From The Australian:

ISRAEL last night threatened to assassinate Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh if Hamas militants did not release a captured Israeli soldier unharmed.

The unprecedented warning was delivered to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a letter as Israel debated a deal offered by Hamas to free Corporal Gilad Shalit.

It came as Israeli military officials readied a second invasion force for a huge offensive into Gaza.

Hamas’s Gaza-based political leaders, including Mr Haniyeh, had already gone into hiding.

But last night’s direct threat to kill Mr Haniyeh, a democratically elected head of state, sharply raised the stakes.

This threat, I think, shows that the Israeli army is running the show. Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is not a strong leader, and the country’s minister of defence isn’t, either.

But even the United Nation’s representative in Gaza is siding, at least implicitly, with Israel, despite the real potential of a humanitarian crisis for the Gazans.

Much of Gaza, including two main hospitals, was without power and running water as a UN aid chief warned that the 1.4 million residents of the strip were three days away from a humanitarian crisis.

“They are heading for the abyss unless they get electricity and fuel restored,” said emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland, who urged militants to free Corporal Shalit and stop firing rockets into Israel.

This is a very dangerous situation that could slide into general war with little more nudging.

Here’s a factoid I didn’t know:

Drowned out in the post-Sept. 11 media frenzy to cover Muslims, Arab-American Christians have been neglected. But 63% of the country’s estimated 3.5 million Arab-Americans are Christian. Most are Catholic, while a smaller number are Protestant and Eastern Orthodox, which includes the Antiochian, Syrian and Coptic traditions. These Middle Eastern churches date to the dawn of Christianity. Most Copts are Egyptians who believe the Apostle Mark founded their church in Alexandria. Many Maronites hail from Lebanon, believed to be where disciples of St. Maron took refuge in the fifth century.

Very interesting article by Paulette Chu Miniter. RTWT.

Yesterday, BOTW Today cited this quote by Philip Slater on the Huffington Post:

Perhaps the reason Americans seem so comfortable about bombing and invading little countries around the world is that the United States, unlike Europe, has never experienced “collateral damage”. If we had ever been bombed and invaded ourselves, had our infrastructure demolished, been subject to foreign soldiers breaking into our homes at night, seen our children slaughtered and our houses destroyed, we would be, I suspect, less gung-ho about war and less cavalier about inflicting these horrors on other people.

BOTW caustically observes, “If you take this guy at his word, he actually has never heard of Sept. 11.”

Not only that, but I’d guess he’s never heard of these two guys, either.

. .

… gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force may destroy but cannot disjoin them.” So wrote Thomas Jefferson in his 1774 essay, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. I am reminded of Jefferson’s explicitly religious view of the natural rights of human beings after reading Gerard Van Der Leun’s essay, “Lincoln’s Land Without God.”

What is really at issue here on the human plane is whether or not this nation can endure once it is officially based on NOTHING [instead of God - DS]. I am of those Americans who say it can not. Myths matter to a person and to a nation. Remove them and they cease to exist. This is especially true when you are dealing with a nation like America which is not based on either blood or land, but on myth alone.

It’s been said that America is the only nation ever founded upon a idea, rather than ethnicity or or soil. That idea, drawn from the European Enlightenment, was simply and specifically what Jefferson said: that the rights of human beings spring not from consent by, or gift from, human authority, but from the creative acts of God. Life and liberty, said Jefferson, are inextricably interwoven because they spring from the same source, the God who creates both.

If you spend some time perusing the writings of Jefferson, it’s hard to avoid concluding that today he would be assailed as something of a religious nut, probably even one the much-reviled “religious right.” No matter that Jefferson was a secular deist, there is no escaping that his writings are permeated with God consciousness. Christ does not figure into his political writings, but God does, and frequently.

Patrick Henry wrote, “It can not be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” I am not one of those who claims that America is a Christian nation; we are perhaps a Christianistic nation. Henry’s claim seems intolerant today because there is a great diversity of religions in America now. But Henry’s statement nonetheless reminds us that America’s founding sprang from a specific kind of religious faith, not just some feelings of a generic spirituality. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a 1952 majority opinion of a Supreme Court case, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”

What gave Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries the right to be so, well, revolutionary? What gave them the right to start this country? Whence came their idea that the people should rule instead of a king or a parliament of nobles? How could they claim that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was “unalienable,” meaning beyond the authority of a government either to grant or deny? Why did they talk about human rights to begin with and where do rights comes from?

