There would appear to be at least two templates for viewing America, an elite version of the country, and one that seems a bit more down home. How are commentators describing these templates and those who hold them? — perhaps that one seems utopian and a bit detached; the other more viscerally engaged. How big is each faction? Let’s take a look at what people are saying.

When Peggy Noonan read the Scott Thomas soldier-fiction in the New Republic, she thought this:

That’s not Iraq, that’s a Vietnam War movie. That’s not life as it’s being lived on the ground right now, that’s life as an editor absorbed it through media. That’s the dark world of Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone, of the great Vietnam movies of the ’70s and ’80s….I think I am observing accurately. It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business. They have had good lives, happy lives, but there is a sense with some of them that they didn’t so much live it as view it. That they learned too much from media and not enough from life’s difficulties.

Mark Steyn observed something similar from a Newsweek writer who focused on the 1970’s movie Deliverance:

pop-culture metaphors aren’t really of much use, especially when you’re up against cultures where life is still defined by how you live as opposed to what you experience via media. It seems to me, for example, that when anti-war types bemoan Iraq as this generation’s Vietnam “quagmire,” older folks are thinking of the real Vietnam –- the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and whatnot -– but most anybody under 50 is thinking of Vietnam movies: some vague video-store mélange of “The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse.”

Take the Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle at the New Republic, in which the magazine ran an atrocity-a-go-go Baghdad diary piece by a serving soldier about dehumanized troops desecrating graves, abusing disfigured women, etc. It smelled phony from the get-go -– except to the professional media class from whose ranks the New Republic’s editors are drawn: To them, it smelled great, because it aligned reality with the movie looping endlessly through the windmills of their mind, a nonstop Coppola-Stone retrospective in which ill-educated conscripts are the dupes of a nutso officer class…

There’s a kind of decadence about all this…it’s the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix’s bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam’s prisons.

The power of the pop-culture media megaphone of elite values is considerable. The power of rich utopians who can craft short messages, full of intense emotions and special effects, and sell those messages as a kind of reality, is not to be underestimated. Those who wield that power know full well just what power they possess. Their vision is one of the dominant templates of our time.

But just how dominant is that template? The other day Robert Samuelson offered a different pop-culture metaphor in America, the one that is portrayed sometimes in a different sort of entertainment:

Americans believe in ambition. They think it’s necessary for them personally and valuable for society. In one survey, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago asked respondents what mattered for “getting ahead in life.” Ambition ranked first at 43%, followed closely by “hard work” (38%) and “a good education” (36%). Lagging behind were “natural ability” (13%), “knowing the right people” (10%), “educated parents” (6%), “coming from a wealthy family” (3%), “having political connections” (3%) and “a person’s race” (2%). Americans think that individual effort counts; other stuff is secondary.

It is not just that we endorse ambition. We’re also fascinated by it. “American Idol” and its many imitators — “Top Chef,” “Project Runway,” “The Last Comic Standing,” among others — are not about singing, cooking, designing clothes or telling jokes. As political scientist Benjamin Barber notes in the current Wilson Quarterly, these shows are “about winning and losing.” That’s why they’re so popular; they’re a televised metaphor of what many Americans live every day.

Superficially, we want to know the outcomes. But the real draw of these programs is that we live vicariously through the contestants’ dreams and disappointments.

There’s another popular form of reality TV that the Samuelson piece does not discuss, and that is sports. Well over 100 million adult Americans watched NFL games last year. The nine Nextel Cup NASCAR races had a similar total number, though there is probably a lot of double counting in the latter figure. American Idol and the NFL are both real competitions, and the participants and many fans are passionately engaged in them. How many of these are Template II versus Template !?

So there is Template I and Template II. How big a slice of America is each? How much of America is Apocalypse Now and how much is American Idol? How much is MSNBC and how much is NASCAR, for example? Right now we get the feeling that the Template I group, the “Full Metal Deer Apocalypse” folks, think they are winning, and have 2008 in the bag. Maybe they do. But it is not necessarily so. To take one example, in recent elections the secular progressives who vote 2/3 Democratic were handily outnumbered by the 2/3 of churchgoers who vote GOP. There are plenty of other ways to dissect the electorate, but this certainly seems to be a valid one — and the disconnect between these two broad groups seems larger than ever.

There are signs that things are coming to a head with Iran, according to Caroline Glick:

when faced with a real possibility that the US or Israel or a combination of states are ready and willing to attack Iran’s nuclear installations, elBaradei seeks to undermine them by questioning the salience of the threat. ElBaradei’s statement of course was not made in a vacuum. It came against the backdrop of an increasing unanimity of opinion among top Bush administration members that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. Last Thursday, President George W. Bush said that a nuclear armed Iran would foment World War III.

The next day, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who until recently was known to oppose military action against Iran and to minimize the danger that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute to the US, said at a press briefing that a nuclear-armed Iran would likely spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and was liable to foment a major war. Gates added that in light of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s stated desire to destroy Israel, “Washington couldn’t trust that Iran would handle nuclear weapons responsibly.” Standing next to Gates last Thursday was Admiral Michael Mullen, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen rebuffed assertions that the US campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have strained military resources to the point that the US today cannot mount an effective campaign against Iran. As he put it, “From a military standpoint, there is more than enough reserve” to mount an attack against Iran’s nuclear installations.

While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continues to champion negotiations with the mullahs, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday Rice acknowledged that “the policies of Iran constitute perhaps the single greatest challenge for American security interests in the Middle East and possibly around the world.” And then there is Israel. It appears that both the IDF and the government are earnestly preparing for the possibility of war. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s sudden visits to Moscow, Paris and London, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s trip to Washington this week were all devoted to the Iranian nuclear project…it seems reasonable to assume that Olmert and Barak did not fly to those foreign capitals empty-handed. Indeed by some accounts they brought with them new and incriminating information regarding the current status of Iran’s nuclear program…

it is important to note Barak’s crash-program aimed at purchasing and deploying missile defense systems capable of covering all of Israel as quickly as possible, and last week’s media reports that US, British and Australian commandos are fighting Iranian forces inside of Iran close to the Iran-Iraq border by Basra.

