This effort began quite crudely, with the anonymous distribution of a faked photo of Kerry with Jane Fonda. But now Kerry critics are focused on the so-called “Winter Soldier” investigation — a public event staged in January 1971 by Kerry and other leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War to expose the brutality and devastation of the Indochina conflict.

The right-wing extremists at Free Republic have set up a new “Winter Soldier” Web site devoted to that event, highlighting Kerry’s subsequent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about alleged U.S. war crimes. According to the Freeper theory, he “launched his political career” by denigrating his comrades in arms, although nobody who reads his testimony will find much evidence to support that accusation. (He did run for Congress in 1972 — and lost in part because of his VVAW connections.)

Coordinating with the Freeper attack are Texas chicken-hawk Rep. Tom DeLay, who recently upbraided Kerry for the Winter Soldier episode, and Gary Aldrich, the former White House FBI agent who fabricated salacious stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton, who now suspects that Kerry was “pro-Communistic” and is demanding to see his old FBI files.

Meanwhile, the National Review descended still further, featuring a weird article by Romania’s former Communist spy chief, in which he insinuates that Kerry, and anyone else who talked about atrocities in Vietnam, was really an instrument of KGB propaganda. (It is remarkable to see a “conservative” magazine publish a smear written by a man who once facilitated the atrocities of the Ceausescu regime.) The essay by Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the West in 1978, is titled “Kerry’s Soviet Rhetoric,” and claims that his testimony about the war in 1971 “sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era.”

Had Kerry said or done something stupid at the impressionable age of 25 — after surviving horrific jungle warfare that had cost the lives of several close friends — his furious protests would be forgivable more than 30 years later. He, too, might have been “young and foolish when he was young and foolish,” as a famous man put it. But in contrast to the VVAW’s radicalized veterans and other elements of the antiwar movement, Kerry was sober and mature. Some of his own allies openly disdained him for his moderation. Although he, too, was disillusioned and angry, Kerry insisted on working “within the system.” During that period he spent much of his energy trying to register young people to vote for antiwar congressional candidates.

It’s also true that he led raucous demonstrations in Washington, and participated in the “Winter Soldier” hearings. When he appeared before the Senate three months later, he spoke at length about reported American atrocities, attributing most of the specific allegations to veterans who had testified during Winter Soldier. Graphic references to rape, dismemberment and murder took up less than a paragraph of his lengthy testimony, but they certainly brought no credit on the U.S. military. Yet his eloquent words won bipartisan praise from the senators who listened to him.

Kerry didn’t join the antiwar movement to indict his fellow soldiers; he often spoke with passion about the injustices done to them, both during the war and when they returned home to inadequate medical care and an indifferent government. His purpose was to prevent more of them from being killed, as he said over and over again.

He didn’t try to absolve himself when denouncing the indiscriminate violence of the war. On “Meet the Press,” he confessed that he had participated in “the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones.” But he felt strongly that U.S. military commanders and civilian policymakers were far more culpable for those atrocities than the men who obeyed their orders. Appalled by the civilian casualties in the “free-fire zones” marked out by their commanders, Kerry and other junior officers had gone to Saigon in January 1969 to complain to their superior — and were of course ignored.

The free-fire zones, the use of napalm, the carpet-bombing and the assassination programs were all aspects of a guerrilla conflict that could not be prosecuted without killing thousands of civilians. Only by falsifying history — and assuming that nobody will remember the truth — can Kerry’s right-wing critics claim that he somehow misled the country about what was happening in Vietnam. The smear depends on historical amnesia.

Last year the suppressed recollections of that disturbing past emerged again, when investigative journalist Gregory Vistica revealed wartime secrets long concealed by Bob Kerrey. Although the most incriminating details remain disputed, the former senator and Congressional Medal of Honor winner has admitted that he and Navy SEALS under his command massacred civilians during a nighttime raid on a hamlet called Thanh Phong in 1969. The ensuing debate over his conduct revived searing memories of My Lai, the village where hundreds of civilians were raped and murdered in March 1968 by U.S. soldiers.

