R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.:Will We Always Have Paris?
Iklé, Fred Charles
Will We Always Have Paris? B O O K S I N R E V I E W which he was directly involved, particularly economic matters, but he can be surprisingly off-base on issues remote from his own...
...She fills so much space in our media that there must be something fascinating behind her stupid blondness and insipid utterances...
...Iklé’s greatest fear is a new Stalin or Hitler, a brute with the strategic sense that bin Laden lacks, who might take over a nation-state after practicing “annihilation from within...
...He also raises the possibility of computer science wedding with neuroscience to create a super brain...
...Lewis concludes: “The third phase” of the Muslim attack on Christendom “has clearly begun...
...This view remains unproven...
...In the meantime we have to worry about one of the smalltime thugs—Osama bin Laden or another crank from a doomsday cult—getting WMDs...
...elegance about the dangerous divergence science took 250 years ago from its inhibitors, religion and government...
...new vaccines, enhanced biological warfare agents...
...The first is from the beginning of Islam, when the new faith spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was born, into the Middle East and beyond...
...Thus, despite Allawi’s claims, the professor of political philosophy, Leo Strauss, had nothing to do with the Iraq war...
...Iklé writes from the perspective of five decades of service in the domain of strategic thought, beginning at the Rand Corporation where his apprehensions over the possibility of accidental nuclear war inspired him to develop trigger locks on our arsenal that even gained the support of Gen...
...Commentary is stronger on religion and politics, the New Criterion on literature and the arts...
...Neither Rumsfeld nor Cheney, strong advocates of the war, fit easily into the latter category...
...Both are highly literary and lightly (but firmly) edited, and both do honor to their country...
...Uninhibited by moral restraints, science eventuates in annihilation...
...Whether produced by a new Stalin or by some crank aided by a band of true believers, our central government could be decapitated...
...Stalin is gone, but he has been replaced by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of thuggish leaders...
...Kenneth Minogue, the economist, though antipodean by birth, is very much part of the London intellectual scene...
...He writes with great knowledge and surprising 7 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 Annihilation From Within: The Ultimate Threat to Nations By Fred Charles Iklé (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 130 PAGES, $24.50) Reviewed by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Dictators, not democratic leaders, are probably best equipped to deal with terrorists...
...That was not the end of the matter...
...After 9/11, those still unexplained anthrax attacks, terrorist attacks elsewhere in the world, and with our troops still engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, I am going to put Paris and Britney on the back burner...
...Will We Always Have Paris...
...They are our Garbos...
...When the peoples of Asia and Africa invaded Europe, this was not imperialism...
...Nor is the policy debate over going to war in Iraq properly described as one between “realists” and “neo-conservatives,” whom Allawi casts in a villainous light...
...is the founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator and the author most recently of The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President’s Life After the White House (Thomas Nelson...
...Unfortunately, as we have witnessed our National Unity unravel since the invasion of Iraq, I am not optimistic that “National Unity” or any of Iklé’s other topics is going to be solved soon...
...After a long and bitter struggle, the Christians managed to retake part, but not all, of the [European] territory they had lost...
...Deterrence during those four grim decades, he argues, was an illusion...
...The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans did not generate intelligence—it was the policy office that dealt with Iraq and Iran, given, perhaps, an ominously inappropriate name as war with Iraq loomed...
...The consequence will be vast casualties, perhaps a plague that defeats our greatest scientists, possibly a dirty bomb...
...Osama bin Laden saw it otherwise, saying, “We have met, defeated, and destroyed the more dangerous and the more deadly of the two infidel superpowers...
...Both have made profound contributions to how we might get out of our imbroglio with savages and back to the enigmas of Paris and Britney...
...Had Stalin lived, Mutual Assured Destruction might have been put to the test...
...The Islamic world, having failed the first time, was bracing for the second attack, this time not conducted by Arabs and Moors, but by Turks and Tartars...
