NEWSPAPER COLUMNS - davidwarrenonline.com

Goodbye Iraq - September 1, 2010

The war in Iraq is now over. All American combat operations are suspended. The troops are going home, hooray. The Iraqi prime minister has addressed the Iraqi people. The U.S. president has addressed the American people. The ships are loading. Goodbye to all that!

Someone should tell the "Islamic State of Iraq," a.k.a. "al-Qaeda in Iraq," and many other cells and fronts, that the "occupation" is over. They can stop blowing up innocent civilians now. Alas, owing to some misunderstanding (and I am being facetious), terror incidents have spiked in the past two months, and the Islamists are on something of a bender.

One is reminded of the wonderful peace that was achieved in Gaza when the Israelis finally did what the international community had been demanding for a long time, pulled up all stakes, and left that "occupied Palestinian territory." For some unaccountable reason (and I am still being facetious), Hamas did not get the message, quickly took over the lame local PLO administration, and attacks on Israel stepped up.

The situation in Iraq is different at one level. If the Islamists take over, there may be no immediate, additional external threat. It is a unique domino, and, when it falls, it just falls.

Will this happen? After seven-plus years of foreign engagement in Iraq, which went well beyond military incursion into extravagant "rebuilding" programs (the quotes because most of what was "rebuilt" was never there in the first place), we really don't know.

We do know, or should know, that the vast majority of the Iraqi population, including those in the politically-dispossessed Sunni minority, hate the Islamists even more than we do. We know that, long before the invasion, the Iraqi people had the most secular-minded and "post-Shariah" outlook of any of the Arab peoples. And indeed, President George W. Bush and his so-called "neo-conservative" advisers were banking on this to make Iraq a regional "showplace of democracy."

But the great majority of any people would rather not be governed by violent psychopaths with apocalyptic visions. They don't always get a choice in the matter, and, even when they have more power than they realize, may still surrender to totalitarianism, in the false belief that this "will bring an end to the violence." Ask the Germans how it works out.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the Islamist totalitarians, in the West, has been to convince a growing share of our population that Muslims are all insane (as we once thought Germans were); whereas, I know at first hand that this is not the case. It does not follow, as Bush came close to arguing, that the inhabitants of the Muslim world are "just like us," or even that they want to be. Many mistakes were made in Iraq by taking naive assumptions too far.

Americans have never quite mastered the Art of Imperialism, for reasons that touch deeply on America's own "exceptionalism" among the nations of the world. This art begins with realizing that the people you are trying to rule, or at least influence, are much different from your own, and have their own preferred ways of doing things. And yet they are sane for all that, and some mutually satisfactory accommodation can be achieved, so long as you retain the guns.

I am not advocating Imperialism. I am merely pointing out that if, as in this situation, one finds oneself cast in an Imperial role, one should try to play it well. But I should add that the Americans were playing it better and better as time went by, and they stopped insisting on doing everything the American way.

This included the big "infrastructure" spending. Yet we have now learned that the entire American effort in Iraq, from beginning to end, in all of its ramifications, cost substantially less than last year's single-shot Congressional "stimulus" package (and was probably much better for the U.S. economy).

Iraq is stronger today for the length of time U.S. and allied forces stayed: not only because they were able to root out more of the Islamist domestic enemy, but also because the country as a whole had more time to find its equilibrium and restore many of its own pre-Saddam civil traditions.

Iraq is now alone. It is, by regional standards, a kind of model, but no longer a model that might be copied, as it was at the height of the U.S. incursion, when even Libya's Gaddafi was voluntarily offering to make mutually satisfactory accommodations with the West.

Except for Israel, and Turkey for a while, Iraq is now the only regional state in which the rule of law has some traction against the rule of tyrants, but, for that very reason, it is now the principal target of the region's most evil powers, and they are volubly encouraged by the U.S. departure.

Name-calling - August 29, 2010

Sticks and stones, according to a proverb I was taught as a child, will break my bones. But, it continued, names will never hurt me.

This is not the only proverb I imbibed, nor even the most serviceable. Nor is it quite compendious; for no proverb can be, in itself, the source of all wisdom. Other proverbs will be needed to flesh it out; which is why, in the Bible, you will find a whole Book of Proverbs, designed to cover the whole ground.

In the case of name-calling, I would like to acknowledge, for instance, the truth of another and related proverb learnt in childhood, which I have often watched being applied: "Put it on thick, a little will stick."

I feel for middle-class, urban children today, who must come to adulthood almost proverb-free, and often enough with asthma, too, for they were exposed to neither wisdom nor dirt. Efforts made to sterilize both the intellectual and material environment, through political correctitude and hand cleanser, have left them unable to cope with the slightest exposure to the rich manure in which a civilization grows and flourishes. They're left with nothing to hurl except the occasional spit-ball.

They are taught, for instance, that "words are deeds." This is almost the essence of post-modern etiquette: that one must avoid not only violent deeds, but even violent thoughts. Yet the person who suppresses all violent imaginings is left without any kind of insight into nature or society. He becomes, perforce, a prig.

The sort who, for instance, took offence the other day, when I privately, casually, and I thought, good-naturedly, referred to some of my opponents as "commies and perverts." How dare I hurl such vile epithets? But note, I wasn't hurling, merely lobbing into play. Moreover, said opponents had thought nothing of calling me a "fascist" -- and in public, too!

This hardly distressed me, because it missed by miles. As the son of a Spitfire pilot, taught at his knee to reject Statism and Socialism in any combination, the epithet "fascist" has no terrors for me; especially when uttered by people who embrace Statism and Socialism in every combination they can buy.

Ditto for such epithets as "racist," and "sexist," when employed by persons who specify that I am white and male. Reviewed in serenity, it will be observed that they have scored own-goals.

Conversely, I don't think I could have raised such a howl, had some part of my own name-calling not hit something. For here we come to a great secret in the art of name-calling: that the outrage increases with the accuracy of the epithets. It is why only epithets with some truth in them are likely to be banned.

But, did you know that all human language is based on name-calling, from the most tangible to the most abstract? Verily, I have sometimes speculated that the first human word was an expletive, uttered when a cave man, who'd been breaking clam shells open with a big rock, mindlessly dropped it on a toe. Perhaps his mate found pleasure in his choice of phoneme, suddenly grasping its potential for analogy. (Beauty and truth are allied in this way.) The notion of philosophy spread from there.

