratic masters, you belong to one of their scheduled "visible minorities." But so far as I can see, being Christian does not get you any points; you'd be better off playing your race card directly, if you have one.

To many nominal Christians it anyway makes no difference. The number of people who state a Christian religious affiliation, in the rare cases when this is asked for in a survey, continues to amaze me. For they are the overwhelming majority.

Perhaps their parents had that affiliation, or their immigrant grandparents. It is an ethnic badge. But the claimants are no more likely to be practising the religion than they are to be speaking the grandparents' foreign tongue.

I was looking through some ecclesiastical statistics for the Archdiocese of Quebec - the successor to the old Apostolic Vicariate of New France, when our country was a missionary territory. This must have been precisely one year ago, for it was the day when Gérald Lacroix was appointed by Rome, archbishop of Quebec, and Primate of Canada. (Did gentle reader recognize the name?)

By the numbers, Quebec is at least 83 per cent Catholic, and more than 90 per cent Christian. The number reporting "pagan" in the last survey I saw was 0.02 per cent.

Yet this is passing strange, because I've looked at Quebec and could almost swear the figures must be the other way around.

Attending Mass on Sunday is not an option for Roman Catholics, but an obligation, so we might get an idea of the number of practising Catholics by looking at that. From what I can infer from a variety of sources it is, in Quebec, less than 6 percent of the current population.

The proportion of those who are "good Catholics" - who take their vocation beyond Sunday observance - I have no idea. The remaining 94-percent-plus must include many "nice people," but if they say they're practising Catholics, they're lying.

Compare, if you will, church attendance in the 1950s, which by most accounts approached 90 per cent in Quebec. This included the mostly Protestant minority of anglophones, of course. A little more than half a century ago, Canada had huge, nationally organized United, Anglican, and Presbyterian congregations. Each of these "mainstream churches" has taken a similar hit, so that today the much smaller proportion of practising Christians is dominated by "evangelicals" of both the Protestant and Catholic varieties.

In the latter case, a significant proportion of practising Catholics are converts, who could not possibly have been attracted by any prospect of worldly advancement, nor inspired by any Canadian church leader of whom I am aware. They enter a Church that is in ruins; and must arrive by the grace of God, for there is no better explanation.

"That you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."

While we are used to getting the upbeat tone from church leaders in all congregations - that sick-making, public-relations blather I find especially irritating in sellout bishops - the Christian teaching begins instead in that assertion of Christ's. The truth may be extremely uncomfortable, and from many angles desolating, but it must be faced. We cannot build our lives or our churches upon pathetic lies.

For the truth is indivisible. Little truths matter, as well as big. Little sins matter - hypocrisy matters - and the "either/or" is a choice between truth and falsehood, not a catalogue of "lesser evils." The way forward begins in the smallest of truths, in the here and now.

It begins in ashes. Through Lent we are called upon - those who hear the call - to wear the ashes. To wear the truth of defeat and desolation, for there is no other position from which we can hope to rise.

Chaff in the machine - February 19, 2012

The matter we were discussing last Sunday - you and I, gentle reader; let's just ignore the rest of them - was in the light of breaking news. A certain President Obama, of a neighbouring Republic, had managed to endanger his party's hold on millions of lapsed Catholic voters, and a few million more non-Catholics, in the course of attacking faithful Catholics through an ObamaCare "mandate."

He, and his health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius - a former Kansas governor and political heavyweight in her own right - had just announced an "accommodation," in reply to widespread outrage about a measure that would force Catholic hospitals, schools, and other charitable institutions to cover contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization in employee health plans. The administrative override, on an issue of conscience, was a fairly obvious breach of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and needed some quick papering over.

The method used was a joke, that involved the alteration of not a single comma in the original order, only a verbal promise to perform a ludicrous shell game. That, in principle, the issue is not only Roman Catholic, but fully universal, is brought home in the following mental exercise, which has been touring the Internet in several forms:

You "mandate" all Orthodox Jewish restaurants to serve ham, bacon, and pork chops. And they tell you to take a hike, and everyone gets excited, and it starts to look like you might lose even the Reform Jewish vote. So you come up with an "accommodation." Orthodox Jews don't have to put any of these items on their menus. A Gentile will come in with a cart and offer them to all customers, free of charge. The restaurant owner need only pay this caterer whatever he's charging for the blintzes and latkes.

Question: what if the caterer is also an Orthodox Jew? Or if the restaurant actually cooks its own food? The shell game does not even pretend to address the moral objections of Catholic insurance providers, only those of insurance purchasers. This is wilfully obtuse.

Another exercise: You want to kill somebody. But you think that would be unethical. So you hire a hit man to clear the snow off your driveway for a mutually agreeable sum, and he agrees to perform the hit free of charge. You are thus, by the Obama reasoning, in no way responsible for the murder. Only the hit man is responsible. And since he obviously doesn't have a "conscience issue," what's your problem?

As I said last week, and often before, the offer of administrative expedients to solve moral problems is a symptom of advanced moral idiocy. But without moral idiocy, we could have no nanny state.

