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Over the past few months, I have been debating Roman Catholics who differ from their Eastern Orthodox brethren on the nature of the Trinity, Protestants who are willing to quarrel bitterly with one another about election and predestination, with Jews who cannot concur about a covenant with God, and with Muslims who harbor bitter disagreements over the discrepant interpretations of the Quran. Arcane as these disputes may seem, and much as I relish seeing the faithful fight among themselves, the believers are models of lucidity when compared to the hair-splitting secularists who cannot accept that al-Qaida in Mesopotamia is a branch of al-Qaida itself.

Objections to this self-evident fact take one of two forms. It is argued, first, that there was no such organization before the coalition intervention in Iraq. It is argued, second, that the character of the gang itself is somewhat autonomous from, and even independent of, the original group proclaimed by Osama Bin Laden. These objections sometimes, but not always, amount to the suggestion that the “real” fight against al-Qaida is, or should be, not in Iraq but in Afghanistan. (I say “not always,” because many of those who argue the difference are openly hostile to the presence of NATO forces in Afghanistan as well as to the presence of coalition soldiers in Iraq.)

The facts as we have them are not at all friendly to this view of the situation, whether it be the “hard” view that al-Qaida terrorism is a “resistance” to Western imperialism or the “soft” view that we have only created the monster in Iraq by intervening there.

The founder of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who we can now gratefully describe as “the late.” The first thing to notice about him is that he was in Iraq before we were. The second thing to notice is that he fled to Iraq only because he, and many others like him, had been driven out of Afghanistan. Thus, by the logic of those who say that Afghanistan is the “real” war, he would have been better left as he was. Without the overthrow of the Taliban, he and his collaborators would not have moved to take advantage of the next failed/rogue state. I hope you can spot the simple error of reasoning that is involved in this belief. It also involves the defeatist suggestion—which was very salient in the opposition to the intervention in Afghanistan—that it’s pointless to try to crush such people because “others will spring up in their place.” Those who take this view should have the courage to stand by it and not invent a straw-man argument.

As it happens, we also know that Zarqawi—who probably considered himself a rival to Bin Laden as well as an ally—wrote from Iraq to Bin Laden and to his henchman Ayman al-Zawahiri and asked for the local “franchise” to call himself the leader of AQM. This dubious honor he was duly awarded. We further know that he authored a plan for the wrecking of the new Iraq: a simple strategy to incite civil murder between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The incredible evil of this proposal, which involved the blowing up of holy places and the assassination of pilgrims, was endorsed from whatever filthy cave these deliberations are conducted in. As a matter of fact, we even know that Zawahiri and his boss once or twice counseled Zarqawi to hold it down a bit, especially on the video-butchery and the excessive zeal in the murder of Shiites. Thus, if there is any distinction to be made between the apple and the tree, it would involve saying that AQM is, if anything, even more virulent and sadistic and nihilistic than its parent body.

And this very observation leads to a second one, which has been well-reported and observed by journalists who are highly skeptical about the invasion. In provinces like Anbar, and in areas of Baghdad, even Sunni militants have turned away in disgust and fear from the AQM forces. It’s not difficult to imagine why this is: Try imagining life for a day under the village rule of such depraved and fanatical elements.

To say that the attempt to Talibanize Iraq would not be happening at all if coalition forces were not present is to make two unsafe assumptions and one possibly suicidal one. The first assumption is that the vultures would never have gathered to feast on the decaying cadaver of the Saddamist state, a state that was in a process of implosion well before 2003. All our experience of countries like Somalia and Sudan, and indeed of Afghanistan, argues that such an assumption is idiotic. It is in the absence of international attention that such nightmarish abnormalities flourish. The second assumption is that the harder we fight them, the more such cancers metastasize. This appears to be contradicted by all the experience of Iraq. Fallujah or Baqubah might already have become the centers of an ultra-Taliban ministate, as they at one time threatened to do, whereas now not only have thousands of AQM goons been killed but local opinion appears to have shifted decisively against them and their methods.

The third assumption, deriving from the first two, would be that if coalition forces withdrew, the AQM gangsters would lose their raison d’être and have nothing left to fight for. I think I shall just leave that assumption lying where it belongs: on the damp floor of whatever asylum it is where foolish and wishful opinions find their eventual home.

If I am right about this, an enormous prize is within our reach. We can not only deny the clones of Bin Ladenism a military victory in Iraq, we can also discredit them in the process and in the eyes (and with the help) of a Muslim people who have seen them up close. We can do this, moreover, in a keystone state of the Arab world that guards a chokepoint—the Gulf—in the global economy. As with the case of Afghanistan—where several provinces are currently on a knife-edge between an elected government that at least tries for schools and vaccinations, and the forces of uttermost darkness that seek to negate such things—the struggle will take all our nerve and all our intelligence. But who can argue that it is not the same battle in both cases, and who dares to say that it is not worth fighting?

