Iran Chosen As Official Poster of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

by Azadeh Ensha (Fri Oct 12, 4:56 PM ET)

The far right is taking its favorite catchphrase on tour. Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is coming to a campus near you.

According to FrontPage magazine's David Horowitz, the event was designed to "confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the 'war on terror' and that global warming is a greater danger to Americans than global jihad and Islamic supremacism." The week's events will include "awareness" speeches by Michael Ledeen, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter as well as Horowitz himself. With such a fair and balanced list, Islamo-Fascism Week will be the perfect environment to proselytize anti-Islamic propaganda to the under 30 crowd.

The official poster of Islamo-Fascism week shows a photo of a teenage girl being stoned to death in Iran (disclosure: my country of birth) and will also feature speeches from Iranians who were victims of persecution. As an Iranian-American, I appreciate that they're spreading the word about human rights abuses in my native country. Unfortunately, I think their goal has less to do with spreading awareness than it does with fostering fear, suspicion and bigotry.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness week is about telling you that Islam is evil and that Muslims are out to get you. When in fact, some crazy and violent people have hijacked the religion of billions of peaceful people.

As part of the festivities, the event will feature a series of one-sided films including Islam: What the West Needs to Know, which extols the worldview of good (Christianity) versus evil (Islam). According to FrontPage, the movie is designed to reveal the "violent, expansionary ideology of the so called 'religion of peace' that seeks the destruction or subjugation of other faiths, cultures, and systems of government."

The event will also include a petition drive designed to force "students and faculty to declare their allegiances: either to fighting our terrorist adversaries or failing to take action to stop our enemies." Students will be instructed to urge their classmates to sign and to call attention to those who don't -- reminiscent of the same public pressure to side with "us" or "them" that defined the McCarthy era. The program notably encourages confronting groups "who might be least likely to sign" the petition. Examples include school administrators and the Muslim Students Association.

So much for higher education.

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Islamic Spain: history's refrain

By Alexander Kronemer (Wed Aug 22, 4:00 AM ET)

The past sometimes provides examples of glory and success that serve as models. Other times, as the philosopher George Santayana said, it warns of impending calamity for those who do not learn from it.

For the past several years, I've been immersed in a history that does both. As one of the producers for an upcoming PBS documentary on the rise and fall of Islamic Spain, I've witnessed its amazing ascent and tragic fall countless times in the editing room, only to go home and watch some of the same themes playing out on the nightly news.

Islamic Spain lasted longer than the Roman Empire. It marked a period and a place where for hundreds of years a relative religious tolerance prevailed in medieval Europe.

A model for religious toleranceAt its peak, it lit the Dark Ages with science and philosophy, poetry, art, and architecture. It was the period remembered as a golden age for European Jews. Breakthroughs in medicine, the introduction of the number zero, the lost philosophy of Aristotle, even the prototype for the guitar all came to Europe through Islamic Spain.

Not until the Renaissance was so much culture produced in the West. And not until relatively recent times has there been the level of pluralism and religious tolerance that existed in Islamic Spain at its peak. Just as the vibrancy and creativity of America is rooted in the acceptance of diversity, so was it then.

Because Islam's prophet Muhammad founded his mission as a continuation of the Abrahamic tradition, Islamic theology gave special consideration to Jews and Christians. To be sure, there were limits to these accommodations, such as special taxes levied on religious minorities. But in the early Middle Ages, official tolerance of one religion by another was an amazingly liberal point of view. This acceptance became the basis for Islamic Spain's genius. Indeed, it was an important reason Islam took hold there in the first place.

When the first Muslims crossed the straits of Gibraltar into Spain, the large Jewish population there was enduring a period of oppression by the Roman Catholic Visigoths. The Jewish minorities rallied to aid the Arab Muslims as liberators, and the divided Visigoths fell.

The conquering Arab Muslims remained a minority for many years, but they were able to govern their Catholic and Jewish citizens by a policy of inclusiveness. Even as Islam slowly grew over the centuries to be the majority religion in Spain, this spirit was largely, if not always perfectly, maintained.

Pluralistic though it was, Islamic Spain was no democracy. After years of enlightened leadership, a succession of bad leaders caused the unified Muslim kingdom to fragment among many smaller petty kingdoms and fiefdoms.