In 1971, John Kerry told the Senate that if William Calley and the other soldiers who committed those atrocities were guilty, then so were the commanders who had made such crimes inevitable and then covered them up. “I think if you are going to try Lieutenant Calley then you must at the same time, if this country is going to demand respect for the law, you must at the same time try all those other people who have responsibility, and any aversion that we may have to the verdict as veterans is not to say that Calley should be freed, not to say that he is innocent, but to say that you can’t just take him alone.” Kerry’s critics argue that My Lai was an isolated incident, but at least one celebrated general doesn’t agree.

Secretary of State Colin Powell held a command position in the Army’s Americal Division, which had included Calley’s unit, and he was asked to investigate the earliest allegations about My Lai. He failed to uncover the massacre and was later accused of facilitating the coverup. Whether that accusation is fair or not, Powell knows what happened in Vietnam.

“My Lai was an appalling example of much that had gone wrong in Vietnam,” he wrote in his bestselling autobiography, “My American Journey.” “The involvement of so many unprepared officers and noncoms led to breakdowns in morale, discipline and professional judgment — and to horrors like My Lai — as the troops became numb to what appeared to be endless and mindless slaughter.” For some reason, despite his loyalty to the president, Powell doesn’t seem eager to attack John Kerry.

“When I first heard about Wilson’s wife, my immediate thought was: Wilson created the very circumstance he now complains about. He voluntarily drew attention to himself and, by extension, his family. He interjected himself into an intense international policy dispute regarding the war with Iraq. And it was his op-ed in the New York Times that caused the so-called ’16-word controversy’ in which President Bush was criticized for relying on British intelligence when he declared that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger…

“Why would the CIA choose Wilson as the administration’s fact-finder on the Niger uranium issue knowing that his wife’s activities might become exposed? Well, in the same Robert Novak column that reveals the identity of Wilson’s wife, Novak reports that it was Plame herself who recommended her husband for the job!

“Shouldn’t it have occurred to someone in CIA management that sending the husband of an agency operative on a highly sensitive, high-profile mission could jeopardize that operative’s activities?

“While I’m all in favor of investigating national-security-related leaks, we’ll never know if foreign-intelligence agencies, among others, had already learned of Plame’s position thanks to the attention her husband drew to himself by taking the Niger fact-finding assignment in the first place. Like it or not, Wilson bears some responsibility for his wife’s predicament.”

Levin’s colleague, former Times correspondent and current National Review contributor Clifford May, says everybody knew Plame was a spook anyway:

“Who leaked the fact that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV worked for the CIA? What also might be worth asking: Who didn’t know?

“That wasn’t news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.”

After dismissing Ambassador Wilson’s qualifications for the Niger mission, May tosses the scandal right back where the White House hoped to drop it in July — in George Tenet’s lap.

“There also remains this intriguing question: Was it primarily due to the fact that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA that he received the Niger assignment?

“Mr. Wilson has said that his mission came about following a request from Vice President Cheney. But it appears that if Mr. Cheney made the request at all, he made it of the CIA and did not know Mr. Wilson and certainly did not specify that he wanted Mr. Wilson put on the case.

“It has to be seen as puzzling that the agency would deal with an inquiry from the White House on a sensitive national-security matter by sending a retired, Bush-bashing diplomat with no investigative experience. Or didn’t the CIA bother to look into Mr. Wilson’s background?

“If that’s what passes for tradecraft in Langley, we’re in more trouble than any of us have realized.”

While some Republicans try to talk around the scandal, others see the danger in sending such serious allegations through the spin machine. Blogger Daniel Drezner, a University of Chicago political science professor who also labels himself a libertarian, wants to hear straight from the top:

“Let me repeat — this is a serious allegation, and I want to see the President address it directly and publicly… I would like to see a strong denunciation by President Bush about what took place. [Though his] press spokesman, national security advisor, and other subordinates have already said that the President would not tolerate this sort of behavior, there’s a big difference between assertions by intermediaries and a video feed of the President himself.”