There were moments this evening during Enemies of Reason, when I wished Dawkins would just put the malkie on one or other of his interlocutors - peddlars of superstition, cold reading ‘psychics’, dowsers, crystal ball gazers and tarot card readers. No, sniffed the Neil Spencer from The Observer - WTF? The Observer has horoscopes? - the very idea that the claims of astrology could or should be tested is mischief pure and simple - not an idea he likes one little bit. Far from questioning the efficacy of dowsing, when dowsers proved unable to detect water more accurately than you or I could by pointing a wooden spoon at a selection of sealed containers, it was because they had been at the wrong angle or because god was having a joke with them today.

Next week Dawkins puts the nut on ‘alternative’ ‘therapies’.

Where once there was reason, now there is confusion …

Via David Thompson, a wee clipette of the same:

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Fresh from his AIDS denialist activity, Thabo Mbeki is now about to start a fresh assault on reason and evidence:

South Africa has also blamed Britain for the deepening crisis in Zimbabwe, accusing it of leading a campaign to “strangle” the beleaguered African state’s economy and saying it has a “death wish” against a negotiated settlement that might leave Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in power.

According to a South African government document that the president, Thabo Mbeki, is expected to present at a regional summit this week, Britain remains a significant obstacle by spearheading sanctions.

“The most worrisome thing is that the UK continues to deny its role as the principal protagonist in the Zimbabwean issue and is persisting with its activities to isolate Zimbabwe,” the report says.

Mugabe took farms from white farmers, gave them to his cronies and made them into non-farms with unemployed and now starving black workers. (He could have taken the farms and given them to black farmers - you know those people who know how to make food.)

He has completely destroyed a country, without any help from an invading force, using economic carpet bombing. Inflation is running at 20,000% and he has recently inprisoned 7000 shopkeepers.

And that’s the UK’s fault how?

Darkness. Light … harm/evil … challenge … enemy … defeat and destroy. Eyes open … alerted. We’ve been a continent shielded by oceans. Carnage known only in Civil War. Foe: Political ideology, not a religion. Our view of the world—‘challenge we did not ask for in a world we did not make.’ People turn to America. Much grief but many questions. Who is the enemy?

An update is needed on Bismarck’s line about politics and sausages being two things whose creation should never be witnessed. These slightly poetic and heavily world-historical jottings constitute the early notes of George W. Bush’s speechwriting team’s State of the Union address for September 20, 2001. “Team” might actually be the most significant word to take away from above extract, which comes to us courtesy of former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully in an already classic piece in this month’s Atlantic, titled “Present at the Creation.” It’s less Profiles in Courage Scully is concerned with and more the hubris of one Michael Gerson, another former wordsmith for the executive and, as we now know, not accidentally the most famous presidential speechwriter since Ted Sorenson.

Scully’s essay is a partial critique of Gerson’s new self-fellating memoir, Heroic Conservatism, in which the head hero is none other than Gerson himself. Known for his studious evangelicalism — in Revenge of the Nerds terms, the Gilbert to Bush’s Booger — Gerson’s greatest flourish, says a disgruntled ex-colleague, was not rhetorical but autobiographical:

[Gerson] allowed false assumptions, and also encouraged them. Among chummy reporters, he created a fictionalized, “Mike, we’re at war” version of presidential speechwriting, casting himself in a grand and solitary role. The narrative that Mike Gerson presented to the world is a story of extravagant falsehood. He has been held up for us in six years’ worth of coddling profiles as the great, inspiring, and idealistic exception of the Bush White House. In reality, Mike’s conduct is just the most familiar and depressing of Washington stories—a history of self- seeking and media manipulation that is only more distasteful for being cast in such lofty terms.

The “Mike, we’re at war” bit derives from Gerson’s factitious addition of his own name to a famous bull-session statement made by President Bush shortly after the Twin Towers were incinerated. Gerson, like all good Beltway showmen, got in nice and cozy with Bob Woodward, who duly regurgitated his source’s self-aggrandizing quotes without bothering to check them against other administration officials, most notably the speaker-in-chief.

Matthew Scully commands instant respect for being a meat-and-potatoes conservative who not too long ago published a meticulous and morally serious book about vegetarianism. (Christopher Hitchens reviewed Dominion in the Atlantic and said, “Scully shows a martyrlike patience in the face of [the militant taunters of animal rights activists], as befits a man who’s had to hear innumerable jests about veal and spotted owls at carnivorous Republican fundraisers.”) Anyway, it’s clear he’s been saving his carnivorous tendencies for a rather different cut of meat.