Well, according to Thomas Jefferson and his fellows, the ultimate answer to all those questions was simple: God. However true it was that commercial interests were prominent in the minds of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and all the rest, only a cynic of today’s postmodern age would say that the religious convictions of the Founders were not central to their determination to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for a single claim: the self-evident truth that all persons are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain rights that may not be rightfully denied them.

That was the whole justification for the American revolution: the rights of the people in America came from God, not from the British crown. When the Crown usurped them, it was the God-given right of the people of America to cast off the crown and determine their own mode of governance. That is what the Declaration of Independence says, and that is what the Founders did. Editorialist James Freeman wrote, “If you could sum up Jefferson’s political views in one sentence, you would say: He believed that God and reason allow people to rule themselves.” As the Declaration of Independence was being signed, Samuel Adams declared: “We have this day restored the Sovereign to Whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven and from the rising to the setting of the sun, let His kingdom come.”

The source of human freedom is not an academic question nor is it merely one of Constitutional history. It is in fact the question of utmost importance in Iraq today, for example. The people there are freed from slavery under Saddam Hussein. At the moment, they are freed from something, but what they are freed to is not yet settled.

One of the genius things our Founders did was create a civil society in which enormous numbers of different Christian denominations and different religions find a home. Our history has seen times of sectarian strife, but it never descended to open combat as it has in, say, northern Ireland. A lot of Protestants were suspicious of whether Catholic John F. Kennedy would cleave to the Vatican rather than the Constitution, but their fears were unfounded. In 2000, an orthodox Jew, Joe Lieberman, was the vice presidential candidate; he ran for president in 2004 and no one worried whether he would have cleaved to Jerusalem rather than the Constitution.

The American ideas of freedom and liberty are drawn from religion. Jefferson was saying that human liberty is inherent in the creative acts of God in bringing forth humankind to begin with. Thanks to God we exist, and in God we live and move and breathe and have our being. Creation was not a static event, it is a dynamic process of bringing forth the image of God in humankind and the world at large. The creation stories in the book of Genesis show that the realms of the divine and creation overlap. God is powerful, but not exclusively so, as creation unfurls. Creation has power too; a certain degree of independence and freedom is built into creation by God’s very acts of creating.

In the original paradise, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were given the run of the garden and meaningful work to do. They were free agents of their own will. Yet there were limits. God commanded them that they could eat the fruit of any tree except one.

Their freedom had its limits. When they crossed that limit, they were less free, and Genesis relates that as generations passed, humankind became steadily even less free. Eventually the story leads to Egypt, where the Hebrews found themselves in chattel slavery to Pharaoh. They had no freedom at all.

The twin images of slavery and freedom shape the entire theology of both the Jews and Christians. Never is God presented as an enslaver. Always God is a liberator. The central story of the Jews is that of Moses leading the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. At their start, slavery. At their ending, freedom. But curiously, neither the slavery nor the freedom is the high point of the story. The high point is what happened at Sinai. The high point, the defining moment, was when God gave them the Law.

The Law of Moses defines the limits of freedom in two ways. On the one hand, the law defined what was forbidden. On the other, it stated what was obligatory.

There is always a tension between the forbidden and the mandatory. But the Bible seems clear that freedom is found somewhere between the limits of what must not be done and what must be done. Without obligations there is no justice. Without prohibitions there is no community. When either individuals or societies attempt to ignore either prohibitions or obligations, bondage results. Slavery is easy, freedom is hard. Jefferson said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The reason is that the natural state of human beings is not freedom, but slavery.

The apostle Paul said that creation itself is in bondage to decay, an amazing statement for a pre-scientific man to make. Science today confirms that the universe is running down and cosmologists now seem convinced that the universe will keep expanding forever, until the time will come when energy states will be even, and nothing will ever change.

As for we men, women and children, we are born slaves to this decay. We cannot escape it, and anyone pushing 50 years as I am is more than well aware of it. At the end lies the grave. We know that. We are born slaves to death because our mortality looms over everything we do. It is the sole reason, really, that the US Congress passed and President Bush signed the biggest entitlement program ever, the Medicare prescription-drug program, to the tune of more than 400 billion dollars. If slavery to death is not really behind it, way down at the foundation, then tell me what is.