Anger management
Bush’s CIA troubles notwithstanding, Washington Post commentator Charles Krauthammer gauges the president’s stature in a recent Time magazine essay, “What Makes the Bush Haters So Mad?” He thinks Bush has done a good job avoiding any major scandals thus far, though oddly enough he puts Bush in the company of Richard Nixon:

“Democrats are seized with a loathing for President Bush — a contempt and disdain giving way to hatred that is near pathological — unlike any since they had Richard Nixon to kick around. An otherwise reasonable man, Julian Bond of the NAACP speaks of Bush’s staffing his administration with ‘the Taliban wing of American politics.’ Harold Meyerson, editor at large of the American Prospect, devotes a 3,000-word article to explaining why Bush is the most dangerous president in all of American history — his only rival being Jefferson Davis.

“The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from. Bush’s manner is not particularly aggressive. He has been involved in no great scandals, Watergate or otherwise. He is, indeed, not the kind of politician who radiates heat. Yet his every word and gesture generate heat — a fury and bitterness that animate the Democratic primary electorate and explain precisely why Howard Dean has had such an explosive rise.”

Though Krauthammer calls Bush “tepid” on one hand, he sees him as a presidential titan on the other:

“Whence the anger? It begins of course with the ‘stolen’ election of 2000 and the perception of Bush’s illegitimacy. But that’s only half the story. An illegitimate president winning a stolen election would be tolerable if he were just a figurehead, a placeholder, the kind of weak, moderate Republican that Democrats (and indeed many Republicans) thought George Bush would be, judging from his undistinguished record and tepid 2000 campaign. Bush’s great crime is that he is the illegitimate president who became consequential — revolutionizing American foreign policy, reshaping economic policy and dominating the political scene ever since his emergence as the post-9/11 war president…

“Sure, the aftermath of the Iraq war has made it easier to frontally attack Bush. But the loathing long predates it. It started in Florida and has been deepening ever since Bush seized the post-9/11 moment to change the direction of the country and make himself a President of note.”

“Titillated by Arnold’s tush”
As the Oct. 7 California recall vote closes in, Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking muscular in the polls. Washington Times columnist Suzanne Fields says Arnold’s all brawn and no brains is just what California — and the rest of the country — needs. She wonders if Arnold might have any substantive thoughts on policy issues, but maintains his election would rightly oust the limp Gray Davis and chalk up a valuable win in America’s culture wars:

“Arnold Schwarzenegger has always been a hunk in the eyes of heterosexual women. But when the widely read Drudge Report reproduced a blurry photograph of a nude Arnold taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, the art photographer who almost brought down the National Endowment for the Arts, the self-declared homosexual blogger Andrew Sullivan asked, ‘Which real Californian wouldn’t vote for someone with a body like that?’

“Our highly sexualized popular culture was bound to spill over into the political culture. Bill Clinton got everyone, young and old, talking about oral sex at the dinner table. So now we’re titillated by images of Arnold’s tush.

“‘Republicans have seldom shied from an embrace of manliness,’ writes Jay Nordlinger in the American Enterprise magazine. George Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, epitomizes ‘political virility.’ Both wear sweaty T-shirts in public and enjoy the rugged cowboy look in hat, buckle and boots.

“But that may be an observation behind the curve(s). If Arnold Schwarzenegger is elected governor of California, Republican manliness will be defined afterward by the size of a man’s biceps. This would separate the men from the boys.

“Arnold, who is indeed adept at flexing physical muscle, nevertheless has yet to show much intellectual muscle. He was clever in the debate, but we still don’t know much about what he thinks on crucial issues. If he wins, it will be because even in California voters are tired of neutral, if not effeminate and effete, images of men, political and otherwise.”