...With these caveats in mind, Americans will learn much from this book, not only about Iraqi perspectives on the war, but about very major problems in the U.S...
...After 9/11, those still unexplained anthrax attacks, terrorist attacks elsewhere R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...In the United States, happily, there are still one or Counterpoints: Twenty-Five Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts Edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer (IVAN R. DEE, 500 PAGES, $35) two which keep the tradition going, notably Commentary and the New Criterion...
...In 1950, after Stalin ordered North Korea to attack South Korea, Moscow had maybe five atomic bombs...
...I would hate to have to choose between them...
...It has acquired an inner dynamic of progress that is self-sustaining...
...They failed to retake North Africa or the Middle East, which were lost to Christendom...
...Iklé in his slim volume discusses a vast range of strategic problems that might in the future set humanity back into a dark age...
...Dealing with the soft, pampered and effeminate Americans will be an easy matter...
...Since war never broke out in Central Europe during the forty years when the largest military in history divided the continent, it is tempting to assume nuclear deterrence preserved the peace...
...Our government has responded only fitfully...
...Now he serves on various defense boards, most notably the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board...
...He doubts that the world can stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but he outlines plans for detecting them and perhaps rendering them useless...
...When Europe attacked Asia and Africa, it was...
...Again, Europe counterattacked, this time more successfully and more rapidly...
...Curtis LeMay, builder of the United States Strategic Air Command...
...Ition’s greatest living historian of Islam...
...WISH I HAD MORE TIME to interest myself in the drama of Paris Hilton...
...At present, if we do not extirpate terror, it seems to me that the days of American democracy are numbered...
...A major theme with him is that “Science makes cumulative discoveries and hence can advance at an accelerating pace...
...Lewis’s is a lecture he delivered at the American Enterprise Institute in March...
...Reviewed by Paul Johnson However, the New Criterion, as this compilation shows, goes some way to supplying the lack of a truly civilized and intelligent review on our side of the Atlantic, for many of its contributors are British, and the topics touched upon often involve English literature...
...Peace is followed by war...
...handling of Iraq that have contributed significantly to present difficulties, yet which have failed to receive the attention they merit...
...As for protecting government from decapitation, Iklé details his proposals under headings that adumbrate the problems that must be confronted, “Assuring the Continuity of the U. S. Government,” “Mobilization Laws,” “Guarding Territorial Sovereignty,” and, most important, “National Unity”—“of all the ingredients needed to defeat an attempted annihilation from within,” the old strategist writes, “perhaps the most important is national unity...
...The history of the human race,” the erudite Iklé concludes, “is a saga with many sad endings...
...John Gross, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is perhaps our outstanding man of letters...
...Now there are very few of them...
...Britney Spears also must have serious qualities that I have missed...
...Lewis asserts that phase three of the Muslim attack on Christendom began with the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, which Americans have seen as a “Western victory—more specifically an American victory—in the Cold War...
...A e t of his T IS HERE ory comes into play THAT BERNARD LEWIS . H ’S magis is our civilizaterial sense t the American Enterprise Institute’s March lecture, he asseverated: President George W. Bush pursuing the war on terror...
...If he or his immediate successors fail to eliminate terror and the terrorists strike successfully again, who doubts that even the Land of the Free will find itself governed by generals...
...Iklé lays down how it must be defeated in a book that should be read by every serious citizen, especially those responsible for our national survival...
...In the hands of leaders who lead unfettered by Western ethics, such a super brain might outthink our best statesmen and generals—he seems to be contemplating such developments in China...
...A knowledgeable Iraqi source here says that Saddam’s weapons were moved to Syria between November 2002 and February 2003—essentially what Lt...
...But the sphere of government and international affairs is marked by alternating periods of advance and decline...
...In Britain, since the extinction of Encounter, there are none, unless you count Prospect, which is a bit too attached to the European Union to qualify as a politically independent magazine...