Assuming that all of these developments do in fact mean that the day is quickly approaching where Iran’s nuclear installations come under attack, a discussion of some of the likely outcomes of such a strike seems in order….Iran will direct a counter-strike against Israel that will include a ballistic missile attack carried out jointly by Iran, Syria and Hizbullah in Lebanon. Furthermore, Iran will direct Hizbullah terror cells throughout the world to carry out attacks against Jewish and American targets.

A little more on Iran’s possible response via Stratfor:

Iran has commissioned Imad Fayez Mugniyah, a notorious Hezbollah leader, to organize cells of Shiite operatives in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to fight against the United States and pro-U.S. Arabs in the event of war against Iran, a source said Oct. 25. Trainees from the Persian Gulf region reportedly have arrived in Lebanon and are conducting drills in the Bekaa Valley…Mugniyah is spending most of his time these days in Lebanon and has in many ways overshadowed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah as the organization’s strongman…

Iran has a clear interest in raising the cost of a U.S. attack against the Islamic Republic by demonstrating its ability to retaliate through Shiite militant assets throughout the region, giving the Gulf states something to consider during their discussions with the U.S. defense officials who are seeking their cooperation. A U.S. attack against Iran would spark Hezbollah attacks against Israel from Lebanon, as well as a series of attacks by these Shiite operatives against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Iraq — carrying serious repercussions for the global energy market. Qatar, which has followed a much more measured approach in dealing with Iran, was notably not on the list of countries where Shia were being picked up to train in Mugniyah’s camp.

Iran is in the deciding stages regarding how it wants to deal with the United States over Iraq. Its options range from entering into serious negotiations with Washington to sticking to its guns and reaching out to the Russians for some short-term security guarantees. In any case, Iran has no solid guarantees against a U.S. attack and needs a good contingency plan. If Iran is going to be taken down by the United States, it intends to try to bring the Arab neighborhood down with it.

It would be unwise to judge prematurely what is being said in certain meetings. Perhaps the clock is ticking toward a showdown a little faster than many of us think.

Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek sees Iran as far less a threat than some others do:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear button yet and won’t for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can’t be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a “residual rationality,” he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad…

Mr. Zakaria may be correct of course. It’s hard to know for sure. However, his case would be strengthened a bit (a) if we did not live in an age characterized by a particular brand of asymmetrical warfare; and (b) if Mr. Ahmadinejad would be a tad less millenarian and paranoid in his rhetoric, as well as less insistent on revolutionary purity.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants to avoid having 9-11 turned into “another false idol like the Holocaust”. He’s all for “examining what really happened in this incident”:

9/11 has led to many significant changes. It was used as a pretext to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the reason for the killing of hundreds of thousands of people. It is only natural for us to respond in an appropriate manner. I wanted to visit there last year, but there was no time for that. So I decided to visit there this year to pay my respect to the casualties and convey my sympathy to the families.

I also wanted to raise several questions and express my views. I wanted to say that in my opinion, this incident is the result of the mismanagement of the world, and the result of the inhuman management of the world. Why did such an incident take place? We need to get to the root causes. We don’t want them to turn this incident, in 20 years’ time, into another false idol like the Holocaust, which they would use as a pretext to kill peoples, and prevent anybody from opening this [Pandora’s] box and examining what really happened in this incident. They might turn 9/11 into something sacred, and whoever does not accept it would be considered an infidel, whereas whoever accepts it would have to accept all the ensuing crimes.

In any event, we must express our views. I believe that this way, we would have formed cordial relations with the American people, and could have opened this issue up for discussion. Well, this is exactly what they want to prevent…

This preventing of “discussion” seems to be a recurring theme of Mr. Ahmadinejad, who appears to see conspiracies all around him, preventing the various important truths of the world from getting out. There are some sound reasons for thinking that Mr. Ahmadinejad and some of the clerisy around him may be less susceptible to the traditional rules of deterrence than was seen in the Cold War.

The philosopher André Glucksmann thinks about terrorism and the dangers of asymmetrical warfare in City Journal (HT: LGF) in a piece called “From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb”:

The only thing that counts is the intention to wipe out random victims. The systematic resort to the car bomb, to suicide attacks, randomly killing as many passersby as possible, defines a specific style of engagement. When, after Saddam Hussein’s fall, terrorist attacks multiplied in Iraq, they spared no one, especially not Iraqis: schoolchildren in buses or on sidewalks, men and women at the market, the faithful at prayer.

When the naive, the falsely naive, and the downright evil blur categories in support of their ideological prejudices and christen the killer of innocents a “resistance fighter,” more lucid minds disclose a different landscape. Consider an editorial published in a Lebanese paper on August 20, 2003, the day after a bomb-laden cement truck destroyed the United Nations’ center of operations in Baghdad: “Yesterday’s operation against the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations exemplifies this mentality of destruction. Expel all mediators. Banish every international organization. Let things collapse. Let electricity and water be cut off, and the pumping of oil cease. Let theft prevail. Let universities and schools close. Let businesses fail. Let civic life cease. And at the end of the day the occupation will fail. ‘No!’ protests Joseph Samara, ‘at the end of the road, there will be a catastrophe for Iraq. . . . The attack against the United Nations’ headquarters in Baghdad belongs to another world: it is a form of nihilism, of absurdity, and of chaos hiding behind fallacious slogans, which proves the convergence among those responsible for this action, their intellectual limitation and their criminal behavior.’ ”

We have entered another world. The threat of a new Ground Zero, small or great, advances behind a mask. The human bomb claims the power to strike anywhere, by any means, at any time, spreading his nocturnal threat over the globe, invisible and thus unpredictable, clandestine and thus untraceable. The terrorist without borders makes us think about him always, everywhere. Without an accidental delay on the tracks—just a few minutes—the pulverization of two trains in Madrid, at the Atocha station, would have claimed 10,000 victims, three times more than in Manhattan. Then there was London. Whose turn is next? Each of us waits for the next explosion.