Consider the following magnificent opening to an article in the journal, World Affairs, by the novelist and essayist Claire Berlinski:

"As the First General Law of Travel tells us, every nation is its stereotype. Americans are indeed fat and overbearing, Mexicans lazy and pilfering, Germans disciplined and perverted. The Turks, as everyone knows, are insane and deceitful. I say this affectionately. I live in Turkey. On good days, I love Turkey. But I have long since learned that its people are apt to go berserk on you for no reason whatsoever, and you just can't trust a word they say."

It happens that I disagree with Berlinski -- who incidentally has a doctorate in international relations from Balliol College at Oxford -- about many things. At the root of them, I do not think psychotic radical Islam can be defeated by Western secularist consumerism. But when I read that passage I smiled, very wide, for I realized that we were observing the same world, and with the same tendency to eschew tinted lenses. And while I haven't read her novels, I might honestly shill for her non-fiction book, Menace in Europe. It is at least lively.

Now, "liveliness" is in itself the enemy of the politically correct Left. Any incautious propensity toward truth-telling subverts their whole agenda; which is among the reasons I am in favour of doing that whenever an opportunity is presented. As George Grant used to say, the place to discuss abortion is at a polite academic sherry party.

That would be rude, I can hear my reader thinking. And I agree with him, that civility requires "nice language" in almost all circumstances. Much hinges on that "almost," however, for when civility has grown into a shell around a lie, we need a rock to break it open.

No one home - August 28, 2010

The problem with a problem that isn't going away -- that is going to get worse before it doesn't get better -- is that it won't go away.

Tautology seems as good a place to start as any, in dealing with the security problem presented by "Islamism," of which we have all been reminded by the arrest of more alleged, semi-home-grown bomb plotters in Ottawa this week. If, as wags have suggested, even the flat-footed Mounties could capture these guys, think what else is out there.

To be fair to the police, who necessarily start from a position of no knowledge, and work within the tight constraints of political correctness -- so that the spontaneous arrest of a known Islamist ideologue merely "suspected" of being up to no good, would be a career-ending move -- they are doing their best. My impression is that their outwardly naive-looking schemes of "outreach" to Muslim communities are, modestly, paying off; that they do find help from "moderate Muslims" when they ask for it.

Reasonable Muslims and their children -- trying to get on with their lives; who often came to Canada to escape this sort of violent nonsense -- are the targets of a very sick propaganda, designed to persuade the psychologically unstable that Allah loves to kill infidels gratuitously. And over the world at large, Muslims are by far the most numerous victims of Islamist acts of carnage: quite literally tens of thousands killed and maimed in the time we've been counting since 9/11.

But when they look outside the community, they feel themselves being held responsible for a murderer's creed. And this is the case whether or not outsiders admit to the "prejudice." Ask the right poll questions, and you will find that a great majority of people in the West have "had it up to here" with Islam generally, even if they are outwardly maintaining the smiley-face of universal multicultural tolerance.

This is how things are, and as we can see from such European constituencies as Holland, that tolerance finally wears thin. Nor is it clear what the way is heading forward, when it does wear thin.

Actually, the problem is worse than this. For reasons, both material and spiritual, too deep to be adequately conveyed through conventional journalism -- intensely political, ideological, "Islamist" interpretations of Islam are advancing almost everywhere that Muslim communities exist. Perhaps the biggest single exception is Iraq: but there the reverse tide may not be sustainable.

The chief material cause is Saudi Arabia, and the extraordinary funding that has gone, internationally, into promoting a Wahabi, "puritanical," strictly Shariah-based, fanaticism. That's where most foreign money for mosques and imams comes from, and the oil wealth behind it shows no sign of evaporating. Nor have our statesmen (or their electors) the guts to confront this issue, and express Western revulsion for a polity abhorrent to every Western principle of freedom.

The chief spiritual cause is the disappearance, on nearly a planetary scale, of sane and effective religious authority. Muslims are responding in their own way to the apparent triumph of atheism, manifest almost everywhere in a tawdry and meaningless consumerism. It is no coincidence that the terrorists recruit almost exclusively from Muslim households with all the material advantages.

Their appeal is to the young, who have had that material advantage, and know it is nothing. If we think they can be bought off with more consumer goods, we are fools indeed.

Compounding this is the universal fact of "us/them." Put yourself in a Muslim's shoes and ask: Who are "we" and who are "they"? It is human nature to identify with one's own, even when one's own are behaving reprehensibly.

Moreover, the very strategy of the Islamists is to isolate Muslim emigrant communities; to prevent their assimilation into the West and its (truly corrupted) values. In other words, to put every Muslim in a position where he is either with the Islamists, or against every aspect of his own identity.

This strategy is working. In both Europe and America, the trend is towards less, rather than more interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims. The mosque insistence on distinctive Islamic dress contributes more to this separation, day by day, than isolated acts of terrorism. Our media insistence on publicizing the more radical Islamic spokesmen, at the expense of the more reasonable, also contributes mightily to this by enhancing and promoting the radicals' prestige.

It would be a different story if Muslims emigrating to the West encountered a society that was still overwhelmingly and confidently Christian in its beliefs, culture, and instincts. There would then be, for better and worse, reciprocal influence, and a "dialogue between civilizations."

Instead Muslim immigrants find a dialogue with the deaf: with a society that still says terrorism is wrong, but can't even explain why.

The Oz show - August 25, 2010

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, decidedly not a conservative newspaper, "Australia is now established as the political canary in the American electoral coal mine."

This is a reasonably astute observation. Just as political trends in Canada tend to run a few years behind those in the States, in Australia they tend to run a little ahead. This, according to my hypothesis, is because Australians live closer to the edge of the world, isolated from the rest of the West. Their decisions could have survival consequences, and they cannot afford the Canadian assumption that, should we ever get into real trouble, "the Americans will come to our rescue."

The Australians ran a year ahead of the Americans in electing a leader from the spacey Left. Kevin Rudd became prime minister at the end of 2007, as the Australian Obama. He campaigned as a moderate, to reassure voters, then veered sinistral after winning. His was largely the Obama agenda: running up catastrophic deficits, while delivering left-wing dream policies in the environment, healthcare, workplace, etc., and walking away from the Australian commitment to Iraq.