Though they competed and fought, the spirit of pluralism continued. Indeed, it thrived as rival kings sought the best minds in the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish worlds for their courts. This was just as true in the Christian petty kingdoms, as the Muslim ones. Christian and Muslim armies even fought alongside each other against mutual rivals of both faiths.

It is at this point that the darker parallels to our time begin. Into the competition for land, resources, and power, some leaders on both sides began to appeal to religion to rally support for their cause. Wars became increasingly religious in nature. Into this tinderbox a match was thrown: the Crusades – the same term that many Arabs use today when referring to America's adventure in Iraq.

The Crusades deepened Spain's religious divide. Minorities in both Christian and Muslim kingdoms become increasingly suspect. Persecutions, expulsions, and further warfare ensued. Nothing could stop it, not even the black plague.

Ultimately, Christian kingdoms gained the upper hand as the Muslim kingdoms of Islamic Spain fell. Spain's Muslims and Jews were forced to either leave or convert. This led to the rise of the Inquisition, whose purpose was to verify the loyalty of suspect converts. The expulsions and inquisitions racked Spain economically, culturally, and morally. Its power was severely compromised. The fall of pluralism in Spain was the fall of Spain itself.

Dark parallels with todayThis fall directly links to events today and raises many of the same stakes. Though few Americans note it, one of Osama bin Laden's justifications for the 9/11 attacks was to avenge the "tragedy" of Islamic Spain.

So far, the post-9/11 world and the policies it has spawned seem to be heading in the same dangerous direction as witnessed before. The religious intolerance that engulfed and overwhelmed medieval Spain threatens the increasingly beleaguered pluralism of our own time.

At its best, the history of Islamic Spain is a model for interfaith cooperation that inspires those who seek an easier relationship among the three Abrahamic faiths. At its worst, it's a warning of what can occur when political and religious leaders divide the world. It reminds us what really happens when civilizations clash.

• Alexander Kronemer is a writer, lecturer, and documentary producer focusing on religious diversity, Islam, and cross-cultural understanding. His film "Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain" premieres on PBS Aug. 22.

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The social responsibility revolution

By Bruce Piasecki (Thu Aug 9, 4:00 AM ET)

Business educators may be in for a surprise. Something extraordinary is happening in the global marketplace that defies classic principles taught at virtually every business school.

Superior product quality and competitive pricing may no longer stand above all others as the most critical variables in the equation for business success. In the evolving global marketplace that I call World Inc., a third strategic factor is coming into play: social responsibility. By that, I mean making products and delivering services that generate profits but also help society address challenges such as climate change, energy security, healthcare, and poverty.

This business trinity of quality, price, and social response is emerging even as multinational corporations acquire unprecedented economic power. Consider these eye-opening facts about their clout at the dawn of the 21st century:

•Of the world's 100 largest economies, 29 were corporations, not nations.

•The combined sales of the top 200 global corporations were the equivalent of 28 percent of world gross domestic product.

•Roughly a third of all world trade took place among multinational corporations.

A growing number of multinational business leaders is already demonstrating that tomorrow's most successful enterprises will be those willing to devote unprecedented time and effort to incorporate social responsibility into their business models. If the trend continues, it will change the way giant enterprises do business.

At first glance, social response initiatives may appear to be superficial public relations stunts. A closer look at the 300 largest firms in this new century reveals that most are really all about business opportunities, profit gains, and expanding market share.

Take, for example, the culture shift occurring at General Electric. GE's "Ecomagination" campaign features a lovable dancing rain-forest elephant that projects a friendly corporate face for CEO Jeffrey Immelt that is very different from the hard-edged, calculating one offered by his legendary predecessor, Jack Welch.

Actually, the change in strategy reflects GE's recognition of advances in markets for environmentally friendlier technologies such as wind power – one of the fastest-growing power sources in the world. It sees green technology for what it is: a great business opportunity. By 2010, GE plans to double its investment in such green solutions to $1.5 billion and double revenue from products included in the campaign from $10 billion to $20 billion annually. These green solutions, GE claims, can reduce energy consumption by roughly 30 percent.