Perhaps we think we don't have a problem in Canada. That is because the issue that hit the fan, Stateside, was never seriously discussed up here. Having been around for a while, I can attest that there were plenty of people willing to discuss it, but we didn't get the "airtime."

We have no First Amendment in Canada, only a Trudeau-era Charter of Rights with vague clauses which can be interpreted to mean almost anything. Indeed, the Charter served to stand all conscience arguments on their head, when unfettered abortion was legislated by our own Supreme Court in 1988, going well beyond even Roe v. Wade.

We take it almost for granted that, under our unambiguously socialist health care system, taxpayers like me, who consider abortion to be a grave crime - the killing of a defenceless human being - must pay for abortions under any circumstances.

And I give the example of abortion only because it is obvious and unmistakable, not subtle and progressive like so many other moral issues in which the centralized state imposes social policies with moral dimensions on an entire population; often not even by majority vote, but by administrative fiat.

And the individual citizen becomes so much chaff in the face of bureaucratic tyranny.

Americans do not yet fully realize that ObamaCare is a "work in progress." What they see now is only the thin end of the wedge, and the current controversial HHS Mandate is modest compared to what will arise farther down the road.

A "Preventive Services Task Force" has been empowered to "prioritize" (thus effectively decide) everything to be covered by private health insurance - and with perfect Kafkaesque serenity, for it makes all decisions behind closed doors, need not announce decisions in draft, and is under no obligation to consider any external suggestions. Its decisions cannot be directly appealed, and it cannot be sued for the consequences of them.

If the Americans fail to repeal ObamaCare, they will soon learn it was a stalking horse for the full "socialization" of their health-care system - for there will be no other way to resolve the contradiction between commercial competition and total regulation.

And then they will have a system like ours, in which an abortion is about the only thing you can get without waiting, committees can decide what your life is worth, and every moral nuance is crushed beneath the weight of administrative expediency. Or in a word: "progress."

Syria - February 18, 2012

There are millions of Christians in Syria, who probably have the Russians and Chinese to thank that they may live there a little longer.

The Security Council vetoes, a fortnight ago, on a resolution calling upon Syria's dictator to step down, and supporting an Arab-sponsored plan to "end the violence," put paid to any immediate prospect of western intervention.

The outrage expressed by Hillary Clinton, William Hague, and other western foreign ministers, probably concealed a little relief, for the vetoes provided the excuse they needed to avoid the issue, while continuing to posture about "humanitarianism" and "democracy."

Let me be clear: I carry no brief for Putin's Russia, or the PRC, let alone the Assad family's monstrous regime in Damascus. The obvious needs restating from time to time: that many, perhaps most of the world's governments are in the hands of evil tyrants (if gentle reader will forgive the pleonasm). Thus it often happens that we must appear to support one evil, in order to obviate a worse. This necessarily involves taking heat from utopian slogan-chanters.

That the Russians have ulterior motives, in supporting Bashar al-Assad, could almost go without saying. They have a naval base at Tartus: an interesting relic of the Soviet evil empire. It was their last supply and maintenance facility in the Mediterranean. Over the last few years, this port has been dredged, renovated, and expanded to accommodate nuclear-armed warships, as Vladimir Putin revives Russia's old imperial dreams. He inherited the Soviet special relationship with the Assad family, and Syria remains a major customer for Russian military hardware, too.

China's covering veto was almost certainly a cynical quid-pro-quo, for Russian energy supplies.

Nor does the horrific violence in Syria please anyone who is sane.

Though here, it is important to grasp that we are getting the same stilted information that comes with all "Arab Spring" reporting. Media both East and West, for different reasons, have taken a partisan position, and assigned white and black hats to the respective contestants for power. The opposition to Assad is presented as if it were a unified "resistance movement," of an "oppressed people."

The truth is we do not know much about what is happening inside Syria - just as we knew and know little about Libya, where, now that Gadhafi is dead, "the show is over" for the western audience. Journalists who (courageously) enter Syria are seldom in a position to check the hearsay they must forward as breaking news to deadline. As an old editor, it distresses me to see things as specific as body counts reported, from places where there are no disinterested observers.

It should also be remembered that all governments, even the most angelic, try to maintain order. When rebels seize bastions in Homs or elsewhere, overpowering local authorities, of course the state's soldiers will go in. To present the Syrian regime's defensive efforts, as if it were shelling for the sheer gratuitous pleasure of demolishing old towns, is to overstate the case for the opposition.

We have received little hints that indeed, al-Qaeda and other terrorist Islamists are engaged in that opposition. The very existence of a "Free Syrian Army," in support of a "Syrian National Council" suggests the violence is not confined to one side; and many of the victims of this violence are likely to be (as in Libya, again) unarmed people loyal to the regime, who become targets for vengeance when the regime's soldiers are out of reach.

No reliable census has been conducted, or even attempted in Syria, since the days of the French mandate; all demographic reports are crude estimates. Perhaps three-in-five of a population above 20 million are Arab Sunni Muslims. Almost all the rest have some interest in the preservation of the Assad family's rule - not for any love of the regime, but because they can see the alternative.