The business of terrorists, after all, is to terrorize—so said Lenin, an uncontested master in the field. The ultimate refinement lies in the inversion of responsibility. Operating instructions: I take hostages, I cut off their heads, I show them on video; those who beg for mercy must address themselves to their governments, who alone are to blame for my crimes: my hubris is their problem…

global terrorism eliminates geostrategic borders and traditional taboos. The last seconds of the condemned of Manhattan, of Atocha, and of the London Underground sent us two messages: “Here abandon all hope,” the Dantesque injunction carried by a bomb that wipes the slate clean; and “Here there is no reason why,” the nihilist gospel of SS officers. Hiroshima signified the technical possibility of a desert that approaches closer and closer to the absolute; Auschwitz represented the deliberate and lucid pursuit of total annihilation. The conjunction of these two forms of the will to nothingness looms in the black holes of modern hatred.

Of course, the most horrific things that Glucksman thinks of may never in fact take place. The Human Bomb may prove to be a self-limiting phenomenon. But it would also appear fair to say that the weight of human history seems to be on the side of “if an awful thing can happen, it probably will.” That is the danger after all, and the bad guys use their weakness versus the great powers as a strategic weapon. As we have said, the logic of nuclear terrorism is that retaliation becomes the crime.

We have previously mentioned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mentor, the hardline Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Messbah-Yazdi. Here is some more, via Pajamas:

One of the most powerful figures in this despotism, and one of the least known in the West, is the hardline Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Messbah-Yazdi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s spiritual advisor. To understand the power and influence of Messbah-Yazdi, one needs to learn a bit about the Hojjatieh sect of Shi’ite Islam. The Hojjatiyeh movement was founded in the early ‘50s by Mahmoud Halabi, a cleric of Arab ancestry and Iranian nationality. The movement believes in the imminent return of the Hidden Imam, Mehdi (a.k.a The Mahdi, the 12th Imam or Sawheb’o’zaman, which means the lord and master of all time). The Mahdi is the 12th descendant of the prophet Mohammad, whose reappearance is predicted for a time when the Muslims are suffering from disaster and injustice; true Islamic rule is possible only upon his return.

The Hojjatiyeh movement opposes the Shi’ite version of a Caliphate, the Velawyat’eh Fagheeh (which Amir Taheri translates as The Regency of the Theologians), which was a principle articulated by Khomeini. Therefore, in a July 1983 speech, Khomeini outlawed the movement and ordered the arrest of Hojjatiyeh supporters. Some he even ordered executed.

Contrary to the concept of Velawyat’eh Fagheeh, which states that all political power should be in the hands of a single leader, Hojjatiyeh claims that a collective leadership should rule until the Imam’s return. The movement’s economic views are liberal, which is the why it enjoys the support of traditional bazaar merchants and landowners; they object to any religiously-based official supervision.

Hojjatiyeh actively encourages its members to spread chaos and violence in society and the world at large, in order to hasten the return of the Twelfth Imam. The movement made the headlines on April 24, 1999, when its members attempted to assassinate the head of Tehran’s judicial system, Ali Razini. In late 2002 and early 2003 Hojjatiyeh increased its activity. In response, Iranian senior officials quickly issued a warning against the entrance of its members into government institutions.

One of the primary missions behind the creation of the sect was the annihilation of the Baha’i faith…Shi’ites generally regard Baha’ism as a heresy: according to Shiite theology, the Hidden Imam went into hiding when he was a child, and they believe he will reappear when the world is being destroyed by oppression and tyranny. Baha’is, on the other hand, believe that Mirza Hossein Ali, known as Baha’ollah, was the reincarnation of the Hidden Imam and that he has already appeared and established Baha’ism. The members of Hojjatieh view this idea as blasphemy, for they believe that Mehdi’s reappearance will usher in the end of the world as we know it, and thus the Baha’is are blasphemously following a false Mehdi.

Ahmadinejad belongs to the Jamkaran group. This is a subdivision of the Hojjatiyeh, named after the Jamkaran mosque, which is located on the outskirts of Qom. The Jamkaran Mosque is a sacred site for the disciples of the Mahdi, who according to a local tradition, drew the plans for the mosque himself and gave them to a man in a dream. Until recently the mosque’s link to the Hidden Imam remained a purely local myth, with little backing from the clergy. But one of the first administrative acts of the newly elected president was to allocate $20 million worth of funding from the government’s coffers to the Jamkaran mosque, in order to strengthen the cult of the Mahdi by creating a place to draw the pilgrims.

One thing we never underestimate is the religious sincerity of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Watch him mock the Baha’is at the United Nations for their lack of a divine prophet, while acknowledging Moses and Jesus as divine prophets for their time. You may get a fuller appreciation of Ahmadinejad’s view of the natural order of things when the Mahdi returns and true religion rules the world.

As a final point, note the narcissism inherent in the belief that this age is the time when the Mahdi will return, with Ahmadinejad, and others of Iran’s clerisy, to herald him and make straight his path. No act is beyond ruthless men who believe such things.