Jeering current pop-culture trends like “metrosexuals” and Bravo’s smash-hit show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” Fields explains the broader importance of Schwarzenegger’s machismo:

“Much of this is amusing as fashion goes. But it testifies to the homosexualizing of our society. Gays are crusading not only to make their ‘marriages’ legal, but to make the popular culture over in their image. They’re making headway. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the photographs by Mapplethorpe to the contrary notwithstanding, is a strong antidote to all that.

“Feminists call Mr. Schwarzenegger a misogynist, chauvinist Neanderthal cad. They’re reacting to decades of interviews revealing him as vulgar, off-color and irreverent. ‘He’s the kind of guy, if you met him at a bar, you’d want to push him off his barstool,’ says Karen Pomer, an organizer for Code Pink, the leftist woman’s group…

“Arnold says he’s a ‘different Arnold’ today. I believe him. I only wish that while he was building the biceps he thought more about what he would do if he’s elected governor.”

Wesley Clark’s PATRIOT act?
Blogger Glenn Reynolds, author of the popular InstaPundit site, offers Howard Dean some take-down advice for rival presidential candidate Wesley Clark: Scrutinize him for Orwellian tendencies.

“JetBlue passengers are unhappy about it sharing their personal data. Interestingly, Wesley Clark is on the board of Acxiom, the company involved, according to [the Washington] Post. Clark didn’t have a specific role with JetBlue, it says, but he was behind the development of the passenger-information database involved. Does this tell us anything about the privacy policies of a Clark Administration? I don’t know. Somebody should probably ask him. At the moment, he’s getting beaten on pretty badly [in the Post article]:

“‘The privacy impact of anti-terrorism initiatives is certain to be a major issue in the presidential campaign,’ said David L. Sobel, general counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in the District. ‘He owes the public an explanation as to how, if elected, he would limit the government’s expanding collection of personal information about citizens.’ Others believe that Clark faces skepticism about the money he took to represent Acxiom, even though many former military leaders have done the same thing. ‘There’s something unseemly and, yes, mercenary, about a distinguished general lobbying for a company trying to get government contracts,’ said Charles Lewis, executive director for the Center for Public Integrity.”

The Post coverage leads Reynolds to one conclusion:

“Think Howard Dean might make an issue out of this?”

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Read more of “Right Hook” here.

“Since Mr. Bush, for some inexplicable reason, will not spell it out for you, it falls on me to do so. There are around the world thousands of Islamic fanatics who want to kill Americans because they believe Allah is down with that.”

A timorous American and European left is actually “the biggest force for conservatism in world affairs right now,” says columnist Andrew Sullivan.

“Their … stance has robbed them of any means to criticize Arab or Islamist societies, or to support reform of them, even if it means temporary armed intervention. Their support for ‘peace’ is really an argument for complete Western disengagement from societies and cultures where tyranny, genocide, terror and theocracy abide. How is it that one can scour the pages of, say, the Nation and not find a single essay marveling at the new freedoms in Iraq — of the press, of free speech, of religious diversity? Even when they do see the good side of, say, greater freedom for women in Afghanistan, their loathing of the Bush administration dampens much of their liberal conviction.”

Sullivan also spotlights the meltdown of the Western media in Iraq, citing a recent report by the New York Times’ John F. Burns. The report has been all over the Web the last few days:

“The best reporter by far on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq unloads a devastating barrage against his fellow hacks … John F. Burns reveals just how compromised and corrupt so many journalists were in Iraq, how willing they were to hide the atrocities of the regime, how their own self-interest trumped the truth … If you still harbor doubts about the overwhelming moral case for the liberation of Iraq, you need to read this interview. It’s devastating about the mainstream media in the U.S., let alone mouthpieces for tyranny like the BBC.”

Even if the left has its head in the sand, Spectator columnist Mark Steyn asserts the American majority has stayed the course in support of the Bush administration’s war on terror.