Then there's Toyota. Its efficient hybrid power train that reduces emissions of traditional pollutants and greenhouse gases, once seen as a risky venture, is today selling like hotcakes. It's now a feature on more than 1 million vehicles sold, making it no coincidence that Toyota has surpassed General Motors as the world's largest automaker.

But it's the actions of Wal-Mart, the world's largest – and perhaps most controversial – overall retailer (serving 176 million customers each week), that signals the true significance of this trend. In February, delivering the keynote lecture at the Prince of Wales's Business and Environment Program in London, Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott unveiled "Sustainability 360," which he described as a company-wide commitment to sustainability going beyond its direct environmental footprint to engage everyone the company touches: associates, suppliers, communities, and customers.

Like GE and others competing in World Inc., Wal-Mart is quick to recognize the opportunities that spring from sustainability. By requiring suppliers to reduce product packaging by 5 percent by 2013, it expects to realize savings equal to removing 213,000 trucks from the road and saving approximately 324,000 tons of coal and 67 million gallons of diesel fuel per year. They'll save millions more by making stores 30 percent more efficient by 2012, increasing fleet efficiency by 25 percent by 2010 and reducing solid waste from its US stores and Sam's Clubs by 25 percent by 2008.

Perhaps the most telling fact in all this is that these giant companies are acting voluntarily. They are responding to market forces and recognized opportunities, not mandates from Congress and government regulators.

We may be on the verge of historic change in the business world. Entrepreneurs, business leaders, and educators will all be watching to see how these companies, and others that follow them, build new profit centers by bringing socially responsible products and processes to the marketplace.

Each will be a model for future decisionmakers. Whether they will be models for success or failure remains to be seen, but the initial signs are encouraging. Welcome to World Inc.

• Bruce Piasecki, president and founder of the management consulting firm AHC Group, is the author of six books on corporate strategy. His latest book is "World Inc." ( www.worldincbook.com ).

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America, stop waving the nuclear threat at potential adversaries

By Jack Mendelsohn (Fri Aug 10, 4:00 AM ET)

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were asked in a recent presidential debate whether they would meet with such controversial foreign leaders as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Cuba's Fidel Castro.

Despite the sparring between the two over the timing and pre-conditions for such a meeting, they both essentially said they would engage international reprobates – something this administration has repeatedly balked at doing. Remember, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "We don't negotiate with evil. We destroy it."

A tougher question is whether the next president would threaten to use nuclear weapons against a foreign enemy. Four Republican candidates – Mitt Romney, Duncan Hunter, Jim Gilmore, and Rudy Giuliani – have already expressed their willingness to use "tactical" nuclear weapons against Iran to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons. Again, this tracks with the vice president who is reportedly urging an attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure by next year at the latest.

Mr. Obama recently told the Associated Press that he would not use nuclear weapons "in any circumstance" involving civilians. Mrs. Clinton once again criticized his foreign policy position saying that she didn't believe that "any president should make any blanket statements."

If the Democrat candidates want to distinguish themselves from their opponents, and if the Republicans want to recover from the disastrous foreign policy of this administration, the candidates should commit to delegitimizing – not stressing – nuclear weapons. Every time the United States threatens a potential adversary with nuclear weapons it tells the world that these weapons are acceptable instruments of modern warfare and that there are no political or moral constraints on US behavior.

It is overwhelmingly in the US national interest to preserve the "taboo" on nuclear weapons use and to seek to reduce the salience of nuclear weapons in US security policy. To achieve this, the candidates should address four issues:

First, announce that they reject nuclear intimidation and the current policy of preventive war. In the future, and under their leadership, the United States will retain its nuclear arsenal for deterrence only and will not employ nuclear weapons except in retaliation for a nuclear attack.

Second, commit to the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons. Even President Reagan sought a nuclear-free world and a number of senior US statesmen, from the late Paul Nitze (Democrat) to George Schultz and Henry Kissinger (both Republicans), agree that the US would be much safer in a world without nuclear weapons.

Third, declare that they plan to withdraw all US nuclear weapons from Europe during their term in office. These weapons are relics of the cold war: There is no strategic requirement for them, and no military mission that cannot be carried out by conventional weapons.