The book of Hebrews says that since we, God’s children, “have flesh and blood, [Christ] too shared in [our] humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death- that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

To some degree human mortality influences everything people do. Human customs and culture are shaped by the end of life in ways we cannot even uncover, to degrees we do not recognize. That is slavery to the fear of death.

We have usually thought of Jesus’ gift of life as some sort of afterlife, a survival of the soul after the body has died. This understanding of being freed from the fear of death is an essential one, but it is incomplete. Christ is concerned about far more of our lives than what happens after they end. Christ frees us not only from the fear of personal death but from our slavery to a death-shaped culture. With death overcome, the family of God is empowered to inaugurate a new order of living and a new kind of life.

Jesus explained in the Gospel of John (8:34-36), “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. 35The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. 36So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Through Christ, we are freed from sin and from servitude to the things of this world which inhibit godly living: greed, jealousy, anger, resentment, racism, selfishness – all the hundreds of things we put under the general label of sin. We are freed from sin and the fear of death.

So liberated, we should be able to live positively in ways not possible before. Justice, the right ordering of things in human affairs, is the result of this spiritual freedom. So the fuller Law of the Hebrews recognized this fact. Deuteronomy 10:12-13 and 17-18 says to the nation of Israel:

“12 So now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you? Only to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, 13and to keep the commandments of the LORD your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being. 17For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, 18who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.”

Those are some of the divine obligations people have as they live in community. Yet our nation’s founding documents make no mention of the obligations and responsibilities, they seek to ensure only our rights. In fact, Jefferson wrote that the whole purpose of government is to secure the rights that God gave us. He ignored codifying the obligations God lays on us.

I think that is a good thing. I shudder to think what our civil life would be like if our Constitution required things of us rather than limited the power of government. Any list of obligations can be twisted into tyranny, whether by civil or religious authority. It is always too easy for the law, whether civil or religious, to cease being a guide and begin being a slave master.

In both our civil and religious life, we would do well to remember Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians, 1 Cor 10:23: “‘Everything is permissible’ – but not everything is beneficial. ‘Everything is permissible’ – but not everything is constructive.’” The absence of limits in America’s founding documents is not an oversight. The Founders expected the people to understand the limits of libertine anarchy on the one hand and political slavery on the other.

The Constitution guarantees our rights. It is our religion under the providence of the God of Moses and Jesus that secures our true liberty.

Various commentators of the American religious scene point out that America is becoming less and less religious. A lower percentage of Americans regularly attend church or synagogue than in past times. But the fact is that Americans are still just as religious as before, it’s just not Jewish or Christian religion they are practicing. Increasing numbers of people are turning to forms of spirituality that are private and personal, not public and social. These forms if religion are, at their base, selfish and self-centered. While this is certainly their right, I fear that over time the obligations of freedom will be ignored and the justice of our freedom will be degraded. Self-centered persons do not prosper, and neither do self-centered societies or nations. Paul warned the Galatian Christians (Gal 5:13-14):

13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence . . . For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

Freedom is God’s will. Certain rights are God-given and cannot be rightfully denied by human authority. God’s gift of freedom carries the obligation to live godly lives under his guidance and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our rights and our obligations reinforce one another, guard one another, preserve one another. Together they comprise our freedom.

Well, maybe.

The US Marine non-commissioned officer who appeared in Michael Moore’s anti-American diatribe, Fahrenheit 9/11, has been killed in Iraq. Staff Sgt. Raymond J. Plouhar was working as a Marine recruiter when he went before Moore’s camera, not knowing that the film would oppose what he stood for.

Raymond Plouhar said that all his 30-year-old son ever wanted to do was serve his country. …

Despite his son’s death, Plouhar said his views on the war are unchanged.

“We need to resolve the war,” he said. “If we walk out now, my son died for nothing and that will make me mad.”

I’m waiting for the NYT’s Maureen Dowd to proclaim Raymond Plouhar as an exemplar, since she wrote plainly that, “the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.”