An administration that began with "hope and change" (after many years of Bush-like rule from the now-retired John Howard), stayed up in the polls. Even as Rudd's policies were shown to be unpopular, Rudd himself enjoyed remarkably high approval ratings.

Then suddenly, he tanked. Australians at large began to grasp the relationship between his pie-in-the-sky carbon schemes, punitive mining industry taxation, etc. -- and economic doom. It became clear that, under his leadership, Labour would be annihilated.

In June, he went down. One morning he was prime minister, but the next, his deputy, Julia Gillard, had replaced him, with a promise that the party would now steer towards the grey in the ideological spectrum.

This is where the analogy with U.S. politics stops, for, under Australia's Westminster model, it actually is possible for a party caucus to dump a prime minister who has made a hash of everything. Under the U.S. system, Democrats who now realize that Barack Obama was the worst thing to hit them since Jimmy Carter are stuck with him for years to come. Nor is it possible to impeach a U.S. president for mere incompetence.

What the Democrats can do, and are doing, is run against their own president. With the prospect of annihilation approaching in mid-term elections this year, and ever more formerly safe Democrat seats in contest, those at greatest risk are making the biggest distance.

In the Australian system, Gillard was herself running against her predecessor, assuring Australian voters that the radical spree was over. Her problems came from two directions. From behind her, surviving Rudd partisans were sticking in the knives. But before her lay an Australian electorate not quite ready to believe her.

Complicating this, and slowing that electorate, is an Australian electoral process designed for soi-disant "fairness" by rocket scientists of the usual progressive sort. Australia no longer has "first past the post" federal elections, as Canada still has. Instead, there is an incredibly abstruse system of voter preferences, such that, for instance, an Independent running in the riding of Denison, in Tasmania, who finished third in the direct poll with 21 per cent of the vote, has emerged as the winner after the "preferential" hocus-pocus.

He in turn is one of four Independents who now choose the new government in a hung Parliament, where Labour and the (conservative) Liberal/National Coalition are in a dead draw, even though the latter won the popular vote by a six-point margin.

Moreover, such is the complexity of the system that it will take more days to determine the precise result, which cannot be confirmed until October.

Needless to say, progressives in Canada, and every other country with a direct voting system that everyone understands, long to introduce similar hocus-pocus systems. They offer a way to get Greens and other crackpot Left parties into Parliament, and to prevent conservatives from governing until they have won by huge landslides.

But that is an unrelated issue. Even with hocus-pocus, plus recent redistricting, it appears that Australian Labour have gone down, and it may actually be worse for them if they succeed in buying off enough Independents to remain nominally in power.

And this result has been obtained even though the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, was generally dismissed by the Australian media as "unelectable." This because, though like any modern politician he has strong statist tendencies, he is also believed to be a "social conservative," and his supposed sotto-voce appeal to what the media sneeringly call "the traditional family" put him beyond their pale.

To their surprise, the Australian people, most of them products of traditional families, are neither shocked nor appalled by proponents of "the traditional family." They just held their noses, and voted for him anyway!

Prudence - August 22, 2010

A delicious question was asked in these pages, this last week, and answered by Margaret Somerville, the McGill ethicist. It was, "What is the most dangerous idea in the world today?"

Her answer -- that humans deserve no more respect than other animals -- is a good one. The consequences of that particular "great dumb idea" would be catastrophic to all humans -- and to animals as well as men, I might add. But my own answer to the question would be different.

I think the most dangerous idea, in wide circulation today, is: "That in making a moral decision, we ought to rule out all merely prudential considerations."

Conversely, I agree with the ancient Catholic and Christian teaching that Prudence is the highest of the "cardinal" or "hinge" virtues. (The idea goes back at least to Plato; and I accepted it myself long before I was received into the Roman Church.)

If the consequences of what one is doing or advocating are evil, then what one is doing or advocating is certainly wrong; and one cannot pretend not to know about consequences that are very easily foreseeable.

But in our schools, and through news and entertainment media, bureaucratic propaganda, and even the courts, the young of today are implicitly taught that Prudence has no place in the ethical order.

They learn instead that goodness consists of making a parade of one's own habitual "niceness" -- of our environmental consciousness, feminist awareness, "tolerance" and verbal non-violence, inverted racism, homophilia, Islamophilia, and the various other politically correct gestures.

My impatience with political correctitude has perhaps been established in previous columns. My point today will not require that I bash it any more. Instead I am making a more subtle point, which I hope will go closer to the bone.

In almost every case -- and books have already been filled with them -- there are unintended consequences to these gestures. You cannot "empower A" without disempowering "B"; you cannot reward one group without penalizing another; you cannot create privileges for which no one has to pay. The result of some very public "good deed" may well be bad deeds done to others out of the spotlight.

In other words, the sane, genuinely reasonable moral operator will cost his good deeds, before proceeding with them. And I do not mean this strictly in dollars and cents, for I am neither a libertarian nor an economist. Example: granting some benefit that means freedom to "A," may well entail imposing real slavery upon the overlooked "B." And that is the kind of cost that needs factoring.

Yet in private as well as public discussion today, there is precious little costing. Worse, the whole idea of this broad accounting for the foreseeable, is rejected. The notion that, "We must do the right thing regardless of cost," is even taken to be "the Christian ideal," by progressive people who are also posing as Christians. And yet it is nearly the opposite of actual Christian moral teaching.

A question for every professional do-gooder should be: "Who is paying for your charitable act? Are you personally making the necessary sacrifice, or are you quietly transferring the cost to others? And then demonizing them, if they complain?"

For when the result of all this "niceness" is shown to be, very likely, nastiness for persons unmentioned, the reply generally comes down to, "Who cares?"

The do-gooder has positioned himself "on the side of the angels," and set an example of smug self-righteousness that others may copy. And by contemporary standards, that's the important thing. The government's job is to "tax the rich" to pay for the fallout; the progressive citizen's job is to strut his narcissism, and receive praise and recognition for his conformity and obedience to the latest white-sepulchral trends.

Fashions come and go; Prudence should remain as the highest civil virtue.

But what is Prudence?

A deep question that, and not one I can answer in a paragraph, except to say it isn't what most people think it is, today. It isn't merely a form of restraint. Nor is it limited to trying to foresee all the consequences of an action: for Prudence requires us to ignore consequences, beyond the horizon of human understanding; to avoid presuming on other free agents; and to avoid what is absolutely forbidden -- what is inherently wrong -- even if we can reasonably foresee a good result from breaking the moral law. Behind this teaching is the theological idea that God is not a utilitarian, and does not Himself cut corners.