Finally, make it clear that the United States will not resume nuclear testing. A reaffirmation of the decade-old moratorium on nuclear tests (or ratification by the next Congress of the treaty banning such tests) would strengthen US efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons to other nations.

In the run-up to the presidential election, the candidates of both parties have a chance to indicate to the world that the next administration will forgo the policy of nuclear intimidation and actively strive to delegitimize nuclear weapons. This nation cannot become more secure by reserving for itself the right to use nuclear weapons while preaching nuclear abstinence for the rest of world.

• Jack Mendelsohn was a US State Department official, a member of the US SALT and START delegations and deputy director of the Arms Control Association. He is presently an adjunct professor at George Washington University and American University.

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WHO ARE OUR FRIENDS? WHO ARE OUR ENEMIES?

By Richard Reeves (Mon Aug 6, 6:02 PM ET)

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- I was so amazed and angry when the White House began talking about invading Iraq that I joked, sort of: "Well, if we're determined to attack Arab countries, why not start with our real enemy, Saudi Arabia?" After all, it was the Saudis, with their whip-swinging, head-chopping religious police protecting the rich little behinds of the royal family, who gave us the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists.

O Freedom! O Democracy! O Monarchy! O Oil! Now the powers that be in Washington want to give the Saudi royal family $20 billion over 10 years in military aid. The princes must have loved it when they were informed by e-mail at their summer places in St. Tropez and Aspen and other high-priced oases.

I was ready to cheer on the New York City congressional delegation, which I often disagree with when they do their more-pro-Israel-than-the-Knesset number, for screaming that Saudi Arabia is our friend only when the princes send out their designated English speakers. In Arabic, they call for jihad everyplace except in the kingdom. The 15 congressmen came out against the deal even though Israel would get another $3 billion a year in military loans never to be repaid.

In truth, the "moderate Saudis," as we laughingly call them, have brilliantly preserved their oil-rich tyranny by exporting their radicals and revolutionaries and their savage Wahabi Islam (and money) to Afghanistan, Pakistan and any other dot on the globe to divert attention from their despicable medievalism at home. The American package, along with Saudi government aid to 30,000 or more Wahabi mosques, should keep the royals in power for another decade -- and keep the oil flowing our way at higher and higher prices, both financial and political.

Moving from the Middle East to South Asia, at least one member of Congress has questioned our relationship with another group of Islamist "moderates," the military dictatorship of Pakistan. These are the people who house and protect the Taliban, probably are protecting Osama bin Laden and gave us A.Q. Khan, who was happily peddling stolen nuclear knowledge and technology to the highest bidders, beginning with North Korea. That questioner last week was Sen. Barack Obama, who said he would use U.S. Special Forces to go after Osama bin Laden and his boys in the "tribal areas" of Pakistan if we had hard intelligence on his whereabouts -- and if the Pakistanis themselves would not do the deed. (If Obama is wrong, it is because the Pakistani Army, whose men don't even speak the languages of the tribal areas, know they cannot prevail against the tribesman. It's not "won't" do anything; it's "can't.")

Obama, of course, is big news because he is running for president, and his rivals and opponents immediately seized on his words to brand him "naive" or call him a warmonger intent on "invading" our great ally. Pakistan, after all, is a nuclear power, thanks to the larcenous Mr. Khan and the American decision not to notice that he was openly developing nuclear weapons at a place called Kahuta in the desert near Islamabad.

That all happened during the decade in which the Americans and the Saudis financed, and Pakistani intelligence agencies trained, Islamic jihadists to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1970s and '80s.

The big result of those secret operations was the defeat of the Soviets -- and arguably the fall of the Soviet Union. The side effect was the creation of trained and armed pre-modern jihadists determined to eliminate Western influence in their precincts.

I was there in those days, and one of the more remarkable things I noticed was that the Islamist fighters saw no difference between Russians and Americans. "Red-faced monkeys," they called all of us, foreigners who wanted to educate their women. That was enough to send them into the hills to fight outsiders as they have since Alexander the Great stumbled by.

The reason we want to throw billions around to buy weapons, which will inevitably be used against us, is to frighten and contain Iran, the Shiite theocracy that has few friends in Sunni Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. But all this will get worse before it gets better, because what our "moderate" friends are trying to do is to buy off their own people. The royal family in Saudi Arabia and the military governments of Pakistan survive by turning over large chunks of their power and countries to fundamentalist mullahs, the whip-wielders and the rock-throwers.