We all know that David Frum first suggested the phrase “axis of hatred,” which later became more memorable and at least as provocative as any construction by Hannah Arendt. “Evil,” though, was never the invention of Gerson, despite his best efforts to give the contrary impression. It was Scully’s. Also unwarranted for Mike’s clipfile are: “This conflict has begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour of our choosing;” “Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign;” “The war on terrorism will not be won on the defensive.” If only there were someone in the Bush administration with so peacockish a desire to claim credit for the policies which followed from these high-flown phrases.

Minuting the finest hours is usually the work of presidential biographers long after their subjects have expired and years after poring through musty archives. What fun that so divided a White House with so unending a supply of defectors gives us the real story as the rough draft of history. It was a major point of all the moist profiles of Gerson that he liked to come up with Bush’s best lines while sitting in a local Starbucks, beating back the “solitude of writing” with, presumably, calls for global democracy and Venti foam lattes. Here, at last, is the decaffeinated version:

My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John’s office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to “keep going.” We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.

The more I cut and paste from this hilarious hatchet job, the more I think the parallels to the Kennedy era are frighteningly apt. As a speechwriter, Ted Sorenson was a model of humility and self-abnegation, for which he must have exhibited martyrlike patience in the face of his grandstanding and reckless and feckless boss. With the Bush administration, we’ve got it backwards: It’s the king who sits small, while the pudgy and pious court servant chews away at his ear and struts around the palace like he owns the joint.

I have just finished reading Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner. It is a wonderful, multi-layered story. It is a novel about lies, betrayal and redemption. It works as an exploration of culture, of character and as an allegory. It is about Afghanistan.

There is a phrase on the last page of the book, ‘… when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time …’

I have also been reading troubling press accounts of the fighting in Southern Afghanistan, of British casualties, tactical mistakes, and the awful deaths of civilians. Commentators talk of withdrawal, of defeat, of the failure of ‘liberal imperialism’.

Then I turned to Terry Glavin’s blog. He has been a consistent advocate of the Canadian commitment to Afghanistan. He has posted a report from the Ruxted Group, detailing hundreds and thousands of melting snowflakes.

Millions of girls are back in school with 400,000 new female students starting school for the first time this year; Over 100,000 women benefited from micro finance loans to set up their own business; 83% of the population now has access to medical facilities, compared to 9 percent in 2004; 76% of children under the age of five have been immunized against childhood diseases; income per capita of $355, compared to $180 three years ago; 10 universities are operating around the country, against one (barely functioning) under the Taliban; work has begun on 20,000 new homes for Afghans returning to Kabul; over 1 billion square metres (roughly 32 km X 32 km) of mine contaminated land cleared.

The violence in the South is real, the failures are real, the frailties of the new state are real, but I sense winter in the mouths of the commentators, breathing an icy blast of betrayal. I want the thaw to continue. One snowflake at a time.

There are a number of people who have come to regret their decision to support the 2003 liberation of Iraq from the murderous regime of Saddam Hussain , because the post-invasion planning was ill-thought out and badly executed. Others opposed the war from the outset, because they say they knew any invasion planned and executed by the Bush administration would be incompetent. But isn’t the real problem a failure to predict a vicious jihadist attempt to destabilise Iraq, and Iran’s mischievous meddling? Well to some extent, that is true but even if that point is granted US policies have some responsibility for failing to prevent the conditions which allowed such evils to grow.

However, even the dumbest of animals will learn if you keep poking it with a electric prod. And so it may be with the Bush administration. Perhaps the US finally has the correct strategy for creating a sustainable Iraqi state, and in the process, producing a situation where they can withdraw without leaving a bloodbath in their wake.

The surge may be working. Two left-leaning critics of Bush’s handling of Iraq have recently visited. This is their assessment:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Bush is looking certain to continue the surge with additional troops being deployed in the coming months. Just because Bush is involved, doesn’t mean it is doomed to failure. Of course, considerable difficulties remain, not least of which is a working Iraqi government, but views on Iraq should be based on realities - not on congealed opinions pickled in 2003 and fermented to a new flavour of despair.

If your view on Iraq is that the invasion was marred by the competence of its prosecution, then at least welcome the fact that the US have learned lessons and may, at long last, be on the right track. If they are, then resolve will be needed, I can see no reason why any rational progressive would oppose it.

Did I mention that there’s some new Hitchens audio here yet?

And don’t forget that Dawkins is on the telly tonight. Should be worth a gander.