In the Christian past, to which we owe such civilization as we have, Prudence was recognized as the hinge of hinges, the heart of all practical wisdom, Queen of the Cardinal Virtues, and the necessary interpreter of each of the others (Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude).

To the post-modern mind, that is "so much baggage." Yet as Prudence herself would suggest, it is foolish to discard "baggage" without first establishing what it contains.

Frank Kermode - August 21, 2010

It is not entirely surprising when someone dies, at the age of 90, unless, like Frank Kermode, he was still at the height of his powers. The famous literary critic had just written a characteristically perceptive and entertaining book on E.M. Forster, and was projecting one on T.S. Eliot, when suddenly this week he took his leave.

It's as if the last English professor died. Or rather, not "as if," for he belonged to a species that stopped reproducing itself decades ago. So long as he lived, and his reviews kept appearing in places like the London Review of Books, it seemed possible that the species might somehow regenerate.

My reader may perhaps remember the image: the tweed jacket, the lit pipe, the "fino" (very dry, pale sherry). Like all stereotypes, it was essentially true, and especially true of Kermode, who never hesitated to embrace his fate, from the moment in the late 1940s when he realized that he lacked the gifts to become a great playwright or novelist.

He could read, however; had already mastered Greek, Latin, and several modern European languages; and could explain the background of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature to reasonably intelligent young persons. So he got a job lecturing at one of the provincial English universities, and never looked back. He had escaped the Isle of Man, and his background as the only son of a Douglas storeroom keeper, with an extremely deferential wife. He was perforce reasonably happy.

Kermode went on to hold almost every major endowed English professorship on either side of the Atlantic; to decorate faculties at London, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia -- and the red-brick University of Reading, where in early middle age he did his most memorable work, culminating in his "masterpiece," The Sense of an Ending (1967; revised 2000).

I remember it with the suspicious reverence one reserves for influences on one's own youth; it wrestled with the motivation for writing fiction, and its function in society.

It argued that this "sense of an ending" -- of the eschatological, the apocalyptic -- is written ineradicably into human nature. Clock time carries on, "between tock and tick," with events that follow each other senselessly, but our inner demand that they come to a conclusion, to a resolution, requires the re-arrangement of a story.

The literary artist struggles with the tension between "story" and "reality," between supplying "the irreducible minimum of geometry," and exhibiting his "clerical scepticism." He is trying in effect to serve two masters: to satisfy our demand for structure and result, while presenting things as they really are. And the reader is captured within this tension.

Looking back upon this, I suspect it was all bosh.

Here was the Kermode who brought Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault and (oh dear!) Jacques Lacan into the English-speaking world, where they would inspire English faculties to engage with "pure theory" -- in which the intentions of authors and the contents of their books would be progressively ignored, in a cat's cradle of ever more tangled pseudo-specialist jargon. From this, Kermode himself walked away, returning to the old-fashioned task of explaining authors and books to their readers.

By some coincidence, about the time I had discovered The Sense of an Ending, I had also strayed into John Amos Comenius, the 17th-century Czech pedagogue, whose work seemed strangely to parallel Kermode's argument at a higher level. The title of that work, from 1631, comes near to explaining it: The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.

Kermode, it seemed, was slandering "clock time," without fully realizing why he was doing so. In turn he found himself compelled to slander "story," too -- as some necessary but arbitrarily imposed order, that must itself be meaningless in the end. It was a reduction, not an enhancement, of literature.

Yet in his everyday life as an English prof, reaching out to the masses with improving essays in the Sunday papers, he was always enhancing. And in his role as a leisurely book reviewer, he challenged readers (like me) to go back and find what they'd stupidly passed over.

For decades I compulsively bought any review with his byline on the cover, and I can't remember ever having been disappointed by his piece.

As to whether he was a nice man, I don't know or care. His own little memoir, dryly entitled, Not Entitled (1995), leaves the impression of a doleful and reticent dandy -- like an elegant if dimpled tin, kicked around the world. It tells us nothing about his failed marriages, or any inner passions at all.

That's exactly what English professors were -- rather humble dandies -- professionally dislocated, ingeniously pointless, yet useful for the very miscellaneity of their knowledge, and worthy of a rather deep affection, never rising to love.

Head over heart - August 18, 2010

Do I feel sorry for the latest batch of seaborne refugees to land in Canada?

The question is irrelevant, but the answer is yes. Sane people do not board a ship sailing to an unknowable destination, in a light frivolous way. The circumstances in which these Tamil migrants left Sri Lanka were not happy. They were on the losing side of something very like a civil war. I could go on for some paragraphs describing the fix they were in -- the greater for those of greatest danger to us in Canada, if they were in fact associated with the Tamil Tigers; and whose word, if they say they now regret this association, cannot be taken at face value.

Notwithstanding, I am generally against public displays of compassion, and favour instead private, genuine, and therefore mostly invisible acts of compassion.

As a public policy, "compassion" is nearly always a fraud; and I have inserted the word "nearly" only in case I think of an exception after filing this column. I can't think of one now.

When, for instance, a certain George W. Bush Jr. was first running for president of the U.S., with a political message of "compassionate conservatism," my comment was that he means some kind of fraudulent conservatism. When Brian Mulroney described Canada's socialist and dysfunctional medical system as a "sacred trust," I called it Irish smarm. It is unfortunate that electorates aren't better trained to spot snake-oil salesmanship, but there you go. Democracy lasts, in this world, for only as long as the people remain astute.

We are lucky, for the moment, to have a party in power that owes nothing to the Tamil Tigers. For the Liberals, the sham of "compassion" extended to fundraising events with their goons, and the settled party understanding that any large, fairly desperate, and culturally exotic pool of welfare-propending immigrants will make reliable Liberal voting fodder. Hence side-splitting expostulations of compassion.

Hence, a Canadian immigration system that is actually designed to be dysfunctional, and advertises opportunities for abuse. It is no accident that it takes very little time to become a fully-voting Canadian citizen, but a lot of time to deport even the most flagrantly illegal visitor to this country, once he has "opted" to stay. It is no accident that an immense vested interest has been assembled in the form of immigration lawyers, who will scream pink bluster when their own gravy train is impeded.