Assad's extended family and inner core are Alawites - a Shia Islamic sect, long associated with the Mediterranean port of Latakia and its environs. They have a reputation as fierce fighters, going back a thousand years, through which they have resisted many attempts at forcible conversion to Sunni Islam. The links they forged with Syriac Christians (a sizable community going back 2,000 years), Armenian Christians, the Druze, the Kurds, Syrian Turkmen, and others, bespeaks a remarkable (if seldom edifying) story of survival.

Christians were as common in Syria as in Egypt, before their numbers were immensely swelled by refugees from Iraq - well over a million fleeing up the Euphrates River valley, from anti-Christian persecution by Iraq's Islamists. By now, there could be more than four million Christians within Syria's borders.

When the Assad regime falls, it will be open season on them, on the Alawites, and all the other minorities. Granted, Assad is a monster who has earned an ugly fate. But at what expense should we indulge the fleeting satisfaction of deposing him?

Apocalypse soon - February 15, 2012

The "What if?" question has been quietly reformulating itself as the "When?" question, while politicians, diplomats, and the news-absorbing public have been trying hard to look another way. Revolutionary Iran is, by general consensus, now on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. The West, generally, cannot abide that. Israel, in particular, cannot abide that, and the question refers to the likelihood that Israel will do something about it.

There are a few more than six million Jews in Israel, the annihilation of whom is an unconcealed, and frequently restated, object of Iranian public policy. There are incidentally nearly six million Muslims in Israel, Gaza, and West Bank, who stand to be incinerated in the "collateral" of any Iranian nuclear strike: a poignant illustration of the old adage, "be careful what you wish for."

The question here is not, "Should Israel hit Iran?" Not even Washington has the power to constrain Israeli action, when the issue involves, for Israel, the prospect of another Holocaust. Moral posturing is, in this case, a waste of precious time.

The great pacifist, Bertrand Russell, once gave his views on Russia acquiring nuclear weapons. This was an issue in 1948. There is controversy over the nuances of his lordship's argument, reported in the contemporary Daily Worker under the headline, "Earl Russell calls for atom war." He did not say that the United States should launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. He only said, that would be the unanswerable humanitarian argument.

For all I happen to despise "Bertie" and most of what he stood for, he was a solid logician. He sketched out three possibilities, in what he considered to be the descending order of desirability. 1. West attacks a USSR still without nuclear arms, and wins easily. 2. West and USSR wait to have war until both have nuclear weapons, and West wins, after horrific destruction on both sides. 3. West lets USSR get and accumulate nuclear weapons, then submits ignominiously to Soviet-dictated peace.

As usual in human circumstances, some utterly unlikely fourth possibility emerged, via "containment." But we cannot know the future, and Russell was, commendably, confronting what we then knew.

The Soviet Union presented a leadership of barbarously evil, but worldly men. They were infected with an extreme form of a socialist ideology that gave them "false consciousness," but when it came to material threats, their calculations were sane. They backed off promptly from any contest that could involve their own annihilation: e.g. the Cuban missile crisis.

Many of Iran's calculations have been arguably sane power plays, given their ideological commitment to planetary Islamist tyranny. But this is where the jaw should drop. Their ideology - a twisted, heretical version of Shia Islam - anticipates angelic intervention in a world apocalypse triggered by their own violent actions.

An Iran with nuclear weapons is thus not necessarily an Iran unlikely to use them, in the first instance. But even if it does not use them in a surprise attack, it will use them as leverage for demands so extortionate as to lead inexorably to the same result: nuclear war.

This is the inevitable Israeli reasoning. The "window of opportunity" for a strike on Iran's nuclear installations is naturally disputed. But the dispute is now over months, not years. As the U.S. secretary of defence, Leon Panetta, recently noted, the Israelis now calculate, "March, April, maybe May."

That he was not joking is indicated by current western efforts to make large-scale evacuation arrangements for their citizens in Israel and vicinity.

As the Israelis know perfectly well, taking out selected Iranian targets will not be easy. Even picking the targets requires faith in intelligence sources that may be corrupted, or simply wrong; and getting to them over unfriendly territory will be a logistical challenge on a scale beyond anything the Israeli Air Force has done before.

Yet they also know it's not as simple as that. Iran's proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, are in a position to make Israel's domestic security arrangements very dodgy, during and after such a strike. This in addition to any retaliatory long-range Iranian missile strikes.

Finally we come to the wild card. The U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has been cruising back and forth through the Strait of Hormuz, and many other American, British, and French warships currently patrol the Persian Gulf.

This is not as heartening as might seem. Iran has been accumulating advanced "conventional" weapons systems, including highly manoeuvrable cruise missiles of Russian and Chinese design. These can't hit Israel, but could conceivably do serious damage to the allied fleet at short range, bottled up in that Gulf. It is not entirely inconceivable that the U.S. Navy could lose its first aircraft carrier in quite a while.

In short, a key test of the ayatollahs' sanity: for if they do that, their regime is over. But also, the powder keg is hit, and they get the apocalypse their theologians have descried.