Benazir Bhutto was reportedly the target of three separate plots on her return to Pakistan. She had intelligence information on three specific individuals who wanted her dead, apparently including current members of the Pakistani government. FT:

In her first public remarks since the twin explosions that killed more than 130 of her supporters and injured more than 500, Ms Bhutto urged General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler, to rein in militant groups, though she stopped short of directly accusing the government of facilitating the attack…No-one claimed responsibility, but Asif Ali Zardari, Ms Bhutto’s husband, held Pakistan’s intelligence agency to blame, while police were investigating whether the attack was connected to al-Qaeda linked militants in tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.

Shortly after the attack, Ms Bhutto’s spokesman called for the dismissal of the head of Pakistan’s intelligence bureau, the main intelligence service for internal duties. Ms Bhutto did not echo this call, but said: “Our internal situation is not being efficiently handled”. A senior leader from her Pakistan People’s Party said she would seek a revamp of the country’s top security hierarchy, including some officials that she suspects of having links to Islamist militant groups.

Militants linked to al-Qaeda, angered by Ms Bhutto’s support for the US war on terror have threatened to assassinate her, and officials say there were intelligence reports of plots by three separate groups…

Ms Bhutto said information on a possible attack against her had been provided by a friendly foreign government ahead of her return to Pakistan, adding that she knew who her enemies were even if they hid themselves behind ”seven veils”. She claimed to have named three individuals planning to target her in a letter to Gen Musharraf earlier this week, but refused to identify them publicly.

So opposition politician Bhutto has multiple assassination plots involving the Pakistan government. Meanwhile, President Pervez Musharraf has survived half a dozen assassination attempts, at least two of which involved Pakistan’s armed forces. Things are so bad for Musharraf that he travels with the next three in succession to him so that an attack on him kills them too, and his personal security detail is manned by non-Pakistanis, according to Richard Miniter.

You’d think that when both the President and the opposition candidate are targeted for assassination that it would be time to pretty much obliterate radical groups in Waziristan. But in addition to the logistical problems of doing so, how is it to be accomplished when (via AP) “militants claim to have support within government structures, including the army and intelligence agencies”?

A Reuters / Zogby poll of 991 likely voters found that a mere 25% of respondents rated George Bush’s performance as good or excellent, and 11% rated Congress’s performance good or excellent. These would appear to be dissatisfaction levels of 75-89% among these likely voters. The stories on the poll are full of explanations that may or may not have some merit:

“There is a real question among Americans now about how relevant this government is to them,” pollster John Zogby said. “They tell us they want action on health care, education, the war and immigration, but they don’t believe they are going to get it.” The dismal assessment of the Republican president and the Democratic-controlled Congress follows another month of inconclusive political battles…

These numbers are truly dismal, though we think it is not at all a bad thing if people generally do not approve of politicians. It certainly is an argument not to give them any more power or money than they already wield and enjoy.

But these numbers are curiously low. Maybe there is a sense that — above and beyond partisan politics — some really bad thing lies around the corner, and these incredibly low numbers are a sign of an animal’s instinct that senses a foreboding thing and waits, holding its breath. We’ll see.

Things have changed in Shiite neighborhoods of late, much as they changed earlier in the year in Sunni Anbar, according to the NYT:

“We thought they were soldiers defending the Shiites,” said Sayeed Sabah, a Shiite who runs a charity in the western neighborhood of Huriya. “But now we see they are youngster-killers, no more than that. People want to get rid of them.”

While the Mahdi militia still controls most Shiite neighborhoods, early evidence that Shiites are starting to oppose some parts of the militia is surfacing on American bases. Shiite sheiks, the militia’s traditional base, are beginning to contact Americans, much as Sunni tribes reached out early this year, refocusing one entire front of the war, officials said, and the number of accurate tips flowing into American bases has soared. Shiites are “participating like they never have before,” said Maj. Mark Brady, of the Multi-National Division-Baghdad Reconciliation and Engagement Cell, which works with tribes…

“Everything is changing,” said Ali, a businessman in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Ur, in eastern Baghdad, who, like most of those interviewed, did not want his full name used for fear of being attacked. “Now in our area for the first time everyone say, ‘To hell with Mahdi Army.’ “Not loudly on the street, but between friends, between families. Every man, every woman, say that.”

The street militia of today bears little resemblance to the Mahdi Army of 2004, when Shiites following a cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, battled American soldiers in a burst of Shiite self-assertion. Then, fighters doubled as neighborhood helpers, bringing cooking gas and other necessities to needy families. Now, three years later, many members have left violence behind, taking jobs in local and national government, while others have plunged into crime, dealing in cars and houses taken from dead or displaced victims of both sects.

Even the demographics have changed. Now, street fighters tend to be young teenagers from errant families, in part the result of American military success. Last fall, the military began an aggressive campaign of arresting senior commanders, leaving behind a power vacuum and directionless junior members. “Now it’s young guys — no religion, no red lines,” said Abbas, 40, a Shiite car parts dealer in Ameen, a southern Baghdad neighborhood. Abbas’s 22-year-old cousin, Ratib, was shot in the mouth this spring after insulting Mahdi militia members. “People hate them,” Abbas said. “They want them to disappear from their lives.”

There are an increasing number of data points on improvements in Iraq. Perhaps that’s why the political scene appears to have moved on to all health care, all the time.

From Walter Russell Mead, the author of God and Gold over at Powerline:

The main trend in world history has been the development and continuing growth of a global system of power, finance, culture, ideology and trade based first on the power of Britain and then on that of the United States. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain has only been defeated in one major great power war – the war of the American Revolution. To put that another way, since the seventeenth century, either Britain or the United States or both together have been on the winning side in every great power war in which they have participated.

God and Gold is a book about this Anglo-American world system. Why have the British and the Americans established the most powerful and influential international power system in the history of the world? What does history teach us about the dangers we now face from the conflicts in the Middle East and from other challenges of the 21st century such as the rise of Asia? Are the best days of Anglo-American power already behind us, or do we still have an important role to play in world history?