The Liberals built and own Canada's immigration system, together with the justifying public policy of "multiculturalism," that the Trudeau government summoned while pointing a demographic hose at major English-speaking urban areas, back in the 1970s. We take it for granted that no Tory today can hope to win a seat in Toronto or Vancouver, or any other dense urban environment. This result did not come about naturally.

We must accept the consequences of past immigration policy, and the political difficulties in persuading past beneficiaries that they will not benefit from its continuation. For there is such a thing as a tipping point, past which an entire country becomes dysfunctional -- because the cultural virtues on which it depended have been squandered.

In this respect, the public ideal of "multiculturalism" does far more harm than open immigration, though the one policy depends on the other, and both are aggravated by the venal attractions of a welfare state.

A society in which all social, economic, and cultural values are optional, and in which, moreover, all traditional and received values are placed under formal suspicion, is a society that is disintegrating. It is a society in which the self-serving rule, the dutiful are in their way, and hypocrisy is consistently rewarded.

The poor souls aboard the Sun Sea were unlikely to have much, if any understanding of the Canadian circumstances into which they were projecting themselves. Nor can they be blamed for receiving all kinds of material assistance at the expense of the Canadian taxpayer, for which they did not specifically ask. Their own interests are immediate, and exclude those of their new host nation; after all, their first choice for landing was Australia.

Yet the whole process by which they were delivered was a cynical manipulation, of an immigration system designed to be cynically manipulated.

Paradoxically, we could better afford to accept refugees at a time when it was clear that each applicant must assimilate in the "melting pot" of an established Canadian society, would be watched, and would be under compulsion to earn his way as a test of his commitment.

We cannot be held to account for the mess in Sri Lanka; nor, from this distance, are we in a position to judge Tamil claims of persecution, after an armed conflict in which the Tamil side was governed by an obviously terrorist organization.

And while we are now compelled to review each refugee claimant under our existing laws, we'd be fools not to change those laws to prevent further cynical manipulation.

Books - August 15, 2010

There is an ancient prayer, to the Virgin Mary: "To you we fly for shelter and protection, mother of God. You alone are chaste and blessed; do not disregard our prayers in this hour of need, but deliver us from danger."

It may be found on papyrus, in the Rylands Library in Manchester, England. It dates to the third century AD. The Greek text found its way independently into the liturgies of the Eastern Church, and the Latin into the Ambrosian rite of the Western Church, which is still celebrated in the diocese of Milan. There are minor differences in wording, through translations, but all I've seen come to precisely the same points.

Having never personally examined the papyrus holdings in the Rylands Library, I have this text from a printed book: Early Christian Prayers, by the French Franciscan scholar A. Hamman, translated into English by Walter Mitchell, and published by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1961. I can no longer remember how this book came into my library: probably through a university book sale. I only know that it has been with me for a long time.

The book is marked in ink on four pages. I gather a previous owner was Protestant, and found several of the earliest Christian liturgical passages too Catholic for his taste, taking particular offence at the word "priest," which he was duly altering to "presbyter," until he gave up. Having ancestors, myself, who spent several centuries doing things like that, I smile knowingly. Were I to find a "clean copy" of the book, however, I would probably buy it.

The Marian prayer is safely in a part of the book this previous owner never got to. In general, I favour capital punishment for people who put marks in books. They'd be easy to catch, for almost all put their marks on only the first few pages. The effort of defacement seems itself to exhaust them, so that they seldom make it to the end of a long preface. But real book readers tend to skip the prefaces, anyway.

My article today is not intended as an essay in religious doctrine, except allusively. The facts of my Christian religion, and of all religions, are as they are. Evidence can be effaced or suppressed; but then, as this case suggests, it will keep washing out of the sands of Egypt. The very next item in the book is a form of the Ave Maria, or Hail Mary, found written on both sides of a pottery shard under an ancient Coptic monastery, with all the offensive Catholic bits ("mother of God," and so forth) duly in place.

Egypt is a big country, and until long after the seventh-century Islamic conquest, it was overwhelmingly Christian. In many ways it was the cradle of Christendom: the country from which missionaries embarked to shores as far distant as Ireland.

Another book on my shelves is Dioscorus of Aphrodito: His Work and His World (California, 1988). Through Greek and Coptic documents, it gives a truly thrilling picture of the Egypt that was, immediately before the conquests -- not only the Muslim one, for the Sassanid Persians had been through a little before them, and rather more destructively.

For those with vague ideas of long "Dark Ages" after the Roman Empire fell, the book would be enlightening. It touches on just one little corner of Egypt, a town that was well up the Nile, on high ground above the flooding river, under what is today a peasant farming village. Only tiny fragments have been explored, archeologically, but it is clear from reading the papyrus sheaves that were found, accidentally, that this lost town was once the centre of a very rich and cultured district, whose life came suddenly to an end.

Books themselves, like the old scrolls and codices before them, have lives of their own. They wash out of the sands of Egypt, or out of university book sales, and the Sally Ann.

Most of this literature is trash, truly, but even the trash becomes interesting when it is old enough. Every physical object has a life, in the sense that -- notwithstanding the famous Bishop Berkeley -- it may go on existing, all by itself, even when no one is looking. And may contain explosive revelations.

I have been myself, since early childhood, when I first got the knack of deciphering the Roman alphabet, a creature of books, and a lover and hater of them. It is hard for me to imagine the brave new world we are entering, when books themselves are being replaced by digital records which can themselves blink out with a quick change of technology. I've lived to a moment when the second-hand book trade is collapsing, for the first time in many centuries; when humane learning is disappearing from our universities, into the age of a new "conquest."

On this feast day, of the Assumption of Mary, we should nevertheless remember that all won't be destroyed. Purity will always rise, and as in centuries long past, we may still fly for protection.

Bushehr - August 14, 2010

Surprise, surprise: the Russians will fuel the Iranian nuclear reactor which they have built at Bushehr, next Saturday, and it will begin the months-long process of firing up. This despite pleas from the West to stop this project; and what the Obama administration in Washington may or may not believe to have been an undertaking by the Russians to delay it -- at least until Iran had come to some plausible inspection agreement on nuclear weapons.

We cannot know the extent of direct Russian collusion in the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and we cannot trust our massively incompetent intelligence agencies to find out. We do know that the technical aid from Russia goes well beyond building the reactor, and into the provision of weapons systems. We know that Iran is not concealing its commitment to build and arm missiles capable of reaching not only Israel, but India, and much of southern and eastern Europe.