And red-faced monkeys like us are willing to give them the money to do it. This is post-9/11 politics. We do not know who our friends are. We do not know who our enemies are.

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Bush to Karzai: Will You Just Shut Up Abour Iran!

The Nation (Mon Aug 6, 2:50 PM ET)

The Nation -- Things got a little testy at the Camp David Summit between Afghan President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and American President George Bush.

Karzai, who when he is in the U.S. is expected to act as a puppet of the Bush administration, made the mistake of actually speaking his mind. In a CNN interview broadcast Sunday, the Afghan president said terrorism in Afghanistan is getting worse, that the hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is at a standstill and, then, he described Iran as a positive player -- "a helper and a solution" -- in the region.

All of these statements are objectively true.

But George Bush does not deal in the realm of truth. And he certainly does not like his puppet presidents getting off their strings.

On the eve of the summit, Karzai told CNN that:

1. "The security situation in Afghanistan over the past two years has definitely deteriorated. The Afghan people have suffered. Terrorists have killed our schoolchildren. They have burned our schools. They have killed international helpers."

2. "We are not closer (to catching bin Laden), we are not further away from it. We are where we were a few years ago."

3. "So far, Iran has been a helper (in the fight against terrorism)."

All of those statements, made by Karzai in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on the eve of his trip to Camp David, were corrected by Bush upon the Afghan president's arrival.

On the security situation, Bush told Karzai not to believe what he was seeing on the ground in Afghanistan. "There is still work to be done, don't get me wrong," Bush said. "But progress is being made."

On the bin Laden search, Bush spoke of how the hunt is progressing and declared that, "With real actionable intelligence, we will get the job done."

On Iran's positive role in the region, Bush again told Karzai not to believe his own experience but instead to accept the neoconservative version of events. "I would be very cautious about whether or not the Iranian influence there in Afghanistan is a positive force," the American president pointedly told the Afghan president.

So there you have it, a meeting of the minds Bush-style.

A foreign leader from a region of supreme interest to the United States comes to Camp David to brief the American president on what is going on. The foreign leader speaks his mind, offering his best assessment of the experience he is living. Then the president tells the visitor from abroad that he is wrong.

As Bush famously declared at a policy session in 2005, "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

And it is just so damned inconvenient when a puppet who is supposed to help spread the propaganda instead messes everything up by talking about what is really happening.

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John Nichols' new book is THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.'"

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Pakistan If You Can

Philip Giraldi (Mon Aug 6, 1:54 PM ET)

The inability of presidential aspirants to deal with reality is sometimes astonishing. Concerning Pakistan and its beleaguered President Pervez Musharraf, only one thing is true from the US national interest perspective: Musharraf is Washington's best hope for containing and eventually defeating the one terrorist group that actually threatens the United States. That group is Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, which has found shelter in the trackless tribal region of Waziristan along the Pakistani-Afghan border. White House propaganda notwithstanding, no other group has the ability, resources, or the stated intention to attack the United States. One does not have to approve of Musharraf's brand of soft military dictatorship or the delicate political balancing act that he must engage in to stay in power to understand that he is essential to American efforts to control terrorism in central Asia. So why don't Congress and the gaggle of presidential candidates get it?

Congressman Tom Tancredo's call last week to threaten to punish all Muslims by nuking Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia to deter a terrorist attack directed against the US should be taken as a good example of the current level of the debate on security policy. The leading Republican candidates had already established an incredibly low benchmark in the foreign policy sweepstakes by their stated willingness to use nuclear weapons against Iran. They have buttressed their resolve to kill still more young Americans in a new effort to remake the Middle East through the appointment of a number of neoconservatives as their foreign policy advisers, including Norman Podhoretz, who has called for World War IV against all "Islamofascists" everywhere. Other leading neocons advising Republicans include Elizabeth Cheney, Robert Kagan, Dan Senor, and Jim Woolsey.