“The story of the summer is that the American people refused to be panicked by the media, the Democrats and the Europeans. Indeed, the awesome divide between the postmodern sophists and everybody else is the real legacy of Sept. 11…

“If 9/11 liberated the Bush administration to put into action its scheme to take over the world, then it also liberated the Western elites to embrace finally and wholeheartedly anti-Americanism as the New Unifying Theory of Everything. It didn’t have to be like that: the intellectual class could have sided with the women of Afghanistan or the political prisoners of Iraq. But the advantage of sour oppositionism is that whatever happens there’s always something to sneer at. If Osama pops up, see, he got away. If he doesn’t pop up, how do you know he didn’t get away? If he turns up dead, whoa, now you’ve made him a martyr, a thousand more will bloom in his dust.

“I think we should look at the late bin Laden in his own terms. In the last decade, he and al-Qaida have bombed American interests a little over every two years…”

Steyn even shrugs off the latest bin Laden videotape, though the CIA tagged it as probably authentic.

“I said in these pages 15 months ago that he’s dead, he’s bin Laden to rest, he’s pushing up daisy-cutters, and I’m sticking with that…

“This is a long war — but for America, with victories at home, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere, it’s been a pretty good start.”

Even so, Weekly Standard chief Bill Kristol says America can still take a lesson from the Israelis on fighting terror. He criticizes the Bush administration for not fully backing Israel’s desire to banish Yasser Arafat.

“The administration’s professed reasons for opposing the removal of Arafat are unimpressive. And they seem altogether de-linked from any underlying moral and strategic judgment of what the war on terror requires, and what those who support and sponsor terror deserve…

“For a decade, Israel bent over backwards to try to engage in a peace process with the chief terrorist of Palestine. Arafat has succeeded in sabotaging the hopes of peace. Justice demands that he be removed. Prudence may well concur. America is engaged in a war against terror. Surely the honorable course is to be a sympathetic counselor of, not a supercilious lecturer to, an embattled fellow democracy that has suffered more terror — and, yes, has borne it with more forbearance — than even we have.”

Conservatives are moving to exploit Howard Dean’s recent ambivalent comments on Israel, given his stance against the war in Iraq. It isn’t clear yet whether conservatives fear a Dean presidential bid or are hoping for one. But syndicated talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Hugh Hewitt says the “defeatist” Dean may not even last till year’s end:

“The refusal to come to grips with the nature and scale of the war is very dangerous. It is inevitable that a war like this would be open to political attack by self-serving would-be electeds … I hope that Howard Dean, the distillation of all that is dishonorable in American politics, gets the nomination so that his defeatism disguised as prudence can be well and properly repudiated for history to see…

“[I came back] from vacation in time to see Howard Dean distance himself from Israel on the same day that two homicide bombers renewed the terror. [Dean said recently of the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire, according to the Associated Press: 'I think America needs to be an honest broker' and 'It's not our place to take sides.'] What does ‘honest broker’ mean? Does it include honestly assessing the nature of the terror and speaking truthfully about the need for the Palestinians to confront their own absolutists? Howard Dean is my preferred opponent for the President in 2004, but with amateurism on this scale, Dean could implode long before Iowa. Lieberman understands the extent of the damage Dean has done to himself and is bearing in on it. This is not a gaffe, but an exposure of an unpreparedness on a scale that is disqualifying.”

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Monday’s recall of the recall vote in California has poured fuel on the partisan fires blazing there: National Review contributor and California political strategist Arnold Steinberg takes issue with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that unreliable punch-card voting is ample reason to postpone the October special election:

“The judges who just threw out California’s recall election are liberal and off the reservation…

“Gray Davis was elected last year with machines that use punch-card voting. I’ve participated in hundreds of such elections here in California. Why should he not stay in office, or be thrown out of office, on the same system? There are problems with any election system…

“Will the next court decision require voters to be able to spell Arnold’s last name?”

Regardless of how the California recall plays out, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan says Gray Davis has taken dangerous measures to shore up voter support, including one that will cause a spike in traffic fatalities.

“Gray Davis is a desperate man. Facing recall, he has just put the safety of California motorists at risk in a naked bid to buy Hispanic votes. Davis signed into law a bill he had twice rejected, to allow illegal aliens to get driver’s licenses.