And we know, or can know if we are not incurably naive, that both Russia and China consider Iran -- and North Korea -- to be wild-card allies in their own rivalries with the West.

It is to their advantage to keep these regimes in a state of dependency upon themselves; thus to our advantage that this tends to limit the amount of co-operation.

But the wild behaviour of both Iran and North Korea -- which also, obviously, trade nuclear-related goods and services with each other, with or without Russian and Chinese consent -- is entirely to the advantage of the other side. Neither of these "crazed" regimes offers, or would be so foolish as to consider, a threat to either of its big power allies. Their threats are directed entirely at democratic, pro-Western states: at South Korea and Japan, in the one case; at Israel in the other.

Now, a regime does not need to use nuclear weapons to get results from them. The mere fact they are so armed can change all the power relations in a region, just as the mere fact that a man has a loaded gun can change all the power relations within a suburban bank branch.

"But why shouldn't he have a gun? After all, the police have guns, and they're just people, too." Or alternatively, "If you don't want that man carrying a gun, then the police shouldn't have guns, either. We must negotiate a gun-free banking environment."

I hope my reader will find the fatuity in the above two statements. And yet the analogous positions are seriously held, even within the U.S. White House and State Department, both of which are committed to negotiating with the Russians and others for a nuke-free world.

The sane ambition is, incidentally: good guys with guns, bad guys without guns. Ditto for nuclear weapons. But this sane ambition is undermined when spokesmen for our own side cannot see the difference between a peace-loving constitutional democracy and, say, Iran and North Korea. ("After all, they're just countries, too.")

Indeed, the threat from Iran is slight compared with the threat to us from our own stupidity. For our lethal enemies are only doing what we have permitted them to do.

It was incumbent upon this and previous U.S. and allied administrations not only to declare that we could not abide a nuclear Iran, but also, what we'd be prepared to do about it. Moreover, a counter-threat requires the preparations to be visible: military build-up, not military climb-down.

This did not mean seeking war with the regime of the ayatollahs, let alone war with Russia. Quite the opposite: it meant preventing war, by leaving them with no room to manoeuvre -- and specifically, with no opportunity to luff us into a position where we must either fight or swim. It meant, for instance, standing our ground on the anti-missile defences the U.S. was installing in Poland and Czech Republic; and refusing to forget about the Russian rape of Georgia.

Instead, when we have no reason whatever to trust the motives or behaviour of Vladimir Putin's Russia, and plenty of evidence it had acted insincerely on previous agreements, Hillary Clinton went to Moscow with her ludicrous "reset button," and Barack Obama followed with a new "START," that jumbles the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons -- again, just what the Russians wanted.

Likewise on Iran: the persistent and ridiculous assumption that the Russians have been acting in good faith, has left us entirely free of leverage. Instead, we are now gaping at a fait accompli.

In the end -- and we are approaching the end, when Iran is established as a nuclear power, and the Israelis must make their "existential" decision on whether and how to take that threat out -- we have not been rendered powerless by the enemy. We began with insuperable moral and material advantages, and we have rendered ourselves powerless by frittering them away.

Flypaper revisited - August 11, 2010

Canada has her exit strategy from Afghanistan: come next year, we are just going to walk. Minor Europeans (they are all minor, even when aggregated, in contemporary military terms) find no serious difficulty in doing the same, under pressure from electorates that no longer see the point of fighting in Afghanistan.

The Obama administration declared a similar 2011 wind-down, or wind-off, in advance; though in the American case, leaving can't be so easy -- they're the ones who must turn off the lights -- and I doubt anyone in State or Defence seriously thinks they can quietly check out, after the much-advertised "surge" never happens.

For the result of an American exit would be ugly: the probable return to power of exactly the party that sheltered al-Qaeda, and made 9/11 possible.

Moreover, thanks to his reputation, and the circumstances of his appointment, Gen. David Petraeus may be making the call, and not the president. To his credit, he never tried to manoeuvre himself into a position stronger than his civilian superiors -- which is anathema to the U.S. constitution. It just happened that way, from "events," while the attention of the administration was fixed elsewhere. And while I admire Petraeus myself, as a remarkably capable general, I am not edified by the spectacle of a man in uniform exercising political power -- thanks to a president who knows he will not himself be trusted on military decisions, and has diminishing political capital to expend.

What Obama could do -- thanks to the earlier success of the same Petraeus's "surge" in Iraq, and an Iraqi domestic political arrangement that is arguably stable -- was announce a formal end to U.S. military operations in Iraq. This passed almost without comment, and should have compelled more journalistic investigation.

The question: Is it not in the U.S. and Western interest to maintain a considerable, battle-ready military presence, right in the heart of the Middle East as a strong discouragement to reckless adventures by any of Iraq's neighbours? For if, as we have heard, the policy towards a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran is to be "containment," there must be forces to actually contain.

The Cold War containment policy towards the Soviet Union necessarily involved a large NATO presence in West Germany, and the creation through that and other means of a visible trip-wire. The strategy, which ultimately depended on the "Mutual Assured Destruction" of nuclear ICBMs, was crazy, and perhaps morally indefensible, but it worked. Within their own sphere of influence, the Soviets were left -- to crush rebellions in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia -- but one boot over the line into Western Europe and they'd be depressing the MAD button.

The Cold War analogy will not work in the Middle East, however, where the West has enemies who are not quite sane. In particular, while they give many signs of bazaar cunning, Iran's ayatollahs are not committed to an ideology of dull materialism. They are instead committed to an apocalyptic religious vision, which with all its heresy (in strict Islamic terms), might actually prefer to trigger international catastrophe, rather than suffer ignominious domestic collapse.

In such a case, substantial forward bases, maintained in a state of readiness for war, are just the thing: to convince the Iranian regime that any false move would entail their own apocalyptic end, only.

Selling such an aggressive forward policy to Western electorates, who must pay for it, was never going to be easy. And George Bush essentially failed as salesman, partly through his own incoherence. With Barack Obama, the chances are zero: he would not dream of defending U.S. interests in so decisive a way. At best, for the length of his tenure, we can hope for some puzzled dithering, in which regardless of his own rhetoric he allows U.S. troops to dawdle in theatre, and their actual presence in turn provides some modest deterrent value.