Remember the “human shields,” mostly Americans and Britons, who traveled to Iraq in early 2003 to place their own mortal bodies between Iraqi hospitals and JDAM bombs? Never mind that Saddam placed them next to ammunition factories instead of orphanages and the like (and man, did those Sir Robins bravely run away when they figured out what was happening).

Christipher Hitchens has a topping idea:

[T]he idea of witnessing for peace in this manner has its attractions. … But would not now be the ideal time for those who hate war to go to Iraq and stand outside the mosques, hospitals, schools, and women’s centers that are daily subjected to murderous assaults? This would write an imperishable page in the history of American dissent.

Indeed.

Saith Mr. Yglesias, making merry of TNR’s culture critic Lee Siegel, who “has now uncovered the most insidious threat of all: Bloggers.”

“The blogosphere,” he told us last week, “radiates democracy’s dream of full participation” but is, in fact, “hard fascism with a Microsoft face.” Some thought Siegel was engaging in a little ill-advised overstatement. But no. The bold truth-teller was all-too-serious, as he revealed in his follow-up post, “The Origins of Blogofascism” — a work of Arendt-ian import, if not quite scale and scope.

As Siegel explained, if bloggers don’t like something you write, they may respond with posts — or emails — expressing that disagreement stridently, much as Hitler (or, for that matter, the obscure but equally brutal Croatian ustashe) did.

But we’ve been there before, haven’t we?

Vercotti: Doug (takes a drink) Well, I was terrified. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I’ve seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.

2nd Interviewer: What did he do?

Vercotti: He used… sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and… satire. He was vicious.

Presenter: By a combination of violence and sarcasm, the Piranha brothers by February 1966 controlled London and the Southeast of England.

Fascism, it seems, knows no limits.

“I didn’t have a .44, so I shot him twice with my .22 .223 5.56mm.”

If I had not seen this news item of Strategy Page, I would have thought it from Scrappleface. James Dunnigan reports,

The U.S. Army completed a study of current 5.56mm M855 round, in response to complaints from troops that this ammunition was inadequate in combat. Troops reported many instances where enemy fighters were hit with one or more M855 rounds and kept coming. The study confirmed that this happened, and discovered why. If the M855 bullet hits slender people at the right angle, and does not hit a bone, it goes right through. That will do some soft tissue damage, but nothing immediately incapacitating. The study examined other military and commercial 5.56mm rounds and found that none of them did the job any better. The study concluded that, if troops aimed higher, and fired two shots, they would have a better chance of dropping people right away. The report recommended more weapons training for the troops, so they will be better able to put two 5.56mm bullets where they will do enough damage to stop oncoming enemy troops.

Got that? The reason the standard US infantry rifle is not doing the job is because the troops stupidly think that they should be equipped with a rifle that drops the bad guys with one round.

“Aim higher” = “shoot them in the head.”

Twice. Then you’ll be okay. Not easy to do in the heat of battle even at less than 50 meters.

Absolutely. Unbelievable.

The Army’s Picatinny Arsenal, which conducted the study, has this to say:

The study sought to answer whether any commercial, off-the-shelf 5.56mm bullets that perform better than M855 against unarmored targets in Close Quarters Battle might be available.

It was limited further to determining if the Army could quickly purchase and field a possible replacement for the M855 and did not consider replacing the current inventory of 5.56mm weapons with weapons of another caliber.

“This was not a caliber study” Rider said. “However, it did find that the current family of 5.56mm weapons and the older 7.62mm M14 have the same potential effectiveness in the hands of a Warfighter during the heat of battle.”

The study also showed an increase in lethal potential when the marksmanship technique of firing controlled pairs, i.e. firing two rounds in rapid succession, was used.

The present edition of the M16 is the M16A2, introduced in 1985, as I recall. The ‘A2 has a full-auto setting that fires only three rounds, no more, per trigger pull. It also shoots semi-auto, of course. The reason for this setting is that on unrestricted full auto firing the fourth and subsequent rounds wind up going skyward, a symptom of full-auto handheld guns since the Thompson submachine gun. IIRC, one soldier per fire team is normally designated as a automatic rifleman and in combat he would normally be the only one who routinely shoots his M16 on full auto, repetitively sending bursts of three downrange.