“One million illegals, many of them young, single males, will soon be on the roads of California. Inevitably, the toll of traffic dead will soar and California families will pay in the lives of loved ones so Davis can collect enough Hispanic votes to serve out his term … The Democratic answer to the invasion of America is: surrender.”

National Review editor Rich Lowry agrees that the California governor is a national security threat.

“Gray Davis has signed a bill giving illegal aliens the right to obtain driver’s licenses in what is an enormous step toward the legal acceptance of illegal aliens and proof that ethnic pandering still trumps security in the United States…

“It is tempting to conclude that this is another reason why, if the recall fails, California should sink into the Pacific Ocean. But other states accept California driver’s licenses, so the Davis sellout affects the nation … California needs to revoke Gray Davis’ license to govern. He’s dangerous.”

“At least the administration has begun dropping the pretense that everything is under control in Iraq and that the civilian authority has the resources and the field commanders the troops that they need. Last week the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, admitted that his forces could not handle any new eruption of conflict in Iraq should one occur. ‘If a militia or an internal conflict of some nature were to erupt,’ Gen. Sanchez told reporters in Baghdad,’ … that would be a challenge out there that I do not have sufficient forces for.’ So when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says the United States has enough forces on the ground in Iraq, what he means is that we have enough so long as nothing untoward happens …

“We trust that … the White House will make the hard decision to put in the U.S. troops necessary to do the job.

“Democrats call for internationalization in Iraq not simply because they like multilateralism but because, as both Howard Dean and John Kerry have said, it will allow us to ‘bring our boys home.’ In this formulation, the call for the U.N. to take the lead role in Iraq is really a kind of veiled McGovernism. The administration’s push to stand up an Iraqi force ahead of schedule is a thinly veiled attempt to make up for the lack of American forces and the unwillingness to introduce more … to shoulder the necessary military burden.”

But according to widely read blogger Steven Den Beste, who writes frequently on “USS Clueless” about foreign policy and the military, the U.S. may not have at its easy disposal the military resources needed for Iraq — nor for future conflicts:

“The Army is stretched to the limit [in Iraq]. The problem is coming up with relief for units which have been there for a long time and need to come home, and in the next few months we’re going to have to come up with about three divisions worth.

“We could do that easily if we were willing to kiss off Korea entirely, and decide that any war there wasn’t our problem …

“But in the longer term, there’s an even greater danger. We have the world’s best military, right now. Will we still have in five years? The kind of force we have, which can operate at the level of effectiveness it does using the kind of tactics it uses, is only possible with volunteers who are capable and highly trained. That kind of military can’t be created out of draftees, and it relies heavily on a substantial core of careerists … when their term of enlistment runs out, how many of them will re-up? If too many decide they’ve had enough, and don’t reenlist, we could face severe degradation. Too much experience and training will walk into the civilian economy, never to return, and it won’t be easy to replace.”

Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, notes that President Bush’s updated case for war in Iraq, per his Sept. 7 address to the nation, includes a “prestige” factor. Lowry suggests that the rising body count might be the necessary cost of proving America’s conviction.

“Bush rightly argued that terrorists were emboldened in the 1990s by the belief that the U.S. could be made to cut and run upon experiencing any casualties. Bush mentioned Somalia and Beirut in this connection. We wish it would have turned out otherwise in Iraq, but the low-intensity insurrection now provides a test of U.S. staying power. If the U.S. can see this through, it may have vanquished its image as a paper tiger once and for all. That, over the long run, may serve to convince terrorists that killing Americans is not as useful as they thought, that it doesn’t bring an inevitable American retreat.”