But of course, while they remain, committed to a war in Afghanistan that can only be won with hard brutal decision (as Vietnam could have been won with hard brutal decision), they are targets for the Taliban. Western electorates will accept military casualties in a war that has some apparent point, and where the possibility of victory is defined. We have no patience for bloody dawdling.

Yet that may be the best available strategy, all round.

It is now eight years since I first brought some minor attention to what I called the "flypaper strategy." Simply stated, it made sense to draw the world's most incendiary Islamist "flies" towards sweet "martyrdoms" in Iraq or Afghanistan. More crudely: it is a good thing when aspiring terrorists, hatched in radical European and North American mosques, travel to Afghanistan to get themselves killed. For otherwise they would be focusing on the possibilities for bombing, demonstrated in places like Madrid and London.

In effect, withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan means carrying all the flypaper home.

Transcendentalisms - August 8, 2010

Is anything sacred?

We can eliminate most of the discussion that would usually follow that question, these days, by noting what it did not ask.

The question was not, "Is anything still sacred today?" That would be a stupid question for at least two reasons. First, it unnecessarily presumes sacred things existed in the past. Second, it unnecessarily presumes that, like bread or even bottled ketchup, the sacred is time-sensitive and can be predictably stale-dated.

Such presumptions are hardly rare in our self-conceited "secular" society. At the root of most, if not all, "progressive" thinking is the incredibly presumptuous notion that it is within human power to change anything we don't like -- including, ultimately, even the content of the past. And while there may be disputes about the precise direction of the "long march" forward, the notion that it must continue, and overcome opposition from "conservatives" and "reactionaries," is beyond dispute. This is, as it were, the "sacred" principle of the Left.

Never embrace a position that is self-contradictory. My papa taught me this when I was a wee tot, and when I grew older I began to understand that the instruction was consequential. My own progression out of adolescent atheism had much to do with the detection of self-contradictions. And this was one of them: How can I reject the sacred, categorically, when the categorical rejection of the sacred itself requires something to be sacred?

And the final giveaway. It involves a kind of solemn pledge ("I will accept nothing as sacred") that is in the exact nature of a sacrament, reverencing an abstract idea as holy, and securing it against violation. The pledge in itself creates a category for heresy and sacrilege: for if I ever did accept something as sacred, I would violate my creed, and desecrate my most solemn ideal.

Nor could I fail to violate it, in the course of normal life.

Practically, we must assume some things are sacred, simply to preclude such acts as gratuitously stomping on a kitten (when no one is looking so we don't get caught). But at a much simpler level, I do not think my reader will meet an atheist so pure that he does not possess avowedly sacred objects. And nothing so obvious as a good luck charm; rather, possessions which, through association with persons or past events -- even a high price tag -- have acquired a numinous aura, and would require something very like pain to discard.

There are (otherwise useless) things we cannot throw out because we find them beautiful, sometimes extremely so. They are a source of joy whenever encountered. Keats famously noted this, though as a scholar of a later generation observed, the sort of Grecian urn Keats admired struck him as rather ugly. "Beauty," like the sacred, might be in the eye of the beholder.

But as we should quickly realize, this is rot -- not the analogy between the beautiful and the sacred, but the idea that these "transcendentals" are arbitrarily assigned. Again and again we dig up, out of the cold forgetful earth, objects from distant civilizations. And we know immediately something about them through our common apprehension of some aesthetic quality.

It needn't be a formal work of art, and indeed, the post-Christian or irreligious mind is easily confused, and tricked into the habit of elevating such apparently "spiritual" things as art and poetry into formal sacred status (demanding public subsidy).

We forget that, for instance, the very idea of "fine art" is a modern invention; and that most of the older art in our museums was created for quite other purposes than to hang on a wall and be reverenced by museum customers.

What most interests me about the sacred is that it seems to cross over the triune "Platonic transcendentals" -- the good, the true, the beautiful -- and to lie "behind" all three. Plato himself seems articulately to grasp this, and to be made aware of the unity of the Divine through the contemplation of such transcendentals -- that is, properties shared by all things, that transcend their differentiating individual properties.

And properties that cannot be imaginary, for they draw a response from all men, or more precisely, all those who are not catastrophically obtuse, or have not wilfully blinded themselves. We respond, inwardly, to what we apprehend as sacred, however partially we apprehend it. Or to put it another way, our souls resonate in the presence of moral, ethical, and aesthetic sanctity.

The sacred can be denied, but so can the sun, and it still rises every morning. It belongs to religion, and is explained through religious doctrine, yet even outside the reach of formal religious practice, it is what it is. And therefore, the most resolutely "secular" person is capable of knowing that some things are, and must necessarily be, sacred.

As to what is sacred, or what is not, this column ends after 860 words. It will have earned the hallowed "two cents" if it encourages my reader to think about such things.

Fearless advice - August 7, 2010

How dare an elected government of Canada tell the civil service how to run the country. How dare a mere prime minister contradict the settled professional views of his fearless bureaucratic advisers. By what right do insignificant cabinet members interfere in the critical tasks of public servants?

Perhaps I am overstating the views expressed by the august professor Errol Mendes Monday on these pages. I encourage readers to judge for themselves. If I do overstate, it is not by much. I read the article (which I was very pleased to see printed) in gobsmacked amazement. I already knew that veterans of our old Liberal order think like this; but to find a spokesman so indiscreet as to tell us what he thinks so plainly. Please, someone, reach into the barrel and hand him an Order of Canada.

I love the expression "fearless advisers," which Mendes repeats several times, to characterize the guardians of our Nanny State. In another piece he wrote this year, in the Toronto Star, he said that while "tilting toward totalitarian government," Prime Minister Stephen Harper was "intimidating the public service from speaking truth to power." Again and again he uses the current leftist formulation, applying the word "ideological" to anything that moves in a conservative direction, or more precisely, fails to move in the approved "liberal" one.

To fully appreciate the (unintended) joke, my reader must summon the image of a senior departmental bureaucrat -- a professionally progressive drone of almost mythic spiritual inertia -- pushing paper all his life till now he sits atop the mighty mound, "speaking truth to power." We are beyond the classic Yes Minister, into Monty Python territory.

It is unnecessary to confute what confutes itself, and especially what confutes itself wilfully. The Tea Party movement in the United States has arisen against much more cautious expressions of arrogance from the American "political class."