In God and Gold I argue that capitalist dynamism and the peculiarly individualistic and forward looking religious culture of the Anglo-American are the foundation of this system. The British and the Americans have liked capitalism more than other people, and they have had less trouble bridging the gap between capitalist change and religious tradition than other societies have done.

These characteristics make us strong, but they do not always make us loved. Catholic Spain, Jacobin France, Wilhelmine Germany, the Nazis, the communists, and Osama bin Laden all denounced the English-speaking peoples as cruel, greedy, hypocritical and vulgar. The Inquisition placed The Wealth of Nations on the Index of Forbidden Books. Napoleon denounced the British as a “nation of shopkeepers.” For over a century, hatred of capitalism, hatred of Jews and hatred of the Anglo-American world has been a powerful ideological force. Since the Boer War, significant elements in European opinion have seen the Anglo-Saxon powers as allied with Jewish plutocrats in a plot to control the world. Churchill and Roosevelt were denounced as puppets of the Jews; today figures like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez speak for a powerful tradition of hatred and suspicion of the Anglo-American world and its Jewish allies.

More than 300 years ago, Oliver Cromwell summoned the English to a war against Catholic Spain using arguments we still hear today. Who are our enemies, Cromwell asked in 1656. His answer: the league of evil men throughout the earth. And why do they hate us? Because the evil that is in them sees and hates the good that we do here in England. or in Cromwell’s own words, “through that enmity that is in him against all that is of God, that is in you…” What are we fighting for? The future of liberty all over the world. Why will we triumph? Because God is on our side.

These are essentially the arguments of Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘evil empire’ speech; they are the arguments that Tony Blair and George W. Bush made after 9/11. They are the arguments Churchill and Roosevelt made in World War II, the arguments Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson made in World War I, the arguments that British ministers and intellectuals made during the wars against Napoleon, the Jacobins, and against Louis XIV.

A world as rich, grand and complicated as the modern world has never existed before. So far America has dealt reasonably well with the cultural contradictions of modernity. But things continue to evolve, and not always to the good. A couple of generations ago every American knew farmers or soldiers; now few do. Some of the old verities currently seem obsolete, as Mead’s statement illustrates, and conditions in America have changed significantly in the last several generations. We agree with Mr. Mead about the greatness of the past, but will it be prologue for future generations of Americans?

We have heard a lot of heated commentary in the course of discussing the Ann Coulter / Donny Deutsch exchange, from all sides and many perspectives. It sure has been emotional. But one of the most interesting parts of the debate is that, if you can strip the emotions out of the various positions, several of the opposing positions make sense from the standpoints of their internal logic. It would be useful to examine this, particularly in today’s world, where the implications of unexamined belief are often deadly.

Much turns on whether yours is the older or younger religion. It would appear that many adherents of younger religions, like Christianity or Islam, absolutely take for granted — indeed, this is what many of those faithful have been taught from youth — that their religion and their God subsume the former doctrine and the former deity in their entirety. Thus many Christians sincerely believe that their religion subsumes Judaism, and many Muslims sincerely believe that Islam subsumes and replaces Judaism and Christianity in their entirely. This often seems quite natural to the adherent of the younger religion, who has often been taught that this is so, and never in his life has given two seconds of thought to the matter. It is an assumption that the believer has never, ever examined. The younger religion appears to think of itself as the perfection of the older religion.

This is, in the ordinary course of things, no big deal to the adherent of the younger religion. He believes that he has the real truth, and that previous versions of God and doctrine need to be updated from version 1.0 to 2.0 or to 3.0 — and he never gives it a second thought. In his own congregation there is no reason to, since everybody else in the group also believes in the correctness of the belief. Of course they believe in their own religion, which they have been taught is the exclusive and absolute truth about the most important things in life — the meaning of life and their destiny after death. So of course they think they are right. Everything important is at stake.

So there are often several shocking moments in store. The first of these is when the adherent of the younger religion exposes his underlying belief that version 2.0 or 3.0 is absolute truth and the last word on the matter. The second shocking moment comes when the adherent of the older religion says to the younger, in absolute befuddlement and perhaps outrage, what on earth are you talking about? The older religion never thinks of itself as outmoded or in need of revision. Indeed, the older religion often thinks of the newer version of God and doctrine as something ranging from (a) interesting but irrelevant to (b) a crackpot scheme of no value whatsoever.

It is understandable too that the adherent of the younger religion now experiences his own shock. He has invested his life and his ultimate destiny in the notion that he is following the right path, and not an interesting irrelevancy or crackpot scheme. So there is plenty of room for shock and outrage on all sides of the issue, particularly among those who have not spent a lot of time making conscious to themselves the implications of their belief that they possess a universal and perfect truth — whether version 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0. (Saying that Allah and the New Testament God are one and the same may sound nice, but has very different implications when looked at from the standpoint and agenda of a Christian or a Muslim, for example.)

It remains to be seen if if any of these religions (1.0, 2.0, or 3.0) are right in any of their claims, or if perhaps they are all kind of right, as some have said. But it is surely of note that those religions that have made claims about the completeness and universality of their truth have to deal with some significant demographic issues.