In the latest Sunday Times of London, columnist Andrew Sullivan suggests Bush’s penchant for wartime swagger might be part of a greater “flytrap” strategy aimed at drawing the global terror network into one central showdown:

“What else did president Bush mean when he challenged the terror-masters to ‘bring ‘em on,’ in Iraq? Those are not the words of a man seeking merely to pacify a country, but to continue waging war against terrorism …

“Last week, Paul Wolfowitz chimed in with a piece in the Wall Street Journal, specifically citing the occupation of Iraq as a central part of the war against terror. ‘Even before the bombing of the U.N. headquarters, if you’d asked Gen. Mattis and his Marines,’ Wolfowitz wrote, ‘there was no question in their minds that the battle they wage — the battle to secure the peace in Iraq — is now the central battle in the war on terrorism …’

“The reason the Bush administration went to the U.N. last week to seek more troops from foreign countries for peace-keeping and security purposes was … not merely an admission that they had goofed in estimating the number of troops required to pacify the country. It was a move designed to liberate the U.S. military machine from peace-keeping in order to concentrate on war-making — against the terror network they had come to destroy. Listen to U.S. Army Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, [recently] on CNN: ‘This is what I would call a terrorist magnet, where America, being present here in Iraq, creates a target of opportunity … But this is exactly where we want to fight them. … This will prevent the American people from having to go through their attacks back in the United States.’

“Will this strategy work? Its obvious disadvantage is that it’s tough to fight an escalating terrorist war in the same country you’re trying simultaneously to nudge toward civil order and democracy …

“At some point, I’d argue, the president … has to make this strategy more formal. He has to tell the American people that more violence in Iraq may not in some circumstances be a bad thing. It may be a sign that we are flushing out terror and confronting it, rather than passively waiting for it to attack again. He has to remind people that this war is far from over, that the mission is still very much unaccomplished, and that this is not Vietnam. Right now he looks defensive, reactive and not in full control. That must end …”

Despite all the focus on Bush and Iraq, there’s still plenty of interest in debating President Clinton’s alleged failures on the terror front. According to James Taranto, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal, the Clinton administration could’ve prevented 9/11 had it focused more intently on American security. Citing a recent article in Foreign Affairs by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Taranto criticizes Albright for treating national-security affairs like a global “popularity contest,” and disputes her claim that liberating Iraq has hurt the war on terror.

“[Albright has cited] no actual evidence that disagreements over Iraq have undermined cooperation over al-Qaida. It’s worth noting, though, that when Albright was in a position to do something about al-Qaida, she demurred — for precisely the same reason that she now thinks freeing Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s rule was a mistake.

“The concluding chapter of Richard Miniter’s new book, “Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror” recounts a meeting of President Clinton’s national-security team in the wake of the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole … at which Richard Clarke, Clinton’s ‘terrorism czar,’ advocated a strike against Bin Laden but everyone else present opposed it.

“Albright says she was against such a strike because there was not yet ‘definitive’ proof that al-Qaida was behind the bombings. ‘To strike without evidence or any expectation of hitting Bin Laden would have turned world opinion against the United States at the very moment we were seeking maximum cooperation in tracking down the terrorist network …’ she wrote in an email to Miniter. It is possible that the Sept. 11 attacks would have been averted had Albright and her colleagues been more concerned about American security and less about ‘world opinion.’”

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On the 2004 election battlefront, Stephen Moore of the libertarian Cato Institute takes a moment to admire “The Appeal of Howard Dean” in the Sept. 15 issue of the Weekly Standard. Though he questions Dean’s purported fiscal conservatism — in terms that George W. Bush himself might appreciate:

“Dean has boasted that he was ‘the most fiscally conservative governor in Vermont in decades,’ but that’s like saying you were the most chaste woman in a Texas whorehouse.

“This is, after all, the former governor of the state that gave us Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch and the nation’s only self-proclaimed socialist congressman, Bernie Sanders. In Vermont, Euro-style tax-and-spend governmental activism is still in vogue and politicians like Senator Jim Jeffords pass as moderates … At one time or another, Dean raised just about every tax he could get his hands on.”