I use that expression advisedly; it has become a term-of-art among Stateside poll-takers as well as pundits, and it does offer a useful distinction between adepts and dependants of the Nanny State, and the rest of the population. In particular, the pollster Scott Rasmussen has devoted much effort to documenting the ever-widening gap between the "Political Class" and "Mainstream America."

As Mark Tapscott summarizes in the Washington Examiner, the political class "dominates government, the mainstream media, corporate boardrooms, academia, nonprofit activism, and the faculty lounge. Theirs is a world of conceptual analyses, bureaucratic edicts, and organization charts, elevated sensibilities, and the conventional wisdoms of political correctness."

By contrast, out in mainstream America -- "flyover country" to the clerisy on both coasts -- we have "the world of what if I lose my job; hurry, Mommy, I'm late for my soccer game; taxes keep going up and buying power is headed down; honey, your mother needs you to come over and fix her stove; the car won't start," and so forth.

Rasmussen's trick consists of pegging people by the nature of their work or station in life, into these two broad classes. He then finds they have diametrically opposed views on every significant public issue. At the most fundamental level, he now finds 67 per cent of the "political class" think America is headed in roughly the right direction; 84 per cent of the rest think it is not.

I have not seen this sort of research done in Canada; though from the anecdotal evidence of my e-mail inbox, I would expect similar results.

Note that Rasmussen is one of those despised private-enterprise statisticians. The very issue Errol Mendes addressed was the Harper government's attempt to make the mandatory long-form of our census voluntary. The questions in question are themselves designed, not to find out what anybody thinks or wants, but to generate the sort of numbers that members of the political class can use to devise new tax-and-spend programs -- which inevitably transfer resources, net, from the "mainstream" taxpayers to the adepts and dependents of the political class, thus progressively (in every sense) skewing the electorate itself.

It would be intemperate to describe this political class as "bloodsucking parasites." Certainly, from what I can see, this is not their self-image. Instead I find they self-identify around the conceit of being smarter and wiser than the "mainstream" of the general population. And it is a conceit so deeply felt, and casually expressed -- at its best in the tone of "noblesse oblige" -- that I would like to see more comparative information. For I'm not sure that, on the average, the "political class" is better educated, even in the narrowest, credentialled sense.

My hope is that the coming civil war can be non-violent. For not only in the States, but here and throughout the Western world, the "perception" among the "mainstream," that we have lost control of our own lives to a class of political masters, is growing inexorably.

Cordoba blues - August 4, 2010

Newt Gingrich -- one of my favourite American politicians, along with Sarah Palin and some others who make progressive Canadians choke on their breakfast cereal -- has waded, at the U.S. national level, into what might be dismissed as a municipal concern.

The issue is the building of an immense mosque and "community centre," overlooking the Ground Zero site from the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan. It is called the Cordoba Initiative, in memory of the grand mosque in Andalusia, erected in the ninth and 10th centuries on the foundations of the demolished grand Visigothic church in that city. In Islamist, and indeed general Islamic legend, that mosque symbolized the conquest of Christian Spain by Muslim armed forces (later reversed in the "Reconquista" by armed Christian forces).

The choice of name, as well as the choice of scale, is worthy of attention. The chief promoter of the scheme, Faisel Abdul Rauf, is himself an imam who, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, suggested that the U.S. was itself largely responsible for being hit. He will not say where the money is coming from (despite some journalistic hounding). Till otherwise proven, the assumption must be that most comes from the usual source: Saudi Arabia, a country whose religious affairs department has generously endowed Sunni Muslim infrastructure all over the world, from an immense oil revenue.

It is also, if my reader needs reminding, a country in which the practice of any religion but Islam is absolutely banned, and grievously punished. All Saudi proposals for "interfaith dialogue" should be considered in that sharp light.

What I have just written is a rough summary of Gingrich's arguments. I can find nothing false in them. He adds a more subtle argument, that, while terribly controversial, cannot be permanently ignored. It is that America's mortal Islamist enemies are not lunatics. Rather, they are acting logically, from doctrine reasonably ascribed to the Koran -- that all who resist the imposition of Shariah would be better off not existing, and that active measures are required to compel submission to the Will of Allah.

As Gingrich says, secular progressive types cannot understand religious zeal; and what they cannot understand, they cannot see. Hence ludicrous events, such as that in Canada, when Mark Steyn was hauled before a human rights tribunal for accurately quoting the declarations of prominent Islamists, as if he were the bigot.

The same impulse silences open discussion of the Islamist threat, everywhere in the West, and Gingrich is using the almost lewd example of the proposed Cordoba Mosque to break this "liberal taboo."

We cannot win the "war on terror" (an expression itself now banned within the Obama administration) if we refuse to name the enemy. It may take some time; but we couldn't have prevailed in the Cold War without naming "Communism" as the enemy advancing not only by armed means, but also by stealth, subversion, and the cultivation of useful idiots among Western progressive elites.

By contrast, New York's politically correct mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has welcomed the mosque as an expression of multiculturalism. He has taken the promoters' arguments at face value, that it will be dedicated to "peace," and welcomed such public-relations gambits as an afterthought proposal to include a memorial to the victims of 9/11 within it. (This week, the city removed the last significant bureaucratic hurdle to the mosque's construction.)

But, as the Communists before them with their "peace" fronts, the Islamists use "peace" to mean a much different thing from what we mean by the word. It is a drollness on their part, and it is understood that "peace" will come when all those who could resist their power have been annihilated. Bloomberg, in this case, is playing the useful idiot.

A columnist in the States (Hinkle in the Richmond Times-Despatch) compares their debate over illegal immigration to watching a contest between two teams of contortionists. Nobody wants to make too clear what he may be advocating. In office, both Democrats and Republicans have done the same things: nothing to fix the problem, but plenty to suggest they really care.

It is the same in almost every controversial issue, both there and here. Thanks to what is inadequately called "political correctness," nobody quite dares to spit the marbles that have tumbled from out of his cranium, into his mouth. Except, when somebody does speak plainly, all sides agree to be shocked.

The issues are not unrelated, incidentally. There is growing evidence that Hezbollah, and perhaps other Islamist terror networks, are buying into Mexican drug gangs to transport their agents across the international frontier into such states as Arizona. Alas, such is the nature of politics and journalism today, that the issue will not be front-paged until said agents blow something up. Then the issue will be: "Why didn't anyone do something to stop them?"