This past week it was the turn of the Democrats to demonstrate again their unfitness for high office. The leading Democrats are unflinching in their support of a military option against Iran and are as willing as any Republican to define Israel's right to self defense as a carte blanche to attack any and all of its neighbors. Now they too are lining up to get tough with Pakistan. Democrats are invariably obsessed with demonstrating how tough they can be. Their latest performances come in the wake of the July 17th National Intelligence Estimate that reported that al-Qaida had largely reconstituted itself in the Pakistani tribal area of Waziristan. Senator Barack Obama jumped on the scrum last Wednesday when he make clear that a President Obama would use US troops to attack Pakistan and would cut off all aid to Islamabad if terrorist operations are not shut down and foreign fighters expelled. As he put it, " ... if President Musharraf won't act, we will." The use of the royal "we" is significant, meaning, unfortunately, that Obama is beginning to believe his own hype.

Obama's comments came one week after rival Senator Hillary Clinton tried to portray him as naïve and soft on terrorism for his stated willingness to talk to international bad guys like Presidents Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Obama's willingness to talk to adversaries would appear to be reasonable to most foreign policy experts, but it was quickly described as a vulnerability when seen through the distorting prism of American politics.

Obama's new, tougher stance to teach the treacherous Pakis a lesson is already being used by the Pakistani media to flail Musharraf for his ties to the United States. Obama might be surprised to learn that no one particularly wants to be invaded by the world's sole remaining superpower, particularly as Iraq has proven to be such a success. Obama also seems unaware that his posturing for political gain could have real foreign policy consequences. His apparent ignorance of the situation on the ground in Pakistan is surprising in a candidate who is generally very well briefed by his staff, but he surely understands that his comments amount to bravado, pure and simple. An American invasion of Pakistan would not likely succeed in locating and eliminating al-Qaida and would instead bring about political chaos spilling over into all of central Asia. Even uber-hawk Senator John McCain conceded that he would have to "think it through" before attacking Pakistan. Afghanistan and Pakistan dissolving into anarchy would make the mean streets of Baghdad look positively benign.

Not to be outdone by Obama's coloratura performance, Senator Hillary Clinton moved even further to the right when she announced on Thursday that she would not rule out the use of nuclear weapons on the terrorists hiding in Pakistan. It is not clear where the "who is tougher" competition will go from here as it would seem that Hillary has seized all the high ground. That such an attack would inevitably kill many thousands of non-terrorists apparently is not relevant. It would also inter alia be an act of war against a country of 170 million that already doesn't like the US very much and that is itself armed with nuclear weapons. For the square-jawed and resolute Hillary, attacking another sovereign nation would apparently be an act without consequences. Unfortunately, the Pakistanis are aware of what she is saying and are paying attention to her, further undermining Musharraf and reducing the number of Pakistanis who are willing to support a US-led counterterrorism policy in Asia. If the Democrats continue to beat on Islamabad there might not be any friendly natives left in Pakistan by inauguration time in January 2009.

And it is not just the presidential candidates. On July 27th, Congress demonstrated that collectively speaking and in true bipartisan fashion it is no better informed than either Obama or Clinton. Legislation sent to the White House mandates that Pakistan take steps to expel the Taliban and al-Qaida from its territory or face the consequences, which would be a cut off in US military and economic assistance. Without such aid, developing world Pakistan would be unable to do anything at all against the terrorist groups and it would drop out of the fight. Congress and the presidential candidates are apparently unaware that since 9/11 Pakistan's security forces have killed or captured more al-Qaida than all of the other intelligence services in the rest of the world combined. Without Pakistan, there would not be any war on terror.

One might argue that pandering for votes and political contributions is as American as apple pie, but every once in a while it would be refreshing to hear a candidate stake out a position that is genuinely supportive of the national interest. Only Kucinich, Gravel, and Ron Paul are regularly talking sense and all three of them have been marginalized by the power brokers in their own parties. Attacking Iran and Pakistan either together or separately in a bid to end regional instability and international terrorism is a delusion. Even talking about possibly carrying out such attacks is foolish as it creates unhelpful perceptions about American misuse of its power and unleashes forces that cannot be controlled. Being tough to the point of weakening allies and unnecessarily making new enemies might please the Armageddonists who are eager to end the world so they can be raptured up to heaven or the neoconservatives who want to fight all Muslims all the time, but it is hardly serves the interests of most Americans.

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