Still, Moore warns Republicans not to underestimate Dean’s charisma:

“Republicans are said to be salivating over the prospect of a Bush-Dean match-up. They shouldn’t get carried away …

“Part of Dean’s star appeal has been the refreshing genuineness of his campaign rhetoric, even when his ideas are cockeyed …

“Ever since [I first met] Howard Dean some five years ago, I’ve been trying to think of what politician he most resembles. The former governor of a small state, he is charismatic, good looking, wonkish, craving of the spotlight, and capable of telling a room full of people precisely what they want to hear. The obvious answer recently hit me: Dean is Bill Clinton, but without the skirt-chasing.”

“There is no reason why an individual homosexual might not be a good and honorable person, any more than there is any reason why an individual heterosexual might not be a liar and a thief. In matters social and organizational, though, the sum is often greater than the parts, and it is not the one we should focus on, but the many. This, unfortunately, is a very difficult thing to get people to do in a highly individualistic culture like ours. ‘What about Joe? He’s homosexual, but a finer human being you could never wish to meet.’ Sure, we all know Joe; but his case tells us nothing about the probable behavior of an organization whose higher levels are 30, or 50, or 60 percent homosexual.”

So gay individuals can be OK. But give them any power or prominence in any institution, and all hell will break out. The inference from this is that gay men and women should simply not be appointed to prominent positions in our society; they should be barred — if they are “frank and open” — from positions of authority. “Pedophiles” and “pederasts” are just other words for homosexuals in Derbyshire’s world: “Please don’t send me e-mails arguing that pederasty has nothing whatever to do with homosexuality. I don’t believe it.”

According to Derbyshire, gays cannot be trusted. They have destroyed the Catholic Church; they will soon destroy the Episcopalian Church. They will, in fact, destroy any institution in which they are given a leading role: “Any organization that admits frank and open homosexuals into its higher levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give itself over to propagating and celebrating the homosexualist ethos, and to excluding heterosexuals and denigrating heterosexuality.” This last pitch is a truly worrying one. The religious right, having failed to convince society that the law should simply reflect their views because they believe them, have recently begun to argue that equality for gays is indistinguishable from oppression of straights. It’s completely zero-sum for them. Some of them even seem to believe that their own churches will be persecuted; that they will be denied the rights inherent in the First Amendment; and that compulsory sodomy is around the corner. They are — especially given the imminence of gay marriage and legalization of sodomy — afraid. So they exaggerate and hyperventilate.

Derbyshire equates “openly gay” with “proselytizing homosexual,” which seems particularly unfair to Jeffrey John, a new assistant bishop in the Church of England, who is openly gay but now celibate. The man is not only not proselytizing for gay sex; he’s given it up himself! His proselytizing consists entirely in his honesty about his sexual orientation.

Yet Derbyshire would have him break one of the Ten Commandments and bear false witness about himself. Notice further that a simple statement of fact is now interpreted as something aggressive, imposing, threatening. That is unhinged. I’ve been openly gay for a long time but I have absolutely no interest in whether anyone else is; I have never tried to persuade some straight guy to have sex with me or fall in love with me. I dare say I know a few more homos than Derb and very few of them see it as their mission to “proselytize” anyone. All they’re doing in being honest about their orientation is being honest about their orientation. It carries no more implications than someone telling me they have a wife or husband or kids, or that they’re Mormon or Italian.

But Derb’s belief that there is some more sinister motive at work is a direct result of some kind of fear. It’s very close to the kind of fear many used to have about Jews. Their very openness was a threat, even though they threatened absolutely no one. Even though most had no intention of proselytizing anyone, their very existence suggested proselytizing aggression to the majority. And when you read more of Derbyshire you find the same classic rhetorical tropes that once fueled fanatical anti-Semitism, i.e., that there were a few good individual Jews but, en masse, they threaten “good Christian families.” Put the term “Jew” in the place of “gay,” and you can see where Derbyshire is coming from: “The point is that open Jewishness is — not necessarily, but all too often — an infiltrating, exclusivist, corruptive, and destructive force.” “Any organization that admits frank and open Jews into its higher levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give itself over to propagating and celebrating the Jewish ethos, and to excluding Christians and denigrating Christianity.”