At the time of Jesus, and Mohammed as well, world population was about 150 million. Now world population is 6 billion, and is heading for 9 billion by 2050. The vast majority of these billions of souls do not belong to 1.0 or 2.0 or 3.0, and some belong to even larger religions or no religion at all. Do these billions of souls all need to be “perfected”, or are they just fine the way they are? How do you react to the notion that some large number of these billions may want to “perfect” you? We do not mean to try to answer these questions, and we are not taking pot shots at anyone’s belief. But it certainly appears true, given the vast numbers of humans, that many people are going to be quite surprised on that day they see themselves floating above the hospital bed, and hear someone telling them to “step into the light,” or perhaps hear nothing at all.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee has decided to get tough about the Armenian genocide that took place at the time of of World War I, almost a century ago. Why the call to condemn today’s Turkey for the sins of the Ottoman Empire at this moment? Why the sudden move to condemn a Muslim ally of the US and member of NATO? Why undertake a move that “could cripple supply lines to American forces in Iraq”? Or maybe that’s the point. WaPo:

The Turkish government warned Thursday that a congressional committee vote labeling the mass killings of Armenians during the Ottoman Empire as genocide will “endanger relations” with the United States. The House Foreign Affairs Committee vote on the Armenian deaths — one of the most sensitive issues in Turkish politics and society — came as Turkish government officials prepared to ask parliament for authority to launch a military assault across the border into northern Iraq in retribution for Kurdish rebel attacks…

U.S. officials said Thursday that rising tensions over both issues could have far-reaching ramifications for American operations in Iraq. A Turkish military attack on northern Iraq could create chaos in that country’s only relatively stable region, and a Turkish threat to limit U.S. access to its air bases and roads because of the congressional vote could cripple supply lines to American forces in Iraq. “The committee’s approval of this resolution was an irresponsible move, which at a greatly sensitive time will make relations with a friend and ally more difficult,” the Turkish government said in a statement Thursday. The Turkish Foreign Ministry said Thursday night it was summoning its ambassador in Washington back to Turkey…

Reuters reported: “The U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee approved on Wednesday a resolution branding the killings during World War One as genocide. The issue of the Armenian massacres is deeply sensitive in Turkey, where it is a crime to portray them as ‘genocide.’ The non-binding resolution now goes to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Democratic leaders say there will be a vote by mid-November.”

This timing of a vote by Congress to condemn the Muslims who border northern Iraq for the genocide of Christians a century ago (a politically incorrect gesture in today’s world?) appears to be inexplicable except as a nasty piece of mischief to make the current work of the US and its military more difficult. Today’s politicians appear particularly craven, preferring subterfuge to straight talk in the decision whether to stand by our armed forces and their difficult mission in Iraq, or to try to end that mission by open debate and aboveboard measures. So they appear to try death by a thousand cuts instead.

For the record, Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman also disapproves of the fervently anti-war Tom Lantos’ decision to bring the resolution up again now:

after a visit in February to Turkey, where I met with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Armenian Orthodox patriarch and colleagues of murdered Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, I became convinced that passing this resolution again at this time would isolate and embarrass a courageous and moderate Islamic government in perhaps the most volatile region in the world. So I agree with eight former secretaries of State — including Los Angeles’ own Warren Christopher — who said that passing the resolution “could endanger our national security interests in the region, including our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan…there is the need for stability in the region. Turkey shares a border with Iraq, and the need for its continued restraint with the Kurds

The US military does not deserve the disrespect implicit in the actions of Lantos’ Committee and Congress, and frankly the remembrance of the victims of the Armenian genocide deserves better too.

The NY Sun describes communications in the al Qaeda network, a subject that has generated controversy in recent days::

Al Qaeda set up its Internet communications in three tiers. The smallest circle includes senior leaders such as the head of the group’s information committee, Abu Abdel Rahman al Magrebi, a son-in-law of Al Qaeda no. 2, Ayman al Zawahari. Mr. Gunaratna estimated that this circle consisted of no more than 20 people, and was nearly impossible to penetrate — although, he said, America, Britain, and Pakistan had a successful operation that penetrated Al Qaeda’s most secretive Web communications for a period in 2004.

Then, after one of the founders of Al Qaeda’s Internet system, Mohammed Naeem Nur Khan, had been arrested in secret by Pakistani intelligence in July 2004, allied intelligence services were able to monitor the communications of this leadership group for about five weeks though Mr. Khan’s messages to the top tier committee. The operation was blown after leaks to the Washington Post and New York Times, Mr. Gunaratna said, a breach he considers comparable to the leaking of Mr. bin Laden’s speech.

The next tier of Al Qaeda’s Internet communications consists of the password-protected sites, also known as Obelisk, and is used mainly by middle and lower-level Qaeda operatives. “We refer to these as the password-protected sites,” Mr. Gunaratna said. “They are time-bound, they will work on this front only for certain people, they change Web sites constantly. You have to be plugged in, it’s like a game

You may recall in reports about the 2004 operation referred to above, some US military men were implicated in clandestine communications of the jihadist variety.

The Boston Globe’s inside headline of a story in 1980 read something like, “More mush from the wimp.” The Globe was describing some thought or action of the ineffectual Jimmy Carter. That this came from a Boston newspaper is ample evidence of the near universality of this opinion at the time. We did a double-take at that headline when we opened the newspaper that morning; it was surprising to see a president who had brought such ridicule upon himself. Not any more. In a discussion with Bob Edwards, formerly of NPR, former President Carter said this:

“I have a specific regret in not having one more helicopter when I wanted to rescue our hostages. If I had had one more helicopter, they would have been rescued. I might have been reelected president.”

Dream on. The ill conceived mission that became known as Desert One was a fiasco from the moment it was cooked up, which included concealing it from the Secretary of State at the time. The very idea that Carter still thinks about the gross Iranian act of war in 1979 in terms of such a limited response — “one more helicopter” — is yet more testimony that the man never was up to the job of Commander in Chief.

Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie on the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who lives in a safe house to protect her from murderous religious men. Anne Applebaum also wrote about this the other day in a WaPo piece. LA Times:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali…first fled to the Netherlands as a refugee from Somalia in 1992 after declining to submit to a forced marriage to a man she did not know. Once there, in hiding from her family, she began working as a cleaning lady. But this cleaning lady spoke Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili, English and was quickly learning Dutch, so she soon found work as a translator for other Somali refugees, many of whom, like herself, were casualties of Islam. These women had been abused, mutilated, denied medical care and proper educations and forced into lives of sexual subjection and compulsory childbearing.