Not any more. If every soldier now understand that he has to shoot a bad guy twice to ensure a kill, then he’ll reasonbly figure, “If two is good, three is better,” set his rifle on auto, and rock and roll every time. Besides, the automatic cyclic rate of fire of the rifle is 800 rounds per minute, or 13 rounds per second. That’s much faster than anyone can achieve pulling the trigger twice. (My guess is that a lot of troops have been three-bursting all along.)

I must say that the study’s finding that “the older 7.62mm M14 have the same potential effectiveness” is rather difficult to believe. The 7.72mm basically is a .30-caliber bullet, which was the Army’s standard diameter round since 1906 (hence the “30-06″ round). This cartridge was used throughout World War II in the Garand rifle, “The greatest battle implement ever devised,” according to this authority.

Top - .30-06 round; bottom, 5.56mm round

I’m not suggesting that the Army re-adopt the .30-06 round. There are alternatives to both it and the M855, 5.56mm round that offer many of the advantages of both. The ‘06 had stellar knock-down power and was heavy enough to rip through truck engines, surely an excellent capability for a time when car- or truck-mounted IED’s are common. The 5.56mm round is lightweight, which means a grunt can carry a lot more of them than the ‘06. It also means that the rifle can be lighter: the M 16A2 weighs more than a pound less than the M1 Garand. There was consideration to developing a 6.8mm round for the XM8 rifle, but the XM8 project settled on the present 5.56mm (M855) round before being canceled last fall.

There was some discussion for awhile, I recall, to re-introduce the 7.62mm NATO-standard round in a new infantry rifle, but it never went anywhere. This round is highly effective in combat with excellent range, very good material penetration and knockdown power. The round was used in the M14 rifle and the famous M60 series medium machinegun, both introduced in 1957. The M14 was based on the M1 Garand and featured a 20-round magazine rather than an eight-round clip.

The M855 round was introduced for the M16A2. It replaced the ‘A1 and earlier models, which all used the M193 round. The M855 bullet is longer and heavier and slower out the muzzle than the M193. The replacement was made for two main reasons: increase the maximum effective range and achieve commonality with the M249, 5.56mm Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), a light machinegun for infantry squads that replaced the M60, 7.72mm machinegun. Achieving an effective range of 1,000 meters for the SAW while retaining the 5.56mm round required the heavier M855 round. The M16A2 was introduced to enable all the weapons of an infantry squad to use the same ammunition.

Paradoxically, the heavier round sacrificed lethality at the short ranges of typical infantry-rifle combat. As I noted three years ago, rifle-combat ranges have not changed since 1917, about 20-30 meters. A technical explanation of wound ballistics can be found here, but the short version is this. Immediately incapacitating wounds from full metal jacket bullets, the only kind allowed by warfare conventions, come from the bullet tumbling and fragmenting in the body. All FMJ bullets will tumble (except in flight, of course) because their center of gravity is well behind the nose, but just when depends on their speed. The 5.56mm round tumbles and fragments when it slows to 2,700 feet per second. With greater inertia than the older M193 round, the heavier M855 slows after impact less readily. Thus, unless it hits bone, it will fly straight in and out without causing an immediately incapacitating wound, as the Army’s study report notes.

There is no quick fix to this conundrum. The M16A2’s chamber is designed for the longer M855 bullet, as is the SAW’s. So the older M193 round can’t just be reissued. And no replacement weapon or round is in the works. So the Army tells the troops, “shoot ‘em in the head, twice.”

Dunnigan concludes, in masterful understatement, “The army report is not likely to be well received by the troops.”

BTW, the 9mm pistol is almost worthless, too.

In his classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Auschwitz survivor and psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl related what it was like to be processed through the camp, to face sortings by the SS where captives were sent to their deaths (about 90 percent were every time, he said) or to work parties.

Frankl wrote that when facing a sorting, it was very common for captives to exhibit what psychiatrists called “the delusion of reprieve.” Every individual so deluded - and that meant almost all the captives, said Frankl - would latch onto the very thinnest hope of being selected to live and mentally make it a certainty. Frankl wrote that condemned prisoners in ordinary times also often exhibit this delusion, convincing themselves that an executive remission of the sentence was on the way, sometimes right up until the hour of execution. People with terminal illnesses or facing severe adversities short of death often exhibit this delusion, too, on very little or no real-world basis at all.