...Yet after we came to the South’s defense, Stalin, undeterred by our nuclear preponderance, sent Soviet fighter pilots against us in Soviet aircraft—a detail the American left ignored, much as it ignores today Iranian agents in Iraq or terrorists using civilians as shields...
...An American president had interns to chase and impeachment to thwart...
...From this phase of the European counterattack [the late 16th century] a new term was invented: imperialism...
...Both are indispensable...
...in the world, and with our troops still engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, I am going to put Paris and Britney on the back burner...
...We had 350...
...Notably they failed to recapture the Holy Land...
...As an Englishman, I am envious and sad that we have no equivalents...
...Who can argue with that...
...Iklé writes about the globalization of devastating new weapons that could fall into the hands of terrorists, anarchists, and doomsday cults...
...In the anthology under review, of the 40 or so authors, Roger Scruton is a well-known English philosopher, jack-of-all controversies, and rider-tohounds...
...Now with the fecundity of science and the efficiency of globalization, weapons of mass destruction have multiplied and spread...
...war with Iraq were firmly grounded in national security concerns, above all, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, and he is too quick to embrace the now-conventional wisdom that Saddam had no such weapons nor significant ties to terrorists...
...This spring my attention has been absorbed by lesser figures, the British historian Bernard Lewis and the legendary strategist, Fred Ikl...
...He does not understand that the reasons for the U.S...
...James Clapper, head of the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency during Operation Iraqi Freedom and now undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told reporters in the fall of 2003...
...They succeeded in recovering Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, and in advancing farther into the Islamic lands, chasing their former rulers from whence they had come...
...He sees all three as real threats to modern society...
...Some of sciB O O K S I N R E V I E W ence’s advances have dual purposes, one for good, the other deleterious: nuclear energy, nuclear bombs...
...In fact, he does not give us much to celebrate about even in the aftermath of the Cold War...
...Civil libertarians are properly concerned about the state of our civil liberties with “Decapitation” is another of the terrible possibilities raised by this book...
...Whenever a nation or an empire had lost its power, pride, and glory, the waning societies have been replenished by a new influx of people —or alas, have been superseded by multitudes of barbarians...
...Yet America is at war...
...Lewis continues: “This belief was confirmed in the 1990s when we saw attacks on American bases and installations with virtually no effective response of any kind—only angry words and expensive missiles dispatched to remote and uninhabited places...
...Individual liberty expands and is suppressed again...
...The consequence for world peace and for America’s democratic order would be catastrophic...
...Soviet archival documents released so far do not provide an answer...
...Iklé’s contribution is a provocative new book, Annihilation From Within: The Ultimate Threat To Nations...
...None, Iklé assures us, has the strategic prowess of Stalin or of Hitler and Lenin, but Iklé fears it is only a matter of time before such evil geniuses arrive on the scene...
...The possibility has engendered in Iklé’s famously inventive mind proposals he now has urged on the government...
...J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7 9 B O O K S I N R E V I E W The Muslim attack on Christendom… has gone through three phases...
...In our own time, we have seen the end of that [period of European] domination [of the Middle East...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W which he was directly involved, particularly economic matters, but he can be surprisingly off-base on issues remote from his own experience...
...Down through the centuries, a new beginning has followed each demise and new civilizations have been built on the ruins of the old...
...From 1973 to 1976, Iklé was the director of our Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and in the Reagan administration he was undersecretary of defense for policy, where his skepticism about Mutual Assured Destruction must have complemented the President’s own skepticism over MAD...
...Anthony Daniels and Theodore Dalrymple are our two leading commentators on physical, mental, and indeed spiritual health, and Paul Paul Johnson’s many books include Modern Times, Intellectuals, A History of the English People, and A History of the American People...
...David Pryce-Jones is our leading expert on the Middle East...
...80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 Indispensable Encounters Fperiodicals have played a major part in the culgh Review Edinbur the OR MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES , serious , beginning with , well-written ture of the Anglo-Saxon world...
...Each has its strengths and limitations...
Vol. 40 • July 2007 • No. 6