After attending the University of Leiden, Hirsi Ali began speaking publicly about the repression of women under Islam, and shortly thereafter she started receiving death threats from local Muslims. Her security situation eventually became so dire that she moved to the U.S. in 2002. However, she was soon contacted by Gerrit Zalm, then deputy prime minister of the Netherlands, who urged her to run for parliament. When Hirsi Ali voiced her security concerns, Zalm assured her that she would be given diplomatic protection wherever and whenever she needed it. She returned to the Netherlands with this assurance, won a seat in parliament and became a tireless advocate for women, for civil society and for reason.

The rest of her story is well known. In 2004, Hirsi Ali collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the film “Submission,” which examined the link between Islamic law and the suffering of millions of women under Islam. The reaction from the Muslim community was nothing short of psychopathic…

Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam…There is not a person alive more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience we take for granted in the West, nor is there anyone making a more courageous effort to defend them.

Compare this with the dangerous nonsense being retailed at the highest levels of government about what is and is not religious, and how truly religious people are apparently all nice.

Judith Miller in City Journal describes some positive developments in the law for a change:

Over the last few years, Islamists have tried silencing reporters, scholars, and citizens by suing them for defamation, often successfully. But recent legal cases in California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota suggest that the tactic may finally be backfiring, at least in the United States, if not in Britain, where libel laws overwhelmingly favor plaintiffs. The American lawsuits’ outcomes—poorly covered by the media—represent victories for the free expression and public participation that the First Amendment guarantees.

The latest victory came in August, when an Islamic charity, KinderUSA, and its board chairman, Laila Al-Marayati, dropped the libel suit they had filed in April in California state court against former Treasury Department official Matthew Levitt, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (which now employs him), and Yale University Press. In 2006, Yale published Levitt’s book on Hamas, which Washington says supports terrorism. Levitt never mentioned Al-Marayati in his book, but he did assert that KinderUSA, founded to raise money for Palestinian children, had ties to terrorist groups.

Al-Marayati and KinderUSA charged that Levitt had made “false and damaging” charges that caused “irreparable harm to its reputation,” and they sought at least $500,000 in damages, a public retraction, and a halt to the book’s distribution. But Levitt and his codefendants stood by his claims. In June, they filed a motion against the charity and its chairman, seeking to quash the libel suit and demanding that the plaintiffs pay all legal fees. They cited a California law that bans “SLAPP”—or “strategic litigation against public participation”—suits, which aim not at winning in court, but at intimidating into silence a group or a publication raising issues of public concern. “California enacted anti-SLAPP legislation to get rid of inappropriate lawsuits like this one,” they wrote in a 15-page brief. Less than six weeks later, Al-Marayati and KinderUSA dropped the suit.

If these developments could spread to England, justice and knowledge would benefit greatly.

President Bush:

I believe in an almighty God, and I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God…I believe that Islam is a great religion that preaches peace. And I believe people who murder the innocent to achieve political objectives aren’t religious people.

We just don’t know where to begin with this dangerous, ahistorical nonsense. So we’ll perhaps just focus on the least wrong part of Bush’s statement. From the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Polytheism - the belief in many gods. Polytheism characterizes virtually all religions other than Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which share a common tradition of monotheism, the belief in one God.”

Follw-up question for the President: Are people “religious” who believe it is okay to prohibit churches and synagogues in their country, or who persecute missionaries, threaten women for talking, or who think it is okay to “command good and forbid evil” to the extremes of putting people to death for apostasy or homosexuality?

The story is about enemy soldiers coming from Syria into Iraq, but it is more interesting than just that in discussing the religious fervor at work in them. London Times:

He had no regrets about his impending death: “There is nothing stronger than my love for God and seeking martyrdom,” he said brightly. As for his wife, he had already thought of his last message to her: “If Allah accepts my martyrdom, then I shall ensure that you are one of those I name to be salvaged and brought to heaven when your time comes.”

These, then, are the factors driving the bombers inexorably onwards. First, fury over the occupation, fuelled by images of the dead on Arab TV stations and fundamentalist websites, and fanned by radical imams who damn the “infidels” and praise Al-Qaeda to the heavens. Second, burgeoning Wahhabism has played into the hands of Sunni extremist groups…

As we have been seeing in Anbar province, “burgeoning Wahhabism” can get tiresome for the locals pretty quickly. Wahhabism and its related viruses are parasitic in nature — they have to be subsidized, because a society fully adopting those rules can’t thrive on a stand-alone basis.

We heard Theodore Dalrymple wonder the other day if the Islamist threat to modernity, as evidenced in the Glasgow airport attack, was overrated, in the sense that the idea of driving a car though an airport window was just so stupid. We wouldn’t go that far, because there are some real threats out there, but it seems clear enough that if the West would stand up and act like a man, we could have done with this foolishness in reasonably short order.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to elucidate his plan, which all hangs together quite well if you see it in his terms. He sees that there is a grand satanic conspiracy to keep his people down, and that it is his responsibility and divinely ordained mission to make things right in the world.