Now Drudge reports (link probably perishable) of Saddam (whose “hunger strike” lasted all of one meal):

Saddam Hussein believes the Americans may reinstall him as president of Iraq, the NEW YORK TIMES is planning to report on Sunday, newsroom sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.

Saddam Hussein has no illusions, his chief lawyer says. As he sits in his prison cell reading the Quran and writing poetry, he knows the inevitable is coming — a death sentence handed down by the Iraqi court trying him for crimes against humanity.

Yet Saddam refuses to submit to the fate that awaits him, Khalil al-Dulaimi, said, for he believes there is a way out:

President Bush will use the court’s sentence as leverage to try to persuade Saddam to tamp down the insurgency, he said, so desperate are the Americans to stanch their losses.

In his madness, Saddam believes the Americans might even reinstall him as president of Iraq!

Nutty as a fruitcake.

Glenn Reynolds has stated several times that, “Terrorism is an information war disguised as a military operation.” (Well, it’s not a disguise; I’d phrase it that terrorism is, in part, not whole, an information campaign using violent methods.)

Today Newsday’s James Pinkerton writes about “feeding the beast,” the imperative of media outlets to meet deadlines without fail. Noting that media-saturation coverage of natural disasters cannot make the disaster worse,

What about terrorism? Those are the challenging questions asked by two academics, Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich and Dominic Rohner of Cambridge University, who argue that reporters and terrorists are playing a “common-interest game” - that is, a win-win for both. Frey and Rohner studied terrorist activity from 1998 and 2005 and concluded, “Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents.” Terrorists gain publicity for themselves and their cause, while the media make money from greater sales and “buzz.”

The Washington Post summed up Frey and Rohner’s argument: “Coverage caused more attacks, and attacks caused more coverage - a mutually beneficial spiral of death that they say has increased because of a heightened interest in terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001.” Perhaps the relationship could be stated as an even simpler equation: More media equal more terrorism. …

But the problem raised by Frey and Rohner is the same problem that many observers have intuited all along: In portraying violence, especially terror violence, the media are unwittingly - or maybe wittingly - encouraging such violence.

So we are reminded of that old line from the “Pogo” comic strip: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The beast was hungry, so we fed it. Then the beast got hungry again, so we fed it again. At this rate, the beast will eventually come hungering for us, too - for all of us.

I do not call for the media to be unbiased. I am biased, darn tootin’, but I admit it. I wrote more than two years ago that the media need to be biased, the question is, which bias? Gen. Richard Myers said in April 2005,

A bomb blast is seen as more newsworthy than the steady progress of rebuilding communities and lives, remodeling schools and running vaccination programs and water purification plants.

I assessed the symbiosis between terrorism and the media in 2004 thus:

There are only four basic outcomes of this war:

1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in Muslim lands, especially Arab countries, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit tendencies toward violent Islamism from their cultures so that terrorism does not threaten us or them. This goal is what amounts to total victory for the United States.

2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamismicization (there’s a word for you!) of the entire Middle East (at the minimum), the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans. This outcome is what amounts to total victory for al Qaeda.

3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and full-scale war erupts between the US and, at the minimum, Syria and Iran. This would amount to a defeat for all concerned.

4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.

Perhaps you can think of other, different outcomes, but I think these pretty much cover the possibilities.

So the question for us commentati, whether based on the web or in traditional media, is simply: which of these outcomes is best? Which will be most favorable to human flourishing?

As for me, I choose the first, and have no qualms admitting I am heavily biased in favor thereof. And that bias certainly shapes my blogging!

The basic issue for news media: Which outcome do you want?

It is not possible to pretend neutrality here, for the power of the media to frame the public’s debate is too great to claim you are merely being “fair and balanced.” There literally is no neutral ground here, no “God’s eye view” of events, and hence no possibility of not taking sides. One way or another, what you print or broadcast, what stories you cover and how you cover them, what attention you pay to what issues and how you describe them - all these things mean that you will support one outcome over another. Which will you choose? How will you support it? These are the most important questions of your vocation today.

It’s nice to see Mr. Pinkerton facing thm. Let us hope other media managers will, too.