As we understand it, Ahmadinejad wants to “decode the black box” of the so-called Holocaust to examine its use as a pretext for the creation and crimes of Israel. He is a scientist, after all, and approaches such matters as the Zionist conspiracy with geometric logic, so no doubt he could decode the secret Holocaust-Israel plan — in which a tiny fraction of the people killed in WWII were given the land of another people. He wants to conduct a referendum in, at a minimum, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, to decide if the Jews should stay or go. If the Jews lose, he wants them to go to Europe, the site of the so-called Holocaust, or now apparently North America

Ynet has the latest on Ahmadinejad’s plans from the Jerusalem Liberation Day festivities in Teheran:

“Let a referendum be held in Palestine. It is our clear proposal to European countries…Let all Palestinians including Muslims, Christians and the Jews attend the referendum”…

“the creation of the Zionist regime, the continuation of its existence and unlimited support for the regime (by the US) are an insult to human dignity…Defense for the ominous interests of the Zionist regime is a must for certain powers. Western governments who are pioneers of secularism pursue defense for the Zionist regime as the holiest task in the world”…

“Nations should be allowed to conduct research on crimes of the Zionist regime and decode the black box for its atrocities…The Palestinian youth and nation have been deprived of all human rights for more than 60 years. Today, Quds is not an issue only related to Palestine and the Middle East but a case of world humanity.”…

Western nations have turned the Holocaust into a “holy issue and do not let anybody raise any question about it “These events took place in the World War II. Later, they (Israel) committed a historical genocide in Palestine. They ratified unlimited and holy rights for themselves and introduced all nations as criminals…They allowed themselves to commit whatever crimes under pretext of the Holocaust. They even built secret prisons in Europe… and attacked and imposed economic sanctions against a nation that did not officially recognize the Zionist regime.”

“the world should know that the Iranian nation hates massacre(s). It regards agents of the World War II and Hitler as dark and black faces.”

In a Reuters story, Mr. Ahmadinejad makes the helpful suggestion that perhaps the Jews should be given Canada and Alaska:

“Iran condemns fabricating such a pretext (the Holocaust) for the Zionist regime to commit genocide against the Palestinian nation and occupy Palestine…The Iranian nation and countries in the region will not rest until Palestine is free and criminals punished”…

“Europeans cannot tolerate the Zionist regime’s presence in their own region but want to impose it on the Middle East. Give them (the Jews) this vast land of Canada and Alaska to build themselves a home and resettle there”

“Iran wants to remove international concerns over its atomic work through talks…But if they (the West) want to start a new game it will have no result for them but regret”

More Reuters:

“I announce to the whole world that the Iranian nation has passed the difficult points (on its nuclear path)…And no power can stop this nation from making more and more (atomic) achievements”

So Mr. Ahmadinejad believes there is a conspiracy of 2000 Zionists who want to rule the world, and that he has a divine mission to do his part to defeat evil and make things right in the world. You are free to take his nuclear plans seriously or not.

UPDATE

We quote from the official Iranian news agency’s report on Ahmadinejad’s comments, and find pretty much the same thing as in the western versions based on it:

“Why don’t you let the black box of the Zionist regime be decoded? If the Western leaders are not members of the Zionist party, they should allow an international fact finding group decode the black box…Nations should be allowed to conduct research on crimes of the Zionist regime and decode the black box for its atrocities…

“They violate sanctity of prophets and insult human dignity and democracy and say they have nothing to do with these acts. You have turned what you call Holocaust into a holy issue and do not let anybody raise any question about it…Events took place in the World War II.

“They allowed themselves to commit whatever crimes under the pretext of the Holocaust. They even built secret prisons in Europe and attacked and imposed economic sanctions against a nation who did not officially recognize the Zionist regime…Today, Qods is not an issue only related to Palestine and the Middle East but a case of world of humanity”

“The world should know that the Iranian nation hates massacre. It regards agents of the World War II and Hitler as dark and black faces.”

Hooman Majd served as interpreter for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his 2006 trip to the United Nations, and had this report about the “2000 Zionists who want to rul the world” in the NY Observer of October 1, 2006:

“Our political situation, by God’s grace, is great,” he went on. “For those who don’t want our people to progress, the situation is not good. In the Middle East, the situation for America has become very bad. Very. They thought if they attack Lebanon, their situation would get better,” he said, allowing no difference between Israel and the United States. “They gave 33 days to the Zionists to do something in Lebanon, and it didn’t happen. Same thing in Iraq; same thing in Afghanistan. It’s not that our situation has gotten worse in the last year; it’s that it’s gotten much better.

“As for America,” he said, “we will not be dictated to. Don’t forget that it was America that unilaterally broke off relations with Iran …. I remember Mr. Carter saying that to punish Iran, we will break diplomatic relations.”…“And now,” he added, “some of them expect us to go and beg for the resumption of relations. We’ll never do that. There’s not one Iranian in the world who would ask us do that,” he said, as if challenging any Iranians in this part of the world to do so. “Never,” he emphasized. “For what?”

President Ahmadinejad, apparently satisfied that he had convinced everyone that Iran was strong, moved on to the question of Iran’s nuclear program. “If, God forbid—God forbid—we budge on this issue, they’ll next say, ‘You have to give up your chemistry departments in your universities, and your physics departments too.’ Then even the medical schools.” The president’s tone wasn’t bombastic; if anything, it was very matter-of-fact. “It’s clear that they don’t want us to progress,” he said. “Of course, not all Americans—Americans are good people.

“Two thousand Zionists want to rule the world. You can do it elsewhere,” he said, as if speaking directly to the mysterious 2,000, “but not in Iran. It’s impossible—it’s not doable.”…

That evening’s dinner, for 500 loyal Iranians, was held in a grand ballroom of the Hilton. The crowd, consisting of Iranians who are fiercely nationalistic and more positively inclined to the Islamic Republic, greeted their president with prolonged applause. The national anthem played loudly over the speaker system, and to anyone who harbors suspicions that 2006 Iran is reminiscent of 1936 Germany, this event would have appeared to have some of the trappings of a Bund rally in 1930’s New York.

“2000 Zionists want to rule the world.” Much else flows nicely from the core belief that there is a tiny cabal of Jews who plot to rule the world, and are the puppeteers in an intricate plan that subverts and uses the wealth and rulers of many nations in service of their nefarious ends. This explains a lot about Mr. Ahmadinejad. This conspiratorial construct, combined with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s profound sense of religious destiny, combine to make him a potentially very dangerous man indeed.